MattMaroon.com

I wasn’t looking for a new car. I’ve loved the one I have ever since I bought it a little over two years ago. In fact, if my business sold tomorrow for a billion dollars, I wouldn’t buy a different one. I’m not a car guy, and I’m not so insecure as to feel the need to show off obscene wealth (even if I possessed it) by riding around in a Bentley. That stuff is for poor people who become famous actors or professional athletes.

Me, I just want something luxurious. A car that pays attention to every detail. Comfortable seats. A good sound system. Suspension that makes you feel like you’re floating over a cloud. And my car has all of that.

But as we sat on the tarmac at Akron Canton last week, I saw a vehicle that made me realize the one thing my car lacks: a 3,000 gallon tank. That’s why this is going to be my next car:

First of all, what I like about my SUV is being up high and having 4 wheel drive. This bad boy is way farther from the ground, and has 18 wheel drive. As far as I’m concerned, that’s 4.5x as good.

Second, what better way is there to hedge against fuel prices than to be able to buy a few years worth of it at once? Even if that sucker only gets 10 miles per gallon highway, I’m covered for the rest of the decade. When 2009 rolls around and everyone is complaining about that $11/gallon they’re spending, I’ll laughing my ass off. As little as I drive, I’ll fill it once, and by the time it’s empty we’ll all be getting to work in solar powered helicopters.

My local grocery chain (Giant Eagle) recently opened up a chain of gas stations called Get Go. They have a gimmick where when you shop at their grocery stores and use your Advantage Card (so called because it gives you the “advantage” of paying normal price for items they otherwise mark up in order to convince you to use their Advantage Card) you get discounts on gas. For every $50 you spend, you get 20 cents per gallon off.

So, the play here is obvious. I do all of my shopping there until I spend $1,000 (not hard to do, especially since gift cards to places like The Home Depot and Bed Bath and Beyond count) and get $4 per gallon off, which is still slightly above the going rate for the cheap gas. Then I park my new car outside of the Get Go until a tanker pulls up and reloads (they’ll need it). After it leaves, I wheel this bad boy up to the pump and fill ‘er up.

I figure one tank full of 87 octane would last me at least two years, so I can turn around and resell almost all of it immediately. I would make a cool $12k per load. Then I’d just go blow $1k of it on groceries (filet mignon 7 nights a week baby) and repeat.

I wonder who I’d see about getting a nav system and some Mark Levinson speakers installed in a gas tanker.

I just realized I forgot to write up the honeymoon. It was enjoyable. I have to say though, after being stuck on a barge with them for a week, I don’t want to see a baby or a senior citizen ever again. That’s the one nice thing about being out here in Cambridge, there are very few invalids, and the ones there are seem to get by without becoming a public nuisance.

I did set a new fashion trend while I was on the boat. One day after formal dinner we were going to go get drinks at some bar but my shoes were ridiculously uncomfortable, so I took them and my socks off and threw on sandals. Thus was born the slacks and sandals combo. Sure enough the next day I saw some guy wearing the same thing. I told Vicki I was the Lindsay Lohan of the Carnival Legend. Whatever I wore, everyone else would two days later. And I was drunk most of the time. Little did I know at the time that she was out doing everything she could to make that joke even more apropos. It’s actually probably better I was unaware. I have a tendency to take jokes too far and might have hijacked a lifeboat.

The Caribbean cities we visited were just like all of the cruise ports I’ve been to, warm little oases in a desert of despair. It makes you wonder how these countries came to be so poor, when we’re right next door lining up to buy iPhones. But then I guess if I had weather like they do, I wouldn’t bother voting for someone who might build a road either. When you can pick a plantain out of your back yard, who needs college? Most Americans work their whole lives just to be able to go to Whole Foods and buy those.

It’s actually baffling how different the quality of life gets when you move just one country south. It makes me feel bad too, until I see a hand-made marble chess set on sale for thirteen bucks and haggle it down to eight. Then I don’t feel bad anymore. Life gave them lemons, but at least I get some cheap lemonade.

