Apple products rule the world

But I’m more concerned with the candy-asses who may buy something just because it’s the newest, prettiest thing. Have you heard about Apple’s new model? The MacBook Pro with Retina display.

It’s nice. It’s gorgeous actually. But you know what it costs? The base price is $2,200.00 and that is a whole lot of cash.
You may be okay with that. It also has a significant decrease in battery life, which you may also be okay with having. After all, part of the beauty of macs is how easily replaceable their parts are. Back in my college days, one could easily defend the cost of buying a Mac notebook or desktop because the memory, battery, etc. we’re all easily fixed or upgraded.

This is apparently no longer true.

Go ahead and read that link. It’s short. I’ll wait.

…
Can you believe it??? Well over two thousand dollars for a laptop that is absolutely guaranteed to die within two or three years. I’d have a hard time dealing with that.
I don’t mind buying items that have a set life expectancy. I bought my iPad2 almost a year and a half ago for $700.00 and I use the ever-loving shit out of it. I love it. And when it eventually kicks the bucket, as it will since it has the same fused-casing problem as the new Pro, I’ll be okay with it as I didn’t invest too much money and I will have gotten tons of use out of it. But there is no way that I could justify spending an easy twenty-five hundred dollars for a two-ish year computer.

But I am a bit worried. I foresaw us buying a Mac laptop for Ben next year as his current (non-Mac) one is nearly five years old and if The People buy enough of the new Pro, the old one will no longer be available. And I will have a really hard time trying to convince him to spend almost three times the amount he did on his current laptop on one that will die out in half the amount of time.

So, I guess what I’m saying is, spread the word. Because no matter how cool Apple’s commercials may be, they will never explain this little bit of money-making magic to you.

-K

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When the world is chaotic, write lists!!

We’re in the process of buying a house. Cue major freak out: “HolyShit!HolyShit!HolyShit!!!”
We also took a lovely 10-day vacation to see some wonderful people and our nation’s capitol city.
I turned 27 years old.
Ben’s band (and other musical ventures) is/are picking up rather quickly.

We’ve been just a bit busy.

And if my German Mama taught me anything, it’s that lists can always be made.

So, a’la the delightful Sizzle, here is a list of 27 things I would like accomplished during my 27th year:

1. Buy a house and have the option of never moving my sweet ass again.
2. Reconnect with my old art alums at my five-year college reunion.
3. Chill the fuck out and create at least one day a month with the obligation of doing absolutely nothing that is required.
4. Keep up with the ‘beguilements‘ section, as well as the whole blog much better.
5. Get back into the habit of regularly walking ole Chubbers.
6. Visit a new place.
7. Keep up with my snail mail correspondence much much better.
8. Get another tattoo.
9. At the very least begin (but with high aspirations of completing) the album I bought for our 11ish year history two years ago that still has plastic around it.
10. Mail out proper “change of address” cards before middle of November.
11. Make all the holiday gifts before the 20th of December.
12. Work a bit more on that tshirt quilt i’ve been collecting for five years.
14. FINALLY have a properly designated art room!!!
15. Start excessive saving to buy a new-to-me vehicle for whenever the old Jeep finally kicks it.
16. Buy a new mattress/bed.
17. Create a tiny edible garden (and since I really hate gardening, I’ll be happy if I can simply maintain an herb garden).
18. Finish transferring our shitty recipe book to the new recipe book.
19.Throw super fun we-never-had-a-reception-slash-house-warming party on our eleventy-first anniversary.
20. Make homemade hummus.
21. Take a class.
22. Bake bread
23. Make cheesy-as-hell holiday cards with The Rock Star.
24. Find our perfect kitchen table.
25. Visit at least two non-local museums.
26. Start that Etsy store we’ve been discussing for several years.
27. Build my very own darkroom!!!
One to grow on: cross off at least half of these listed items!!

Wish me luck!!
-K

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hey, ya’ll–remember me?

Hi.

Yeah, sorry I’ve not really been present at all. I’ve been super-duper busy. Fighting with my landlords (they want their house back WAY before our lease is due); sooner-than-expected talks of buying a house with each other, with our real estate agent; going on a quick vacation to Tybee Island/Savannah, GA that wasn’t really a vacation…

it was a honeymoon.

