Today’s www.toothpastefordinner.com entry:
Early to bed, early to rise. I was in the office at IBM at 7:45 this morning, avoiding the morning rush hour. Yay!
I had a 30-minute “Counseling Session” with the MoneySmart people today. MoneySmart is a most excellent new program being provided by IBM free of charge. It’s described as follows:
| The new program, called “IBM MoneySmart” combines in-person educational seminars, online tools and confidential, one-on-one personal planning sessions with independent financial experts.
It is designed to help IBMers “get smart” about personal finance by providing them with the guidance they need to plan for a secure retirement. Employees will have access to experts who can assist them on topics ranging from retirement income planning to college savings and debt management. |
The neatest part of it, to me, is a tool that they have that lets you enter all of your online accounts from which it pulls everything it needs to display your net worth in terms of your assets and liabilities.
It even has a way to include your “rewards” program, after which doing I discovered I had over 30,000 Marriott points that I had no idea I had. I hardly ever stay at Marriotts, as I am a Shearton points whore, so I have no idea where those points came from.
Here’s a snapshot of the rewards section:
Vivian came over at about 6:00, and we had a cocktail and an appetizer before heading out to Dick’s Sporting Goods at Crossroads.
As we approached Crossroads, she started telling this story about a lady with a very proper southern accent who helped her on the phone recently with a pocketbook she was trying to purchase.
OMG, by the time we got to Dick’s at the other end of the shopping center, I was laughing so hard I couldn’t see. I, literally, had to pull my car over and stop, and I put on my flashers while we sat at the curb as she proceeded to kill me with the ending to the story. We were both laughing so hard it was ridiculous.
In Dick’s, Vivian bought two pairs of golf shoes, and two pink wristbands.
After that, we stopped at REI, where I bought a pair of shorts.
We had dinner at Red Lobster, where we got into another hysterical laughing fit when she told me about this girlfriend of my brother’s, who had spent the night once with her, and how this girl had rolled her hair before bed.
She had very long, kind of stringy/frizzy red hair, and my sister said that before bed, she took out four Campbell Soup cans and rolled her hair around them, to make big wavy curls.
While she was telling me this, my mouth was contorting in disbelief, and I said, “Good lord, if she flipped over during the night, those cans could have killed somebody, as heavy as they are.”
Well, Vivian just fell out at that. “They were empty!” she howled. “And the ends were both cut off, so they were just big round cylinders.”
Oh shit. We both just lost it after that.
We stopped back by my place, where I put our leftovers in my fridge, she grabbed my “Gay or Straight” game, and then she followed me back downtown.
At Hargett and West, I turned left to head to Flex, and she went straight, heading back to the Sheraton.
There were new faces at the bar tonight—two cute ones. One of them was with his group of two friends, and the other had three problems: 1) He knew he was hot. 2) He knew he was hot. and 3) He knew he was hot. Very unattractive.