Bryce Moore's Blog, page 108
June 6, 2019
Credit Card Churning: 1.5 Years In
I posted back when I began to dip my toes into the vast world of credit card churning in October of 2017. (For those of you who don’t know, it’s the practice of signing up for credit cards that have attractive incentive offers (tens of thousands of points for spending $3,000 in the first three months, typically), and then chaining those offers together to gets tons of free points for, well, free.) I posted another update about four months later, saying that so far, it had been going well.
How are things looking now?
Still peachy keen. Really, my only regret is that I didn’t start this a long time ago. Though, as always, that comes with a huge disclaimer. To make this work, you need to be hyper-organized. You need to keep track of what cards need to be used when and for what. You *need* to pay off each card in full every month. You also need to have a steady stream of purchases you put on a credit card anyway. If you start making purchases just to meet a minimum spending goal, then you’re spending money you wouldn’t have spent otherwise. And that means you’re likely losing money . . .
Denisa and I have some purchases we know will go on a card every month: groceries, phone, utilities, gas. We know how much we spend on those each month, and so we’ve gotten a new card about every 2-3 months. Since I started this, I have gotten 10 new credit cards. With those credit cards, I have gotten 260,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards Points, 325,000 Marriott Points, and I’m coming up on 275,000 Hilton Points. All earned on purchases we were going to make anyway. In addition, I have Gold status with Marriott and Diamond status with Hilton.
Of course, some of the nicer card offers come on cards that have annual fees. If you don’t watch yourself, you’re going to lose some of your “profits” by paying those, but if you swing it right, it actually works out very well. Some examples:
My Marriott cards typically cost about $95/year. However, they each come with a free night each year. If I’m planning on staying at a Marriott one night/year anyway (per card), then as long as the Marriott I was planning on staying at would cost more than $95, I’m ahead of the game on this one. With my family, when we stay at Marriotts, the cheapest we can find them is usually around $120, so this is just fine. And we travel often.My Hilton card costs $450/year(!) When I was starting out, this would have been a deal breaker for me. However, I realize there are ways to make this work as well. For example, it comes with $250 of Southwest gift cards, which knocks that annual price down to $200. It comes with a free weekend night at almost any Hilton. (This year, I’m hoping to take Denisa to stay at a Hilton right off Central Park. It would usually cost $450 for the room. I’ll stay there for “free.”) In addition, I get automatic Diamond status at Hilton, which comes with free upgrades to rooms when I say there, free breakfasts, and other perks. If you don’t travel and stay at hotels enough, it’s hard for these perks to counterbalance the $450 you’re paying for them, but if you *do* travel anyway, they’re an excellent bonus.My Chase Sapphire Reserve card is also $450/year. But again, there are benefits. If I spend Chase points to travel, I get a 50% bonus. The first $300 I spend on travel with that card each year is refunded. I get extra buyers protection on purchases, automatic trip insurance, and more. It all depends on whether these bonuses work for what you’re already doing or what you want to do anyway.
I’m to the point now where I’m being more selective on what cards I get, and where I use which card, as some of them give you bonus points for spending in a particular category. For example, my Chase Freedom card gives me 5% points at grocery stores and home improvement stores this quarter. That means I get back about 8-10% of what I spend there if I use those points in travel. If I was going to buy groceries anyway (spoiler alert: I was), then which would be better: buying them for $100 and getting nothing back, or buying them for $100 and getting $8 in travel credits?
My biggest concern going into all of this had been for my credit score. I needn’t have worried. It’s still at the highest level possible, even with all these cards.
Would I do it again? Of course. But only within the constraints I’ve outlined. This morning I just bought round trip tickets to San Antonio for my family, all with points. They would have been over $1,500 for cash. I spent 96,000 Chase points, transferring them over to Southwest. It really felt like a cheat code for travel.
Honestly, my biggest “problem” at this point is that I’m so used to saving money, my natural inclination is to save points as well. They’re no good to me if I don’t use them, so I’m having to look for ways to spend the points to have fun, which is why I got into all of this in the first place. Next up? I’m hoping to stay in Orlando for a week with the fam for free, and there’s another trip to Boston I’d like to take.
