Friday, September 18, 2009

Official Title Owner...Yay!!!

So I finally paid off my car! I sent the final payment in a few days ago and received the title in the mail yesterday. Yay, no more car payment...at least for a while. "Armand", that's my Passat is in pretty good shape. He's got a few dings and minor dents from those in Chicago that do not know how to parallel park and simply gauge their proximity to the car in front and behind them by just bumping into it. He's only got 39,600 miles on him and he's 7 years old!! So, if/when I do decide to sell I should be able to get a pretty good price.

I was going to sell him a few months back, but then I realized that I was less than year from paying it off, I might as well wait it out. Now I have extra money to put in savings or go towards paying off my credit card, which is also nearly paid off. I'm probably 3 or 4 months away from being debt free!! Yay!!!! I never thought I'd see the day.

~Kelli

Thursday, September 10, 2009

How well do you know your neighbors?

So...my next door neighbors are seemingly normal people. They're on the quite side, keep to themselves mostly. They are from Vietnam and have 3 kids. The oldest girl, Mi (5) and her younger brother Khoa (sp?) (3) often hang out with me in the yard when I'm doing yard work or just hanging out on the porch. Mi is cute, but somewhat bratty and hard to manage and Khoa is adorable and very sweet. They also just had baby girl a few months back, also named Mi or so Mi (the oldest one says). I don't know why they named both daughters the same??

Anyway, the parents as I mentioned are pretty quiet. Even when the kids are out with me, they just sort of watch from the house and don't really talk much. They'll say hi and wave if they see us coming or going, but that is about it.

Several weeks ago, the husband put a sign up stating that they were selling all their landscaping. They have big fountain and pond thing in their back yard. Lots of stone and wood as well as trees and plants and such. We didn't think much of it at that time. We also noticed that they started moving a few weekends ago, but their house is not for sale (I'll come back to this in a minute).

Our downstairs neighbors have had issues with them because they leave their garbage can to the side of their deck and then just throw stuff over the deck. Sometimes they miss and don't bother to pick it up right away and sometimes they forget to take it out to the alley so it will start to stink and I don't know what they eat, but their trash is horrendous smelling. We don't notice it so much in our part of the house, but the downstairs neighbors notice it more as the garbage can is right outside their window. They talked directly to the neighbor's about it several times, but they never did anything about it so they filed a complaint with the city and the city came by and fined them and made them put it out in the alley where it belongs. It stayed there for a few days, but ultimately they brought it back to the deck only this time they left it on the other side of the deck. Even though it was further away from the downstairs windows it was still stinky so the downstairs neighbors complained again. Again the city came and forced them to keep it in the alley.

In addition to the garbage issue, the female, the Mom, wife, etc. cannot park to save her life. She always had one tire up on the curb and is diagonally facing out to the street with half her car on the lawn and half in the street. One day we saw a police car in front of their house and an officer walking up to their door and we thought maybe he was going to ticket her for her crappy parking job so we chuckled about it a little and went on our merry way. Then a day or two later, we saw another police car and another officer approach their door. These aren't just ordinary police either, these are sheriff cars so we figured it had to do with something other than her parking skills. Then we thought, maybe their house was being foreclosed on. That would make sense as to why to they're selling stuff and moving out without a for sale sign or anything.

Come to find out...

Our other next door neighbor to the East was reading in the local paper (sort of like the Davis County Clipper) an article that just happened to be about the neighbors to the West of us. She shared the news with the downstairs neighbor who then relayed it to us...I know it's very gossipy, but I bet you want to know what the article said too, right?

Well, the woman is an Accountant/CPA and apparently she has stolen nearly 2 million dollars in tax returns. I guess she had the returns direct deposited into their bank accounts as opposed to the rightful tax payers? Anyway, she plead guilty to the charges and was sentenced to 4 years in the Illinois State Penn. The husband hasn't been charged yet, but is under investigation to see if he was involved in anyway. Crazy!!

I feel bad for the kids. They do have some Grandparents in the area so perhaps they'll go live with them especially if the husband gets convicted as well. It's funny, I always a weird vibe towards them, but I thought it was just because they kept so quiet and I thought maybe (especially the wife) didn't speak much English and that's why she didn't talk much, but turns out she's a crook!

Their house is really nice, we'll have watch for it in the Government Auction section of the paper and see how cheap we could buy it for. Though its well over a million dollar home so I'm sure even at an auction price we couldn't afford it. Oh well!

Friday, September 4, 2009

Oops!

I know I haven't written in a while, but I just haven't had anything extremely interesting to write about, not that my previous posts were all that interesting either!! In any case, I decided it was time to write again and I have just the story to share...

So last night David and I were at Costco and our friend Pallavi called. We haven't seen her in a while and were just talking about trying to set up a dinner with her and Martin (her boyfriend) in the next couple weeks; anyway she said she'd been working really long hours, which she often does and just hasn't been around, but she got off at a decent time and wanted to see if we could meet for her dinner. We, of course, said SURE!

We picked her up and decided to go to a South American restaurant over in the Bucktown neighborhood. Not that it matters, but for those non-Chicagoan's, Bucktown is pretty much directly West and slightly to the North of downtown Chicago by about 2 miles or so.

We parked the car and here's the interesting part...I locked the doors and started walking to the rear of car where Pallavi and David were waiting and I dropped my car key. Now, you might be saying what's so interesting about that? Well, you're right, usually this wouldn't be a big deal...BUT my car key is one of those kind that's basically just a square, then it has a button on the corner that you push to release the stick part that actually goes into the ignition. Currently it's not attached to my house keys. I removed it a while back when I had my car in the shop and it's difficult to get back onto the key ring so I just haven't gotten around to putting it back on. A decision I would regret today because when it hit the ground it started to slide as the road sort of curved downward towards the gutter; I tried to stop it with my foot, but missed, then Pallavi tried to stop it with her foot and missed, David then tried to stop it, but it was too late...it slid too fast, right through a hole in the gutter grate!!!

CRAP! We were all sort of stunned for a few seconds, at least I was. I kept thinking did my key really just fall into the sewer? I had no idea what to do, I had no idea how deep this hole was and if we'd be able to get it out? I don't have a secondary key so I kept having visions of having to call the city, them having to send someone into the sewer to retreive it or use all this major equipment and it costing me a fortune!! Then I thought well, it's going to be expensive anyway because it's one of those square kind, it's not like you can just go to a locksmith and have them make you new key either! You have to order it through a dealership or through VW and they are like $100!!

After a few minutes of trying to figure out what to do. David and his super-human strength was able to get the iron grate off the hole and we looked down into the darkness. Fortunately, it was only about 4 or 5 feet deep and we could see my key leaning up again one side of the gutter wall. Now, it may have only been 4 feet deep, but too deep to just lean down, reach in and get it AND we didn't want to jump in, because we had no idea if the base was solid or soft or how deep it could go under all the sediment? Plus, it was just gross. I wouldn't want to get in there, nor would I want David or Pallavi to get in there either so Pallavi volunteered to go into the nearby restaurant to see if they had some kind of tool that would long enough to fish it out. In the meantime, some people playing catch with a football came over to see what we were doing and had the thought to grab some wire hangers. One of them unfolded the hanger and dipped it into the big hole. There is small opening one end of the key, but the reason I never put it back on the keyring is because it's really hard to even get a small key ring through it so I wasn't sure the hanger would fit through it. Thankfully...IT DID! and he lifted the key out to safety!!

We thanked them a million times and headed off to dinner, which by the way, was super yummy!

Moral of the story...Procrastination is bad and no matter how difficult a task might seem, it's better to get it done and avoid having to jump into the sewer!

~Kelli