Because we got married. (eep!)

But we like to keep things complicated, so of course it was a secret marriage.

And I learned some things:

1. It’s reallyreallyreallyREALLY hard for me to keep my own secrets as I typically do not have any secrets and I’m used to just walking around and gabbing to anyone who is in range about what’s going through my head.

2. I do NOT handle stress well. Back in high-school/college era, I was a stress-managing machine–a good German through and through, I could itemize, list, and conquer with the very best of them. I have since turned to a life of mostly leisure and am now quite unaccustomed to a stressful way of living. This means that I turn into a little ball of bitchiness. It’s not fun. And it’s real fucking ugly.

3. I have no idea how women (or men) who plan full weddings do it. NO FUCKING CLUE. We had us plus nine people and a minister at a park on a Saturday morning and guys, it was just too much for me to handle. We didn’t even have invitations–just stopped by to visit grandparents and parents and let them know about it. Seriously, it was ridiculous.

4. Honeymoons are awesome. I mean, for real. In all our years, we’d never taken a vacation that was just the two of us. We’d always go along with our families or we’d plan trips with our friends, never had we traveled long-distance over several days just the two of us. And it rocked! We did nothing but sit on a beach and stare at the ocean for three days (fourth day we walked around Savannah), stuff our bellies with the most amazing seafood we could find, and have lots and lots of sex (sorry, mom). It was a blast.

So, hopefully, I’ll get back into regular blogging that I’m sure will be all about how awful it is trying to find a house. We’ll see.

I’ll leave you with our wedding announcement we posted after we got back. Made pretty much entirely by the lovely Rock Star:

-K

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Hey!! Look at this!!!

So we’ve been absentee bloggers for a bit, but that is because we’ve been setting up a new blog for Ben and his numerous guitar/musical endeavors. We’ll have a Petler Inn catch-up pretty soon, but in the meantime:
Check out Ben’s new blog!!!

(for those who found us by searching for guitar swirling pictures and techniques and/or ibanez searches and/or any other guitar/bass/music related search–we are now separating all of that stuff into this new blog–please read and enjoy!)

-K

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The New Family budget

What with a fantastic new job opportunity lined up for me (which I’m just not quite ready to go über public with, just yet) and Ben’s guitar-swirling beginning to really pick up, we’re preparing ourselves to see more money in our household than we have in ages. Although let’s keep our perspective, we’re still going to be at the very bottom rung of the pay scale; now we’re finally going to be able to get one foot off the ground.
We are going to be combining our monies in ways we’ve talked about for years, but I think we’ll finally be able to practically utilize. We’re going to be using what I’m calling the Venn Diagram of family budgets:

Despite being part of Coupledom for nearly a decade, we have always fiercely maintained financial independence from each other. But we realize it will make everything a bit easier if we just finally merge most of our money. We are using this method because, frankly, I’m just too lazy to keep a budget for guitar strings, new speaker cabinets, paint and buckets for swirling and Ben’s sudden cravings for cherry limeades.
Aside from my laziness, Ben (and now me!! [YAY!]) is considered a contract worker. Which basically means taxes are a giant pain in the ass. And a fully merged account would make an already tedious month in late winter even more confusing (especially now there would be two accounts needing to be pulled from it).
We’ve had a collective savings account for years, but we’ve also maintained separate savings and separate checking. We will merge all three savings accounts into one lump account, keep our individual checking accounts and begin a new checking account in both our names with a large-ish percentage of our paychecks put towards it.
But I’ve never created a budget before. Neither for myself nor for us. I mean, in my head, I’ve allotted so much to a certain item, but I’ve never sat down and wrote any kind of structured form for money. And Ben’s idea of budgeting is alternating spending a lot of money and spending no money at all. To help us figure out how much we’re going to need, I’ve been tracking every single penny each of us spends for the past few weeks, and I’ll continue to do so for the next two months. Hopefully, this will help give me a good idea how we should allocate our funds.

