Meeting Davy Jones

Pete at BibleMoneyMatters recently posted about his opportunity to meet Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty. He stated that the governor seemed really nice and asked if anyone else had met someone famous and what their opinion of the famous person was.

I thought for awhile and then smiled, remembering the time that I met Davy Jones (of the Monkees). It's kind of a fun story, so I thought I'd share!

I think it was in 2002 that two of my best friends and I decided to go to Kentucky on vacation. One of the girls and I had gone the summer before and had so much fun that we talked our other friend into joining us on a second trip. You hadn't realized Kentucky was such a fun place, had you?!?

Anyway, I think we were in Lexington when we decided to stop at a mall. I don't remember why we stopped, maybe one of us had forgotten something? At any rate, we were walking through the mall and, coming to the center, saw a huge line of people. Wondering what was going on, we looked around and eventually saw a sign stating that Davy Jones was going to be making an appearance to sign autographs and do the picture thing with fans.

My girlfriends and I didn't really have an agenda for the vacation, so we decided to get in line! Once we got to the front, we realized that Davy Jones is a pretty short guy! I'm 5', so I was shorter than him, but I was the only one. :) We got our picture taken and cracked a few jokes. It was fun listening to his British accent (whenever I say the name Davy Jones, I have to say it with a British accent!). He was a very nice guy, and I'm really glad we decided to hop into that line. Pretty crazy, huh?!

How about you? Have you met anyone famous? What were they like?

ps - The picture of Davy Jones above is the one that was taken with my girlfriends and me. I cut us out to protect the guilty!

$72 Saved On Our Mortgage

About a year ago, I created an Excel spreadsheet that I enter our mortgage payments into every month. I used directions in this post from Trent at The Simple Dollar to create the spreadsheet. There are instructions in the comments on adding an "Additional Principal" column, which I also did.

I have really enjoyed using this spreadsheet over the past year. My husband and I round up when we pay our mortgage each month, and I get immense satisfaction in putting that $7.xx in the "Additional Principal" column (I know, I'm a geek!). The spreadsheet automatically adjusts our final payment (which is about 10 years from now) with each additional $7 I enter.

Since my husband and I both get paid bi-weekly, we end up with two months each year that contain an "extra" paycheck. This month happens to be one of those months, so we decided to apply an additional $100 to our September 1st mortgage payment, just for fun.

I went into my spreadsheet the other night and typed $107.xx into the "Additional Principal" column. I then checked our final payment to see how much it was affected. Our final payment went down by $179.xx! How fun is that?!?

That, my friends, is $72 our mortgage company will never see. :)

*sigh* It's the small things in life!

I Love Fresh Tomatoes!

I grew up out in the country, and we always had a large garden in the summer. I have now lived in town for five years, and I sure miss that monstrous country garden!

Though I will probably never have a garden as big as the ones I had growing up, I am growing edibles at my house. A very nice raspberry patch came with our house when my husband bought it three years ago:

The raspberries have just finished up, but it's an ever-bearing raspberry patch, so we should have more berries this fall. Mmmm, mmmm!

This spring, I planted two "large tomato" plants and one "cherry tomato" plant. I love cherry tomatoes and have been enjoying them for about two weeks now.


My husband really likes the larger tomatoes. We just took the first two off the plant last weekend (in the picture below) and my husband had them in tacos. He was very happy.


At my first "city" house, I tried cucumber plants, which are another of my favorites. Between the deer and the rabbits (I had a wooded ravine in my backyard, so I had deer in the middle of the city), I could NOT keep the cucumber plants alive. I haven't tried them at my new house, but I think I'll give it another go next spring. We don't have deer here, just the rascally rabbits. I plan on having my husband build a wire mesh cage around the plants to protect them from the rabbits. I have no idea if that will work. Any tips?

New Countertops Equal Happy???

I drive past a cabinet and countertop store on my way home from work every day. They have an electronic billboard out front that they seem to like to change regularly. It's very nice of them to change it up often, but I found their last two messages to be fairly annoying.

