Enough griping about politics for the moment. I’m going to gripe about other stuff.<\/p>\n
Coin<\/b><\/p>\n
I’ve been trying for several days now to deposit my spare coins at the bank. <\/p>\n
A few years ago I had a regrettable experience at a Wells Fargo in MN. I spent a while rolling up about $80 in coin, and I carried the rolled coins in to the branch. The girl behind the counter looked at my coins in the manner one might usually look at entrails and said “unroll those. They have to go through the machine.” She then turned to the next customer, and left me to eventually remember to shut my mouth. The combination of having done unneeded work with public rejection scarred me at a deep level.<\/p>\n
Turns out that no bank anywhere in Rhode Island has a coin counting machine. Instead, the tellers give the entrails-look to my bag of unsorted coinage and hand me little stacks of paper coin-rolls. Almost all merchants give my coin sack the entrails-look, in fact. I’ve taken to assuring people that I have no intention of actually trying to *use* the money in the bag, I’m just carrying it around looking for a way to turn it back into cash. <\/p>\n
In desperation, I finally turned to the “coin star” machine at the grocery store. These little monsters take 8.5% of your money, but they count the coinage for you. I dumped my coins into the maw of the machine, which promptly said (I’m not even making this up) “Wow, you have a lot of coins, please ask a store employee for help.” Needless to say the customer service staff at the grocery store had no clue how to un-jam the machine…and I ended up taking my coins and leaving.<\/p>\n
The Mailbox<\/b><\/p>\n
We bought a new mailbox. It’s shiny and white. We have a post with a horizontal support on it at mailbox-height, where the old mailbox was mounted. The new one is wider than the old one, so I got a piece of pine to mount it on, and tried to nail the new pine on top of the old mounting board. I promptly knocked the horizontal support right off the post, and a little cloud of dry-rotten wood went everywhere.<\/p>\n
So, I ended up doing a total hack job to get back to having any sort of mailbox at all.<\/p>\n
The Bank<\/b><\/p>\n
Went to the bank today and (hopefully, pending some sort of thing-or-the-other) secured a “Home Equity Line of Credit” in support of my plumbing and other projects. This seems to be a pretty sweet deal. It’s a credit account with a checkbook, secured by my house. The interest rate floats at 1.01% below prime (today that’s 3.74%), and I need to pay only the monthly interest to avoid fees and penalties. Best part is that it’s tax deductible (being a “home loan”) and you can use it however you please. According to the woman at the bank, a lot of people use these to buy cars, since they can get a better interest rate *and* deduct the interest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Enough griping about politics for the moment. I’m going to gripe about other stuff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}