tnguy

Car started first time. I have a zerostart heater to warm the engine on days just like this (Diesels are slow to warm). The front door was kinda frosty though and when I got to work, I went to get something from the back seat and could not open the back door.

I have one of these I wear every day. Love it to death. Perfectly my style and has features I actually use a fair bit. Got a great price on it from searching aggressively and finding a store that actually hadn't launched yet. It's taken a beating and I'd really like to get it refurbished sometime. This is the one I wear when I have put that one down somewhere and it evaporated. I am a big fan of hands but it serves a purpose. I also have some cheaper ones I've owned at one time or another and a couple of Timex wind-ups I got as a kid.

I wish there was pick six here. At least there are some drinkable beers these days. It used to be a sad sight in the beer aisle at any of the grocery places around here.

I already have a new card awaiting activation from before all this. I should really do that I guess...

  Very good point.   Our first house was a tiny little one-bedroom that was painful to service, expensive due to its location (ten minutes walk to work was nice though).

Your home is not an investment, it's the place you live.   And for what it's worth, that didn't come from me or Dave Ramsey, it came from the CFO of a company I worked for which was leveraged to the hilt.

I got focussed on paying off the house when I looked at a few statements and saw how much was going to interest. I'm not totally against a mortgage for living space since you would otherwise have to pay rent anyway (though people will probably be inclined to aim for a bigger mortgage than they'd be willing to pay rent) and it's really a personal choice about borrowing money for investment but debt has downsides that are not necessarily immediately apparent.   In the interests of full disclosure, if it weren't for some inheritance, we'd still be paying on our mortgage. On the other hand, we got about half the house we qualified for and were on track to pay off quite a few years early. The two-weekly thing was a scheme whereby you take you monthly payment, divide it in two then pay it every two weeks. That makes an extra payment a year which helps quite a lot. I'd also throw bits and pieces of money in on it as-and-when it was going spare.   Paying interest is like throwing money away in my book. If you're leveraging like Hersh says, it may make sense on paper but you have to look at the other factors and see if they are something you are willing to accept. In the case of rental properties, for example, are you prepared for if property prices crash? If you get a deadbeat tennant? If you get no tennant? If a Hells Angel gang moves in next door and scares all tennants off? If you need to move, would you (or can you even) sell at a loss or afford to hold on while things happen slower at a higher price? Don't get me wrong, I'm a landlord myself. It's not always the most fun in the world.

  I forgot gardening :)   I tend not to do it but for just a few items... Then again, our Walmart now has the self-checkouts again.

Nah. I wont vote for him cause he isn't going to win cause I won't vote for him.

Whole foods has a pretty decent selection if you're ever by there also.

  This. Your diagram is incomplete and needs to show the power incoming.   I think typically you don't see the switches wired that way, it goes power->Switch 1->switch 2->Fixture. Though there is undoubtedly a way to do it that way.   The ground doesn't really complicate things. They need to be tied all together and to any metal parts that aren't part of the circuit and to house ground. They don't participate in the active part of the circuit at all. Likewise, white is neutral and should be tied together and to neutral. Black and red are hot and comprise the "complicated" part of the circuit. I think the way you have it wired, you end up having to use the white as a hot wire which you would have to have an electrician tell you if that was to code.   (Apparently if you do this, you need to mark the white wire with black tape). http://www.homeimprovementweb.com/information/how-to/three-way-switch.htm   After studying your diagram some more, if the power is coming from the right, it looks like you have it correct. If it is working correctly as you say, it is difficult to see how it could be wrong anyway.

Never forget you can checkout at sports, automotive or the jewelery counter too. Oh, and electronics. 

  I remember they ran a campaign a while back where if there were more than two people in line, they'd put another cashier on. That appears to have quietly been dropped.   I have a policy of not going to Walmart on Friday evenings or all day Saturday and, if I can avoid it, Sunday. Other times it's usually OK though there seems to be times some evenings where they've cut the cashiers down to one or two and there's suddenly a big rush. That usually seems to occur just after I walked past empty lines in order to pick up that one-more item I needed.

Well, it is upstairs in a folder in a bookshelf but I have one :). It actually didn't feel a whole lot different making that final payment but it is nice to not have to cut that check each month (well, we were actually doing every 2 weeks before the end)

It's in "Nashville West" (Old Charlotte Pike just south of 40). I ignore the furniture but there's a fair bit of stuff that I miss from England.

Antibiotics have no effect on viruses

  When the government is printing money like crazy, it distorts the market, creates perverse incentives and causes malinvestments. Borrowing to fund investments "makes sense" in such an environment. It's just a question of what happens when the music stops. I have become a big fan of not carrying debt though. May do it again if we trade up houses though.

  They are a little confused but Obama is definitely "right wing". Guantanimo, drone strikes, cozying up to big business... It can take some sophisticated thinking to work out where you are politically when there's really only one party split over a few issues up there. By dividing us over a few wedge issues, they keep us under control.   Any friend of freedom is a friend of mine. I'm not sure these people are but if you can believe in one piece of freedom, it's a good starting point to be convinced that other freedoms should be respected.

  Possibly. The fire dept did a dive exercise at the local lake a while back and turned up about 13 firearms if I remember correctly,

Heck, those chinamen will send me things for less than the shipping would be here. I have a suspicion that the USPS is being taken for a ride.

Well, I was looking for an excuse to buy some of their stuff :)

  I'm not upset with Amazon for introducing the sales tax since they now have distribution centers in TN and that is the way the law works for better or worse. However, it should be noted that Amazon are pushing for the internet sales tax (after all, why should anyone else enjoy the advantages they did while building their business?). They are attempting to pull the ladder up behind them and I think that's contemptible.

  I already cut down on my buying from Newegg and Buy.com once they got a presence in TN and started charging the tax. This will only drive more business to Chinese sellers on ebay and the like, sad to say.

I'd say find where you're going to work first. I recommend avoiding crossing Nashville during rush hour.   If you can work anywhere, that opens up a whole lot. Spring Hill seems to be the hot area around here.

  The one possible good thing about it is that it may focus attention on the 2014 elections and create a bigger R turnout. Unfortunately, with the quality of R candidates these days, that's not such a good thing anyway.