Life’s rough.
If any of this sounds like it’s something that’s up your alley (with the disclaimers I gave), then let me know. I can give you some referral links to good cards . . .
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
June 5, 2019
Book Review: The Reluctant Swordsman
The Reluctant Swordsman by Dave Duncan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The Seventh Sword series went on sale on Amazon a while ago, and so I picked it up. (Four books for $3 total? Why would I pass that chance up?) It was well-reviewed on Goodreads, though almost none of my friends had read it, but I grew up reading 80s fantasy, and this was an author I’d missed. Still, high fantasy can be a real time commitment, and so I kept passing the series by, waiting for a better time.
At last, I started the book on Sunday. I finished it on Tuesday, which is really all the endorsement you need from me. I couldn’t put it down. Of course, some of that is because much of it was right up my alley: it’s got a straightforward premise that’s executed in ways that are surprising. A normal man from our world finds himself transported into a fantasy world, where he’s put into the body of the best sword fighter in that world. Sounds great, except right before he was put there, the best sword fighter in the world got himself into an almost certain death situation, full of political intrigue the guy from our world knows nothing about.
Adventure ensues.
Along the way, there’s some discussion of religion and free will, plenty of fascinating world building, portrayal of different societies and how they function, and more. I was kept moving not just by the plot, but by the desire to know more about the world and how it functioned. The writing is immersive, doing an excellent job of describing the land without bogging you down with too much detail. It’s a fast read, and a ton of fun.
That said, it does have some issues that might be major stumbling blocks for some. Its portrayal of women leaves much to be desired. Maybe the series improves in this aspect later on, but for the first book at least, they’re often viewed much more as objects than as individuals. Yes, the protagonist does object to this, so it’s not a complete fiasco, but the objections feel more like window dressing than anything else. If that’s an issue that would massively interfere with your ability to read and enjoy a book, this isn’t the book for me.
Then again, it’s a class sword and sorcery book, and the portrayal is typical to the genre and the time it appeared. I was able to read around it, though that might say something about me. Not sure, but I’m not going to read too heavily into it. I viewed this book as escapist, and it scratched that itch perfectly. There’s some adult content, but it doesn’t delve into the details the way so many modern books do.
If any of this sounds remotely interesting to you, I encourage you to give it a shot. I’m already well into book two and still enjoying myself immensely.
View all my reviews
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
June 4, 2019
When Do You Make Your Mind Up About a Book?
I’ve had a string of bad luck with my reading choices for the last while. I haven’t given any of the last four a rating higher than a 5/10. (I gave one 5, two 4’s, and one a 2.) No, I won’t tell you which books they were, but I will say that they were well reviewed. One has even picked up some major awards, so I had high hopes for it. My disappointment is what led me to want to write about this topic.
I typically wouldn’t finish a book I’m enjoying so little. I’d set it aside, give it no rating, and move on with my life, because who has time to read books you’re not in love with? Except I also have this goal to finish a book a week. When I’m under the gun to keep up with the pace, then that means abandoning a book partway through is abandoning the progress I made in finishing it. I think I need to come up with some sort of a compromise to solve that, because I know from experience just how easy it is to dislike a book you’re being forced to read. (Even if you’re the one forcing yourself to read it.)
But even setting that forced reading experience aside, I wasn’t going to like the book in question. I respect the fact that others did, but it didn’t work for me at all, and I wanted to figure out why. I’ve come up with a few possible scenarios.
First off, a book can have a bad start. If I don’t find a reason to be engaged with the characters right off, I start getting bored. Scratch that, actually. It doesn’t just have to be the characters. There needs to be something about the book that digs into me. It could be the style or the humor or the mystery or the characters. But it needs to engage me. Ideally, it compels me to keep reading.
This book had that. I liked the setting and the character development at the beginning, but sometimes that’s not the case. So much can hinge on getting a reader’s buy-in right from the beginning. Once an author has made me care about what’s happening, there’s a lot more leeway for him or her to work with. I can be much more forgiving about some things like pacing or believability because I’ve invested some of myself into the text.
