Achievement unlocked

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If you have been around a while, you might remember me buying this car. At the time I took a 72-month loan on it, which I’ve been told is an unwise decision under nearly all circumstances, but whatever. 72 months from the purchase of the car would have been July of 2023.

It is currently March of 2022 and as of today my car is paid off. $237 a month back in my pocket. Awesome.

I am still waiting for my student loans to go away, which is likely to take a bit longer, but will still probably be done by the end of the school year. That’s another $545 a month. After that I pretty much just have the house and a personal loan to take care of (and “take care of” is a bit of an understatement, if I’m being honest, as they’re both pretty sizable amounts) but once those two are dealt with I will be debt-free, and getting rid of the car and the student loans will make an enormous difference, especially since I’ve been channeling every spare dime into paying for the car for the last six months or so and don’t have to do that any longer.

God help me, but that almost feels like cause for optimism. Time for the entire frame to fall off my car!

Some realizations

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  • First, that it is 7:30 PM, and I probably ought to blog today;
  • Second, that I am officially closer to retirement than I am to college, even assuming I wait to 65 to retire;
  • Third, that my student loans are due to be paid off four years prior to said 65th birthday, which should be a crime;
  • Fourth, that even if the notion of living another 20 years much less teaching for that long is difficult to wrap my head around, I probably ought to take this retirement thing seriously since I have, y’know, a wife and child in the mix now.

In case you can’t tell, I met with a retirement … dude, of some sort, at work on Friday, and several mortality-confronty sorts of things were discussed, and then this weekend I managed to keep my shit together long enough to dig through the folder that I throw anything even vaguely investment-related into and find not one but two different investment-related accounts that appear to no longer be receiving active contributions; I did some strategic scanning and sent them off to The Dude with a note attached that basically said I don’t know any of the money words, please help and we will see if anything happens. I have never really believed in retirement, to be honest; not in the sense that I don’t want to eventually quit working– I want to quit working now— but in the sense that I suspect any money I “invest” in my “future” will be stolen or siphoned off somehow before I’m able to actually benefit from any of it.

Today also included mowing, putting all my laundered clothes away like a big boy, finishing a book, starting another one, getting my grading done, writing a number of important emails, and a couple of videos recorded for The YouTubes. All in all, not bad for a Sunday.

Nattering on

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I’m in a mood again today, and I think it’s social media related; I need to spend less time on … well, everything, really. I’ve done a reasonable amount of adulting today; I rescheduled a doctor’s appointment, made my first dentist’s appointment since before the pandemic (letting people stick their fingers in my mouth before I was vaccinated was not happening) and got some more planning done for next year. I also finished my first bookbinding project, which I was going to share with you but I think I’ll wait until I finish the second one instead. All I can see when I look at this one are the mistakes, so I’m going to give it to my son and make a better one for my wife, which hopefully will be something I’m actually willing to share with people.

You’d think this would have me in a decent headspace, but I just can’t deal with the level of stupid the world is throwing at me today:

I also sat down with the estimate I just got from the fixtures place for our bathroom renovation, and compared it to our initial estimate, which was supposedly based on average prices at that specific location, and I’m going to have to have a stern word with someone about it, because right now we are astronomically over budget, before a single square inch of drywall gets pulled off the wall or a single tile gets laid. To a certain degree I’m willing to blame myself for not paying attention to certain things– like the fact that a shower door wasn’t included in the original estimate, when in fact what I was told was a very basic shower door at this place is thirteen hundred dollars, and a shower door is not exactly an unexpected purchase when redoing a bathroom. But when you tell us that your estimate for the vanity will cover a “custom” vanity for the space, and we in fact pick out a pre-built, non custom vanity, and the vanity still runs three times the estimate? That’s on you. When we are specific across the board that we are looking for mid-range stuff, and we ask you to quote us out for mid-range stuff, and then they show us what they are saying is mid-range stuff, and the estimate is off two hundred percent? I am not taking all the blame for that shit.

So first I have to go over all this with my wife to figure out just how deep in the shit we are, and how much we can afford to crawl out of said shit, and then I need to call my guy who put this estimate together and we’re gonna have us a come to Jesus moment.

So, yeah. I’m in a mood.

In which brain melty need stopping

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It has been a hell of a day, not in a bad way but in a there is too much information in my head and I don’t know what to do with any of it sort of way. I was out and about for a couple of hours– actual hours! Not just a quick trip to the Target in my back yard!– this morning, mostly running errands for my father-in-law, and I just had a conversation with my wife that ended with not only deciding to go ahead and move forward with LASIK but I also need to look into either a home equity loan or a mortgage refinance tomorrow, and there was a lot of talk about things like new roofs and bathroom and kitchen renovations and my brain has already spent some time today trying to figure out how to rearrange my office so that the layout makes a little bit more sense and that’s a lot of work and there is some work around the house that I need to do and oh a lot of that stuff needs contractors and do we know any contractors or maybe does your dad know any contractors and I really need to repurpose my entire computer setup to be better for video editing because I’m going to have to do a lot of that this fall one way or another and oh America just had its biggest day so far in terms of new cases of COVID so let’s fall down that depressing-ass rabbit hole too while we’re at it.

I need a nap.

7:46 PM, Wednesday June 24: 2,376,263 confirmed cases and 121,932 Americans dead.

This is how much I don’t want to be grading

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There is a new, canonical Benevolence Archives microfiction up at Patreon right now. I don’t update my Patreon nearly as often as I ought to but I’m also prone to not charging people during the months where I don’t update much, and there’s definitely enough content up over there now to justify your $1 or $2 every couple of months. So if the idea of more BA excites you at all, maybe check it out.

In other news, I am watching basketball again. IU is up four on Maryland at the moment with two minutes left; we’ll see if me posting that fact here ends up losing the game for them.(*)

(Yes, I have managed to more or less eradicate paying attention to sports from my life. No, I will never manage to eradicate being deeply superstitious about IU basketball. Never, as long as I live; it’s ground in there too deeply.)

That said, I’ve now blogged, written actual fiction, done a bit of light cleaning around the house, showered and gotten dressed today, so I’m much closer to an adult than I usually am on a typical Sunday and there is at least a chance that some of the ridiculous pile of grading I need to take care of is going to have some headway made on it after dinner.

Just a chance, mind you, not a guarantee. Just because I’m close to being an adult today doesn’t mean I’m a responsible one. 🙂

(*) Did Maryland end the game with a 7-0 run and win by a point, despite the fact that I waited to post this until after the game ended? Yes, they did. Am I nonetheless responsible for the loss, even though I could very well have deleted the evidence and not said anything about it to anyone? Yes. Yes, I am.