1. Gave in to the car’s whining and brought it in for service. Service Advisor 1 confided that I am 2000 miles ahead of each service, so the car started pleading for the 120,000 mile service as I was nearing 118,000 miles. Not only is the 120,000 mile service expensive, but it also involves taking apart a lot of the car and discovering that various expensive parts of the car are leaking essential fluids. Service Advisor 2 offered me a 10% discount on the work for absolutely no reason whatsoever that I could discern. This car needs to last another four years, give or take, because we just bought a new car a few weeks ago, and I would like to stagger the number of years between car purchases.

  2. My year-end bonus will be included in the next pay period. It is roughly double what I paid in car repairs.

  3. One of my yarn-friends is starting at the company full-time on Monday! Assuming that I filled out the refer-a-friend form correctly, I should also be getting a small bonus for that. I’m going to split the after-tax value of that with her. With this money we’d each be able to knit roughly four sweaters in Cascade 220.

  4. You know how they say that you are supposed to save a certain fraction of your income for retirement yadda yadda? I get emails from my financial institution pleading with me to schedule automatic monthly transfers so that I can save money without even thinking about it. I’m not particularly good with money, so instead I tend to wait to roughly this time of year and then move some money into long-term storage. OK, it is not really long-term storage because it’s not an official retirement account. However, I haven’t yet figured out how to get the money back OUT of this account to where I could spend it.

  5. Based on my luck, now would be a great time to short the entire stock market.

  6. I know, I know, retirement account, tax advantages, blah blah blah. But if I want to buy something, like, I dunno, a house in San Diego, I could probably call someone up who would tell me how to take this money out of long-term storage and send it to the house-buying-paperwork-reconciling people.

  7. The apartment downstairs from me is for rent. You can hear me being loud early in the morning for just $2200/month.

  8. I had always thought that the building across the courtyard from mine was roughly the mirror image of my building and that all of the apartments in their building were roughly the same size as the apartments in my building. However, Apartment 1 in the next-door-building has come up for sale, and it is allegedly a 3br 1100 sqft apartment, while all of the units in my building are 2br 800 sqft. I am kind of wondering where the extra space comes from. This apartment also has two nice patios and a garage. If there were an open house scheduled, I’d be tempted to take a look. Listed for $509,000.