Time to go!

My financial advisor gave me a bit of a talking-to the other day. I totally deserved it.

See, I close on the new place in five days. She is perfectly aware that I am spending the bulk of my money on the down payment, but also knows me well enough by now to know that my Amazon cart is, at this very moment, stocked with copper drawer pulls and such for an apartment that I do not yet technically own. She knows this because we first started working together right after I moved to Woodland Hills, and she set me up with this software that's sort of like Mint, but actually functional - it puts your expenses into various buckets, so you can see what you're spending on, and where you seriously need to cut back - and quickly discovered that my top expense was home renovation and decor items. For a rental.

Let us first begin with a quick story that has absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter of this post, because sure.

By now, I think we are all aware that I hover somewhere on the "holy shit, how are you still alive" end of the clumsiness spectrum (see evidence here, here, here, and here). A few days ago, however, I reached Apex Level Disastrousness, in the form of a Spring Break trip to the desert during which I managed to break 1) my cell phone, 2) my son's laptop screen, 3) the glass top of a table in our AirBnB that I shattered by tripping and falling directly on top of it (I'm fine, and obviously I paid for the table, and no it wasn't cheap), 4) my left index finger, perhaps not literally, but I burned it on a pan so badly that I look forward to a very large, very glamorous scar that will almost certainly last for the remainder of my days.

The phone, of course, was the most critical issue at hand, because of course we have evolved to the point where we are completely non-functional without our phones. I had to ask people (!) in person (!!) how to navigate to the AT&T store to get a new phone, and when, upon arriving, I was told that I was welcome to ship my phone off to Apple and await a replacement that could take up to 5 business days (no), I ended up saying fuck it, and upgrading to the newest version - the iPhone 12 ProMax - for basically the same cost as the insurance deductible.