A Cry for Help

Here she is:

Yes, it's missing some gutters. Sure, it's been scarred by a few ill-fitting replacement windows. I know, the aluminum shutters have seen better days. But she's our dump, and we like her just fine. What do you expect from a building pushing 140 years old?

Well, this is it, I have to pack up the computer, so this is the last ever post from our apartment. We closed on the house on Friday, and we've been packing up and moving the past couple days. I'm a little sad to go, but we've got a lot of good stuff in front of us. See you soon!

I've been traveling, and feeling a little under the weather, and getting less work done than I'd like, so my social life has also been taking a hit. This usually isn't a big deal, but Em and I are making the huge (and hugely stressful) leap to buy a house and I haven't told everyone I know yet.

I want to update bil.com when it's more finalized and my blood pressure returns to normal, but I did want to let everyone know.

Now I'm going back into the fetal position until closing…

So Em and I had to take a class to learn about being landlords, and we heard the damnedest thing. Apparently, in RI at least, it's illegal for your landlord to ask you for more than the first month's rent and a deposit when you move in. All this prepaying the last month stuff, which I have done in every place I've ever rented, is not within the landlord's rights to ask for. Who knew?!

Well, my plan to get Barack Obama the Democratic nomination by ignoring the election on bil.com seems to be going well. However, this being election day in Rhode Island and since I'm flush with civic pride, let me take a quick moment to ask you to go out and vote for Obama. The conventional wisdom is that Hillary Clinton will win here in the Biggest Little, but if all the volunteers I've been seeing the last few days are any indication, I think it's totally possible for Obama to pull it out.

Find your polling place here (it might be different than last time you voted!)

Here's the view from downtown East Greenwich at 8:15am (according to Em, who pays attention to these things while I just try to get the whole "connect the arrow" thing right): traffic was steady but no wait time, more younger men than younger women, more older women than older men, and we overheard one guy mention this was his first time voting (in a primary, no less!)

OK, now go and exercise your America muscle.

I saw this at my coffee shop on Tuesday:

That was my strategy, too. And that's all I'll say about that. (Please, though, note the crying flowers)

I've been trying to avoid the presidential election stuff as much as possible. Luckily we don't have cable, so this hasn't been too hard. But since it's the actual year of the election, I figure I can start paying attention (a little). As many of you old skoolers may remember, I got majorly burned by the Howard Dean Iowa flameout, so my heart really hasn't been in this political season.

However, a lot of people ask me who I'm rooting for to get the nominations. Like many college-educated young white males, I have a big old man crush on Obama (not Tom Brady level man crush, of course. Speaking of which, is there any doubt that Brady could get Ahmadinejad to make nice with Isreal with an aw, shucks wink and a nice dinner with Gisele? MVP and Nobel Peace Prize winner!). I don't hate Hillary and John Edwards seems fine, but Obama is getting my vote (not that it will matter by the time RI gets to vote)

Bonus pick: I'm pulling for Mitt Romney to win the GOP nom. Sure he's a crazy unprincipled immigrant lover, but wow, that hair!

UPDATE: ah, my plan to ignore my preferred candidate completely seems to have worked!

I subscribe to one of those credit score monitoring services, and apparently Christmas has not been good to my FICO score. I didn't go overboard or max out any cards, but just my one day shopping spree seems to have lowered my score by 5 points. So if you're shopping for a car loan, mortgage or car insurance this January, make sure you pay off all that Christmas cheer!

Man am I glad I'm not out in this mess…

Yesterday was my last nⁿ birthday, and if you know what that means then you're a huge nerd (like me and Em). If my memory serves, that means today is bilherron.com's 6th birthday. I think my first blog post ever, in typical navel-gazing blog fashion, was a complaint about who forgot to wish me a happy birthday. This year I'm moderately more well-adjusted, so I'm just happy about all the nice emails, myspace comments, calls and text messages I got. Thank you guys!

Here's the card I got at work today (click for larger version):

(If you can reach way back to middle school math, you'll remember that nⁿ means I'm 3³ = 27. I'm going to try to shoot for 4⁴ (256), but I'll admit I might not get there)

Em and I have a thing where we try to make it to October 15th before we turn the heat on. October 15th has been balmy the past couple years, so we've pushed it back to November 1st. This year we were perfectly content to pull on the sweaters and do some extra cuddling, so we pushed our deadline back again, this time to November 15th.

So today is the 8th and next week is looking awfully far away, especially when there's frost on the grass in the mornings. Think we can make it, in our third floor apartment with no insulation? There's nothing like fighting global warming by freezing your ass off…

I know this is kind of old, but I just saw it today, and it's pretty cool:

Yup, that's Providence's skyline in the background and the terrible soulless blank wall of Brown's Life Sciences building. Em's dad's company worked on the project, which I would imagine was quite an engineering feat.