Month: May 2007

It appears my brother-in-law (one of them, anyway) is back in Mexico City. You can tell this because he’s blogging again. He goes down there to study atmospheric chemistry, but spends all his time talking about Mexican facial hair.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, I’m not sure I’d read his blog if it were primarily about atmospheric chemistry. Not because I don’t think it’s important, but because I know nothing about it. Complaining about the DMV is really more my speed. And something I am intimately familiar with.

Although, whenever I talk to people with post-graduate degrees (Which my wife’s family has about a million of) I start thinking I should go back to school. I’m not sure it makes a whole lot of sense for me, though. I have a B.A. in math, and all my professors always encouraged us to go on to grad school. But while I enjoy learning, I was never a particularly good student. I did well here and there when I really got into a class or two, but I was never the type to do those things that you need to do to succeed in school, like my homework. I got away with it for a while. My ninth-grade Spanish teacher graded us 1/4 each on homework, participation, tests, and quizzes. My test and quiz average was about 98% (It may have been higher – I think she gave a lot of extra credit, and I knew the Spanish pretty well), and my homework and participation average was about 40%, so she gave me C’s. She even kept me after class once to give me a speech to the effect of, “You know the Spanish. If you would put forth even a minimum effort to actually do the work assigned, you’d be getting A’s.” It didn’t work.

So, I generally ignore the urges to go to grad school, and they go away. Maybe I’ll go get a PHD in something weird when I retire. I think that would be fun. I would definitely call my professors “Sonny” and refer to my classmates as “whippersnappers”.

I called Capital One again today to make sure someone got the fax. Apparently the company that deals with titling for Capital One is on the West Coast, and no one is answering the phone yet. The CSR I spoke to was a little snotty with me. It’s not my fault that, while the first person I spoke to two weeks ago said the title would be mailed in 72 hours, this one told me that Capital One doesn’t even have a record of my request for 72 hours, and the whole process takes three weeks. So, even if I had started this process the day we moved, I’d barely have enough time to register the car in DC within the 30-day period that DC requires.

It’s more trouble than it’s worth to refinance my car loan through someone else, but this is likely the last time I deal with Capital One. The process to get the Blank Check loan was great, and they gave me a better rate than the dealership could, but once they had the loan, they haven’t been terribly helpful.

Capital One is stupid. Because the DC DMV is totally insane and requires that the original title to a car be sent to them before they will allow you to register it, I called Capital One, who hold the lein on my car. I asked them to send the title to the DC DMV. They said, “Sure. We’ll send it within 72 hours.” I thought, “Great. Now I can register my car and not get a ticket.”

It wasn’t great. About a week and a half goes by, and the DMV still doesn’t have my title. I called Capital One again. I got a very different story this time. “Oh, you have an electronic title, you have to fax us the form from the DMV.”

What?

I love when some CSR tells you, “Oh, you are in this situation, therefore you have to jump through this hoop”, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and aren’t you stupid for not knowing. Even better is that they didn’t bother to tell me that they weren’t going to send the title without the faxed form. Never mind that they have contact information for me – they sure find me when they want to try and sell me something. They just figured that I’d notice eventually.

So I’m waiting some more. Hopefully my wife will be able to bat her eyelashes at the nice police officers down at the station on V St. and get me another temporary parking permit. I have faith in her. And I’m going to call Capital One tomorrow and make sure they got my fax. I asked them to expedite it because they already screwed it up. I can’t imagine that they’ll listen, but there’s always hope.

I just realized that the movie script version of National Novel Writing Month is kicking off its inaugural session in 21 days.

Since last year’s Nano ended, I’ve moved from Northern Virginia to DC, which means that have a whole new group of fellow participants to not go out and meet.

Is there an active group of Columbia Heights (and nearby areas) Nanoers who plan to do Script Frenzy?

I don’t like to throw away food. I mean, who does? But sometimes you’re left with some kind of random stuff in the fridge, and you don’t feel like going to the store, but you really would like some dinner. What do you do?

Well, if you’re me, today, you order pizza.

Actually, I’m just kidding. What you’d do, if you were me this evening, is go to Hi Market and buy a six-pack of Sierra Nevada, two Vitamin Water XXX’s (Because you’ve never seen that flavor – it’s all rich in antioxidants and stuff), and some corn tortillas. Then you come home and wait for your wife to get home from happy hour. Late, as usual. And her cell phone died over the weekend, and you haven’t replaced it yet, so she couldn’t let you know. It’s okay, though. You just naturally assumed that she’d be late, and it didn’t bother you that much.

Next, you take the leftover onions and green pepper from making veggie burgers the other night. You saute them in some organic canola oil because you just ran out of organic olive oil over the weekend. Then you add some Quorn fake chicken, the spicy black bean salsa you made last week to serve with fish, and serve in the tortillas with some rice.

Your wife might then have to add the tail ends of two bottles of store-bought salsa and a bottle of picante sauce because it’s a little dry, but luckily that’s not enough to give her credit for cooking, so she still has to clean up.

You might later have to do some work, because you’ve been spending a lot of the work day checking your site traffic after not one but two links from Wonkette this week (A slow week, you guess. You swear you’re not paying anyone on staff there. Really.).

Anyway, that’s what you’d do if you were me.

Who steals a trash can? My wife tells me they’re kind of pricey, but seriously. I’m still hoping that someone in the building will offer an explanation, but I really can’t imagine what explanation there could be. I put the cans out at the end of the driveway last night around 10pm. At 6pm today, they were gone. I don’t know what happened in the meantime. Perhaps one of the building residents who parks out back can tell me the last time they were seen, but they haven’t responded to my email yet.

What can we do about this? I don’t think there’s any way to secure the cans and still leave them free enough for the garbage men to pick them up. We can put our address in big numbers on the side, but I don’t think that will be terribly effective.

To whoever has our trash cans: I hope you enjoy them. I hope, very soon, you accidentally place something very dear to you in one of them. I hope you then realize that you’ve done this about an hour after the bins are picked up. To quote my 6th grade math teacher in a moment near nervous breakdown (It wasn’t my fault, it was Lucas’), “Karate Kid says, ‘What goes around comes around’.” I’m not sure he really said that, but it’s true nevertheless.

The Metro was empty this morning. Is there some holiday I don’t know about?

It still amazes me how different a city neighborhood is from a suburb neighborhood. I lived in my condo in Falls Church, VA, for two years. The only neighbor I spoke to more than once was the guy two doors down who signed for my vaccuum cleaner, and the women one floor down because the seal on my toilet broke and started leaking into their ceiling.

Now, I’ve been in the city for about two months. I’ve met a few of the people next door. Someone who lives down the street contacted me through Flickr to welcome me to the neighborhood. And I know everyone in my building, although that’s partly because of the condo association meetings.

I find myself feeling very smug about moving into the city. Walking to the neighborhood market, hopping on the bus to meet the wife for happy hour, listening to people talk through the open screen to the cat sitting in the windowsill . . .

In any event, I’m very happy with our decision to move. I’m glad we decided that we couldn’t afford anything we liked in Ballston and Clarendon.

I realize that this is a little rambling, and I’m not sure I ever really had a point. Maybe I’m just confused because it’s Monday morning and I’m not actually in a terrible mood. There’s probably a full moon or something tomorrow.