Tunnelling out of Pile City.

I spent at least 3 hours earlier today figuring out what files needed to go into our suitcases, or into the (new) firebox, and what needed to be shredded. After shredding about 2 hours worth, I finally finished up! Whew!

But then there was this whole box in the basement left over from when I lived in NYC which still had to be dealt with. Fortunately, most of those accounts are already closed, so they were trash - but check out this pile of pay stubs from my time at Limited Brands, from before they converted to E-statements. I will have to shred them one-by-one, because they contain my SSN - AND they are several layers thick, and the paper is so thick that they will certainly jam the shredder otherwise. I've cleared two paper jams from the shredder today already, and i don't want to do it again!!

IMG_1605

IMG_1605, originally uploaded by katie&bas.

June 25 Pics

Link to pics on flickr.

Pile City

It's getting crrraaaaazy around here...

The first couple weeks I was home I kept the place spotless. I'm more like my sister than I thought. :) But then, as my list kept getting longer, even as I was attempting to cross things off - it became clear that there would be no relaxing pool days for me! And as the deal for the house firmed up the piles started.

And now we're in pile city. Since I have to:

1. pack for MT vacation before 7/1
2. prepare items and clothing to go in air shipment 5 days after we return from vacation
3. figure out what will go into our suitcases for final trip to Germany on 7/18
4. get all the documentation together for the closing, scan it and get it to the title company
5. manage getting the rest of the "request to remedy" work done before we leave 7/1
6. vacuum all the rugs
7. mow the lawn before we go on vacation
8. get the laudry done before we go on vacation
9. pack for vacation
10. pick up the dry cleaning
11. polish the silver
12. shred un-needed documents
13. buy a bike and a grill
14. schedule bulk pick-up for old grill
15. re-organize file system, fill firebox and identify documents we hand carry
16. go pick up wedding albums (finally!)
17. go consult with financial advisor regarding 401 (k) rollovers
18. drop off car for body work
19. Go on vacation YAY!
20. Un-pack.
21. Do laundry
22. Pick up medical records.
23. Pay final bills.
24. Organize and separate storage room items for storage vs. Germany shipments.
25. Organize and separate garage items for storage vs. Germany shipments.
26. Label all items in house with post-its directing movers for Storage/Stay/Air Ship/ or Germany.
27. Take pictures of all items in house.
28. Get copies of keys, so I can hand them over and lock the house..
29. Pick up car.
30. Pack for Germany.
31. Close on house.
32. Manage movers.
33. Clean house.
34. Cancel all utilities that can't be done ahead of time.
35. Get to the airport and get out of here!!

And of course this is all with 5 meals and 3 nursings a day for Luna!! Good news is she is finally going down for naps again. (For a whopping 30 minute max!) We'll see what happens when the whole world turns on end for her again!!

Don't get me wrong, I'M NOT COMPLAINING!!! I'm so excited about this, and very happy to be getting this vacation with family. But whew! What a list - and of course I haven't mentioned all the stuff we already got crossed of!!

So anyway - we're in pile city, and it's just going to get worse, especially since I have to make it easy for the movers to know what's going where!

One more - I'm sorry...

BUT read it carefully...


ASKING THE BOMBERS TO TRY AGAIN
By Dick Morris And Eileen McGann
06.23.2008
Published in The New York Post on June 19, 2008.
In an ABC interview on Monday, Sen. Barack Obama urged us to go back to the era of criminal-justice prosecution of terror suspects, citing the successful efforts to imprison those who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993.
It was key to his attack on the Bush administration, which he charged, has “been willing to skirt basic protections that are in our Constitution . . . It is my firm belief that we can crack down on threats against the United States, but we can do so within the constraints of our Constitution. . .

“In previous terrorist attacks - for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in US prisons, incapacitated.”

This is big - because that prosecution, and the ground rules for it, had more to do with our inability to avert 9/11 than any other single factor.

Because we treated the 1993 WTC bombing as simply a crime, our investigation was slow, sluggish and constrained by the need to acquire admissible evidence to convict the terrorists.
As a result, we didn’t know that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda were responsible for the attack until 1997 - too late for us to grab Osama when Sudan offered to send him to us in 1996. Clinton and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger turned down the offer, saying we had no grounds on which to hold him or to order his kidnapping or death.

