Dirt, Boxes and Empty Houses

So we hit a major milestone this weekend.  The old house is completely empty, clean and ready for new people to move in. The deal was that if I emptied everything and brought it to the new house, Lauren would clean the old house.  Probably 95% of the move was done by May, but there were some things lingering in the old house that took us a while to get to, like our office, which we didn't really pack in its entirety before the movers got there.  There was also a lot of stuff in the basement and in the attic.

So a lot of the weekend was spent moving boxes, which made it not very distinguishable from other weekends in recent memory.  Just getting everything to the right place, much less getting it unpacked, is a nightmare.

Then there was the dirt thing.  See, it's been raining pretty much non-stop in New York for the past several weeks.  That's led to water intrusion in the basement.  I've been doing a lot of stuff to get the gutters to channel water off the roof and away from the foundation, like cleaning all the goop and trash out of the gutters and buying pieces of elephant trunk to extend the downspouts.  But there's another thing we need to do - pitch the grade away from the foundation so that water siting on the lawn won't pool up against the house.

So I ordered some topsoil on Saturday.  Ten yards for $120 delivered - not a bad price.  It was just the "delivery" that was the problem.  You see, the topsoil was somewhat moist, so when the delivery guy showed up with his truck, he raised his dump bed about as high as it would go without tipping the truck over, but the dirt just stuck and refused to slide down onto the driveway.  The delivery guy actually had to take the dirt back and bring a different, wider truck that wouldn't tip over in order to make the delivery.

Then Jimmy and I started taking it out back to where it was needed.  We'd fill up a wheelbarrow and the John Deere's dump cart and take it back into the yard, dump it and rake it out.  Jimmy and I would switch after two loads, so that I'd be using the wheelbarrow while he used the tractor and cart.  It was a pretty good system and we moved at least five yards that way.  There's still five yards sitting in the driveway on a tarp, though.  We'll do a few loads when I get home from work.

I think I'm going to end up ordering more dirt, though.  There are plenty of uneven areas around the lawn and I still haven't put any fill or soil under the porch where there's a whole other bit that needs to be filled in.  Water is pooling under there, too, because no one ever took the time to do a final grade before the builders put the porch on the house.  So the grade under the porch is slanting back toward the house.

Soon, Jimmy and I will start pouring the slab for the air conditioning units and the hot tub.

Some Tips for PayPal

I can't believe that something that was invented in order to streamline online payments has made it MORE difficult to make online payments almost every single time I've used it.  If it weren't for eBay and all these little independent merchants who don't have their own credit card processing, I'd never use it to begin with. Here are some suggestions for PayPal to help make things easier for the end user and make some more money in the medium- to long-term.

1. Stop defaulting to the payment option that's most profitable for PayPal. I have my checking account linked to my PayPal account.  But it's often better for me to use one of the credit cards linked to my account.  PayPal always defaults to take money directly from my checking account and makes it a huge pain in the butt to pick another payment type.  The end user, though, doesn't care what's most profitable for PayPal.  They just see that PayPal is picking the option most profitable for it, and not the one that's most convenient for the end user.  I find myself changing my payment option out of spite - to the debit card that draws money from the same checking account PayPal wants so desperately to directly debit.
2. Make it easier to change information after you change addresses.  Having just moved, I now know that this process is a pain in the ass.  You can't just change your home address in the system.  You have to log in, delete any credit cards associated with your old address, then delete the old address.  Then you have to add your new address, add the credit cards back and then designate that address as your new home address.  All credit cards have to be reconfirmed.  How about an "I'm Moving Wizard?"
3. Change the whole process for confirming credit cards. The existing process is screwed.  PayPal wouldn't let me use my Discover Card because it was "associated with another account."  I just found out it was associated with the right account, all right - just the wrong address.  So I went through the steps described in #2 above and found out that I needed to reconfirm the Discover Card.  How PayPal does this is to charge the card $1.95 and have the owner of the card confirm it by entering a code that appears on their statement.  Once confirmed, the $1.95 is refunded.  The transaction takes a few days to show up in electronic billing, assuming you don't want to wait for the statement to come in the mail.  Meanwhile, PayPal gave itself a $1.95 interest-free loan on your credit card.  Doesn't sound like a big deal, but what if you're confirming a few million credit cards at any given time?  That's a lot of float, to say nothing of the breakage.  I should point out that when I've opened checking accounts with ING Direct and Emigrant, they send you a micropayment of something like 8 cents or 12 cents and ask you to confirm the amount.  They don't take money out.  Interesting...
4. Quit trying to upsell when you should be streamlining payment processes.  People resent it when PayPal wastes the chance to make a payment process shorter and simpler and tries to upsell a Mastercard or whatever.  Do Not Want.  Keep doing it and its a big Do Not Want for the whole service, which exists (ostensibly) for simplifying payment.

