San Diego and Climbing!

Ugh. I can’t believe that it’s already Oct 20th! Where is this year going!??!

This weekend was another busy busy weekend! Friday night was a dinner party. Our first one in a while. It was just Steve, Jason and I for a while, then these two girls showed up. The one girl was fun, the other was scary and smoked. Gross. We had lots of fun though and it was good to catch up with Steve again. Ended up playing Phase 10 till like midnight and then went home.

Saturday morning I got up early and ran some errands then met up with Jason and Vince for breakfast then drove down to Santa Ana. Met up with this guy Dustin and then carpooled down to Solana Beach to this delicious pizza place called Pizza Port. I’ve been there a few times before and Love that place! 🙂 From there we drove through the beach cities and headed into San Diego. Went to Balboa park and walked around a bit, had a few drinks and then saw this play called “The Women” which was hilarious! After that we went to some huge Hotel and had more drinks then tried to make the 6:30 train back but JUST missed it so we ended up having dinner down there and then catching the 8:30 train back. Which was hilarious! The woman kept yelling at us and being all bitchy.

Sunday morning I got up and headed out climbing. It was just Jerry and I and he didn’t even climb at all. So I did 3 hours of climbing. I was EXHAUSTED by the time I got home and my fingers are still hurting from all of it. Got home about noon and did some stuff around the house and then called Kris, he and I went shopping at the Thirft stores for his halloween costume then hit up the Apple store where I orgasmed all over the new MacBook Pros. From there we went to Fry’s and I was expecting to just buy a new external hard drive because mine was filled up, but they had a 1TB Terastation for sale $350! So I bought that because I’ve been wanting one FOREVER! Brought that home and then went grocery shopping and made dinner for Kris and I and then watched some scary movie.

So that was basically the weekend. Lots of crazyness and lots of fun!

Royality

What an excellent weekend!

Let’s see, Friday we were going to go to GGB. But Jason talked me out of it because he said that the line was going to be too long. Either way, Constantine and I ended up staying in and watching a movie called Driving Lessons. It was pretty entertaining.

Saturday we got up and went shopping. I spent the last of my Best Buy gift card. I really hate that store. Such over priced Crap. Constantine bought a new Apple Macbook! Yay for him! I also got a new mouse for my computer and bought the new Futurama Movie. We watched it on Sunday and it was pretty good.

After that we headed to Inglewood to look at an apartment complex that was for sale. Sooo ghetto. That night we had a dinner party at Jason’s, his cousin was there and we played Catch Phrase. I came up with the word “Royality” and to answer “Dime a dozen” I said, “Hookers!” Very funny times!

Sunday Constantine and I went hiking looking for this Nazi camp called Murphys Ranch where some crazy lady built a hige mansion with tons of neat underground stuff. We never did find it. Googled it when we got home and found out that we were on the wrong side of the canyon. Stopped at El Burrito on the way home and ran into Jason and his cousin again.

My Trash Won’t Empty!

My Mac has been having issues lately. It can’t empty the trash!

I put stuff in there, I hit “Empty” and it says it does, but the Trash icon still says there’s something in there. I look, and it’s not showing me any errors.

I’ve let it go for a while because I couldn’t find anything. I went to ~/.Trashes and /.Trashes and everything was empty there. This past weekend I got out my install disk and booted off it, did a full disk and permissions repair and it said that everything was all right.

Well this morning, I got the bright idea to check the bootcamp partition. Sure enough, there’s a .Trashes on that partition, with a folder called “502” in it. I went ahead and tried to just remove it…

Wako-Bytes:BOOTCAMP chris$ rm -rf .Trashes/

To which my computer told me:
rm: .Trashes//502/\004␀␀␀ö\001␀␀.\024␀␀: File name too long
rm: .Trashes//502: Directory not empty
rm: .Trashes/: Directory not empty

Doing an ‘ls’ shows me this:
Wako-Bytes:502 chris$ ls
??????????o?????????.???????

I couldn’t move the folder, I couldn’t remove it, I couldn’t do anything.

So to fix this problem, I had to boot into Windows and run a full disk check there. During that check, it converts that whole folder into a file, which you can then REMOVE! 🙂

Problem solved.

I’m very excited to go home now and see if that fixed all my time machine issues as well!

You Will NEVER Guess…..

My flight into Des Moines has been CANCELED!