I got to ride a dolphin in Cozumel. That’s was pretty neat. You don’t really realize just how strong one of those are until you’re trying to hang on. It’s like a jet ski with flippers. I wish I’d had one around when we were tubing down a river in the rainforest too. Then maybe I’d have been able to avoid the 300lb lady who checked me up against a rock.

We spent a day checking out some Mayan ruins and the entire time the tour guide was talking about how great the Mayans were. “They invented astronomy” he’d say, or “they invented zero.” Too bad they couldn’t invent guns and penicillin, they might still be around.

(That’s always been my attitude towards most of the now defunct cultures from this hemisphere. New-agers always talk about how wonderful they were, how in touch with the earth. If they were so great, why do you only ever see them in parades or casinos? Maybe scalping each other, worshipping the sun and treating major illnesses with ground up leaves aren’t such good ideas after all. )

The food on Carnival was surprisingly mediocre in the dining room. It was a big ship though, so they had a better restaurant you could eat at for a fee. If you ever cruise with them, I recommend you do so every single day, as it’s like going from Outback to Ruth’s Chris. It’s probably cheaper to do that than to cruise on Holland America or one of the other lines with better food anyway, and you’ll be much happier. As I told Vicki afterwards, I would have been willing to skip buying each other birthday presents (mine was on the cruise, her only a few days after) in favor of the upgraded food. Next time we’ll know.

Otherwise, though, I liked Carnival. The entertainment was decent, the rooms were nice, and the port selection was good. I think any future cruises would have to be to somewhere in Europe or something of the like, as I’m tired of seeing nothing but jewelry and duty free liquor stores. I’d much rather see old buildings and duty free liquor stores.

Well, today at around 4 p.m. I’ll be a married man, unless my fiancée comes to her senses. And we’ve been together for most of the last 6 years, so I have to think that if it were going to happen, it already would have. My dad, who has been asking her why the hell she’s with me since day one, keeps asking her if she’s sure, and she has yet to say no.

Apple tried to upstage me by releasing the iPhone on the same date, even after I got my groomsmen iPods as their gift. I figured everyone who wants an engraved flask (which is probably nobody) already has one from the last wedding they are in.

That reminds me, I need to go find mine and fill it with some Chopin.

A lot of guys my age are pretty down on relationships. They’re all in the “single and loving it” frame of mind. And while they’ve got a lot going for them, there is one very commendable thing about being in a relationship that you rarely hear, which is that you can put foil on your window.

See, at this apartment I’m staying in here in Cambridge, the windows have nothing but cheap blinds on them. I like to sleep until 3 or 4 in the afternoon most days, so that’s pretty damn annoying for me. So here’s how I solved the problem:

So what does that have to do with relationships? A single guy my age spends all of his time trying to convince women to come to his bedroom. And nobody who has any chance of bringing a strange girl home could risk having a window covered in foil. I don’t know for sure because I haven’t tried it, but I’m pretty sure that unless she was blind, she’d hightail it on out of there.

So even if he’s really good at picking up women, most nights the single guy sleeps alone. And when the sun comes in at 8 a.m. he has pretty much no choice but to wake up. Not me though, I just keep on sleeping. Since I have a girl whose pretty much stuck with me, I can put all of the Reynolds wrap I want over my window.

I will say that there were some logistical considerations I had not considered when I decided to foil my window. For one, the window air conditioner is a pain to work around. It also lets air in beside it. It has those little accordion shaped things to try to block up the window, but they’re not perfect. And when the wind blows, the foil moves and makes a crinkling noise.

Also you have to be really careful not to have seams, or light gets in. One tiny ray of sunshine in a room is pretty much disastrous. That’s why today I did a second layer. I also stretched it taut and ran strips of tape across it lengthwise to keep it from moving.

There’s still some minor crinkle effect though. Any thoughts on how to get rid of it?

Long time no post. Sorry about that. I’ve been consumed with the move to Cambridge and all of the startup work. That’s progressing at a pretty good pace I think.

So far I don’t really care for this place. It’s crowded. It’s loud. It smells bad. I drove to a Whole Foods that is less than 3 miles away and that took almost a half hour, and once there I had to fight through aisles so narrow you practically had to turn your ketchup bottle sideways just to get it out.

