I’ve been here for a total of five seconds and I already have a short list of things I love and things I hate.

Things I Love

• My apartment is HUGE. I know I’m completely deluded about the proper size of apartments due to my exposure to housing in NYC, but still.  HUGE!  I’m not even unpacked right now.  There are boxes and junk strewn throughout every room, but there is still plenty of space for me to perform cartwheels and make carpet angels in my living room.  Yeah.  ALSO, my bedroom has a garden tub in it!  So OSSUM!
• Everything is so cheap here! Again, my brain is addled by NYC living.  But still. I am LOVING the cost of living here.
• My grocery store is HUGE and OSSUM. They had all the crazy hippie food I wanted to buy including some pretty good chocolate.

Things I Hate

• Grocery stores can’t sell wine.  Beer cannot be sold in the same store as Wine or Liquor.  Liquor stores are closed on federal holidays.  I thought Georgia’s blue laws were annoying, but Tennessee’s outdo them if only by being a confusing maze of unintelligible rules and regulations.
• PEOPLE CANNOT DRIVE!
  • Listen to me, Nashville: “Yield” and “Stop” are not synonyms. Those signs aren’t even close to being the same thing.  So, please desist with the stopping at yield signs and stop rolling  through blowing through stop signs!!
  • Why do you have your hazard lights on when it rains?  Those lights are intended to be an indication that you have a problem with your vehicle.  It’s not an indication that you find the weather less than pleasant.

In general, Nashville is rocking.  I miss my friends and I miss NYC, but I’m trying to focus on this new, exciting adventure in a new place.

It’s my birthday. Yay, me.  But now I am very angry.  Let me tell you why. *DEEP BREATH*

For my birthday and my move, I decided to fly Mr. Zbornak He-Who-Has-Yet-To-Be-Named to NYC.  So, I went to Expedia and bought a ticket on US Airways.  He was supposed to arrive this morning at 7:43.  I then arranged to have a car pick him up and bring him to my apartment.  Fancy, right?

I have a lot of sympathy for airlines. The craziest, rudest, most impatient, most obnoxious people in the world get on airplanes every day along with everyone else.  Airlines have to balance not only the very reasonable concerns of their other passengers, but they have to contend with those maniacs, federal regulations, and the weather.  It’s no easy job. I understand and I am usually a patient, kind, gentle customer as a result.

But as a customer I expect a  basic level of service and respect.

Well, unfortunately, his plane broke down this morning.  They sat in the plane for nearly an hour before they were let off.  US Airways tried to arrange another plane, but they failed.  So, they started trying to get people on other flights and they even chartered a bus to get people to NYC.

Unfortunately, I have to pay for the car and driver even if he doesn’t show up.

So, I called US Airways in hopes of getting some sort of refund or comp or something due to the hassle and expense that their failure has cost me.  Did I mention it’s my birthday?  Yeah, this is all unfolding while I type this.

So, I reached a customer service lady and our conversation went a little like this:

Her: How may I help you?

Me: Yes, I’m calling for a refund or something because a flight I booked was cancelled due to some sort of mechanical problem.

Her: What’s your last name?

Me: My last name or the passenger’s last name? I bought this for a friend.

Her: (annoyed) OK. Sir. I need the passenger’s last name.

Me: OK. The passenger’s last name is Zbornak.

Her: Let’s seeee…  Yes, here it is. Hmmm…  Well, I don’t know why you would call for a refund on a non-refundable, non-transferable ticket, but let me see what I can find.

Me: (annoyed) You don’t have to give me a refund. I’m calling because in addition to the hassle and inconvenience US Airways has caused me, you’ve also cost me $XXX for a car and driver I had arranged and the failure was mechanical.  So, I am calling for some sort of restitution here.

Her: (Ignoring me and adopting a condescending tone) Uh huh, so, is he still going to DC?

Me: He was never going to DC. He’s coming to New York.  Right now he’s waiting for a bus.

Her: But this says he’s going from San Francisco to Philly to DC to New York.

Me: No, he’s going San Francisco to Philly to New York.  And right now he’s grounded in Philly waiting on a bus.

Her: (very annoyed) So, is he using the second half of the trip?

Me: He wants to, but your plane is broken and now the second half of the trip is a mess.  That’s what I’m calling you to make right for me.

Her: (condescending) OK. Well, I can’t do anything for you.  Customer Service handles…

Let me stop there.  The rest of the conversation was her continuing to be condescending, annoyed, and just an all-around bitch trying to pass the buck to someone else and blame me for the problem. I just agreed to call back later once they’ve managed to get him to NYC and stopped screwing everything up.

Newsflash: if you talk to customers YOU are customer service.

Also, you stupid, unmitigated afterbirth of troll, I called you because that’s what the US Airways website instructed me to do for a refund.  So, stop treating me like an idiot for not properly navigating the phone maze and bureaucracy of US Airways.