I am stuck in fucking Dallas Texas!

There’s only 3 flights direct from here to DM tomorrow.

I got to the counter and the guy NEXT to me took the LAST seat on the LAST flight into DM. Soooo

Instead, I am flying from HERE…

To Wisconsin…

To CHICAGO!

To Des Moines.

I leave here at 2:20pm and get into DM at 11:50pm… And then I have family Christmas starting at 9am Saturday. And I have to gift wrap and what not.

Can you believe this FUCKING SHIT!

ARG!

At least last night was amazing… Const got me a pair of Ray Ban sunglasses, which I’ve been really wanting ever since he introduced me to them, a blender which I’ve been wanting for years, and a new keyboard for my Mac! Which I almost bought for myself this past tuesday! Good thing I didn’t!

On the news now…

The “TSA” is the most hated government agency in the US! Hhaha. They rank BEHIND the IRS even! 🙂

I think I’m ready for the “L” word…. Scared!

I sold my old car this morning too!!! I’m a very sad about that, When she drove away, the last time I’ll see her, I cried a little! :'(

Gays and Financial Planning

So, this past weekend my mom bought a new iMac for the family computer… GO HER!

But, she’s not telling my dad about it till the credit card bill comes. This was brought up between Constantine and I while we were driving somewhere this weekend. I mean, does that really seem like the right way to do it? If you are spending the family money, you should really discuss it with the other family people before you go out and buy it, right? This happens all the time in my family and it’s really quite frustrating.

So Constantine and I were talking about it and it’s been on my mind since… How would you handle the financials in a gay relationship? When you are straight and married, there’s precedence for how these things would work out in the legal battles of divorce, especially if there are children.

I have a few ideas on the whole matter. First, if you are just living together, a newly formed household, after only dating for a year or whatever. Money matters should probably be kept separate. This would be a time of testing still to be sure you are compatible. Once you move in there’s tons of things that can change or you might realize while you are just dating. Did you know that he or she gets a $5 cup of coffee every morning? Did you know that even though they say they are making and saving a ton of money that they actually just spend it all?

I don’t really feel like it’s my place to ask to see my partners financials until we are very serious. IE although I have an idea of how much Constantine makes and what he spends, I wouldn’t flat out ask him to see. These are pretty personal things, and although I feel you should ask BEFORE you move in together, sometimes that just doesn’t happen.

During this first year or so of living together, the household expenses should really be split based on how much money the person brings in. Lets say that person A brings in $100,000/yr and person B brings in just $50,000/yr. Your rent is $1,000/mn. In this situation, person A would pay 66% of the rent, or $666. While person B pays $333. This will tend to keep things fairly equal to how they were before the move in and they should both still have a fair percent of income to live on. It would be unfair to make person B pay an equal share in the rent in this case because it would take a larger portion of their income.

Also during this time, you should really try and discuss any major purchases with each other before they happen. Even though the money is still technically, “MY” money and not “OUR” money, this will help you to work out the kinks in money spending. In this case, person A may be used to buying Gucci clothes and eating $40 lunches where as person B may be used to buying Old Navy clothes and taking lunch to work. During this time you can work out how the family money should be spent. Should person A still be getting $40 lunches and person B be taking lunches to work after the merger of money? Probably not as this would build up anger over the years between the two.

After a sufficient amount of time, the money should be merged. By now you should both be pretty close to being on the same page. Do we still spend all that money on Gucci clothes, or do compromise and both get cheaper but still nice clothes at the Banana Republic?

How do you handle big purchases like cars? Do you both get new ones at the same time, do you stagger them? It’s all so confusing!

All this stuff is really pretty standard between gay and straight….

But all this brings up the idea of, what if we split up? How do you un-merge a gay relationships money? Should both of them be allowed to get half of everything as if this were straight? What if it’s 20 years later and now person B is making $200,000/yr while person A is still only making $100,000/yr? And what if this huge increase in person B’s income is only because person A supported them while they got a masters or other education? On the other hand, what if the increase in income was all because of smart choices before the two got together?

This is all very twisted, in most cases people would say, “well what about a pre-nup”, etc.

But are those even really fair? Do they hold out? For me, personally, they are just asking for failure with those. It’s as if you are admitting straight out the door that you are expecting failure.

These are all just the millions of other thoughts that have been flying around my head the last couple days. I wish there were easy answers!