Flour Power

Yes, you read that correctly! I spent no more than 1 minute inside the locksmith shop to make a new key, and it cost me €5. I mean, even if the cost of the key itself is half of it, that’s still a lot. And the actual work of making the key took no longer than 20 seconds! This would be a hell of a per hour revenue, if only there was enough work to be done continuously…

Morning: Nice temperature and sunny. When I woke up at noon the sunlight was peeking into my room and the weather looked really nice.

Afternoon: In an attempt to enjoy the nice weather, I went out for a stroll and a visit to the farmer’s market. It’s there every Saturday and I had never checked it out, for a multitude of reasons (read: hangover). The weather quickly turned into something gray, with some wind to make things worse.

Night: Rain. It’s not pouring, it’s just that annoying rain, but it’s rain nonetheless. It makes you wet. And if you wear glasses, you won’t be able to see a thing after a couple of minutes.

Just goes to prove that you can’t plan your day according to the weather conditions in the morning…

So today I had to go to the bank to pay my rent, and my mood was not the best because I’ve been trying to do it for more than one week with no success. I’ll explain.

First I asked the caretaker of the house (not really the owner, just the guy that makes sure everything is OK, takes care of the deposits, etc) to give me the IBAN (International Bank Account Number) of the account I should transfer the money to and he told me he would send it by mail. A few days later (and no sign of said email) I called back and it turns out he didn’t have the IBAN in the first place, he just had the “local” account number. I told him to give me that one and I would go to the bank and get the IBAN myself.

Next I needed to find a way to get to the bank before closing time. Like in Portugal, banks (annoyingly) close very early, and if subtract the bank’s opening hours from my job schedule I end up with only half an hour on Friday. That’s the only time in the whole week I can go to the bank! How insane is that?

This gets me to today, and I went to the ATM machine to withdraw the money for the rent. Tried €300 and got the “insufficient funds” message. Well, this had already happened to me once, and I figured out (after a lot of attempts and a phone call to the bank in Portugal), that there seems to be a withdrawal limit of €250 per day, or at least for some unknown time, until some updates are made (the lady with whom I talked to didn’t seem to know a lot about it either). It’s all got to do with security and the delay between the withdrawal and the time when the actual account balance is updated. I had to ask my father to go to the bank and change/remove that limit. Which he did, and he was informed that the limit had been raised and I should have no more problems. But apparently the problem still persists…

I ended up taking the €250 from the damned machine, tried a few others from other banks (to make sure it wasn’t a bank-specific limit) and ended up giving up knowing that it either is my bank’s fault, or there’s some entity that controls these kinds of international transfers and they enforce this ridiculous limit. I lean towards the first option: it’s all my bank’s fault.

The bank is Millennium BCP. I don’t have any other reasons to complain about them, other than the fact that the bank fees are probably higher than in other Portuguese banks. The online banking platform is quite good (in the sense that I always managed to easily do what I need, and not by comparing to others because I never used any), I never had any problems with erroneous transactions, and the customer service is always very good. But this situation is just unacceptable. They always use the “for security reasons” excuse, but I just hate it when security starts being a such a hindrance to the most basic tasks. I don’t care if they make the PIN number 10 digits long for enhanced security. But I do mind only being able to withdraw €250 in a single day!

It seems that they want me to plan my “rent-paying-day” ahead of time, to make sure that in the day I get that magic amount of money from the ATM I still have some money in my wallet to eat and go out if I feel inclined to it. What the hell!? That’s not acceptable! Do I really have to open a bank account in another bank to be able to freely access MY money?!

Anyway, I managed to get the IBAN at the bank and so I’ll be able to do everything online and bypass all the hassle I just described. But I needed to share this, and alert the readers of this blog (yes, all two of them!) to this issue.

I’ll start of by saying that I now respect the work done by painters more than I ever did. Not that I didn’t respect their work before, but it seemed so much easier before I actually had to do it…

Yes, the experience of painting my previously pink room definitely took its toll. Every single part of painting is a huge pain in the ass! Each and every one of them:

• Choosing the paint – As a guy I can only distinguish 10, maybe 20, different colors (no, I’m not exaggerating, all guys are like this. And if you know one that knows more of them, well…), so when confronted with half a dozen shades of each of those, times at least three levels of shininess…
• Preparing the room – That starts by taking everything out of the room, to make it easier to “navigate” around it while painting and also to avoid getting paint on everything. Then comes putting masking tape wherever the wall touches stuff that’s not supposed to get paint on it (like light switches and ceiling). And don’t forget to clean the areas that are to be painted (I might have skipped this last one).
• Painting – When you’re already quite worked up, the bulk of the work begins. The walls themselves are not that hard. It’s the corners (top, bottom and sides) and the details (around windows, light switches, etc…) that are tough.
• Cleaning – Just when you think you just can’t take it anymore you still have to clean all the brushes and rollers. Be prepared to spend some time squeezing them to try and get all the paint out. (I think I would have just thrown them away if they were mine…). Cold water makes it even worse and if you do it in a bathtub your back will scream for mercy. Oh, and don’t forget to take out the masking tape.
• Moving back in – The final part is hauling everything back inside the room. This is actually the least terrible part of all, since you can already see the light at the end of the tunnel very clearly. It’s still a pain to get everything set up properly.

So, next time you decide to paint your room another color… think again. I know I won’t be doing it again unless it’s absolutely unavoidable. I’ll try to avoid renting pink rooms from now on

I’ve just seen the first episode of the fifth season of Lost that aired last wednesday. And although I’m a bit disappointed, that didn’t really surprise me.

It’s just that it keeps getting weirder and weirder. What’s up with making the plot more complicated in each and every episode? What about finishing up on some stuff before moving along? I miss “The X-Files” (the first few seasons), where most episodes had all kinds of bizarre stuff happening but in the end everything was wrapped up and explained. The explanations were always quite… “supernatural”, but at least they didn’t leave us wondering what the hell just happened and salivating for next week’s episode in the hopes of getting some answers. And people kept coming back to watch it next week anyway.

Getting back to the season premiere, we do get some answers on this episode (or maybe just one), but those answers come at a cost… You guessed it, more questions! I don’t want to reveal any spoilers… but I don’t like the direction where this is heading, with so many time-travel-related stuff. It never works out! It always makes everything too confusing and most of the times completely incongruous. I only remember it working out well a few times, like in “Back to the Future” and “The Butterfly Effect”. I don’t even want to get started on how wrong it’s working on “Heroes”…

Anyway, I was a bit afraid of what might show up in this fifth season and episode 1 just made me confirm that I only keep watching this show because I’m too stubborn to stop after I’ve watched the previous 4 seasons. I mean, there has to be some kind of unifying story behind all of it. Although I’m really starting to doubt it will make any sense at all.

Oh well, at least I still have stuff like “How I Met Your Mother”, “The Big Bang Theory” and “Californication” that continue to be a lot of fun to watch.