Obama’s embrace of the post-’93 approach shows a blindness to the key distinction that has kept us safe since 9/11 - the difference between prosecution and protection.
Pre-9/11, the priority was what it had always been - to identify the guilty, gather evidence to convict and punish them by imprisonment.
Post-9/11, the goal changed - now it’s to identify and frustrate any and all pending terrorist attacks.

Should the effort to stop the attacks lead to arrests and provide enough admissible evidence to incarcerate or deport those responsible, fine. But gathering intelligence - not court-admissible evidence - lies at the core of the mission.
So when we found Jose Padilla - a terrorist planning to build a dirty bomb and explode it in a populated area - we couldn’t prosecute him for his plans. We had the evidence, but it hadn’t come to us in a form that made it admissible in a criminal court. So we prosecuted him on lesser charges of aiding terrorists by providing them with funds and supplies - something for which we had sufficient admissible evidence.

Would Obama require all our investigations to be conducted within the procedural framework needed to bring a criminal prosecution? That would slow our anti-terror efforts - fatally.

It has before. Following Obama’s logic, Attorney General Janet Reno and her deputy, Jamie Gorelick, ruled that evidence seized in an immigration prosecution couldn’t be turned over to intelligence operatives investigating terrorism.

The “Gorelick Wall” barred anti-terror investigators from accessing the computer of Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th hijacker, already in custody on an immigration violation.
He was taking flying lessons in Minneapolis at the time, so we wondered what he was up to. But we didn’t look at his computer, and find the e-mail addresses and records of fund-transfers to each of the 9/11 hijackers - information that might well have prevented the attacks.

Our constitutional protections are wonderful and shouldn’t be abridged on any account. But the protections in the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments relate to prosecution under criminal law.
Intelligence that doesn’t lead to prosecution isn’t covered. But Obama would cover it anyway. He’d require us all to proceed in the way we had to in the halcyon days after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing - procedures that led us to miss the point of what was going on, to fail to identify the real culprits until it was too late and left us unprepared for future attacks.

Great article I just read...

One would argue that speculation is a necessary and healthy part of our markets, but should it be regulated a bit more?


OIL PRICES: ‘08′S DEFINING ISSUE
By Dick Morris
06.18.2008
Published on TheHill.com on June 17, 2008.
Gas prices are the first important issue in the 2008 elections. But both parties have been pathetic in their solutions and, one suspects, in their understanding of what is going on.
Democrats call for windfall profits taxes. Bad idea. How can you get oil companies to explore and drill if you tax away their profits? Republicans focus on a gas tax “holiday,” an 18-cent palliative to gas prices that now top $4.50.