That leeway is not inexhaustible, however. In the cast of this book, I couldn’t swallow the plot, the character motivations, and the magic system. I don’t think it was all three of them that turned me off, however. I think one of them likely began to not sit well with me to the point that I began to lose faith in the others, like a disease spreading from organ to organ. If I were pressed to identify one thing . . . it would probably be the plot. There were a couple of romantic subplots that felt like they’d been shoehorned into the book, and every time they came up, I gave them an inward eye roll.
And they came up many times.
After enough of those times, I didn’t want to read the book anymore. But I was so far into it that I felt I needed to finish it. A bad combination. But whenever I have a bad or good experience with a book, I try to figure out what it was about the experience that caused it. Mainly so I can avoid it or use it in my own writing. For example, I’m always amazed by how good Stephen King is at writing characters and putting them in relatable, compelling circumstances. If I could pick one thing that I could get better at, that would be it. So I’m paying close attention to books and character introductions to see how the good ones really shine.
In the meantime, I’ve just started a new series, and I love it so far, which is such a refreshing feeling after such a long run of the doldrums. Here’s hoping it keeps it up!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
May 31, 2019
Pray for Trump
I read an article this morning that Franklin Graham, son of the late evangelist Billy Graham, is trying to organize a national “Pray for Trump” day this coming Sunday. According to Graham, Trump is surrounded by enemies and needs divine intervention at this point to protect him and bring him to whatever glorious endgame God must surely have in store for the man.
And I certainly believe there’s an endgame waiting for Trump. On that, Franklin Graham and I definitely agree, even if the temperature of that endgame might be up for debate. I’m also all for praying for the man. After all, the first scripture that came to mind when I read the challenge was Matthew 5:
38 ¶ Ye have heard that it hath been said, An aeye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:
39 But I say unto you, That ye resist not aevil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right bcheek, cturn to him the other also.
40 And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.
41 And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.
42 aGive to him that asketh thee, and from him that would bborrow of thee turn not thou away.
43 ¶ Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt alove thy bneighbour, and hate thine enemy.
44 But I say unto you, aLove your benemies, cbless them that dcurse you, do egood to them that fhate you, and gpray for them which despitefully use you, and hpersecute you;
45 That ye amay be the bchildren of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth crain on the just and on the unjust.
46 For if ye alove them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?
47 And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?
48 aBe ye therefore bperfect, even as your cFather which is in heaven is dperfect.
There’s a narrative that’s being used by some religious groups that’s deeply disturbing to me, even as I once bought into it. Confession time: I remember in the days after 9/11, I felt that George Bush had been helped by God to win the 2000 election because of what lay in store for the country. That if Al Gore had been president at that time, things would have been much worse. (Go easy on me. I was 23, and in Utah.)
That’s not an idea that I plucked out of the ether. It’s an idea many Republicans believed then, and probably still believe. Within my own faith, we believe the Founding Fathers of America were inspired by God to create a new template of freedoms, and I continue to believe that, although I don’t buy into the almost sainthood status some within my faith would have us bestow on them. The Founding Fathers were still simply men, warts and all.
But sooner or later all this “God put ____________ into office” logic begins to break down. To hear the Republicans, they’d have God helping in some elections and sitting others out. He got Bush into office, but then took a couple of election cycles off, letting Obama (who some Republicans called the anti-Christ, and I am not making that up, sadly), have a turn in the Oval Office. But then He came back to help Trump get in. But while He pulled that stunt off without the help of a national day of prayer to get Trump elected, apparently things are bad enough now that we need to move the prayer needle back to Trump’s favor.
Of course, it’s a dangerous thing to dismiss the role of God in our lives. To toss out the potential for prayer to actually have a real impact on us personally. I remember one of my professors at BYU questioning how mass prayers really were supposed to work. As if God was up in heaven, waiting to pour out blessings or unleash the heavenly host to come to our aid, but He had to wait for the giant Prayer Meter to get to a certain point before He could. And if someone ended up dying, God snapped his fingers in disappointment and said, “Shoot. They were just five prayers shy of me being able to help.”
