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Oh, dude, I so hear you. We've been saving money for YEARS, put down a big down payment, keep throwing EXTRA money at the mortgage . . . but I can't bring myself to spend money on, say, redoing the bathroom that hasn't been touched since the house was built in 1924. (Ditto the kitchen.) Yeah. Because what if the economy implodes even MORE and Jon loses his JOB? Can't eat a shiny new bathroom, you know! I wish I could be a little less risk-averse, once in a freaking while.
Drop typekey or whatever and just comment like back in the olden days when you had to type in your name and url. Does that work?
Yes, I'm tired of the "have to" expenses too. We're getting money back from the gov't (thank EIN wealth redistribution tax refund) and I was going to buy either a new fridge or rip up the dog pee carpet. Poverty be damned, I was going to be stupid. Then this morning, alternator went out on the GOOD car. Son of a bitch.
Oh, and my boss as well as a number of parents from the school are my FB friends, no way I am doing 25 things that say anything revealing about me. I have a hard enough time being taken seriously or looking respectable. Not going to add to that.
"being perpetually prepared for the bad times does not ACTUALLY give you any sense of comforting self-righteousness when the bad times finally arrive. It just makes you pissy and resentful that you didn't have a better time back while everyone else was."
Word, word, so much word.
I am bitter.
Haloscan is mocking us in our bitterness. We hates you, Haloscan.
Nah, nothing works, Lisa. According to some forum I was reading, signing into Typekey is supposed to cure the issue, but it didn't for me. Bah, humbug!
Yeah, I have to edit what I say on FB pretty carefully b/c there are people from my church there. The downside of being friended, I guess.
And oy for the plumbing. One of the things that actually makes me happy that I don't own a house. Because plumbing problems seem to be eternal.
As for ice--it doesn't snow here that it doesn't rain on top of it this winter. I HATE it.
And Blogrolling keeps SAYING it's coming back...as recently as two weeks ago they were hoping to be back up soon.
Otherwise, I'll be rebuilding my blogroll by hand, too.
(Happy chuckling)
(Chuckling -- such a funny word)
The whole internet is broken, I think.
(((Phantom))). And when the good times roll again, I will come help you roll with them.
And is haloscan messing with you, too?
I believe Blogger has a new way to build a blogroll. I have to change over the entire list at RevGalBlogpals, which is over 300.
I am wishing I'd gone off travelling the world, instead of studying. Maybe I should drop out of grad school and do that now. Want to come with me?
We live in fear of things breaking; but once in awhile things croak on us at just the right time. Like New Years Eve, when the door fell off the fridge. There was a big New Year's Day blowout sale the next day at Bernie's. Oh and our minivan. Labor day weekend, it gave up the ghost. We decided to temporarily liquify the Roth IRAs we had for a down payment on a new one. Had that money still been in there 2 weeks later...well, most of it would have gone up in smoke when the market tanked.
Everything else breaks at the worst time, and all at once. Washers, dryers, hot water heaters, the roof, the garage doors, the children...
ugh.
Sympathy/empathy on the plumbing - we had that in 2008, had to dig up the front yard (but fortunately not the street after all, hope you don't have to either). Yeah, I hate spending money on non-fun house improvements.
I can comment on Jody's, why can't you? I just did regular old typing in.
Have thought about doing the 25 things meme, as no one too embarrassing is currently linked to me, but I'm afraid my mom will join up one of these days. I love her and we get along well, but we live nearby and talk almost every day, I don't need her more in my business than she already is. (and she's big on offering suggestions, whether or not she's been asked - what happened to women as empathizers, men as problem solvers? 
)
1. make your feed reader be your blogroll. both bloglines and google will do that.
2. i hear you on the plumbing. we had to dig up the street a couple of years ago because the line from the main broke...just our side of the main. pissed me off. made a big hole in the bank account too.
unless of course you have people on your reader that you're hiding from your blogroll, and vice versa.
Lucy: yes. When do we leave? We can send my kids postcards occasionally.
Nici: laughing out loud. Yeah. My kids appear to be (mostly) fixed at this point, but, boy, they picked some really bad times to break, back when they were broken.
Genevieve: I can't comment because TYPEPAD HATES ME.
Or because I have a persecution complex. I'm not sure which.
Now I want to know: which one of us broke the internets?
Oh, Magpie, I use Sage (Firefox plug-in) as my main feed reader -- I don't keep either Google or Bloglines updated. But hey. Doing the links by hand will keep me out of trouble for awhile, at least.
Oh, I hear you on the being-prepared curse. When I was scraping by for all those years in grad school, once every couple of years my mother would send me a check, a couple hundred bucks just for the hell of it. Since I had precisely zero extra money, those unexpected windfalls were so exciting... except that *every single time* some emergency would come up that cost me precisely the amount she had sent. I was always profoundly grateful to have the extra cash to cover the emergency, but then I would sit down and sob over never having the chance to spend it on anything fun. (And then I started dreading the windfalls, because they inevitably meant an expensive emergency!)