My rent here on a tiny, very old apartment is more than I pay at home for a mortgage on a recently built house in a good school district and a new Lexus SUV. And if there’s anything about this town that makes it worth the expense, I’ve yet to find it. The restaurant situation looks pretty amazing here, but I’m not sure how much chance I’ll get to try it out.

This also has to be the worst city in the world to drive in. I take multiple wrong turns on every trip even with GPS. The road layout is just that confusing. Lots of traffic circles and six way intersections. It makes you really appreciate newer cities like Las Vegas, which are basically one giant grid.

I think that from living where I do, I’ve become accustomed to space. I like my neighbors being on the other side of an acre of grass. I like having a spare room for an office. I like having a room big enough for a 55″ TV, even though I’ll never really watch it. I like having a backyard to chase my dog around. I like having a giant driveway and a two car garage.

So while this apartment is nice for Cambridge standards, I miss my home. I’m not the sort to get homesick either. I’ve spent weeks away with little trouble, but after three days here, I want to move back.

Nonetheless, we’ll get a lot more work done here. We’re already getting stuff together. I expect we’ll have a private beta up and running in 2 weeks, and hopefully a public one not too long thereafter. I’ll keep y’alls posted.

 

 

My last post reminded me that I am just way too into this whole blogging thing. When that whole cab fiasco happened I was thinking “oh well, this will make a good blog entry.” I find myself thinking about that often.

I don’t just look for blog entries either, I write them in my head as they occur. When we got back to the hotel, courtesy of the free shuttle, we were talking about blogs and Chad said “you should write an entry about our cab ride.” Little did he know it was already written, it just hadn’t been typed out yet.

Unfortunately my brain is a pretty poor hard drive. It often crashes and loses entries I spent a little time thinking up, but the best ones always make it through. Maybe that’s just my subconscious way of separating the wheat from the chaff, but either way I’m going to try to start jotting down reminders in my Treo. I’ve done that a couple times already and it seems to help.

Either way writing is pretty much the only thing I consider a hobby. Poker is a profession, and Tetris is a recent addiction. I like wine a lot, but I rarely find myself thinking of it when it isn’t in front of me so I can’t call myself a true oenophile, or a true alcoholic. Someday I aspire to become both, but for now this is pretty much all I’ve got.

I’ve been shopping around for mortgages, which is the financial equivalent of a rectal exam. I was talking to one broker on the phone today and I swear when the woman said “Ok, let’s take a look at your credit report,” I heard a latex glove snapping.

The good news is my financial hemorrhoid seems to be clearing up. All of those paying-my-bills-on-time suppositories seem to be working. Yes, I could go on with this analogy all day, but I’ll spare you.

Suffice it to say that when I was in college I made a number of stupid mistakes. The first was, of course, going to college in the first place, but more on that later. The second was paying the tuition on credit cards. Then there were a bunch involving alcohol. More on some of those later too, if you behave.

I learned my lesson, which was that 29.9% APR really adds up when you only make $9 per hour part time, the hard way. And, of course, wasted much money and ruined my credit score. Luckily that is a temporary problem and mine is on the mend, but still I some times suffer for it.

Honestly I can’t believe I was that stupid. Like just about all of my biggest mistakes, that one can’t be blamed on parenting. My father was a shining example of good money management and always told me about the importance of good credit and how much money it saves you in the long run. But as Oscar Wilde once said, “The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself.”

So I ignored it and now I’m paying for my mistakes in the form of higher interest rates. My credit rating has gone up quite a bit over the last few years and will continue to do so for a while, but it’s still not where I’d like it to be. Luckily I’ve got a lot of the one thing more important than credit: cash. It turns out that if you’re willing to put enough down on a house they’ll let you just tell them how much you make and how much in assets you have without even asking you to prove it. I could pretty much tell them I’m a billionaire and they won’t question it as long as I can write them a sizeable check. That’s so Las Vegas, even if the mortgage company is based in Delaware.

Also, I’m just curious, why the hell does the scale for credit scores range from 330-830? Who came up with those numbers? Why not make it 0-500, or 500-1000 if you don’t want to insult anyone by calling them a zero? Maybe I should invent a metric credit score sytem.