That sounds ridiculous, and I don’t believe it. Yet I also think there are times when the collective faith of the many opens up avenues not otherwise available. There’s a dissonance in those two ways of thinking, and it’s not a dissonance I’ve totally come to peace with yet. I tend to believe it’s because my understanding is limited to a strict cause/effect way of thinking. But that’s a thinking bounded by a fourth dimension (time) that’s always linear. Always moving from cause to effect. But if a being could be outside that linear restriction, could the effect ever come before the cause? Could it be planned for, not ahead of time, but outside of it?
And now we’ve reached a point I had no idea I was even headed in when I started this simple post about praying for Trump. So before I head further down that rabbit hole, I’m going to back up and leave the topic for another time.
Where was I?
Praying for Trump.
I’m baffled that so many religious people can continue to put so much faith in a man who is so clearly without morals. Who doesn’t just spit on every single one of the ten commandments, but smiles while he does it and assures you he isn’t, even as the spittle’s still wet. This, then, is the tool God is using to keep the country safe?
I don’t doubt God capable of working through even the most rusty and decrepit of tools. His work will eventually be complete, no matter what. But I can’t pray for Trump to continue down the path he’s on. I can’t believe it’s one God looks on favorably.
Will I pray for Trump? Sure. The way the Children of Israel prayed that God would soften Pharaoh’s heart. The way Christ prayed for the men who crucified Him. I will pray for Trump the way Paul exhorted Timothy:
1 I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men;
2 For akings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and bpeaceable clife in all godliness and dhonesty.
3 For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour;
Here’s hoping it does some good.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
May 30, 2019
Different Flavors of Sainthood
When Denisa and I were looking at where we wanted to go after BYU, we both agreed we wanted to shoot for the northeast. Maine, if possible, but we’d settle for anywhere north of DC. This was for a number of reasons, but one of the main ones was, perhaps ironically to non-Latter-day Saints, we felt that Utah just had too many members of our church.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I have many, many family members in Utah. The vast majority of them, actually. But I’d grown up in the northeast, and I’d always observed a stark difference between the experience I’d had growing up in the church and the way the church functioned in Utah. I wanted my kids to have an experience closer to what I’d had than what I observed living in Provo, Orem, and Lindon.
Of course, now that I’m even older, I’ve come to doubt there’s any such “uniform” experience to be had anywhere. Latter-day Saints like to talk about how universal the church is. How you can go across the world and attend a meeting anywhere else, and you’ll still see the same church functioning. No difference! And at first blush, you’d be right. The ordinances are the same. The way church meetings are put together are the same (at first glance). The beliefs espoused from the pulpit are (often) the same.
But the experience we each have as members of this church can be very, very different. Not just from continent to continent, country to country, or state to state, but even within the same stake or even the same ward. So much of what “the church” consists of depends on the friends you have within it, the way you live it, the way others around you expect it to be lived, etc. For example, within my congregation in Maine, you have people who are quite liberal and people who are very conservative. Surround yourself with all of one group or the other, and the sort of conversations you’d have about “the church” and the direction it’s going might be very different.
Yet I still believe the overall sentiment of my earlier opinion (that I wanted to get away from so many church members) was the right one for me. There’s a certain amount of groupthink that begins to emerge when too many people share the same assumed beliefs. Here in Maine, I might have a very different take on some church practices than my neighbor, but we get along, because neither of us assumes what the other believes, and we each give the other the room necessary to live within those belief discrepancies.
Is this making any sense? Maybe some specifics will clarify what I’m talking about.
I could use any hot button topic as an example. Abortion. Gay marriage. Women’s role in the church. But as soon as I trot one of those out, it’ll warp the conversation away from my central point, so let’s use something much simpler, instead. We could use playing cards, or R-rated movies, or caffeinated soda. (To non-members: yes, these each inspire long debates among Latter-day Saints, depending on the crowd.) I’m feeling dangerous today, so I’ll go straight to R-rated movies.
