Adam is one of the co-creators of MindSay. He likes to blog and enjoys long walks on the beach.

Finally the major pains in the @$$ that come with home ownership have caught up with me. Opening the mailbox yesterday, I had about a dozen pieces of mail, all of which were bad news. Mortgage bills, gas bills, electricity bills, and most annoyingly, a letter from my homeowner's association telling me that I need to move my satellite dish off the roof of my front porch by February 1st or pay a $50 fine. This means I will a) need to schedule a time for the DirectTV technician to show up, probably only to have them get "tied up" and need to reschedule and b) probably have to pay DirectTV loads of money for extra service.

Not to mention I don't understand about half of my other bills. I appear to have been double-billed for my dialup Internet access, and one of my bills appears to be much lower than I expected, meaning a) I'm lucky or more likely b) I'm being charged for yet another thing I wasn't anticipating. It's called a "periodic interest charge" which sounds like "we're going to take more money whenever we feel like it." I guess I'll have to make some calls tomorrow and figure out what the heck is going on with some of this stuff.