So I guess it means that the fact that I've lost my blogrolling password won't be a problem in the long run.
Well, maybe you could feel some kind of comforting self-righteous NOW.
Genevieve, I think we should sic your mother and my mother on each other, and watch the suggestions fly!
Also, y'all are confirming for me why I'm not on Facebook. I keep thinking, OK, so if I sign up, and friend my bloggy friends and my cousins, what do I say when people ask "Who is So-and-so, anyway?"
(Also, when I posted that note to Genevieve, hers was the last comment I could see so it made more sense. The other ten comments in between magically appeared after. Hmmph, Haloscan.)
In my experience, Madeleine, nobody asks. Maybe that's just my family and the great! lengths! I have gone to in the service of creating functional! boundaries!, but so far no one has asked me how I know so-and-so.
I wanted to ask my cousin how she knew Stockard Channing, but then I figured, hell, that's none of my business.
Well I say f*** ice and f*** snow and double-f*** cold; I want nothing more than to be able to bike John to school and then me to work again.
Also call me weird but I wish I'd done more homework and more drugs... youth, young, wasted on can be a weird thing.
Did the 25 things meme because about 4 million of my family tagged me and revealed stuff not too revealing.
Madeline, no one ever asks how I know someone.
I actually have less problem with my family and bloggy friends on the internet then I do with the random people who I'm on a "hi, how are you" basis from real life. Why would they friend me just because they know my name? All the same, I've accepted most of their friend requests, and just kind of monitor myself.
That suckity sucks. It seems like everything in our house is falling apart RIGHT. NOW. And the savings? GONE.
Being irresponsible was o.k., but I wish we'd been MORE irresponsible.
I'm with you on the hatin' of Blogrolling right about now. Those fireplacers sure have mucked it up good.
Sorry about the plumbing. We had the same sort of thing not long ago when the washing machine backed up into the sinks and bathtub. Talk about Creature From the Black Lagoon! That was no fun. We have yet to do the whole ripping out of the plumbing, but by the sounds ours makes, we're not all that far off. Sad thing is -- we HAVE no savings. We're seriously lower middle class, still ekeing by paycheck to paycheck. Our big college plan for Offspring is for JF to stay employed where he is, and she can go for free. Seriously. That's really our plan right now.
God, I hope we win the lottery soon. Or a little known relative leaves us buckets-full of money when they die. God, that sounds so mercenary! Well, these are bad times. Thanks, Bush! You not only made me poorer, you also made me a mercenary ass!
Good grief, I'm happy I left Blogger lo those many years ago (2?). Maybe Bush 43 broke the internets on his way out of office?
I've also got all kinds of groups of people on FB, and nobody has ever asked how I know anyone (although there *is* someone out there on my fringe, who I've not friended but we have many mutuals, that is totally nosy and *would* ask). Every once in a while I find a weird connection--2 friends that I know from completely different places who also know each other, but hey, not my business. It's a small world. After all :-p
You have so totally captured my feelings about this particular "economic downturn."
There my husband and I were, saving our money. Living within our means. Staying in a tiny apartment for 7 years. Keeping only one car. Paying off our credit cards in full each month. Not traveling, not buying expensive technology. Saving for retirement and college funds.
And this was supposed to be the year it paid off. Youngest in kindergarten, more work hours for me, non-postdoc job for him. We were going to travel, and gut out one of our 5x7 bathrooms and replace the 8-year-old computer. Heh.
Note to self: In the real world, the grasshopper and ant will BOTH be hungry during a harsh winter, but the grasshopper has more fat reserves because he ate better and did less work.
I am having similar issues with typepad and given up on the blogroll on Wordpress as that's even more mystifying. Also experiencing serious dollops of pissy for similar reasons. I'm considering changing my name by deed poll to Pissy Bad Ass.
Cheers
Sending hugs and sympathy your way, my friend. We are in hard times for so many of us, and it's cold outside (even my 5 year-old says he's bored of the snow). In about 6 weeks we'll have the first day of Spring, which hopefully will begin to fix the latter problem. As for the former, well, I keep hoping that our New Administration in Washington will miraculously improve the situation. But I have admit the odds do seem long on that one some days.
What's that old curse about living in interesting times?? I think it may apply here...
I don't suppose it's going to make you like me any more if I tell you that when most people on our street were subjected to Major Plumbing Work due to the asshole contractor who did shoddy job setting up the sewage system for the street, we escaped untouched because it turns out our house is connected to the pipes from a street downhill and one over. It won't, will it?
Also, you disappeared again. No fair...
I've had no luck with the blogroll on wordpress either so I just stick to the blogger thingy on the other blogs and that just has to do.
Cheers
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