There are a lot more tips I could give.  PayPal ought to give serious consideration to fixing some of this stuff.  The big picture is that they're screwing up their brand.  They look like a company that scrapes for every nickel and dime it can get out of customers in exchange for adding minimal value.  That may cut it in a world where PayPal is pretty much the only game in town for folks who don't want to spend money on payment processing, but how much longer can that last?  It can't be too long before PayPal will see serious competition (most likely indirectly).

My guess is that PayPal will leverage its user base, the eBay ownership and other assets to enforce the status quo.  Should be good for a 4-7 year slide into oblivion while users slowly find and exploit other options.

List of Complaints Du Jour

Lots of things going on, as usual.  And because the tasks are piling up, so is my general list of maladies and complaints:

1. Dear Best Buy, CostCo and all other brick-and-mortar retailers - I bring the product to the register and pay for it.  You give me my receipt.  Transaction over.  No, you can't peer through my bags to see whether or not I'm stealing something.  (Oh, and nobody's buying that "We're making sure you got the right item" bullcrap, either.  If I didn't have the right item, I wouldn't have brought it to the counter.)  You can't stand in my way and block my exit until I give you a receipt, either.  Think I stole something?  Call a cop.  You don't get to BE the cop.
2. Dear New Next-Door Neighbor - Keeping pets requires responsibility beyond leaving giant mounds of cat food on your porch outside for the cats that live in the woods behind your property.  You're supposed to make sure they're spayed/neutered, get them their shots and keep them off other people's property (namely, mine).  You can't have it both ways such that you feed them, cuddle them, etc. but bear no responsibility for what they do.
3. Dear Mother Nature - Make up your mind regarding whether or not you want to wash out the weekend.  This "two hours of sun followed by two hours of rain and then back to sun" thing is getting old.  My vegetable garden looks like the mud pit at a monster truck rally.  And, please don't wait until I've brought a bunch of boxes out of the garage into the driveway before you decide to make it rain again.  Can I have a sunny weekend, please?  It, is, after all the second half of June, not the beginning of April.
4. Dear Guy at the Brookhaven Town Dump - It sucks that I got there five minutes after closing.  You don't have to shoot me a self-satisfied smile at me as you're closing the gate in my face.
5. Dear Brookhaven Sanitation Workers - If you're not going to pick up two tall kitchen trash bags filled with ordinary household trash, I need to know why.  You can't just skip my house for garbage pickup and leave me wondering whether I did anything wrong.  (Was I supposed to put pink bows on the bags?)

Thanks.

What Was Your Favorite Toy?

Weird stream of consciousness at about 7:30 this morning.  I was thinking about how much cooler toys used to seem back when I was in the target market.  Big Wheels, Star Wars action figures, slot cars, Stretch Armstrong, etc. - All these things would get me really excited when I was a kid. So then I started thinking about whether kids today would get excited about toys I had during the 1970s.  And I was thinking I'd do a little experiment: Get Kate a vintage 1970s toy and see if she spends as much time with it as she spends with her other stuff.

So then I was thinking Weebles, because they'd be too big for Kate to swallow and they don't have any moving parts.  I remember digging Weebles when I was, like, three.

So I logged on to eBay.  And there are a few vintage Weeble auctions going on.  I can't seem to win one to save my life.  I bid up a set of five or six of the little bastards to over $20, only to find out someone else wanted them more.  No way I'm paying more than $20 for a set of plastic eggs left over from 1973.

But I still want some vintage Weebles.  So I'm opportunistically bidding.

Tell me, what was the first toy you remember having?