Money Crisis

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
-- Woody Allen

Saturday, September 1, 2001
One year ago: Another List
Two years ago: Site Refresh
Three years ago: Ephemeral
Four years ago: By This Axe, I Shall Rule!

This summer has been so busy, that Jack only got down to his parents' place on the Klickitat River for the first few days of July, and I didn't go with him. They'll be leaving that place soon, so we wanted to get down and see them before that. We'd planned to leave Friday morning, but Jack woke up feeling bad. This was a mysterious malaise; he had a bit of fever, a queasy stomach, and generally felt achy. We decided to put off the trip.

Jack felt better this morning, but now it was Saturday. If we put off leaving till tomorrow, we could go to Vanguard!

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We still don't have DSL at our new West Seattle place, plus my computer remains set up at my Capitol Hill apartment. So I went over, as I've been doing, to try and get my new website ready to be posted. This has been a long process, since I decided to move the first few years of journal entries into their own folders (where they should have been from the start).

Jack called me mid-afternoon. He was having a bank crisis and sounded very upset. There were checks and ATM withdrawals that he couldn't track down at first, plus the dial-up access he was using in West Seattle wasn't working. I wrapped things up, looked up his bank branch locations in West Seattle, and hurried home.

I felt bad! There were things I should have been reimbursing Jack for that I hadn't got around to (but then, he hadn't asked for the money). We headed off to the grocery store in the Admiral district that had his bank branch, where he succeeded in straightening things out. No checks had bounced, and he was able to figure out what most of the withdrawals had been (i.e., no stolen checks, which had been concerning us).

So I dashed back to Capitol Hill and actually got this website posted!

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When it came time to actually leave for Vanguard, Jack's daughter H---- talked about how she wasn't happy to be spending the evening alone in our house. I felt bad -- if I'd known this would be an issue, we could have made arrangements for her to spend the evening or the night at my sister's place. She wasn't be too far from people, though; we have an upstairs neighbor and the couple who live in the "shack in the back" who would be available in an emergency.

We had an easy drive over to Jane and Vonda's house, taking the viaduct. I was surprised to see that the Safeway near them is closing in a few days. They had a few days left, but the shelves were eerily empty already. It was shocking to see Ian with wounds from his accident. A few weeks ago he was hit by a car while riding his bike (and the weasels just drove off!) and has scrapes all over.

In the smoking room, Andy Hooper showed us Homies, little figures that are banned from gum machines in LA. He related these to folks who customize hot wheels cars, which is apparently very popular in hispanic neighborhoods.

We got home early (for a vanguard), so we could get an early start on our trip tomorrow.