Karin and I try to be very careful with our money. This is partially because we don’t have that much, my current job doesn’t pay the best and Karin cannot work. But it’s also because we are focussed on our goals. We want to pay off our mortgage as quickly as possible, get me through school ASAP, and work on our long term goal of buying property in Mexico. The sooner I can get through school, the sooner I can earn significantly more and we’ll be able to focus on achieving our other goals. Towards this, we make certain sacrifices.

Sacrifices might not be the best word, prioritizing might be better. Everyone prioritizes, but we are a bit more focussed in this regard. When we enjoy a day in Vancouver, there is a lot of window shopping involved, walks in parks or the beach, our dining choice is carefully considered, and we drive home even when hotels offer tempting “BC residents only” winter specials that would then let us enjoy ourselves more.

Our lives are a little more simple than most, even though they are following budgets also. We don’t have cell phones. We survive with one aging car. Our computers are our main source of entertainment, but are almost 6 years old. Yes, we’ll be forced to move forward on most of these items soon, but we delay that much further than most.

One of our big passions is travel, and we have fallen in love with Playa del Carmen, Mexico. We have met a number of people who travel to Playa through the internet, and notice that a lot of them who love the area as much as us will travel there 4 or 5 times a year. They state that if they could afford it, they would buy a vacation home there. We limit ourselves, and made a long term goal of returning for our fifth anniversary this year, with our last visiting being for our honeymoon. We also don’t go precisely on our wedding date, but rather a few months later when the weather is perfect, but the rates are still low season. By booking cheap flights, not pre-booking a hotel room but instead letting the seasonally empty hotels fight for our business once we are there, and researching fabulous restaurants that are a few blocks of the tourist street and priced for the locals; we can go for a fraction of the cost most pay, but still we limit ourselves on frequency. However, this is what we hope will allow us to one day buy that vacation home of which others dream.

So how does this all link into today, St. Valentine’s Day? Well, first, we are not going out for dinner today, I am not giving her $100 roses, and diamonds are definitely not on the list. But unlike others who shun Valentine’s due to its commercialism, we still will acknowledge this day. We do not need expensive gifts to show our love, but we can still say “I love you” today.

But most importantly, ignoring today’s commercialism together just stresses why we are so happy together. We have the same interests, similar tastes, and we share the same goals in life. If this wasn’t true, one of us would likely be upset that we aren’t doing more today. But because we complement each other so well, we are happy just being together today, knowing that we are that much closer to our goals. Someday, the two of us will be celebrating the success that today’s prioritizing has produced as we sit in our little Mexico hideaway, exchange local trinkets we picked up while out for dinner on Fifth Ave, and saying “Feliz Día de San Valentín”.

Update: 5:27pm Karin just messaged me to say “If you plan of buying flowers, do it tomorrow when they are half price. It will save money for Playa”. And that’s why she’s my Valentine.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

When my in-laws moved from their house to a condo, we had to move my wife’s Harley that had been stored in their garage. We now owned our own condo that has secure underground parking, and one of our two spots was empty, so luckily we had somewhere to move it. Karin’s vestibulopathy has kept her from riding it for the last seven years, but the last time she did her insurance costs were about what a car costs us now. While we had not had storage insurance on it for the past few years, we knew we had better get some now that it was a bit more publicly accessible. Given that we pay just over $1000 for our car’s insurance, we expected storage insurance to be about $150.

We visited the insurance office at our credit union, and sat down with an insurance agent.

Agent: Storage insurance will cost you $604 a year.

Us: Ahhhh…….

Me - thinking logically: Well, we’re going to try and sell it, and so having it ready for test drives would be a good thing. It can’t be much more for road insurance. What would that cost us?

Agent: Well, as you have your full safe driving discount, it will only be $2300.

Us: Ahhhh…….

Me: OK, we’ll just be getting storage insurance in that case.

Agent: Of course. Now will you be wanting comprehensive on that? It’s $300 more.