There are many members who believe it is wrong to view R-rated movies. They cite President Benson’s talk in General Conference in 1986, where he admonished young men to specifically not go to R-rated movies. They cite the For the Strength of Youth pamphlet, which advises youth to avoid movies that depict good as evil and evil as good.
Long time readers of my blog will have no doubt observed that I watch many movies, many of which are rated R. And I’ve been criticized for the choice at times. (I do, in fact, have standards for what I will and won’t watch. My standards allow for artistic license and quality, though. I also believe some movies aren’t appropriate for people based on age. But I won’t get into the nitty gritty.) But I have only been given a hard time about the choice when I lived in Utah. Not since moving to Maine. There are definitely some who have disagreed with my choice (in fact, there have also been occasions when I’ve been criticized for watching PG-13 movies), but there’s no critical mass of members believing the exact same thing, and so it doesn’t feel nearly as oppressive to me.
Now imagine that same debate, but with one of the previous hot button topics I listed.
But again, I don’t know if that’s been my experience because “that’s how it is in Utah” or because “that’s how I experienced it in Utah.” I’ve brought up issues in the past that have elicited very different opinions. One good example is a post I wrote about how women are treated in the church. I had a number of women object, saying they had never experienced what I was describing some of my friends had gone through and what I had observed. That was eye opening to me. I didn’t doubt they hadn’t experienced it (or at least noticed it), but nor did I doubt my own experiences and the accounts of my friends.
Same church. Different realities. All dependent on what each person had lived or observed.
I continue to feel that the church culture in Utah is too homogenized, but I haven’t lived there in 12 years. I base that opinion on my past experiences, my observations of news items coming out of the state, and my interactions with people who still live there. So I recognize that I could be wrong. But I prefer living in a place that’s more of a melting pot. Where I come into contact with beliefs that are extraordinarily different from my own. One thing I don’t like about my corner of Maine is the uniform whiteness of the area. I’d love there to be more diversity of race and religion. But no place is perfect.
I’m not sure what else I have to say about the topic. Basically, it’s an observation about how different church members can be, despite the general outward appearance of uniformity. I don’t believe any one flavor of church member is necessarily superior to another, but I do believe they all should be respectful of each other, realizing we’re all on our own path to perfection, and that includes people not of our faith.
And I suppose that’s all I have to say about that for now.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
May 29, 2019
TV Series Review: Chernobyl
Yes, there’s still one episode to go in this, but I can’t wait to talk about it anymore, so I’m going to gush about it now. Chernobyl (a mini-series airing on HBO right now, with the final episode coming Monday) is absolutely riveting stuff. It’s a depiction of the events, response, and aftermath to the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl in 1986. Is it 100% historically accurate? No. But through its depictions of these events, it manages to bring the history alive in a way that’s definitely worth watching, if for nothing more than to get you thinking about what really happened and why.
Before watching this, my experience with Chernobyl was pretty much nothing but abstract. “It happened.” “There was a meltdown.” But what exactly “it” was and what a “meltdown” consists of was never really clear in my mind. So while some reviewers criticized the show for having some blatantly obvious set up scenes (such as where an official asks a nuclear scientist to “explain how reactors work”), I appreciated them taking the time to do that. It needed to be done, because the vast majority of the audience just doesn’t know enough about how nuclear energy works to properly understand what it is they’re watching.
The threat in Chernobyl is invisible. There’s a fire, yes. But there have been fires before, and humans generally know the risks involved with flame. If it’s not spreading, it’s not an immediate danger to you. But the people in Pripyat had no idea what they were dealing with. They accepted the official storyline, and why wouldn’t they? The immediate problems with radiation weren’t clear, and the cases that were clear were hushed up.
Basically, you end up watching a train wreck in slow motion. But because the film makers are careful to inform you just what’s happening when, and what those implications are, it’s that much more powerful. (Even more impactful when watching it with Denisa, who was 10 years old at the time and living 700 miles away. You’d think that was plenty of space for her to be safe. After all, it’s the distance between me in Maine and Erie, Pennsylvania. But it wasn’t.) The show is also very much informed by the current political events here in America. (Or at least, I was unable to avoid drawing many parallels.)
