Frenzied Daddy

Miss K got a new t-shirt from Auntie A and Auntie L ( Auntie? Grammas? Whatever ) for her birthday. She couldn’t wait to wear it all day long, and now is trying to convince me to let her wear it to bed.

She likes it almost as much as the play-doh but there’s nothing like play-doh.

Miss B loves drawing; she’s drawn about seven of these guys in the last three days. She’s working on a new story, about dragons and kids. This guy, however, is just a “surfer dude.” I like his surfboard, but his spiky hair (inspired by Yu-Gi-Oh) is cool too.

Miss K is three now; we’re having her party this saturday at the park we’ve always celebrated it at. Hopefully it’ll be sunny, we don’t particularly have a backup plan in place.

She loves to draw, I think partly because her big sister loves to draw and Miss K wants to be Just Like Her. But also, she loves to draw. Between those two girls, it’s rare that I can keep a ream of paper in the house. This is a self-portrait. Her people pictures don’t usually have smiles on them, but they frequently have eyes, noses and mouths. The hair is often there too.

Geez sometimes I think I should just start a personal finance blog. Or bring up more pf entries. My rantings on USBank get the best traffic on the site.

When it comes to paying my bills, I’m kind of a luddite. I think I’ve mentioned this before. I don’t want automatic bill pay, I don’t want electronic bill pay, I just want to feel the check in my hand as I write it and send it out. It’s the same reason I used to keep track of my business accounts in a ledger book; I like the physicality of the process. It makes it seem more real to me. Besides; what if something went horribly wrong.

I’ve had so many problems with USBank and overdrafts that I signed up for email alerts; if our account goes below $50, I get an email, and if our account goes negative, I get an email. So it really surprised me when I got an email yesterday that our account had been overdrawn the day before. So, yeah, that’s another hundred bucks in overdraft charges. Completely avoidable if I had gotten the email the day it had happened (I had the money sitting in the savings account). I called USBank and bitched them out. They transferred me to the online services department who told me that this was “working as intended.”

Ok, I’m not arguing that it’s the bank’s responsibility to tell me when I’m overdrawn, but when they tell me that they’ll alert me when I am, then I expect them to tell me, ahem, when I am. I’m not blaming the bank for the fact that I was overdrawn. I take responsibility for that- but their system is supposed to let me know if something went awry.

They only send out emails three times a day, and paper checks go through all in the middle of the night sometime. Electronic tranfers are handled immediately, but paper is processed at the end of the day, which happens to eb about six hours before they send out emails.

So yeah, one paper check goes through, bam, you’re overdrawn, five electronic transfers get handled immediately, and suddenly you’re $200 overdrawn, and wake up to the musical ka-ching of US Bank’s registers.

This is from their FAQ regarding account alerts:

You will receive an alert when a transaction posts to your account that causes your available balance to become negative. Subsequent account activity may make your end-of-day available balance positive and prevent an overdraft condition.

So on 7/16, I had activity and could have made a deposit. However, I wasn’t alerted to this until 7/17, which meant that I got banged for the “overdraft condition.”

Are there any banks that treat their customers fairly? Jeez.

Dooce’s kid Leta and Miss K must swim in the same school. Or something. Or maybe it’s a trait of all three year olds.

…” and for a moment I forgot what I was dealing with and asked her, “Leta, are you adorable?”
Which was the wrong thing to ask because she fell in the floor and started screaming, “NO, I AM NOT ADORABLE!”

Miss K does this routinely. If you call her “sweetie” she’ll shout that she is “NOT A SWEETIE!!! I AM A [miss K]“. She’s not a cutie-patootie, she’s not a sweetheart, she’s not even a cuddlebunnie.

Miss B, aka Zoo Angel, headed off to camp today. She’ll be gone a week. Now that she’s ten, she’ll be allowed to ride the horses, but I think she’s most excited about playing capture the flag again.

It gives me some special time with Miss K, whose birthday is coming up fast (July 19). She’s having fun, dancing around the house with Miss K’s karaoke microphones singing and shouting “ta daaa!” Very sweet.

She’s been expecially kind to me this weekend; I started getting a cold yesterday. I thought it was just an allergy fit because of all the sneezing, but then my throat started hurting and this morning I woke up with a low grade fever and my whole body ached. And I have one of those headaches where when I move, my heartbeats in my head get painful. It’s a real pita. Well, pith. Miss K has been ( when she’s not climbing over me and pinching my face trying to get me to laugh ) very solicitous of my well-being, and offering me blankets and water. Kind of unusual in a (not quite) three year old, I believe…

Which reminds me- she painted this amazing picture of me that I’ve got to scan for you.

Oh, well I guess that’s enough rambling.

Just when I think my daddyhood couldn’t get any worse, Miss K decides to show me how very wrong I am.

Miss B, Ms B and I were laying in the big bedroom (Ms B’s and Mine), in front of the fan, reading and working. I see Miss K with the gentle leader, she takes it over to Perrin and hooks him up. He’s not choking or anything, so she must have done it right. I go back to my work, and Miss K and Perrin leave the room. I’m listening to the sounds; I’m expecting to hear her crying or him barking or some sort of disaster but I don’t hear anything. I’m also expecting Miss B and Ms B to have noticed that Miss K was up to something.

I’m working on a piece of code and need to get it out of my head before I forget about it. A lot of my work is like that; my breaks come between pieces of code. It’s very creative-process-y.

I involve myself in the code, not hearing any noise ( but I can hear the fan and the radio, I’m not totally zoned ), and tell myself that I’ll find Miss K after this function block. Before I finish, however, I hear a voice. I look up from the computer and listen more closely; I can’t decide if it’s the radio or not, and I’m about to ask the Bs if they hear it too, when SS, our neighbor, comes into the room. She had let herself in, through the open front door.

Apparently Miss K had walked Perrin out of the house and down the street (away from the busy street, deeper into the neighborhood ) and had gotten about 4 or so houses down before someone noticed her. They asked SS if she (Miss K) was hers, but it wasn’t until SS actually saw her that she realized that it was Miss K. I was astounded that Perrin hadn’t pulled her over or anything, that he was politely walking along with her. And when SS picked her up to bring her home, Miss K threw an unholy temper tantrum– as if Miss K believed that she was doing the right thing; it was like the two of them had teamed up and were going for a walk come Heck or High Water.

Sigh.

I guess I have to put locks on our gates too

“Players may blunder through dialog with shocking ineptitude, forget the name of the country they are in, or get confused about which side they are on, but once it comes time to roll for initiative they all turn into Sun Tzu.”

In a world where every every idiot with a pirated version if Photoshop™ and a twisted sense of humor thinks he’s a web comic artist, it takes something special to shine above the dross. I’ve been laughing so hard at the DM of the Ring that I think everyone around me wonders what the heck I’ve been drinking. It’s the funniest thing I’ve read today. So far the quote that begins this post is my favorite.

Even the comments are hilarious; this comic focuses on DnD, but one of the comments refers, in a thread about “my dice are trying to kill me”, to a Champions (superhero) game where a player hit a villain for max damage, which knocked the villain out. Knockback bounced the villain into (one bad roll later) another player’s character whose armor did not deflect the “attack” (another bad roll) and who took more damage, and who (another bad die roll) was essentially turned to strawbelly mush after knockback of his own.

And why I hate dice