Blog Master G

It’s my birthday and it looks like Gmail knows it, too.

A big thank you to everyone who helped me to celebrate last night. I had a great time and hope you all did, too!

It was one year ago today when I wrote about our then-new game, Karaoke Revolution 3.

In the past year, the game has revolutionized partying as we know it. Most parties at our house now involve rockin’ the karaoke mic and cheering for video game characters dancing on screen. And whenever we go to parties at our friends’ houses, karaoke is often on the scene. In fact, at least two sets of friends have purchased a PS2 and KR3 or Karaoke Party, the newer version of KR3, after experiencing it at casa de A_nderson.

Be it my birthday party last year or Sarah and Eric’s Labor Day party, KR is always on the scene and the hit of the party.

Here’s to another year of partying KR style.. and my infamously bad singing!

Sometimes I’m not really inspired to write about one particular thing, so I’ll just jump in here, start typing, and see what happens. So with that caveat, here we go.

It’s another beautiful spring day today. It’s only about 40 degrees this morning, but warm enough that I’ve switched to my fall/spring coat and can walk the dogs glove-free once again. There was a brownout here in Saratoga Springs yesterday — it immediately brought back memories of last month’s three-day outage — though, luckily, it’s more than thrice as warm now, and the outage only lasted from about 9:30am to 2:45pm. Still, I had to move my office location, and ended up working in Justin’s back yard, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since we got to enjoy the great weather.

I’ve lately been obsessed with this great piece of software called RoboForm. I can’t recommend it enough. Once you start using it, you’ll wonder how you ever got along without it. Go get it. You won’t be sorry. In fact, I plan to treat myself to a birthday present of one of those little USB memory sticks and use Pass2Go with it — that’s the portable version of RoboForm so that all your Passcards, SafeNotes, and Identities can go with you wherever you are, and they’re never left behind on the computer. In fact, at the end of this blog entry, I mentioned putting RoboForm data on a free memory stick from Microsoft — before I realized that there was a USB-specific version of the software that runs directly from the memory card. I like this SanDisk 1GB Titanium Cruzer, but it’s gotten a few bad reviews, so not sure that’s the best option. But I love gadgets, so I’m excited about getting a new one.

Last night Jen and I enjoyed the sunset and the great weather with a fire by the lake at Seth and Niki’s place, followed by some drinks and appetizers for dinner at Longfellow’s with my Dad.

Three years ago today: Papers from the Past.

We hit Brooklyn over the weekend for a fun birthday dinner party at Karen and Joti’s place. The lasagne and other culinary delights were delicious, and the wine flowed a’plenty.

View all Karen’s Birthday photos

While driving around Brooklyn and into and out of the city, Jen and I were amazed by how terrible the roads are there. Driving down Flatbush is like a carnival ride, bumping from side to side, to and fro. On one bridge (the Triboro?), you can actually see portions of the steel grating of the bridge beneath where the road is literally falling apart. NYC has its own special tax. Where is that tax money going, if not into infrastructure? So it was really no surprise when I saw this story yesterday (thanks, Sarah, for the link):

Sinkhole swallows up SUV in New York street / Shocked driver escapes serious injury; vehicle rested on gas main

In other news, it’s finally starting to feel like spring here in Saratoga Springs. Yesterday I rode my bike into town, drove with the windows down, and started the task of raking up all the leaves and branches and other winter debris (front yard only so far). It was 60 degrees at one point, as the dogs and I soaked up the sun in the back yard.

Nothing ever happens in my wife’s small hometown of Kinderhook, NY, where there are more cows than people. So when a man entered a real estate office and took the employees hostage yesterday afternoon, it was big news. We heard about the standoff with police via the Kinderhook News Network (my mother-in-law) before the story even hit the wires. Fortunately, the man, who was drinking beer during the standoff — if you’re gonna go down ya may as well be wasted — let the hostages go and no one was hurt. And it turns out he didn’t even have a gun. See? Nothing happens in Kinderhook. But this time, that’s a good thing.

