7/17/07

18,400 smackaroos
Yesterday (Monday, July 16, 2007) a snail-mail letter arrived from Chase-Visa raising our credit-limit to $18,400.
Why thank-ya, Chase; but I think that’s rather silly. It’s almost as much as our Key-Bank home-equity line-of-credit — $20,000 — which I get loudly excoriated for for not paying off.
The last major purchase on the Key-Bank line-of-credit was the dreaded LHMB (2003).
Other than that, I use it to pay the real-estate taxes each year, and paid the staining-contract with it. (Brought the balance to $3,450.)
I could close it, but keep it open to maintain a line-of-credit. Closing it and opening another would be a mess. We originally got it to buy the Faithful Hunda, which new cost $14,000+. (The CR-V and Bucktooth Bathtub were both paid for with savings.)
Since we paid off the mortgage, that line-of-credit is the onliest loan outstanding against our house.
But an $18,400 Visa-limit is ridiculous. I’ve never seen the account-balance go above $7,550, and that was only because of a $5,102 window-project down-payment.
The highest that account goes is about $2,500.
What’s really silly is I pay it off every month. (Wherein is Chase making any money?)
Visa bills me for the month’s charges, and I pay ‘em off in full — I never maintain an outstanding credit-balance. At 19%+ are you kidding?
Our Visa account is very old — it goes clear back to 1969.
It got stolen once, so we closed the original and opened a new account. No loss for us — Chase ate it; we snared it almost immediately, both them and us. Apparently they have software that monitors your charges, and the thief was charging ‘pyooter equipment willy-nilly.
I’ve always paid it off in full — I never borrow against it. (—Maybe once, long ago.)
By doing so, I’m putting float onto charged purchases, that lasts until Visa bills. And I never pay cash for anything anymore. Most everyone takes Visa.
We get bombarded with credit-card applications. Anything with my name goes in the shredder, and the prepaid-postage business-reply envelopes go back, full of junk, with a flowery Easter-Seal on the back flap.
To me, an $18,400 credit-limit for us just reproves the old adage about “thems that don’t need it, get it.”
In late 1966, when my Corvair tanked and needed a tranny-repair, I applied for a $325 loan and got tossed on the street. (I had to save up to repair the Corvair.)

Renovations
The vaunted Canandaigua YMCA is renovating, and expanding, its exercise-gym.
I guess it will be a year-long project; it started last week, but I wasn’t able to hit the Canandaigua YMCA last week for various reasons.
Yesterday, the onliest evidence of this great project was transferring all the cardio-equipment from the old cardio-room to another room that had previously been an anteroom for a counter (which had been removed).
Supposedly at some time an exterior wall is to be removed, and the exercise-gym extended to lawn-space outside.
But there was no evidence of that. (The exercise-gym was what it was weeks ago.)
The anteroom doesn’t have the satellite-radio feeds. I was doing the treadmill entertained by a flurry of ads from a boombox tuned to a local FM-station.
Amazon-Lady was there, and a cohort commented about the various minor changes.
“You have to be more flexible,” she said. “The promise is project done when the snow flies, but I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“I give up!”
This morning — trash-day in our area; at least for Pratt Disposal — the shredder-head for our shredder got consigned to the mighty Flint landfill.
The shredder-head is the gizmo atop the shredder waste-basket that actually shreds the documents.
About a year ago we fed it too much, and it jammed, probably blowing a fuse.
It looked repairable, so I set about taking it apart — it looked like all it needed was a fuse.
The motor on it was big-enough to turn a Small-Block, but things were rather inaccessible, so that assembly would take a while.
Meanwhile, I could never find time to actually assemble it; plus it kept weeping grease all over the newspaper we had it on.
That being the case, I wasn’t sure I wanted to reassemble it. I could get it back together, but it might lunch again from lack of grease.
At this point cue noisy Bluster-King; except I have a Husqvarna string-trimmer that I fixed, plus a wind-chime, which together put the kabosh to all his noisy posturing.
A new shredder might cost 140 smackaroos — so its either that or fix the errant shredder we have (had).
So the shredder-head got deposited with the trash this morning for Pratt. —So it goes; similar to the off-kilter shed. I ain’t what I was before the stroke.
Pratt appeared as I set out to run at the so-called elitist country-club; so I said “watch that thing; it’s heavy, and it’ll cut your fingers.”
They took it; lobbed it into the smelly maw of their mighty trash-truck.

“LHMB” is my 2003 Honda 600-cc CBR/RR motorcycle. Seeing a picture of it, my sister-in-Floridy declared “Lord-Have-Mercy;” and my loudmouthed brother-in-Boston, a macho Harley-guy, seeing it was yellow, pronounced it a “Banana.” So LHMB equals Lord-Have-Mercy-Banana.

“The Faithful Hunda” is our 1989 Honda Civic All-Wheel-Drive station-wagon, by far the BEST car we ever owned, now departed (replaced by the CR-V). (Called a “Hunda” because that was how a fellow bus-driver at Transit [Regional-Transit-Service in Rochester, where I once worked], pronounced it.)

“The Bucktooth-Bathtub” is our 2005 Toyota Sienna van; called that because it’s white and like sitting in a bathtub, and appears to have a bucktooth on the grill.

Amazon-Lady is a YMCA-employee. We call her that because she is extremely muscle-bound.

Our private trash collection-company, “Pratt Disposal,” dumps at the “Flint landfill.”

The “Small-Block” is Chevrolet’s V8 motor, introduced in the 1955 model-year.

“The almighty Bluster-King” is my blowhard brother-in-Boston, who badmouths everything I do or say. Supposedly I am incapable of repair of any kind, unlike him.

RE: “The off-kilter shed.....” Our storage-shed had to be a prefab design; i.e. I couldn’t design it. As such, its roof is not centered atop the shed.

I had a stroke October 26, 1993.

“The so-called elitist country-club” is nearby Boughton (“BOUGH”-tin) Park, where we walk our dog. It was called that long ago by an editor at the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, where I once worked, because it will only allow taxpayers of the three towns that own it to use it.