And on the 530th day...

Last year, we had a family friend who's an electrician come out to have a look at the family room and help us get the power situation fixed. Between my laziness, the baby coming along, and his insanely crazy schedule, the room remained dark.

Until yesterday. The stars aligned, he was able to come out for hte morning, and we now have fully functioning electrical service in the room, with safe, modern Romex wiring and a lighted ceiling fan. I've spent about 10 minutes just playing with the switch watching the fan.

All we have left to do is run speaker wire, put up the crown molding, and touch up some paint!

The pantry is still dark. The BX cable supplying it was tied into the same circuit the family room was on, tied in down in the basement (as was one basement light). Running new power to that light should be pretty easy, I just need to get some more wire molding.

So antique I'm back in fashion

The Albany Times Union ran an AP story last week about the resurgence of the reel mower. Turns out that with our antique mower, we're actually ahead of the coming mower rennaisance.

Kogan and Skalinder said that, considering their yards are the size of apartment bedrooms, power mowers didn't seem necessary.

"I felt a gas-powered (mower) was a little over the top for my needs," said Skalinder, adding he didn't want to use the kind of screaming power mower that keeps him awake when he's trying to nap.

Sums it up nicely. We don't have a lot of area to mow, and between the cost of a gas mower, the maintenance, the fuel, the size (we don't have a big garage to store it in) and the noise, I don't want a gas mower. Plus, a reel mower is healthier for the grass - and me.

Our local Lowe's can't keep the mowers in stock this year, they're flying off the shelves.

Sign-on stupidity

I own some of my employer's stock, purchased through our employee stock purchase plan. Money comes out of my paycheck post-tax, and goes into shares of the company once a month. There's an "investor services" website which I can log onto to check out my account, buy more stock, sell some, etc. Nice & convenient.

I also learned, about a year ago, that my position is one which the company decided is worthy of receiving options on an annual basis. Very cool indeed. I wasn't aware of this when I took the job, but I'll gladly accept. When I got my notice last month for this year's grant, the letter stated I could go on the investor services website to acknowledge it. So I logged on, but couldn't find where to do the acknowledgment. I emailed the service address, and they responded saying "we can't do anything to help you till you email us with your company code and account number."

Yeah, right. Like I'm going to send something like that via plaintext email. Why don't more financial companies make it easy/possible to email them using GPG, or just put a "contact us" form on their website instead?

Anyway, tonight I was clearing part of my desk and found information from last fall about the program which I had carelessly set aside. It turns out that there's a different section of the same site for my options program! With a different ID/password combo to sign on with.

Same institution, same employer, same employee. Can someone explain to me why I can't have a single view of everything behind one ID & password? It's asinine.