Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Weigh in #10 - August 12th - Corn, Teabags, Baseball, No Impact Man and Foreclosures





But not necessarily in that order!

Taking a break from some frantic, well not really, wedding planning, to try and catch you up with the GGG project!

Starting off with the weigh in. A reasonable 26oz for the last couple of weeks. Grand total now at 187.5oz, so still way under budget! If only everything could be so under budget.... like the Bay Bridge for instance.



I went to the baseball with my beautiful niece, to show here America's favourite, sorry favorite, pastime! Hope I didn't embarrass her too much during the 7th inning stretch. It was a fun game and the A's might have even won. I don't really remember.





Unfortunately, Lesley had to return home due to the death of her grandfather. Very sad times indeed. We miss your Lesley. Hope you can make it back for the wedding.

Here's a picture of me with some of our harvest, corn and basil. Very nice indeed and very different from the perfectly uniform yellow corn you get down at Safeway, I can tell you. Garden is doing pretty well and the tomatoes are starting to turn red.

Still losing a lot of apples to the codling apple moth, but the squirrels are certainly in "retreat".



Further exciting news on the Numi tea-bag front. As you know I wrote complaining about the individual wrapping of them, and they wrote back saying they were trying to develop one that would break down in "a home composting system". Well I have one or two of them so I wrote back and offered them my services!

They told me they'll send me some once they get them finished, so I am happy to be a tester for them.

My efforts, sorry, Ananda and mine efforts at the reducing-reusing-recycling and composting life pales into insignificance compared to a certain Colin Beavan, "No Impact Man". We watched the same titled documentary the other day, and although he did got to some extremes, it was very interesting and certainly highlight a lot of shocking stuff.

Unbelievably to me the average American throws out 1600lb of rubbish a year. How the frick is that possible. Ananda and I aimed at less that 104lb for the year. If I knew the average was 16 times that I would have given us a bigger allowance - like 110lb ! ;-)

It's an interesting story; check out his blog at

http://noimpactman.typepad.com/

(maybe one day he'll refer to my blog, ha ha ha)

and

http://noimpactproject.org/.

One thing I wondered whilst watching the film was when he entered the no electricity phase of his project. So there he was in his apartment with quite a lot of candles on the go to keep the place lit. Do all of these candles throw off more or less CO2 than the CO2 generated in providing the electricity that he could use to power a highly efficient CFC light bulb? I wonder if he did the calculation. I'll write to him and ask!

Finally, (hoorah I hear you cry) Foreclosure!!!!!!! House is now gone, goodbye, see ya, nice knowing you, don't call me we'll call you, goodbye, gone. It had been moribund for sooooooooooooooo long I thought the effer would never die. Like a really, really bad actor milking his dying moments on screen as much as he could.

I still have my HELOC to fight over with but an interesting article in NY Times quoted a collection agency as saying they never pay more than $500 for a debt

"Clark Terry, the chief executive, says he does not pay more than $500 for a loan, regardless of how big it is.

“Anything over $15,000 to $20,000 is not collectible,” Mr. Terry said. “Americans seem to believe that anything they can get away with is O.K.”"

Full article at

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/business/12debt.html

So, armed with the news that my house had "reverted back to the bank for $347,000" on August 2nd, I decided to pay a visit for one last time, armed admittedly with a tool box, to the house to remove a certain fixture I needed for our new place.

The visit took place on August 15th and the buggers had already changed the locks and placed a new lock box on the door. It took them 16 months to foreclose on me and then less than 14 days to change the locks. Seems like they can move fast when they want too.

Return homed to open my email and find a message in my inbox from Zillow.com. Subject title

" 418 Presidio St now listed for sale"

Good night all!

Monday, August 2, 2010

Weigh in #9 - July 29th






So a better week this week, 16.5oz, so our total is now 161.5oz.

Must dash. More enthralling stuff later. Maybe