Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Tuesday, November 29, 2011 Road Tripped Up Trash and I used to take vacations all the time where we'd get in the car (or fly somewhere and rent one) and just drive. We'd travel almost at random, covering as much ground as we could during the day, and as night fell we'd pull into the first hotel we saw and get a room for the night. This has led to some memorable stays, like the place in Sioux Falls where the bed was shaped like an inverted U, or the cinder-block motel in Williams, AZ where we wore our socks in the shower, or the motel in Albuquerque with a room door that didn't latch. We don't do that as much since M. Edium, partly because he doesn't like to travel that way, but also because we don't like to travel that way with him. Also, we're not in our broke-ass twenties any more. That's one recurring theme of our vacations. Another one is that we tend to show up at places either right before or right after natural disasters. Last summer we were in South Dakota after the flooding of the Missouri River, one year we arrived in coastal South Carolina just days ahead of Hurricane Fran, and this time we showed up in New England a week after a disastrous snowstorm. It's not often that our two recurring themes converge. Which, as it turns out, is good. This was just a three-day trip, mainly to check a couple of little New England states off our list at last. I thought that was too short a time to cover much distance, but given that within an hour of landing we were in our fourth state of the day, I had to admit I was wrong. But the freedom of being only a few hours away (or less) from anywhere else in New England at any given time has a downside. When we left Harvard on Saturday afternoon, we had no idea where we were going to spend the night. We just knew we wanted to hit Rhode Island (and in the case of Providence and its drivers that evening, we ended up wanting to hit it hard), but had no idea where we were going to spend the night. We just had lunch plans the next afternoon in western Massachusetts, so we figured we'd just make sure to land somewhere that was within a couple hours from there (which, as previously mentioned, applies to most of New England other than parts of Maine). We had dinner in a small town in western Rhode Island (not actually an island, as it turns out), then proceeded west. At some point after dark we started feeling tired, but didn't see anything in Norwich, CT that cried out to us. Before much longer we were in downtown Hartford, and were starting to think about where we might spend the night. Still, we're not really "staying downtown" kind of people, so we headed on north to find a place in a smaller town. In Glastonbury, we started looking up hotel phone numbers on the GPS and calling them on our cell phones (such a better system than our old one, where Trash would make me get out of the car, walk into hotels, and come back out with an embarrassed, hangdog expression on my face), but none of the first few places we called had any vacancies at all. By the time we reached Springfield, Massachusetts, pulling off at every other exit and trying all the hotels closest to where we were at that moment, we were even more tired, and starting to get desperate. Trash was speculating that at the increasingly late hour, inhospitable desk clerks just didn't want to deal with new guests. Eventually she asked one of them, "Is there some kind of event going on?" Yes, there was. An event called the aftermath of one of the largest October snowstorms in New England history that had left millions of people with no heat, power, or anywhere to stay other than a hotel somewhere. Thus the run on hotel rooms. And thus the reason idiots like us were screwed. Off the freeway in Springfield, in a spot overlooked by several giant chain hotels (all of which were full; we called), I got a hold of someone in Windsor who had a room and even quoted me a price. "Fifty-five dollars a night?" I repeated for Trash's benefit. "Let's go," she said, not waiting for me to finish the call. On the way over there, however, she belatedly put together two facts: the room price, and the fact that it's not 1995 any more. "Wait, do you think it's creepy?" she asked me. "Yes, I do," I said. "When I said fifty-five dollars a night? I wasn't repeating it as a selling point. I was repeating it as a warning." Sure enough, when we pulled into the narrow parking lot of the rundown place and rang the doorbell so the desk clerk would come let us in, he smiled at us with his half-a-front-teeth and offered to let us see the room before checking in. We appreciated the offer, because there have been plenty of places where a look at the room in advance would have definitely affected our decision to stay there. As we walked single file down a hallway that you didn't even need a UV light for, I could see Trash in front of me already shaking her head. Inside the room, Trash was too polite to tell the truth, which was that we'd rather sleep in the car than spend a night here. After all, how comfortable would we be in this room, where the only way we'd be able to sleep would be suspended from the ceiling? Fortunately, a polite way to convey that we wouldn't be staying here came to me just in time: "Do you have wireless Internet?" And that's how we got out of there. In case you ever find yourself in this situation, you can have that for free. As we got back on the road and resumed the search, we started asking the desk clerks at chain hotels where their nearest hotels with vacancies could be found. After talking to one that had rooms in Brattleboro, Vermont (and surprisingly, New England suddenly gets a lot bigger when you want to be in a bed in the next half hour), I reached a guy in Wilbraham who had one room left, but it was a smoking room -- which I didn't know still existed -- and he sounded a lot like the guy at the other hotel, so I said I'd call back. "CALL BACK NOW!" Trash roared when she got back from inside the gas station where we were making a pit stop. Which I did, and only by virtue of being able to drive there in fifteen minutes were we able to beat one other desperate traveler to what was almost certainly the last available hotel room in western New England. The mattress was like a duffel bag full of socks and the blankets were of the fuzzy-rubber variety you find in your better motels and it smelled like an ashtray and was scandalously overpriced, but it was better than sleeping in the car. Oh, and as for our goal of being a morning's easy drive from our lunch date, we were so close that we had to drive to Worcester and back the next morning just to kill some time. And we learned our lesson. Next time we'll plan our vacations around natural disasters with a little more foresight. posted by M. Giant 8:43 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:Morbid curiousity demands my inquiry: where ivan I find this unique Sioux Falls bed?