So, apparently, they think he is both flying to DC and taking this charter bus at the same time.  Right now he’s waiting for his bags at baggage claim so he can get on the bus.  We can only hope his bags didn’t get put on that plane to DC.

Once I’ve calmed down and can refrain from leveling all the new curse words I learned during my time in NYC I’m going to call back and see if they can refrain from annoying me further.

Things have been wicked busy for me lately.  I’ve got this new fella thing going on and my job has presented me with a huge new opportunity that requires that I move nearly 900 miles away. Never mind the fact that my job even as it stands today has been superbizzy of late.  Everything is just piling up like crazy!

So, what’s happened so far?

Well, this past week, I was fortunate to be able to spend a little time in Nashville.  I saw some of the city and I looked at several apartment complexes.  I am very happy to say that I found a very nice apartment complex in a good neighborhood, close to work, and well within my price range.  It has two bedrooms and two bathrooms.  If I should be possessed by the devil and decide I want to start doing my own laundry, there are washer and dryer hook ups.  The kitchen is really nice and even has a dishwasher and a garbage disposal and lots and lots of counter space.  The closets are HUGE.  (I’m pretty sure if the closets had windows they would try to call them studio apartments here in NYC.)

I’m pretty stoked about it.

Also, whilst in Nashville, the new fella (Any suggestions about a sobriquet for this one?) was in the area and we were able to spend the weekend together.  It was so much fun.  We had an ossum time.

But it also underscored for me how much I’m missing out by virtue of the simple fact that we live 3,000 miles apart.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not second guessing the relationship itself.  It’s just that I spend so much of my time with him simply on the phone or looking at a jumpy webcam view of him.  When we’re together in person, I feel shocked into silence over just seeing him and getting to spend time joking around, talking about art or philosophy or movies or music or television.  I feel like I didn’t say everything I want to say. I didn’t get to show him all the things I wanted to show him.  As soon as I kissed him goodbye at his gate in the airport I wanted to call him to tell him about things I was seeing and thinking.

It “sucks” that he reads this blog sometimes (and I showed him how to use Google Reader this weekend, so now he’s following me) and I can’t just tell you ALL the crazy stuff I think about him — like how he vaguely resembles a chimpanzee sometimes when he smiles real big. (Don’t tell him I said that.)  And about how much I love that he tolerates me singing in the car — I am nearly tone deaf — along with Top 40’s radio hits — as if I didn’t notice how many times this weekend he pointed out how obnoxious those songs are.  And about how he tested me and noticed exactly how bad I am at recognizing faces, which is an embarrassing level of bad.

But whatevs.  He’s  sweetie and we have a stupid amount of fun together.

His brain amazes me.  In one moment we’re talking about unicorns and Britney Spears and then next moment we’re talking about something called the Principle of Explosion and riddles about coins.  He listens to me rave on about how a painting in a restaurant is both an impressive display for a young artist and a disgusting conjunction of “Hopperesque use of lighting,” “Cezannesque perspective,” and “Lichtensteinian pop-art influences.”  AND he seems to be impressed with that identification if nothing else.

He’s coming to help me move in a couple of weeks.  I’m excited about that.  I’m excited about moving. I’m excited about seeing him.  I’m excited about moving and him being with me to help out.  I’m just excited.

I’m excited about the opportunity my job is presenting me right now.  Things are in a state of transition and it could fall out in any number of directions.  I’m pretty sure I know how it will go, but there’s a lot of work to be done to make sure that’s the case.  And on top of that, there’s a lot of work to make sure I achieve what I intend to achieve while I’m in Nashville.  It’s going to be tough. Really tough.  But I’m looking forward to it because I am pretty sure I will be granted a fairly significant amount of latitude to make things happen.  And if they do happen, I have a lot to gain.

I’m sorry for all the vague language here, but I can’t disclose much. I can’t disclose because I have clients who follow me and I have co-workers who follow me.  So, suffice it to say that I am optimistic about the way things are going to play out, but I also know that it’s not an easy row to plow.  (I’m so gonna rock this.)

This post is to officially announce that I am moving back to the South, that is south of the Mason-Dixon.  That’s right.  I’m leaving the bright lights of New York City for the light of the neon moons of Nashville, Tennessee.

I was going to wait until next week, but most people in my office seem to already know about it, so I don’t really see any harm in just coming out with it.

A few of weeks ago, my boss told me that he thought I should move there to run our agency office there. I thought about it. I annoyed my friends talking about it. I wowed my mom by talking about it — and the fact that when she visits me she won’t have to walk up five flights of stairs and when she gets there she’ll have central air conditioning again.

Basically, every way that I looked at the offer it was a win. How could I refuse?