So much of the problem of Chernobyl came from the response to it. The attitude that if they ignored it or kept it quiet, it would go away. That it was better to safe face than it was to save lives. And you’d like to think that sort of mentality ended with the fall of the Soviet Union. That surely today, qualified people are put into positions of power to make sure they understand the consequences of the decisions they make. But I look at some of the people selected to lead American cabinet positions, and I inspect their qualifications, and I am far from convinced this problem is behind us.
The mini-series starts with this line: “What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, that we no longer recognize the truth at all.” It’s a sentiment that continues to be one of the things that alarms me the most in the world. The constant undercutting of truth.
I think that’s why I find Chernobyl so compelling. It helps inform my views of the present while filling in my understanding of the past. I gave it a 10/10 so far, and I can’t really imagine that will change after the finale. Be aware that it’s TV-MA, mainly for gruesome depictions of what exactly went on in Chernobyl, though there’s also some (very) non-sexual nudity and language.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
May 28, 2019
A Day Trip to Boston
We moved out to Maine almost twelve years ago. In that amount of time, I’ve been to Boston for a couple of conferences, and Denisa has been to the Latter-day Saint temple a few times, but we’ve never gone to downtown Boston with the kids at all. In our defense, we had young children for most of that time, and we were just reluctant to go into a large city with all the trappings you need when you’ve got a baby or toddler in tow. (Though on the flip side, we’ve been to London, Dublin, Vienna, Budapest, Salzburg, Munich, Krakow, Prague, Dresden, Leipzig, and Paris all with the kids in tow, and all before we ever made it to Boston . . .)
We finally decided the time had come to change that.
So last Friday we headed down to the city. We stayed outside of downtown for this first trip, mainly because we were heading to the temple on Saturday morning, so we wanted a spot that was near there. (We’ve typically been Marriott brand people, but one of the perks of the American Express Aspire Card that I now have is that it comes with automatic Hilton Diamond status, their highest status. So this time we stayed at the Embassy Suites in Waltham. It was one of the cheaper options, but we still left very impressed. The breakfast was great. They had free snacks in the evening. The pool was much nicer than you get at a Fairfield. The internet was more of a pain to use, but other than that, thumbs up from us.)
Friday night Denisa took the kids swimming, and then we went out to dinner at Tuscan Kitchen with some friends. It was pricey. but we all enjoyed it. Great food. Saturday morning, we had breakfast and then headed to the temple, leaving the kids to watch movies and play games in the car while we were inside, with Tomas in charge. (That all went well, though when we got out, we discovered they had drained the car battery. Kids today are like electric vampires.)
We then headed into the city. I had zero desire to park in Boston, so we drove to Alewife Station (just five minutes or so from the temple) and parked there. ($3 on the weekend, though when you drive into the parking garage, you begin to wonder if you didn’t take a serious wrong turn at some point.) You can buy a Charlie Card there (one per family), and use it to take the T down to Park Street. ($2.25/person, and kids 11 and under are free.) Having done it now, it was super easy, very cheap, and I’d totally do it again.
In the city, we walked around, just getting a feel for the layout so we know what we want to do when we come back. We checked out the outside of some of the sights, went to eat at Quincy Market (Indian food. Yum.), and then went on a bakery expedition. We tried Mike’s Pastry, but the line looked ridiculously long, so we went a block or so further to Bova’s Bakery, which also had outstanding reviews. We proceeded to spend $50 on baked goods, because that’s how we roll. (You can count cannoli as dinner, right?). It was all delicious. I’ve had cannoli from Mike’s Pastry before. Didn’t particularly care for them, honestly. These were much better. I’m not sure if that’s because they were fresher, or I was more hungry, or they were just superior. Either which way, I would skip the lines again the next time I go.)
We took the T back to our car and headed home. (Thankfully it started right away. There was some debate about if we’d let the battery recharge enough. We had.)
Overall, it was a great expedition. We had a fun time, and we definitely plan on going back. Probably in much less than 12 years. 
