Day 874

I forget how many household chores I usually complete on weekends until we have an event filled weekend like we did Saturday and Sunday and nothing gets done. I played catch-up today, doing several loads of laundry, mowing the lawn, and vacuuming the house. The house doesn't really look that much better, but at least I've made an effort.

As I kind of expected, I'm starting to get calls from neighbors in the area, asking why I priced my rent property so low. These people aren't really planning to sell their nearby houses. They're just worried that if my property sells, it will drag the price of their house down with it. These folks don't understand how markets work. The true price of anything isn't what you think it is worth, it is what someone will pay you for it. Houses are no different than stocks and bonds. The value isn't intrinsic. It's variable.

One of my clients was in a panic this morning because their hosting account had been suspended and all their websites were down. They had set their account up to auto-pay and then forgotten that they had changed the credit card it was attached to. There is a lesson to be learned from this and since the same thing has happened to me, I need to learn the lesson myself. There are all kinds of reasons why your credit card number might change. The credit card company might just hand you a new card when they think their security has been compromised. You might be getting erroneous charges on your statement and change the number yourself. Maybe you just cancel your card and get a similar card from a different bank because they have a better deal. These things happen all the time, but it's hard to remember remember all the online accounts that you've set up to auto-renew or make automatic monthly payments. This is why I no longer use auto-pay for anything. I prefer to get a paper statement in the mail. It's much easier to remember a letter you get in the mail than a website you seldom visit.

I've got a photo shoot tomorrow. It seems like a while since I've had a full-fledged photo shoot, so I'm trying to remember where all the gear is stashed away and which batteries need to be recharged. I used to really want more photo jobs and fewer writing jobs. Photography seemed a lot more exciting to me. Now, I think I've come full circle. Increasingly, photography just seems like filling the car with heavy equipment and then unloading it again when the job is finished. These days, writing jobs seem much more relaxing. I get a cup of coffee, think of an idea, and words appear on the screen. You don't even have to type anymore if you don't want to. Modern dictation programs are remarkably accurate.  I'm just waiting for the day when you can put on a little WiFi hat that reads your brain waves and allows you to just "think" your assignment into Microsoft Word.

Spot is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day