Generally speaking, I check out the daily feed at DealNews almost every day. I rarely buy anything but I love the prospect of knowing what all the good deals are at any given moment. It’s fun and every once in a while you can find something so bizarre that you just have to take a closer look.
Today is one of those days.
Today there was a listing for a complete airplane kit on sale for the low low price of $29,980 plus shipping, crating and handling. And of course I had to check it out because what guy hasn’t thought to himself at one time or another, “Ya know, if I just had a little plane or helicopter or jet pack, life would be so much simpler.”
So I looked. It may not be the prettiest thing but it sure looks like fun. Now if only I had roughly $35,000 USD to throw away on a toy. A very large toy. One that can kill me in various ways. The fun I would have…. *sigh*
There’s so much going on these days and so little time it seems. I had a bad run in with the liquid shits last night and this morning so I’m taking a sick day today. So today’s been a bit of a breather which is nice. I got to sleep in (mostly).
We found a house and the contract negotiations are complete as of last night. We will be closing on October 24th (when some money comes available for us) and moving in directly afterwards. Probably just in time for the baby to be ready to do it’s impression of an Alien chestburster. Or something like that. That ordeal is coming to an end and then of course the constant ordeal of home ownership starts. But that’s OK. We know how that works already. We’re old pros.
I still need to post pictures of my car. Wow, I’m such a slacker. Muse got her old car back from my Step-Mom who bought it from us when we left for Hong Kong. Of course we had to pay for it but it makes Muse happy and that’s a good thing these days. At least she’s no longer a menace to society driving the gigantic white truck around. Not because she’s a bad driver but because she feels like she can run over everything if she wants too.
On Sunday we finally got mobile phones. Finally. I got a 8GB Apple iPhone and Muse got a red LG Shine slider. Oh it is so nice to be tethered once more. I’m not sure what it is but I don’t even feel comfortable being disconnected like that. Of course now I have to figure out how to make my iPhone sync with the Bluetooth functions of my car. Yay for technology!
What I really wish I could figure out though is how to get music onto my iPhone through iTunes. I thought that crap was supposed to be simple?!
Well, that’s all I got. Keep hoping that my ass is done vomiting. I know that’s what I’m hoping.
We got the written counter-offer on the house yesterday afternoon and the wording had been changed. Probably not a big deal but it is a seriously legal binding contract with mucho money on the line. So, many phone calls were made and lots of aggravation ensued. However, in the end we got what we wanted and sent in our signed copies.
So far we haven’t heard anything back from the seller. They still need to initial off on the the wording changes to their counter-offer that they verbally agreed to. It shouldn’t be a problem but I’m getting a little antsy waiting to hear the official answer.
Of course that won’t be the end of it. There’s a bazillion inspections that need to be done (I think I mentioned that before, it’s hard to forget a bazillion). Some they have to pay for but most we have to pay for. All part of the process I suppose. I’m just hoping that interest rates go down again before we close. The financial industry is getting scary again but I’m hoping it works in our favor.
Well, we shall see.
Sunday it rained like hell. The perfect day to go look at houses. If you ever in the market to buy a house, rain is your friend. The harder the rain the better. Why? Because if a house has roof problems or a leaky basement, you may not find that out if it’s been dry out for the past week. Not everyone is completely honest on those Seller’s Discloser statements and nothing beats rain for an equalizer.
That being said: when we went and looked at houses on Sunday, we saw a lot of water in basements. Even houses that have no previous signs of water were leaking. That was serious rain we had. Seriously. There were a few houses that we probably would have loved in a dry spell and would have been cursing the heavens when that rain came during our ownership.
And yet, we found one.
A contract was written on Monday for a house in Manchester and we got a verbal counter-offer that we accepted (again verbally) and we are one step closer to having a home again. I’m expecting to see a written counter-offer to sign any time now. Sooner rather than later of course. The seller only has till 7:00pm tonight before our contract expires.
Of course that’s not the end of it though. We have a bazillion inspections that need to be done (yes a bazillion) and you never know what will come from those. But I’m keeping my fingers crossed. Well not when I type of course….