So, right after my birthday, September 3 — send cash so that I don’t have to move a lot of bulky presents — I’ll be moving to Nashville, Tennessee, where I can apply to carry a handgun and I don’t have to pay state income tax — except on interest and dividends.

Here’s a short list of the things I am most excited about:

• Central air conditioning.
• A pool.
• A dishwasher.
• A proper freezer.
• Hell, I’m looking forward to a proper kitchen where I can cook like a civilized human being!
• Having a car — even though I hate driving — so that I can pick up and go where and when I please.
• A cost of living that is 53% what it is here in NYC.
• Not walking behind gaggles of gape-mouthed, fat-ass, meandering, indecisive, inattentive, rude, and mind-numbingly stupid tourists on my way to work.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a number of things I’m not particularly excited about. Things that include:

• Driving.
• Being the gayest person anyone has ever seen.
• Door-to-door religionists.
• Anti-abortion people.
• The lack of Pinkberry.
• Doing my own laundry.

There’s a lot more to it on both sides, but ultimately it makes the most sense (Value-dense!) for me to make the change, take the challenge.

So, look out, Dirty South! I’m coming back and I’m bringing with me no shortage of haughty New York attitude combined with a fair bit of southern aristocratic bearing.

I need to buy a car here in the next month or so, but I’m not sure what to buy.  Any thoughts?

I want to buy a used car and I want to spend less than $18K.  (FAR less if I can manage it.)  Obviously, I want a car that gets good gas mileage and isn’t likely to need repairs.  I’m generally diligent about maintenance requirements.  I expect to put about 1,000 – 1,500 miles a month on it.

It should have pretty decent storage capacity.  I am open to trucks and cars, but probably not station wagons or SUVs.

And I want seat warmers.

Any thoughts?

I haven’t been blogging for a little while because I have a lot on my plate.  There’s just a lot going on for me right now both professionally and personally.  The only things I’m thinking about are things related either to my job in a very specific way or to my love life in a very specific way.  If I thought my blog could remain unseen by involved parties, then I would likely blog on those things if only to sort things out for myself.

The problem is that plenty of people from work and my boudoir do read this blog.  So, I can’t say too much.

Anyway, that’s why I haven’t been blogging.  I can’t say anything.

I just invented this.  I haven’t even cooked it, but I know it’s gonna be awesome.

Ingredients:

• 1lb of bacon
• A head of cauliflower
• A bag of baby carrots
• A bunch of celery
• 3 – 4 onions
• Rosemary
• Thyme
• Parsley
• Salt
• Pepper

Directions:

1. Bake the bacon in a 9 x 13 baking dish at 400ish degrees until it’s cooked the way you want.
2. Cut up the veggies and put into a big bowl with a lid.
3. Add herbs and spices to taste.
4. Cover bowl and shake it.
5. Remove your bacon and put veggies in the bacon fat.  Really stir it up and get the grease all on it.
6. Bake veggies until it’s what you want. The carrots will take the longest.

That’s it!

This evening, I was looking at my accounts and I decided to put myself on an austerity budget for a week.  Since this runs counter to my “value-dense spending” standard of operation, let me explain.

I have only a pinch over $1,000 in credit card debt left.  This is about three weeks worth of payments.  (I pay my credit cards weekly because of the dick move that one credit card company pulled in which the payment cycle was 22 days.)

I’ve managed to figure out a good sum of money for my personal weekly budget for food and adventure, but if I cut my spending in half for one week, I can pay off my credit card debt in just two weeks.  That means by next Tuesday I will be out of credit card debt!!!

With this advancement in schedule, I will be able to immediately release the austerity budget and contribute a portion of what was being paid to credit cards to a savings account from which I will draw to make future purchases like clothes, presents, trips, and the like.  To start, I will take half of what was going to credit cards and put it into that account.  Once I reach the minimum threshold for that account, I will direct a higher portion of my income toward paying off my student loans.

Speaking of student loans, using Mint.com’s new Goals feature, it looks like I won’t pay those off until April 2012.  But with the plan above, that will get cut almost in half.

But I am very, very pleased with the way things are going right now.  I’m zooming my way toward a much healthier financial situation!

My first experiment in a caveman-friendly ice-cream was a dismal failure. So, I decided to try a more classical recipe — minus the sugar — to see where I could get with it.  I think the results will be good, but could stand quite a bit of improvement, so here’s what I did and what I will try next time.

