2010 Wrapup

With the lack of posts here thanks to my laziness, I've resorted to cutting and pasting my holiday e-mail to be forever enshrined on this blog that no one reads.

Greetings to my most faithful and loyal e-mail readers! As another year quickly comes to an end it's time for "that Dreese family" to brag about how rad they are under the clever guise of a friendly newsletter. No doubt you've been waiting with bated breath to hear of our tales of worldly travel, unimaginable fortunes, and maybe even some snake charming. So, uh, with the possibility of you being really disappointed, let us jump in.

July marked our first full year in our house. Aside from some excitement with a wasp infestation, a basement flood, furnace issues, and the never ending forrest of leaves, it has been overall very quiet and pleasant. Recently we've started our first big house project, a full remodel of one of our spare bedrooms (I'll try and keep that album updated as progress is being made). While it's a bit slow-moving at the moment, I'm hoping with some time off after xmas we'll be able to make some more progress. If nothing else it's been a fun (and expensive) learning experience. The next big steps are fixing/finishing the electrical wiring, running network cable, re-insulating the ceiling, re-framing the closet, and then probably drywall and all that stuff. I should be able to bust all that out in a few hours, eh?

Arguably our biggest news of the year been paying off Amber's student loans in full at the end of September! It took us just shy of two years, which was our goal. As you can imagine we're thrilled and all sorts of full of ourselves ;) To award ourselves we now have satellite TV so we didn't miss much of the football season. If you want to be nosey and read about the nitty-gritty details you may do so here. Since we're in polite company I decided to keep the tacky details out of my high-brow e-mail newsletter for monocle enthusiasts.

We had a nice week-long vacation in Emerald Isle, NC with Amber's family in June. We had a small condo right on the beach which was (as expected) really great :) My second trip of the year was to San Deigo for a work conference, it was my first commercial flight anywhere and it was overall a good time :)

Aside from that, it's been your typical everyday living going on. Work has been going pretty well for Amber and myself. We're still working at the same place so we continue to carpool to work and eat lunches together on most days. She's been settling just fine to her position as a supports coordinator and I've continued my reign as the (sometimes evil) database administrator. Amber continued with her assistant coaching of the women's volleyball team this year, and after some deep thought she decided 5 seasons of coaching was enough. In October she received the "Outstanding Athletic Alumni Award" for her role as a coach and a player during college. Speaking of volleyball, we still continue to play in weekly leagues and had a fairly successful season that wrapped up last week.

That's about it! I hope everyone has a safe and successful holiday season and just maybe we can keep in better touch! You know, if you want to. It's cool :) Thankfully technology makes this much easier these days, there are many ways to keep up on what's happening:

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/dandreese

Personal blog: http://www.3dollarbicycle.com

Automotive video themed blog: http://www.giveitthebeans.com

Twitter: @dreesemonkey

Nobody Makes Arrested Development Sit in the Corner

Do you think you know me? If you do, and I were to ask you what my favorite TV show of all time was, and you had an answer other than Arrested Development (X-files might be an acceptable, though incorrect answer) guess what genius, you officially know nothing about me.

Sorry about the hostility, it's an un-welcome side effect of amazing-show-canceled-itis Fox has infected a chosen few with.

So what's up with the post? Even though Amber and I are currently broke from our adventures in rug buying, Amazon had an amazing sale on the complete series for $27.99. What was a guy to do? To quote my favorite allegedly-Russian-billionare I jump eeeen ittttt.

Big Doins

Big doins around the Dreese house, a little too much excitement if you ask me. In the past week our basement has taken on water and our furnace stopped working. All of this while I wanted to work on the real project that is a complete gut and remodel of one of our spare bedrooms.

You are no doubt reading this and incredibly impressed with my man skills, but I assure you I haven't done something like this before and am fairly clueless to most of the goings-on.

Small catastrophes aside, Amber and I bought our Christmas gift to ourselves last week, a nice large shag rug for the living room. I've always wanted a big fuzzy rug and she found one that ticked those boxes, if you will. As you can see it is majestic and as squishy as you could imagine.

Lowes 10% payoff

Here's my first exploitataion of the lowes 10% off coupons - a Dewalt DW716 Dual Bevel 12" Miter Saw - truly a manly machine if there ever was one. I was looking at a similar Hitachi with a laser guide that also had great reviews (and a $100 cheaper price tag), but I wanted to see if these Dewalt tools are all they've cracked up to be. This will be a tool that will hopefully be with me a long time through a lot of projects, so I think the higher initial investment will be a smart choice in the end.

In other news, it appears that AES has finally mailed out our refund check for overpaying our student loan payoff so we should be getting our money back soon. The peasants rejoice!

Next up on the agenda is to whine about the ridiculous amount of leaves in our yard. When I say we have 40+ trees in our yard alone is, unfortunately for us, not an exageration. I spent the better part of 2 hours leaf blowing about half of one side of our yard over the weekend and there are already enough leaves on the ground to do it again. If I were a wealthy man you can bet your sweet rearend I'd have a leaf vacuum in my shed. Someday leaf vacuum, someday!

Frugal Tip: 10% off at Lowes

As a newish homeowner, sometimes I feel like I'm spending more time at Lowes than at home (or as much money there as I do on my mortgage). Lowes will very helpfully send you a "congratulations on moving" 10% off coupon that you can request on their website here.

That's all well and good if you're actually moving, but what if you'd like to save a few bucks independent of your housing status? Head on over to the post office and pick up a change of address packet to find the same coupon inside. The coupons are only good for a few months so you may want to run and get some every so often.

10% off everything up to $5000 - not a bad deal.

Edgar Allan Bro

I was looking through my folder of funny internet pictures and I was totally like "LAWL - Edgar Allan Bro - I am heeelarious" and then I did a google search and realized I was not the first to make that joke and I was a bit put off. Luckily the large amount of other amusing pictures soon lifted my spirits.

Not much new to report going on in life, hence the lack of blog posts. AES still remains a colossal smelly face in regards to holding $1500 of our monetary units hostage, but we're assured that the matter will be wrapped up soon.

Amber's final volleyball coaching season will soon be coming to an end, I think she'll appreciate the extra time she's going to have. We still haven't started any major work on the house, though a few weeks ago I installed a ridge vent to help ventilate the attic. I still need to pull the insulation out of the soffets on one side of the house, I got sick after I did the first side. Let's hope it was coincidence.

$0.00 Yayyyyyyyyyyy! -$1500 Oh crap!

Good news everyone, the student loan balance has been KO'd by the mighty Dreese financial assault squad on Friday, 9/24/10. It's been a long journey and we've finally reached the end! That's the good news.

The bad news is that before Amber and I decided just to pay them off (thanks to some extra money in checking), I had submitted a payment to AES for $1500. Hey there ho there, no problem, they have a "Cancel Payment" link on their website which I took advantage of so I could just go through the payoff process instead. Yesterday I come to find out that AES never processed the cancel payment, so on top of the almost $2500 it took for payoff, they decided to help themselves to the $1500 as well. Gulp.

Upon further investigation it looks like they can only issue a refund by check, which can take up to 30 days. Such service after paying out balance 28 years ahead of schedule! Ironically our biggest financial emergency in a while happens after we've paid off our debt - did not see that coming. To further annoy us, transfering money from savings (ING direct) takes 2 business days, and we had to pay a $185 fee for helping us with our bee situation, so looks like we're in the poorhouse for the time being.

For those looking for the juicy details of the the student loans I made a post on reddit so you can check it out there. Financial success - ahoy!