Me: To cover what? Comprehensive is extra insurance for crashes. Storage insurance covers all damage that might occur while it’s sitting in my parking spot. I’m pretty sure that if we have comprehensive and crash into something, the insurance will be null and void since it isn’t insured for driving.

Agent: Oh, comprehensive on a storage policy would be to cover you if it were to roll out of your parking spot, across the lane, and into the vehicle parked opposite you.

Me: It’s a bike. If it starts to roll, it will fall over.

This weekend has been a busy one as I work on several computers, wiping them all and then setting them up fresh; but I do have time to get online as I sit waiting for various installations to finish.

I had posted previously that the website Technorati would not index this blog. Technorati is a site that keeps track of every known blog, and allows you to create a list of those blogs you follow so that you can read them all in one place. It also ranks blogs based on links from other blogs, frequency of posting, popularity, and other criteria I don’t know. Therefore, adding a blog I visit often to my favorites there lets the author(s) know I appreciate their work.

One of the main reasons for my previous postings is that I found when searching that a lot of people reported problems with Technorati indexing their blog; but not many ever said what was the solution. I therefore promised that I would follow up with my posting, just in case someone came here as a result of searching when they had issues.

I’m happy to report that my issues with Technorati are fixed. Sadly, I cannot say how they became fixed. I had emailed Technorati support, who promised to get back to me and even stated that if I hadn’t heard from them within a week, I could then request an update as to when they would be able to get to me. Reading the experiences of others indicated that often support had fixed the issue, but that sometimes it took weeks of reminders before support looked at their issue. I had decided to give it about 10 days before I bothered them again, and right about then the issue suddenly resolved itself. I had made no changes on my end that should have helped, and since Technorati never got a hold of me, I have no idea if they did something that resolved the issue on their end.

However, I have since noticed poor performance on their part in other areas. My wife’s blog will sometimes be listed in Technorati as not having been updated in five or six days, even though she has made at least two posts a day. This will be despite the fact that we can see the Technorati spiders visiting her blog’s feed multiple times a day. According to Technorati, my sister-in-law’s blog did not even exist until I manually pinged it today, after which it immediately said not only that the blog existed, but that it had already noticed when looking at three other blogs that they linked to it. I would think that a site that tries to index all blogs would notice one on Blogger, and especially notice it if it was linked to in other blogs it has indexed. Similarly, my stepson’s blog existed in their index, but Technorati had not noticed any updates in it for 77 days until I manually pinged it today.

So it appears that perhaps Technorati is suffering pains from the ambitious task they have tried to undertake. It is a good thing that I am not too concerned with my ranking there, or these would really get to me.

There’s been a few times lately when someone has said something to Karin and I while we’re out that has me shaking me head for a few days afterward. They may not have happened today, but they have stuck in my mind and keep replaying themselves, so I just need to start sharing them.

A few weeks ago we had an appointment for Karin to see an allergist in New Westminster. He became concerned when he heard about an abnormal reaction she had to her last bee sting. It was declared that she must caring an Twinject injector with her from now on, as if she had a sting near her face, it might swell her throat shut.

His nurse comes and demonstrates the unit to you after with a demo unit they then let you keep. The instructions start:

“You’ve just been stung by a bee, and you can feel your throat swelling up. You are too far away for medical help to reach you in a reasonable time. First, you twist the case to open it.”

She twists open the case and the injector falls into her palm.

“Then you take the red and green end off each side.”

She removes caps the cover the needle hole and the plunger.

“Next you take of the top tab.”

She removes a tab that keeps the plunger from being accidentally pressed.

“Next you check the expiry date that that tab covered up. Once you’re sure it has not expired, you proceed to…”

When the instructions were the same again as Karin this time handled the injector, it took all my might to not ask what happens when you find it has expired. But it still bugs me, I want to know, is there a special position you can lie in to minimize the pain of suffocating when you accept your fate, put aside the expired injector, and wait to die?