Fadel Gheit, managing director of oil and gas research for Oppenheimer and Co., and Jim Norman, author of the book The Oil Card, coming out next month, say that speculation is responsible for a huge part of the run-up in prices.
The growing demand for oil by India and China and the instability of oil supplies certainly account for much of the increase. But the recent spike, they say, is equally due to the weakness of the dollar and massive speculation.
They argue that oil prices are, indeed, determined by supply and demand — not only the supply and demand for oil, but also the supply and demand for oil futures. (Oil futures are a commitment to buy 1,000 barrels of oil at a certain date at a certain price.)
Formerly, most of the investments in oil futures came from energy companies. The federal Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) sharply limited investments by those outside the business, to prevent precisely the kind of speculation now gripping the market.
But when the stock market slowed down in 2000–2002, outside investors decided to speculate in oil futures.
The new players were institutional investors like corporate and government pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, university endowments and other investors, guided by brokerage firms like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.
To avoid the CFTC caps, these investors moved their operations to London, setting up the International Commodities Exchange. Now they can buy all the oil futures they want.
Michael W. Masters, of Masters Capital Management, told Congress that the volume of investment in commodities futures soared from $13 billion at the end of 2003 to $260 billion by March of 2008.
After a while, the CFTC rescinded its limits on how much speculators could buy as long as they went through special “swap” desks at the major brokerage houses.
You can buy oil futures for only 5 percent down on margin, a bargain considering the 50 percent margin requirement for stock market equity investments. Because the margin requirement on oil futures rises as the due date approaches, few investors actually end up buying the oil; they just roll over their investments.
So the willingness of sellers to unload their oil futures, and of buyers to acquire them, sets up its own market of supply and demand that has more to do with determining the actual price of oil than even the global demand and supply for the product itself.
On May 20 of this year, Masters told Congress: “Commodities futures prices are the benchmark for the prices of actual physical commodities, so when index speculators drive futures prices higher, the effects are felt immediately in spot prices and the real economy. So there is a direct link between commodities futures prices and the prices your constituents are paying for essential goods.”
Gheit and Norman suggest that the CFTC regulate the domestic oil futures market (NYMEX) and the participation of U.S. companies in the ICE, restoring the caps on the amount of oil futures speculators can buy. Gheit also urges raising margin requirements for them.
Both worry that the oil futures bubble is going to burst and cost a lot of investors — particularly pension funds who channel their investments through the swap desks of the brokerage houses. We don’t need another sub-prime or savings-and-loan crisis on our hands right now.
The Senate recently tried to force CFTC regulation of all commodities speculators, but the bill was loaded down with a windfall profits tax, so the Republicans killed it.
John McCain needs to get with this program. In his town hall meeting in New York City last Thursday night, he attacked speculators for driving up oil prices but didn’t propose remedies or really explain the problem.
Americans will pay close attention if he does. For McCain, this is the issue and now is the time to use it.

Wake up America, I love you.

So I'm going off on a bit of a political tangent here, forgive me...

I have heard Barack Obama say that he only wants to raise taxes on the "wealthiest" Americans... those earning over $250,000 a year. Well, I'm going to go ahead and assume that this would also include households which earn that much per year combined. Now that I'm not working, we don't really come close to that, but when I was, we came fairly close! So I've really questioned myself as to whether I feel like I qualify as one of the "wealthiest" families in America - and I can tell you I sure as shoot don't!!

Don't get me wrong, I know that we do better than many, and even most Americans, and I feel very fortunate - but hey, we live in a 2000 SF house in Clintonville! We go out to dinner and take nice vacations, and certainly don't go wanting - but wealthy? I think not! We will scrimp and save for college and retirement just like anyone else. We know we can always put food on the table, but that doesn't mean we don't worry just like everybody else.

So I decided to do some research online about income levels in the US. Here are some interesting things I found...

Household income is a measure of current private income commonly used by the United States government and private institutions. To measure the income of a household, the pre-tax money receipts of all residents over the age of 15 are combined.

In 2006, the median annual household income was $48,201.00 according to the Census Bureau.[

In 2005, there were approximately 113,146,000 households in the United States. 19.01% of all households had annual incomes exceeding $100,000.

The aggregate income distribution is highly concentrated towards the top, with the top 6.37% earning roughly one third of all income, and those with upper-middle incomes control a large, though declining, share of the total earned income.[

Households in the top quintile, 77% of which had two income earners, had incomes exceeding $40,705.


SO my first big takeaway - that Bas and I learned about when we filed our taxes this year anyway - was that 77% of the top quintile have two wage earners - and they will be hurt by this. So I would guess that around 77% of people earning 250k or more are from two-income families, too. So Obama wants to raise the taxes on couples essentially like Bas and I - or close to it - before I stopped working. Bas and I both worked hard in high-school and college to achieve what we did, we had parents who sacrificed for us in order to get us to school - and then when we went out into the workforce we busted our butts to get where we are. And yet according to Obama, we should be penalized for this.

The second thing that struck me about these statistics was that 6.37% earn a third of our annual income. A THIRD! So if Barack really wanted to go after the wealthy - why not just restrict it to that THIRD!! And that's only if this money is that he is trying to raise really goes towards the betterment of our country and not towards government sponsored hand-outs and programs that we don't need.