I’m curious to see other people’s relationship with money; be they single or moving in together or legally committing themselves to each other . With so many people we know getting married, I’m curious to see how they merge their money. Are you just going with the lump bucket of Everything Earned Is Ours or will you maintain totally separate accounts? How do you handle your money now? And even the ones not part of Coupledom: do you have a set budget and how did you come up with the numbers?
The few people I’ve told about our budgeting don’t seem to understand it. But the people I talk to keep everything totally separate (granted of everyone I asked, not a one of them was married). The daily tallying of our spending has been keeping money on my brain for the past few weeks. And I doubt it’ll go away until I’m used to the whole responsible-adult budgeting/following that budget issue.
This could take awhile.
-K

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Unser kleiner Shrekhund

***(this is an old post from my old anonymous blog–but it’s a good introduction to ole Chubbers)***

Also known as our sweet little dog, aka Ol Wheezy, aka Chubbers, aka our pygmy Bear, aka house pig, aka Little Bitch, aka Unser Kleiner Shrekhund, otherwise known as Attila.

Attila came into my life by pure happenstance, also by a mother who could not knowingly leave a tiny four-week old 1/2 chihuahua 1/2 poodle mix with a family that would most certainly destroy it within two months (and if they didn’t, the busy highway feet from their front stoop most surely would have).

I came home one day (not too long after moving back from new york) to find my mother sitting on a chair, saying, “well, I’ve either done a very wonderful thing or a really terrible thing…either way, you’ve got a dog now b/c [my father] will kill me if I bring a new dog into this house.”

The next day she and I went to pick up this adorable little puppy dog. This tiny black bundle of fur fit snuggly into the palm of my hand (literally) and I lost my heart to him. All sorts of motherly-type instincts kicked in while caring for this too-small to be believed puppy. Of course, with good comes bad, and I spent several months not going too far from home and countless times cleaning up my puppy’s waste, and all the little things he’d chew on, and listening for him to see if he was either A: using the bathroom somewhere in the house or B: chewing up something he shouldn’t be. (Needless to say, all the bad re-confirmed my decision to [hopefully] remain childless.)

Attila remained nameless for a few weeks while I tried to come up with something clever that suited his personality. One night I took him to a bonfire-gathering my friends were having to celebrate their graduation/going away from our tiny close-minded town and one of them picked him up after hearing me tell about how this five pound dog is somehow managing to knock over his gate in the hallway and said, “well, you’re just like Attila-the-Hun is all!” And preceded to inform me that the all-conquering Hun was a fairly small-sized man. (I want to say around 4’5” but it could be 5’2”….I don’t remember anymore) and the name stuck to my sweet and yet very destructive puppy-dog.

Attila is a wonderful little doggy. He’s really not all the bright, but he’s so sweet, it makes up for it. The dog has no concept of stranger, it’s simply “FRIEND!!!” or “POTENTIAL FRIEND!!!” he even likes most other dogs too, but if there’s too many of them he’ll go far away from the rough play and just watch them (to be fair, most of my friend’s dogs are larger-sized breeds) and occasionally run into the fray to chase and be chased and then run back to his little spot and continue watching.

He’s traveled from my parent’s house to the shitty apartment complex I lived in while I finished college, back to my parent’s house, and now to mine and Ben’s current rental house. He such a great little dog that wants nothing more than to have his belly rubbed all day long. His favourite words are, “want a bellyrub?” (and he’ll fall onto his back and spread his legs, the little whore) and “alright, let’s get a treat!” (to which, he’ll make a beeline for the kitchen and sit in front of the shelf where he knows his treats are kept).

I could write so much on my little Attila, how his fur grows out until he’s just this black cottonball that runs around my house, or how he loves to “talk” to us in the morning, or how whenever he’s playing “rope” he’ll growl as he pulls. . . . .so much about mein klein Shrekhund, but I must quit here for now.
-K

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genesis

In the beginning, there was loneliness and darkness and the misunderstanding of teenagers. And one day in a big box store of pre-manufactured goods in east Tennessee, there became understanding and friendship and love. And then there was added a small dog of magnificent girth, and it was all good. And there was movies and music and books and laughter and tears and lots of moving about. And it still was all kinds of good. And there was friends and family and vacations and talk of moving together, and bad jobs and wonderful jobs and a house and cooking and lots of fun. And it is still so wonderful.

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