By Tuesday, November 15, 2011 Credit Where it's Due Trash and I have sometimes admitted that Phil and Claire Dunphy on Modern Family are exaggerated versions of us. Actually, she's the one who says they're us, while I'm the one who says it's exaggerated. One area that's not exaggerated, however, is that she's the responsible one. I'm not quite as hopeless as Phil when it comes to getting some things done, but it's not uncommon for her to have to remind me to do occasional things like turn off the stove, put on clothes, breathe, etc. Then there are things that she doesn't even bother involving me in, like paying the bills. We used to share that job: she'd organize the bills, write the checks, seal and stamp the envelopes, put the return address on them, and earn the money we'd use to pay them, and my half of the job was take them to the mailbox, a task I was able to successfully manage more than half the time. But ever since we switched to online bill pay, I don't even have to have that level of involvement. She could be handling all our finances in Amazon gift card codes and airline miles and I wouldn't have clue one. It's like she doesn't trust me to handle it, just because I got my first-ever checking account into such a hairball that my mom had to fix it for me six months after I opened it. Even though that was, like, five years ago. But there are certain times when the family finances are inexorably brought to the attention of both partners, and one of them is when one of you buys a new car and the credit reports get pulled. I wasn't at all surprised to learn that Trash's credit rating is very nearly perfect. She doesn't carry balances, manages debt responsibly, and pays everything on time except the stuff she pays early, which is most of it, except for the stuff she pays crazy-early. I think we're ahead on the mortgage for our next house. What surprised us both is that my credit rating is even better. So there we were in the finance office at the dealership, as she sputtered incoherently about how it makes no sense; all our finances are together, she's the one who pays the bills, and it's totally unfair. "Maybe you should pay them better," I suggested. So then the finance guy is focusing all his attention on his computer and trying not to laugh while I speculate, "My credit rating is probably higher because I'm a dude." Whereupon he points out that with married couples, the wife typically has the higher credit rating of the two. "Way to blow the curve," I say to Trash. Paperwork is being printed up, and I'm being shown where to sign, and Trash, who has been running all these conversations on her own for more than an hour, has to sit back and watch me sign the paperwork as the primary owner. "Maybe when your credit rating is as good as mine you'll get to be the primary borrower," I say as she signs her name on the line under mine. But after all the works she's put in, she's still having trouble adjusting to the fact that this part of the process is about me, and looks like she's ready to accept the keys. "No, no," I say, "you'll just lose them. Maybe if you had the kind of credit rating that proves you're as responsible as me, I'd let you hold them for a minute." After the paperwork is all done, she drops the pen in her purse. "Did you just take the man's pen?" I ask. "You're so absent-minded. This is why your credit rating is shit compared to mine." I do enjoy my new car. I'm also looking forward to the Modern Family episode where it turns out that Phil has a higher credit rating than Claire. posted by M. Giant 8:25 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:Hah! Same thing in our family. I was extremely, extremely annoyed. It's because she has more activity, more accounts, more checks on her credit just because she's the one who does it.
By I figured it had to be because she has more activity, although I still can't work out why that would lower your credit rating. Surely having activity that proves you can handle the credit responsibly should be better than having minimal activity that doesn't prove anything? Also not getting how checks on your credit rating lower it. Weird.