Oh I have been absolutely terrible with updating lately, haven’t I? Well, I’m not one of those weirdos who feels like I have to apologize to you people for not entertaining you for a few days so just deal with it. I’ve been busy.
Muse and I have been using every available minute of our realtor to look at houses. We looked at eight or so last night and will be up at the crack of dawn to look at another eight tomorrow morning. So far we’ve found only a couple of decent places and a whole lot of crap. Nothing really that just says “Spend $200,000 on me!” as soon as you walk in though. It’s getting a little depressing. The agent is a good sport about it all but he did gently let me know that after this weekend we will have looked at around 70 houses. Wow. That’s insane.
I remember all of our friends and family telling us how great the housing market was and how everything was dirt cheap. Of course they also said that about cars and we found that it just wasn’t true unless you want to buy an SUV that guzzles gas. The housing market sucks ass. At least here in St. Louis, Missouri. Sure there are a lot out there to choose from but a bunch are in financial or physical distress. Many are still over priced and “haven’t gotten the memo” about the economy. Others, are just a bad fit for us for one reason or another. Sometimes many reasons.
Well, I’m hoping we find an ace tomorrow. We both are. We’re running out of time and that baby is getting big!
A long holiday weekend. Time to relax and sleep in and generally enjoy yourself. Yeah right.
Thursday night, the power went out and didn’t come back on until almost the afternoon on Friday. We went to bed with the window open and no breeze and sweated. I barely slept and I’m sure Muse didn’t sleep well either. I woke up the next morning and took a shower by flashlight and skipped breakfast because we couldn’t open the fridge.
Friday I was exhausted at work and luckily it was only moderately busy. But then I get home and we have to get packed up and drive 100 miles down to the country to visit with Muse’s family. Highway 55 was completely stopped in Barnhart for some unknown reason so we had to fight a parking lot of cars to get off the highway and take some backroads to get out of the mess. Needless to say that 100 mile trip became much longer than normal.
Of course we had to go visit people who are up drinking (unlike us) instead of going to sleep. We didn’t get to crash until around 1:30am Saturday. I’m pretty sure I’d only been asleep for 15 minutes when Muse woke me up with hallucinations of a large spider crawling on me. Which wouldn’t be completely out of the question considering no one had been in the house we were staying at for a while. But no. No spider. OK back to bed. Another restless night on an ancient and uncomfortable bed only gives us marginally more sleep than the night before. At least there is some air-conditioning.
Saturday was spent visiting various family members who all live near each other but can’t really stand one another. It wasn’t horrible, but it would be so much nicer if Muse’s family could just quit worrying about who is screwing over who for what and just get together so we could see them all at once. I get so sick of telling and hearing the same stories five times because each visit is like another day of Groundhog Day forever doomed to repeat.
Of course being tired and sleep deprived, I really wanted to get out of the country and back to St. Louis while there was still some daylight. And of course that didn’t happen. At least we got some dinner out of the deal before we stayed even longer. Dinner which didn’t sit well with me unfortunately. But finally we got on the road and Muse layed back in the seat and proceeded to sleep the next hour of the trip home. Good thing the new car has satellite radio to keep me entertained. So we got back in around 11:30pm and had to take care of the dogs and probably didn’t get to bed till around 12:30am or so. And then I set the alarm for 6:45am.
On Sunday morning we got up early and met our real estate agent to view a bunch of houses in the South County area. No luck. We finished up and headed home. Muse took a nap and I joined her. Unfortunately my lingering cough that I’ve had since I returned from Hong Kong cropped up and gave me coughing fits. OK no nap for me. The rest of Sunday was fairly uneventful and we started a big jigsaw puzzle with my Mom and Step-Dad for lack of anything better to do. Besides, when was the last time I did one of those? Who knows.
We stayed up late again and set the alarm for 6:30am. More house viewings on Monday morning. Needless to say, we were one of the only cars on the road at 7:45am on Labor Day. We went on a marathon run of house viewings and only found one maybe and another possibly-maybe. Muse took another nap in the afternoon and I helped finish up the jigsaw puzzle.