The third thing that bothered me was that those with "upper-middle" incomes are controlling a declining share of earned income! What does that tell us? That our 30% tax bracket is already too high! If we make so much more money than the rest of the country, why not leave a little more in our pocket, so that we have more buying power, so that we can get more of the lower income tax bracket folks employed!! But Obama would prefer to just take our money, give it the poor through health care or new programs, and thus motivate them less to go out and work hard for themselves.

I can tell you one thing - America needs to wake up and realize that this country can't AFFORD BARACK OBAMA AS PRESIDENT. If we're all so worried about (what I strongly just believe is just a down cycle in) OUR ECONOMY, and $4 gasoline - then Barack Obama is not the answer!!

And this is going to sound completely callous and crass, but if he is elected I will understand why. The majority of our populations is so stupid and mis-informed that they actually can't think for themselves. (Sorry, I told you that would not be nice.) Wake up America, I love you.

This is the house I'm hoping that we can build.

We will have to see how much it all adds up to, buying land, etc. And of course we will look around, and I may end up changing my mind, but from here, this is the best one I've seen in our price range. There was another one that had an actual real walk-in closet, but the living space on the first floor wasn't as nice. We would probably add a basement, so the room that is pictured in the floor plan as a wash room would probably be an office instead. There would also be a rec room in the basement, and a storage room. We could probably use the smallest bedroom on the second floor as a closet, or eliminate a wall, make the parents bedroom bigger, and add a closet. We'll see. (And I don't think we'll go with pink, I'm sure we can pick a different stucco color!)

2008 edition of getting to know your friends!

Subject: 2008 edition of getting to know your friends!
Welcome to the new 2008 edition of getting to know your friends! Here is what you are supposed to do, and try not to be lame and spoil the fun. Change all the answers so that they apply to you. Then send this to a bunch of people you know, INCLUDING the person who sent it to you. Some of you may get this several times; that means you have lots of friends. The easiest way to do it is to copy this into a new email and change the answers. Have fun and be truthful!

1. What is your occupation? wife, mom - previously fashion designer, technical designer and business analyst

2. What color are your socks right now? they're all the same color they were yesterday.

3. What is your favorite dessert? cherry pie - only started liking it when I was preggo, still love it!

4. What was the last thing you ate? oatmeal, about to eat a clementine

5. Can you drive a stick shift? yes - and I still do!

6. Last person you spoke to on the phone? Laura Ott

7. Do you like the person who sent this to you? she's my sister, I adore her!

8. How old are you today? 24 (plus 10 in years but not in spirit!)

9. What is your favorite sport to watch? college football - Go Bucks!

10. What is your favorite drink? diet coke and miller lite

11. Have you ever dyed your hair? not really other than some pink and blue streaks in high school!

12. Last time you hugged your child? half an hour ago

13. Favorite food? filet mignon - served oscar style

14 Last movie you watched? i have no idea.

15. Favorite day of the year? Easter

16. How do you vent anger? Talk!!

17. What was your favorite toy as a child? the doll house my parents made for me

18. What is your favorite season? all of them. each one has it's special beauty

19.Ocean or pool? ocean

20. Cherries or Blueberries? neither - I don't like most berries, haven't since I was a kid

21. Do you want your friends to e-mail you back? if they want to.

22. Who is the most likely to respond? Angela

23. Who is least likely to respond? someone who doesn't get an email from me!

24. Living arrangements? happily married but separated until we move out of this house!

25. What's your favorite - sunny or rainy? love sunny, but there's something special and snuggly about an occasional rainy day

26. What is on the floor of your closet? shoes, shoes, shoes and more shoes

27. Who is the friend you have had the longest that you are sending this to? Laura

28. What did you do last night? talked to neighbors and on the phone

29. Hawaii or Florida ? Florida

30. What inspires you? almost anything I read, good movies, broadway performances, classical music - and family and friends

31. What are you most afraid of? Luna getting hurt.

32. Plain, cheese or spicy hamburgers? cheese

33. Favorite dog breed? standard poodles

34. Favorite day of the week? Sunday

35.How many states have you lived in? arizona, oklahoma, north carolina, virginia, new york, massachusetts, kansas, pennsylvania, maryland, south carolina, ohio, new york - that's 12.

The end!!

New (and funny) Video!