A couple of weeks ago, the billboard proclaimed "Be The Joneses". Oh, brother. Give me a break! Does anyone really fall for that? Check this article out before you run out for new cabinets if you fight with wanting to "be the Joneses".

This past week, the store had a new message for commuters. "New Countertops Equal Happy" the sign declared when I drove past on my way home last night. Are you serious? Do they really expect me to believe that? An inspiring article I read this week demonstrates that there are those out there that really know what does equal happiness.

Have you read any billboards lately that made you roll your eyes? I'd love to hear about them in the comments!

Favorite Blog Post: 8/1/08

I was going through my Google reader today and came across this post over at Gather Little By Little.

Glblguy is letting his readers know about bump keys. Bump keys are a special key readily available on the internet that allows anyone to open just about any lock, including the one on your front door. Pretty scary. Check out Glblguy's post and the link to a website that would like to ban the sale of these "skeleton" keys.

Have a great weekend!

My Gold's Gym Fiasco

This past spring, my husband and I decided that we didn't like the long drive to get to our local Gold's Gym, where we were members. Our town's YMCA is much closer, plus they have a lot more basketball options, which is VERY important to my husband.

Knowing that gyms tend to be a little ridiculous in their cancellation policies, we went into our Gold's over two months before our renewal dates to find out what we needed to do to cancel our memberships. We were handed a form to sign and mail to their corporate headquarters.

Fast forward to the beginning of June this year. My renewal date was June 1st, so I should have been done with my membership. On June 5th, I noticed my credit card had been charged for my monthly gym membership fee. What? I called my local gym and was told I had to call their billing company, ABC Financial. I called ABC Financial four times in June trying to straighten things out. Let's just say that I will never again do business with any company that uses ABC Financial for their billing.

I thought everything was straightened out when on July 1st I get billed yet again! Completely fed up, I finally managed to talk to a supervisor at ABC Financial who is semi-helpful. At the same time, I left messages at my local gym, trying to get a solution from both ends. After being told by multiple people that I couldn't have the phone number to the Gold's Gym corporate office (since my request supposedly never got to ABC Financial, I figured it must have gotten lost between corporate and ABC), someone at my local gym relented and handed the phone number over (it's 540-825-5994 if anyone else wants to know!).

I called Gold's Gym corporate and spoke with a super-nice lady named Donna. Donna looked through all of the computer files and couldn't find my cancellation request. Finally, she said, "Well, we had a new person start about the time you sent your form. Let me check our paper files in case the paperwork got filed without being processed."

A minute later, Donna got back on the phone, "You're in luck!" she said, "I found it!"

So that's my Gold's Gym fiasco. My cancellation was back-dated to my renewal date like it should have been. It only took me about TEN phone calls to about FOUR different phone numbers to get things straightened out. Even though things turned out in the end, both Gold's Gym and ABC Financial have lost my business for life because of their poor handling of my situation.

Some Lessons Learned
1. Always mail cancellation requests via certified mail. I was asked on at least five occasions if I had mailed my request by certified mail. Each time I had to answer, "No. I wish someone had TOLD me it needed to be mailed by certified mail."

2. Always make a follow up call making sure your cancellation request was received. I was mad at myself for waiting until I got billed to realize that my request never got processed.

3. Check companies out on the Better Business Bureau's website BEFORE doing business with them! This really wouldn't have helped me since I signed up when my Gold's was brand new, but I'm not surprised that they've had over 100 complaints even though they've only been open for one year!

4. Be wary of gyms. So many people have had problems with gym memberships. I've realized you have to be very diligent in making sure things get handled properly. Avoid letting them charge your credit card monthly if you can. Be prepared to spend hours on the phone once you need to cancel!

Does anyone have a YMCA membership? Anything I should know about dealing with them?!?

And the Winner Is...

Sphinx63!

Congrats! I sent you an email to verify you want the codes. Reply back and they are all yours! Thanks, everyone, for entering. :)

ps- I picked the winner by assigning all of the commentors a number and then using random.org to generate a winning number.