By Monday, November 07, 2011 Two Doors Down What with both my car and Bucky dying three Tuesdays ago and having to deal with all that fallout, it was a pretty unexpected day. The next day, Wednesday, five of us were traveling to New York for M. Edium's birthday trip. One expects the unexpected when traveling, especially when traveling with small children (his nine-year-old cousin Deniece was also with us), but this time we weren't the only ones who were surprised. Getting everyone to the airport, on the plane, off the plane at LaGuardia, onto the Super Shuttle, and into Midtown where we were staying went mostly according to plan. We had booked a two-bedroom apartment to sublet through Airbnb.com. If you're not familiar with that, it's more or less Craigslist for home rentals, but with a less checkered reputation. People with available places can list them online, and people like us can rent them. It's not limited to New York, of course, but since that's where we were going, we figured a New York apartment would be our best bet. There have been stories, of course, of Airbnb deals going wrong, with people coming home to find their place vandalized, but since we were renting, not renting out, we weren't worried. I want to be clear that what happened is in no way the fault of Airbnb, and having used it, I would recommend it unreservedly. But the particular place we rented also lists through a separate management company (which I do blame), and after the five of us and our luggage were dropped off on East 50th Street, it was my job to hike down to 45th street and several blocks west to actually pick up the keys from their office. There were going to be four adults staying in the place (Trash, Bitter, BuenaOnda coming in from Mexico to meet us later, and myself) in addition to M. Edium and Deniece, so I was glad to be able to get four sets of keys. Then I walked the 18 minutes back in the spitting rain to meet the others at the pizza place where they were waiting, and learned that Trash had lost her cell phone. That's not the bad thing that happened, though, because Bitter called Super Shuttle and the van Trash had left her phone in was back in half an hour, with her phone still in it. The unexpected thing was when we went into the apartment building. Or rather when we tried to, because the key to the security door didn't work. So imagine, if you will, three adults and two children under 10, all slightly damp and groaning under the weight of our jackets and luggage, crammed into the steamy vestibule of a Midtown New York City apartment building with a key that doesn't open the security door. No, make that two keys. No, four. No, eight, because we tried all eight. And I knew this was the correct address, because I'd gotten 10 e-mails with that address and had saved it on my phone. Which is an antique that brought me in for a lot of mocking over the course of the visit, but it does have the message drafts feature for storing important information as long as I don't accidentally erase it, which in this one rare case I hadn't. Just as I was getting out that very phone to call the management company to shout a hearty WTF down the line, an actual resident came in and let us piggyback through the security door. We still weren't sure what was wrong, but I closed my phone for now, figuring that once we got into the apartment and offloaded our luggage we could figure it out. So we all dragged ourselves and everything we'd brought with us up the stairs to number 2C, where the good news was that the other key definitely fit the lock on the apartment door. Better yet, it turned and unlocked it as well. So everything was mostly cool again. Except you know how you look at pictures of a place online, and you get there and it looks completely different? Like you wonder how the photographer was able to take a picture through the wall, since that's the only way a picture could have made the place look that big? Well, imagine walking into your vacation apartment and it's totally different. Like, the wall colors, the decoration, the furniture, the layout… …The dude sleeping on the couch… We did not know what the hell was happening -- whether the place had been double-booked, or we were evicting a squatter, or what. After all, even if the security door key hadn't fit, the one to the apartment key did, so we assumed we were in the right place. Bitter explained to the guy we'd rousted that we were supposed to be subletting this apartment and he was like, uh, no you're not, because I live here. All the time. So…back to the hallway. I was hitting redial really hard when Bitter happened to notice that one of the key rings had a faint address handwritten under the management company's label. A different address than the one we were at. Different from the address I had been sent multiple confirmation e-mails of, the one I had confirmed at the management office, and personally seen on their computer screen. The good news -- the really good news -- is that the correct address was only two doors down, and not on 50th Street East or in Brooklyn or Manhattan, Kansas or something. So it was a relatively short haul to where we were supposed to be, where both keys worked and we soon found ourselves inside a different 2C. An apartment that, aside from the colors on some of the walls, looked exactly like the one we'd seen online. Best of all, both living room couches were totally unoccupied by humans of any variety. So it really wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been, at least not for us. The person I feel is the dude who was rudely awakened to the fact that two doors down on his very block is an apartment with the same number whose key also opens his place. Good luck finishing your nap after that. posted by M. Giant 8:28 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:Wow. Is it legal to demand the locks be changed if you're the tenant? Because if I were couch-sleeping dude I'd be down there first thing and banging on their door until they did it. Sheesh.
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