Standoff ends with surrender / Resident attempted to take hostages inside Kinderhook realty office, cops said

From the Sunday, March 26, 2006 Times Union special section Capitaland Quarterly: City of hope / Saratoga’s splendor offers shining model:

No small city in the Capital Region has been as successful as Saratoga Springs. It’s the hometown everyone wants to emulate.

The Broadway shopping district boasts shops and cafes. Businesses like The Ayco Co., an affiliate of Goldman Sachs, and First Guarantee Mortgage Corp. occupy the floors above the stores. New condominiums rise six stories tall, teeming with people who have money to spend.

Good-paying manufacturing jobs are nearby, at Quad Graphics Inc. and Ball Corp. in the W.J. Grande Industrial Park off Geyser Road. Entertainment venues like the Saratoga Performing Arts Center and Saratoga Race Course are well known.

The city achieved what experts say can be accomplished when a compact, dense downtown area provides a robust heartbeat and identity to urban life that is affordable.

Edward Miller, co-director of the Center for the Small City at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, said a characteristic of small cities is “everybody is engaged.” So citizens must decide how they want their community to look in the future and make it happen.

“If you look at surveys, individuals prefer to live in smaller communities; they prefer that for the quality of life,” he said. “People are moving back to small cities out of the metropolitan areas.”

Small cities cash in on their sense of community by offering an identity not found in sprawling suburbs. They use that to sell themselves to new residents and industries.

Saratoga Springs residents knew what they wanted.

“Saratoga stands out as a community with citizen involvement bar none. There’s always been an attitude in Saratoga County and Saratoga Springs that we can do it,” said Joseph Dalton, president of The Saratoga County Chamber of Commerce.

They promoted downtown and poured money into improvements. The Saratoga Springs City Center opened to provide convention space and hotel rooms. Government pushed to attract industry.

Saratoga Springs’ population soared 69.2 percent, to 26,186, from 1950 to 2000. That’s in stark contrast to the region’s other small cities, where population slipped as much as 43 percent in the same 50 years.

More…

Sparked by my Tuesday post, Jane wrote a post about mortgages and financial goals, to which I added the below:

Although Jen and I are good about saving/investing every month, we’re also guilty of having slipped back into debt with this great little invention called the HELOC — it even comes with its own checkbook!

Psychologically (and credit-wise), we’d rather carry a balance on a HELOC than on a credit card… plus, the interest is tax-deductible. But it’s still debt, and we want to pay it off.

It takes a lot of discipline to stay debt-free, and our consumer-driven society makes it all too easy to charge, charge, charge away! In fact, the system is actually designed to work in your favor for borrowing vs. cashing out assets (the perfect example is that we can write off the interest on our HELOC but get slammed on paying interest on gains should we sell any stocks/funds). Also, when was the last time you actually SOLD something (on eBay, a garage sale, etc.) vs. buying non-essential goods or services?

Of course, debt is, to some degree, inevitable, if you want to enjoy life while you’re young. For example, we’d rather finance international travel now while we’re still (relatively) young and kid-free, and worry about paying it back later.

I think your goals are good ones, Jane, and you’re probably in an elite club if your primary financial goals are not related to debt reduction.

I’d say our goals would be these (and I hope Jen agrees):

1) Enjoy life without stressing too much about finances (but making good decisions).
2) Pay off HELOC.
3) Save more in ING safety net (so HELOC isn’t safety net).
4) Increase monthly investment/ESPP contributions.
5) Continue to live mostly under our means and (try to) stop slipping back into debt.

# posted by Gabe : 10:40 AM

This time of year (tax time?) seems like the time when everyone is reflecting on financial goals. It was a year ago yesterday when I last wrote a blog entry of the same title, Savings Goals (and I posted the above comment to Jane’s blog yesterday… how ’bout that?).