May 24, 2019
School Budget: 2019 Edition
It’s that time again, boys and girls! Time for approving a new school budget. Last year’s voting was blessedly non-confrontational, but on the theory of an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, I think it’s important to stay out in front of any negative messaging around the budget, especially when it’s as reasonable as this year’s proposal.
The biggest thing voters should focus on is the bottom line increase to local taxes, since that’s where the biggest amount of sound and fury has been generated from budget hawks in the past. For this budget, that increase is .27%. Please note the decimal. This is an increase of a quarter of a percent. In fact, 3 of the towns will actually see a decrease in taxes this year. Per the article in the Daily Bulldog:
Specifically, if the budget passed as proposed, Chesterville would see a $8,723 increase, or .83 percent; Farmington would see a $50,102 increase, or 1.05 percent; Industry would see a $8,695 increase, or .94 percent; New Sharon would see a decrease of $3,201, or a reduction of .31 percent; New Vineyard would see an increase of $21,846, or 2.94 percent; Starks would see an increase of $17,989, or 3.88 percent; Temple would see an increase of $7,347 or 1.73 percent; Vienna would see an increase of $8,559 or 1.19 percent; Weld would see a decrease of $27,352, a reduction of 5.22 percent; and Wilton would see a decrease of $56,657, or a reduction of 2.01 percent.
The budget changes for individual towns from year to year based on town valuation. Basically, the state calculates how much each town can bring in through taxes each year and then portions out how much each town owes for school funding accordingly. So if your town starts bringing in more money than it did in the past, it owes proportionately more for school funding. This makes sense. More taxes coming in means more people living in that area, which means more people able to contribute. If towns do better, they chip in more. If they do worse, they chip in less.
But this potentially opens up the budget to manipulative messaging. For example, you might hear someone say something like “The budget is going up $1.58 million AGAIN! That’s another 4.4%! When will these fat cat school administrators learn that ENOUGH is ENOUGH!??!” But that’s looking at the overall budget, not the local assessment. Overall, the district has 177 more students in it than three years ago. When the district gets bigger, it costs more to teach those students. Lucky for us, the state recognizes that, and so it gives the district more funds from the state level.
Of course, if you point that out to the strawman we’re arguing with, he’s quick to respond, “But local taxes are going up 3.88% in Starks and 2.94% in New Vineyard!” as if that proves you’re wrong, and that local portions are indeed rising.
Just remember: that argument has nothing to do with overall state budgets. That’s based on town valuation. So to respond to that, congratulate Starks and New Vineyard for having growing populations and property tax values. Huzzah!
Anyway.
My hope is this year will be non-contentious again. But the meeting to set the budget is this coming Tuesday (5/28) at 7pm at the high school. Come on out and vote YES to this ultra reasonable .27% increase for local tax payers. And if you hear any naysayers, try to get out in front of the messaging. Sure, the data can be manipulated to seem like it’s another big increase. But if you look at the real figures, there’s no getting around the fact this budget is more than reasonable.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
May 23, 2019
220 Volt Wiring + Drills = Bad
If there’s one thing I’ve come to expect over the years of renovation projects on my house, it’s that there will always be surprises in every project. Whether it’s ripping off the eaves and discovering rotting wood beneath them, giant rocks in the way of holes that need to be dug, incorrectly installed insulation, or something else, any time you open up a house that’s 178 years old, you’re bound to find a thing or two you’re not expecting.
We’ve already come across the first surprise with the new renovation.
Yesterday my contractor was taking off the siding from the bathroom. It’s vinyl, and we’re replacing that bit with clapboard so that it matches the clapboard going up around the sun porch. As he’s ripping it off, he came across some areas where the supports for the old porch had been drilled into the wall. No big deal. You can you a sawz-all to get through those old screws no problem.
Except one area didn’t look quite right. There was a hole around it, and looking through it, he could see wiring right next to the screws. Suspicious, he carved out some of that area to be able to see more before he sawed through the screws. It’s a good thing he did, because three of those screws had gone straight through the 220 volt wiring that leads to our dryer.