Party on dudes. Party on.
Muse is shopping for maternity clothes.
I’m shopping for a new computer.
I’m also shopping for a digital camcorder.
Soon we will be shopping for two cars.
Then we will be shopping for a house.
I’m assuming there will be lots of shopping for the baby.
Will the madness ever end? Or has it even begun?
So what did you get your Mother for Mother’s Day? Me? I sent mine some flowers. Which cost almost $200 US dollars. Am I that generous with something that will wilt in a week or so? No. But the other charges on my credit card bill for unknown ‘services’ cost almost cost that much. Let me explain.
I made two different orders of roughly $40 for Mother’s Day on ProFlowers.com. You may notice that I didn’t make that a clickable link. For good reason. When we did the checkout, we signed up for a service called EasySaver in order to get $10 or $15 off our next order. Normally we wouldn’t have done that but we were planning on making two orders so it worked out fine. We would just cancel the subscription before we were charged and be done with it.
The second orderlisted that it had free shipping. Bonus! That plus our money off from the first order should make it a good deal. I’m all about good deals so that made me happy. So we get the e-mail from EasySaver (notice how I’m not linking these people either?) and we input the code. It doesn’t work. We tried the code in many different ways and in different browsers and even on another PC. Still no work-y. OK… so that sucks, no money off. But at least we get the free shipping, right?
Well yes and no. When we were checking out that last order it seems that you also get signed up for a site called FreeShipping.com (definitely not linking these bastards). I had no idea what I was signing up for as it seemed like part of the check-out process. The orders shipped and things were fine even though we didn’t get the money off. Oh well.
I checked the credit card statement on-line the day after to see if it posted and saw that EasySaver had already billed us for $1.95 for their service. It seems that they start charging right away unlike what I thought was on the checkout. So now we didn’t get the money off the next order but we also paid more. Well, we figure we just read it wrong and decided to cancel it. Yeah we forgot. Which is exactly what these companies hope will happen.
So I checked the credit card bill on-line last night and realized that I missed the last statement (dammit) so I go back a month to see why we seem to have an awfully high bill considering we rarely use our credit card. That’s when I noticed that we had forgotten to cancel EasySaver and they had charged us an additional $14.95 and probably hoped to do so for ever and ever. OK yeah we screwed up, shame on us. What shocked me though was a mystery charge on the same date from FreeShipping.com for $72 and no explanation or contact number or anything. WTF? I called shenanigans and then called Chase to dispute the probable fraud charge.
The people I talked to at Chase were really nice like they usually are. They gave me an 800 number that showed up in their records that isn’t publicly available for FreeShipping.com. I say it’s not publicly available because it’s not on the credit card statement and the only form of contact on their website is a form you can fill out and hope that they contact you back. No phone number or address or anything else. It also mentions that they are personal information harvesters. Nice.
The guy from Chase politely asked the person who answered the phone for FreeShipping.com about their service and how I got charged for $72. They told him that I signed up voluntarily and had to accept their terms on three occasions during the process. I told them both that I’d never heard of the website and having to accept anything three times would have definitely thrown up a red flag for me. However they did have some information on me that would definitely have been something I would have typed. So I asked the woman on the other end how I could have signed up for this and not realized what was happening. I asked her if this was setup at all to be misleading. That’s when the Chase guy stopped talking.
She told me that all the information is available during the process if you read all the terms and conditions. I asked her if that meant that a person would need to read all the fine print to understand what was going on and she said yes. I asked her some more questions and she admitted that she’s never actually seen the website that we’re talking about. I asked her how she could be expected to answer my questions if she doesn’t even know what I’m talking about. She was not amused. I asked her why I had gotten an e-mail from EasySaver telling me that I had signed up for something but I received nothing from her company. She said that they don’t send out e-mails like that. She mentioned that a reminder e-mail is sent out a day before the trial period ends so you know to cancel if you want to. When I asked her why I didn’t receive a reminder e-mail she told me that they don’t do that. Uh….