Ingredients

• 2 10oz packages of frozen strawberries
• 1 10oz package of frozen raspberries
• 1 10oz package of frozen blackberries
• 2c whole milk
• 1c heavy cream
• 6 egg yolks
• two tsp of vanilla extract
• a pinch of salt

Notes on Ingredients

• I used frozen, organic berries because I wasn’t sure when I was going to get around to making this. If I knew I would make it right away, I probably would have gone with fresh berries instead. Also, I used organic berries because that’s what I saw first in the freezer. They’re smaller, a bit more tart, and more self-righteous than berries grown with chemical fertilizers, so that’s why I opted for a reduction as you’ll see in the instructions and why I suggest an alternative fruit base later.
• Also, this is way too much berries.  This batch of ice-cream turned out to be HUGE. See the recipe for my next attempt below.
• I opted for a 2:1 milk to cream ratio because I was thinking I wanted a lower fat ratio such as one finds in commercial ice-cream. In retrospect, I probably would make this with a 1:1 ratio, which would produce a richer result.
• I also decided to use six egg yolks because I used SO many berries.  With fewer berries, I’d probably drop down to four yolks.  Just FYI, the yolks help create the emulsion.

Directions

1. blend all your berries in a blender and strain out the seeds.
2. Reduce the berries in a non-stick pan.  This just means cook it for a while over a low-medium heat, stirring frequently. The goal is to concentrate the sugars.  If you decide to do a reduction, let it cool before proceeding to step 3.
3. Mix your milk, cream, and berries and heat over a low heat.  Just get it hot and be careful not to heat it too quickly because the milk will turn into something really groady. Do NOT boil it.
4. In a separate bowl, whisk up your egg yolks.  Then, slooowwwly whisk your berry mixture into the eggs.  You want to do this slowly because you don’t want to cook the eggs and end up with scrambled eggs in your ice-cream. This is also why you don’t want the berry mixture to be too hot.
5. Once thoroughly mixed, return to heat.  Add vanilla and salt.  Heat slowly, stirring constantly. Be sure to scrape the bottom of the pan while you’re stirring.  When the mixture starts to coat your spatula, it’s time to take it off the heat and chill.
6. After thoroughly chilling the “custard” you freeze it in your mixer.

So, as I type this, I’m waiting for the custard to chill so I can freeze it in the ice-cream mixer.  I tasted the custard and it’s very good. It tastes like berries and whipped cream. (That’s basically what it is.)

On my next attempt, here’s the ingredient list I want to try:

• 1 10oz package of frozen cherries
• 1 10oz package of frozen blueberries (or maybe blackberries. We’ll see.)
• 1 peach
• 1.5c whole milk
• 1.5c heavy cream
• 4 egg yolks
• 1 tsp vanilla
• tiny pinch of salt

I think those proportions, flavors, and chemicals will work out really well.

UPDATE: You may have noticed that I didn’t add any alcohol to this.  I usually do that to lower the freezing temperature of the ice-cream and keep it scoopable.  I may still add some kirschwassar to it before I freeze it, but my apartment is so hot in the summer that it’s hard to get the ice-cream to freeze properly and I didn’t want to risk not getting it churned up properly.

UPDATE 2: I didn’t add any kirsch to my ice-cream.  It seemed to set up well enough, but it’s quite tart. I’m wondering if there wasn’t enough sugar in the berries to get everything jiving together properly.

I was tinkering around somewhere, probably on Mint.com, and I stumbled across a bit of information that made me want to throw up and/or scream — although not at the same time.

The piece of information was the interest rate on one of my credit cards.  The rate was 27.2%.

I make good money. I pay my bills on time.  My credit score is in the mid-to-upper 700s.  It’s insane.

The only reason I think the rate on that card is so high is due to the fact that a couple of years ago, that same credit card company did something very douchey to me: they implemented a 20ish day payment cycle.  This was douchey because when I carry a credit card balance, I set up automated payments that deliver a payment well above the minimum every single month.  This means that at a certain point, my monthly payments started being late.  But because it was automated, I didn’t notice.  (My fault there.)  So, even though I was paying more than triple the minimum payment on that account, my payments were late.  I found out when they sent me a letter saying they were going to send me to collections and that they’d already reported it to the credit bureaus.  Upon making that discovery, I immediately paid off the entire balance.

Flash forward to today where I’m carrying a balance and unwittingly paying nearly a third of the total in interest.

Yeah.

So, being how I am, I assumed responsibility for not noticing that sooner and called them up to ask that they lower the rate.

They refused saying that thanks to some new law, they only review accounts every 6 months and do not change anything between review cycles.  Oh, that was the wrong answer to give a customer like me. I tend to hold very long grudges against companies that employ such shoddy tactics in dealing with customers.

I immediately phoned up my preferred credit card company and they informed me that I was eligible for a low rate on balance transfers.  Bingo.  I requested the transfer.

And as soon as it goes through, I am closing out all of my accounts with that other bank. No wonder it’s been so difficult paying off the balance on that card!

Note: I’m not willing to name the banks in question in public as they are clients for my company and if I get fired, then I can’t give money to the banks that do treat me right.