This is, naturally, disturbing on many levels. If you’re not familiar with wiring, let me explain a bit. Most electricity in American homes is 110 volts. When you plug your toaster into the wall, that’s what you’re plugging into. Some appliances need more juice, so they have wiring and circuit breakers that allow more voltage through. 220 volts to be specific. No electricity is safe to get zapped with, but twice the amount of it is that much more dangerous.
When you drill through a wire, you take something metal and put it into contact with that electricity. That can complete a circuit, sending all that electricity through the metal whatever-it-was and straight into you. If somehow that doesn’t happen and you don’t notice, that metal and wiring can cause electricity to arc inside your wall. Arcing electricity generates heat, and heat generates fire, and fire inside your walls means your house burns down.
So to put this in context: someone in the past drilled through the most dangerous wiring in my house not once, not twice, but three separate times. Somehow they were able to not get zapped on any of those occasions, so they unwittingly left those screws in place in the dryer wire, where they’ve now lived for at least 12 years. A constant fire hazard that could have gone up at any time.
I count us very lucky in many ways. Lucky that our house is still standing, and lucky no one got hurt in the renovation process. We have an electrician coming today to fix the work and make it safe at last. It’s not an expensive repair, thankfully. Which is why it’s surprising it ever happened in the first place. It also hasn’t pushed back the timetable of renovations at all, since it’s in a spot that can be ignored for now as work proceeds elsewhere.
We just don’t have a functioning dryer until it’s repaired, but that’s why they invented clotheslines, right?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
May 22, 2019
Movie Review: Christopher Robin
I’m a big Winnie-the-Pooh fan (specifically a big Eeyore fan), so I’m a bit surprised it took me as long as it did to finally watch the live action “sequel” to the films and books: Christopher Robin. But it’s been on my list for a while, and I got around to it last week with the fam. My feelings on the movie are . . . mixed. Parts were fantastic, and parts were bad.
First, the good. It was so much fun to see the characters interacting with each other. Yes, they looked different than they did in the cartoon versions and the book illustrations. More like a hybrid of both. But the voices were great for Tigger and Pooh (because they used the same voice actor as the cartoons, Jim Cummings), and that made a good impact. When the core characters were just allowed to be themselves and do their thing, it was a lot of fun. There were some great callbacks to the stories and films, and as a fan, I appreciated those.
My kids liked the movie as well. It was entertaining throughout (with a few exceptions I’ll get to in a moment.) All told, I gave the film a 6/10. I liked it, but the flaws just kept holding it down in my estimation. What were they?
For one thing, the first half of the movie is flat out depressing. Christopher Robin leaves the Hundred Acre Woods and grows up to have his life consumed by work. It was a big enough down that MC actually began to cry in the middle of the sequence. A film that takes Winnie-the-Pooh as a conceit and then makes something that makes 6 year olds cry is taking its dramatical aspirations a bit too seriously, I’d say.
Beyond that, however, I really disliked how they oversimplified “work” in the movie. The older Christopher Robin has a job where things have taken a downturn. He’s got real commitments to keep, but the film portrays that all as a bad thing. That he’s too obsessed with work to have time for his family. In other words, it falls into the tried and true trope of “overworked dad needs to remember life is fun and that he shouldn’t work so hard.”
Except when times at a job really are tough? And people are in risk of losing their jobs? If I were at a company like that and my boss suddenly starts playing with stuffed animals again, I’d have some real complaints.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for work/life balance. But in this movie, it’s vastly oversimplified, and then the solution to it is also very reductive. It’s made out to be this insurmountable problem, and then it’s surmounted with a bit of brainstorming in the last five minutes. (I don’t think I’m spoiling anything when I reveal the film does not have Christopher Robin’s entire family tossed in the poor house at the end.)
The film just felt like it was struggling too hard to be a Serious Family Movie. There were great sprinkles of light-heartedness, but all the depressing stuff kept rearing its head to bring it all sinking back to earth again.
If you’re a fan of the original, it’s worth watching. Just don’t get your expectations up too high, and don’t go into it assuming it’ll be a fun time for the whole family . . .
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