I asked her (knowingly) why they needed to be so deceptive in not being open about who they were, what they were doing and what they were planning on doing. I asked her why there is no contact information for this company and not notification that I’ve signed up for something that needs to be cancelled. She apologized and told me that she would refund the pro-rated amount of the yearly membership costs. I asked the Chase credit card guy if that was good enough but got no answer. It seems that he must have dropped off when I started asking pointed questions. Oh well.
I called ProFlowers.com next and talked to a very nice woman on the line. I told her that I had a complaint about their partner offers and wanted to speak to someone about it. She told me that she could help me. So I told her about the charges. I told her about the company admitting that their offer was deceptive. I told her that there is no notification process at any point and that the costs of my orders was almost tripled. She told me that she couldn’t help me after all. However she was very nice and took down all my information and said she’d have a supervisor contact me about this. So far, no e-mails or phone calls. I’m not holding my breath. I didn’t ask for anything from them but I do want them to know that I will not be using ProFlowers.com ever again. Considering we used their service multiple times a year that really won’t be significant to them. However I guarantee that I’m not the only one who’s gotten screwed on this and I’m not the only lost business they will suffer.
I hope for their sake that it was worth it.
It’s Monday and I’m sitting at home still un-showered and working on comics. Today is a public holiday here in Hong Kong. It’s Buddha’s birthday! Who am I to argue? Sadly though, public holidays are a double-edged sword. Sure you get the day off, but unless you feel like pushing through crowds of people everywhere you go, you pretty much just sit at home all day. Like I’m doing.
We say Iron Man on Saturday afternoon and it was awesome. I’m a bit of a fanboy when it comes to comic book to movie adaptations and I know many of them aren’t that great. Iron Man definitely lived up to the hype in my opinion though.
After the movie, Muse and I split up and went with our friends to different places. Me and my friend went to Sham Shui Po to go to the computer and game malls to look for a Sony PSP for me. I thought about getting a second hand system but decided it was too much risk for too little discount. So I went for a new one. Unfortunately all the cool colors of the new ‘slim’ PSP are all twice the price (or more) of the standard black, white or pastel colors. So I found a shop that still sold the ‘fat’ versions. They had a few of the limited Japanese releases so I went for one of those. Just to make Colin jealous if nothing else.
Oh yeah, that is a metallic blue Sony PSP. Only released in Japan but everything ends up in Hong Kong eventually. Sometimes I love shopping here in Hong Kong.
This past Saturday, Muse and I went to The Peak which is the small tourist area at the top of the mountain that makes up Hong Kong island. Muse had been there once before on a tour but I’d never been. Which everyone here thinks is weird because that is one of the major tourist places to visit here in Hong Kong. Well… whatever.
The weather has been beautiful here in Hong Kong lately and since I know it will be miserably hot and humid soon, I’m glad we’re getting out and about outside while we can. The Peak isn’t all that much to see actually. It’s basically two small multi-story shopping malls side by side, one with a funky shape and a roof-top viewing deck that you have to pay to go on. There’s lots of restaurants and tourist gifts and a Madame Tussauds wax museum (which we didn’t visit) and a nice path that is generally crowded with people taking pictures of the hazy but nice city skyline.
Above: A picture of the Central district skyline at night from The Peak. Kowloon can be seen across the harbor.
We ate at a Bubba Gump restaurant which had a nice view overlooking the path and a portion of the city. I’d never been to one of these restaurants before and we thought that it was funny that my first time at one was in Hong Kong. It was a bit expensive, but considering how expensive everything else on The Peak is, it was actually a hell of a bargain. I would definitely recommend it if you go to The Peak. Considerig Muse and I shared the same meals and drinks, I don’t think the severe diarrhea I had later that night had anything to do with that place.
We waited till night time so we could get some night shots of the city skyline and then we took a taxi back to Central. We had taken a bus up the mountain so we kind of skipped the main attraction of the famous Peak Tram. It’s always too long of a queue to wait in. I don’t like waiting.
August 7, 2009 3:01 pm | 