It’s probably a good thing my blog isn’t quite as popular as that of fellow Saratoga Springs blogger Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler. If I had even half the number of comments that his most recent post about the housing market in Saratoga and across the country, Jitters, has garnished, then I’d never get anything done. Of course, many of the comments have taken on a life of their own and turned into the personal soap box of those commenting.

Yesterday I joined the comment extravaganza and added one of my own:

It’s pretty scary that this country has a negative savings rate.

I fear for what will happen when everyone who bought a house with an interest-only loan can no longer afford a mortgage payment of interest AND principal when the interest rates continue to climb. Will all those houses flood the market? And who will buy them?

Thanks, kd, for the particularly poignant glimpse of life in San Marcos, TX. In the words of the characters in Team America, all I can say is, “America! Fuck yeah!”

Pretty depressing… this unsustainable landscape of strip malls and SUVs we’ve created called America.

Posted by: Gabe | March 20, 2006 at 09:07 AM

Happy Spring! Though today’s officially the start of spring, it still feels like winter here in Saratoga Springs with the temperature currently at 19° and a 30% chance of snow predicted for this morning. I also woke up with a bit of cough and feeling tired in the bones this morning, so I may be fighting the onset of my once-per-year cold (it was around April 15 last year, according to this blog, when I was last fighting a cold).

It was a mostly chill, yet productive, weekend. Yesterday Jen and I spent most of the afternoon doing a spring cleaning of the office, clearing off the desks and emptying out the clutter from the closet. It’s amazing how much crap we’ve accumulated… in just one small room in the house. The closet was like a giant junk drawer. It’s a lot more manageable now, but I still feel like I just have too much clutter in my life.

Saturday I hung out with Justin, enjoying martinis and watching Hustle ‘n Flow, which I enjoyed quite a bit. Was it Jon Stewart at the Oscars who said it was this movie that made America fall in love with a pimp? Or at least feel compassionate toward the pimp?

It was the first movie that came from my renewed Netflix account, which I reactivated last Sunday, primarily inspired to catch up on the first three seasons of 24, which I never saw all the way through (I’ve already watched Season 1: Disc 1 and am waiting for the next one to arrive).

We also did some more research this weekend on planning our Mallorca trip. After ruling out Air Comet Plus, which sounds like a sketchy charter airline (bad reviews online), we’ve narrowed down our itinerary to include either Delta or Iberia. If you’ve flown either airline on an international flight, I’d appreciate any feedback you might have about the experience (we flew British Airlines to London last year and had a great experience; although we could take the airline to Spain, we’d have to do so via London, which would nearly double the travel time).

Tuesday night was the culmination of all the hard work that the Saratoga Steeplechasers put in to the planning of the Universal Preservation Hall Fundraiser auction. The auction was a huge success, raising more than $20,000 for UPH and giving more than 150 people a chance to see the work to date on the building. It was an amazing, fun, and uplifting evening. So many people — the band, Garland the emcee, the “day in the life of” auctionees, the food and liquor donors, photographer Niki Rossi — deserve a huge thank you. So on behalf of the Steeplechasers, thank you all for such an incredible evening!

You can view photos from the A_nderson camera here (and a select two below):

Party people Niki, Seth, Gabe, and Jen

A few Steeplechasers: Betsy, Alsya, and Gabe

The true photographic brilliance of the evening, of course, came from Niki, who created this online photo jam that highlights the evening. A select few photos from Niki (I’ll later provide the link where you can order prints):

Garland Nelson and the UPH Revelators rock the house

Mayor & Auctionee Valerie Keehn, Peter (my dad), and Gabe

Party people Gabe and Jen

Saratoga County Supervisor & Auctionee Joanne Yepsen and Gabe

Garland and Mayor Keehn convince the crowd to bid on a day at the track with the Mayor

It was one year ago today when I first wrote about UPH, following last year’s auction (and before the Steeplechasers came into existence).