Good return on your money

I made over 60% in a recent investment. You can do 75%.

Sounds like a Ponzi scheme pitch, eh? Allow me to explain.

ING bank started a promotion recently that lets new clients open a bank account and receive a $50 bonus. A separate promotion allowed existing clients to refer new clients and receive a $25 bonus.

The only condition is that you have to deposit at least $100 initially. Available types of accounts include savings, TFSA, RSP and GIC. I'm not sure chequing accounts qualify, but who knows.



So I opened a savings account and put my $100 in. Almost immediately the $50 bonus went into my account. I also received a referral key so I could refer other new clients.

Next I (uh, I mean Carrie) opened a new account in her name, using my referral key. With her initial $100 and her $50 new client bonus, she had $150. My account received another $25 for having referred her.

The totals: $200 of our own money and $125 in bonuses. Not bad for a bunch of paperwork.

Here's the sad part (for me): the referral bonus has now doubled to $50. Not procrastinating cost me $25. Oh well.

All you need to do now is start some ING accounts. Just use my referral key (39513191S1) when applying for your account; on the enrolment form, change the provided promo code "Post50" to my number above. Start a savings account here or choose from more account types here.

Once you have an account, use your own referral key to make money by referring your spouse. Then you'll be $150 richer. Not sure if this works for kids, although there are other promotions for kids from time to time.

Since ING has no physical branches to visit, it may not be convenient for everyday banking, but it makes a great rainy savings fund. You can bank by mail (write cheques from your main bank), by linking it online with your main bank, or with a debit card (some ATMs are free to use, some aren't).

There you have it: free money! It's a great excuse to build that 3-month-wage emergency fund you've always been planning to start.

The days are shortening...

At last, winter is on its way! It's not that summer and I don't get along, but if I'm gonna wear my slippers in the house it may as well be winter, eh? We had a very warm March, so I've been done with summer weather for quite some time now; bring on the snow! (Even though I just took the winter tires off the car only about a week ago.)

I spent last week bachelorin' it, as my babies were in Costa Rica yet again. I permitted it, since I was out of cigars. I'll definitely need a celebratory stick in, I dunno, about 7 weeks. (I'll confess this is the first pregnancy pic I've taken; I mean well, but that camera is always like eight feet away.)


Carrie returned with a suitcase full of cigars, which meant either I needed a humidor or I'd have to chain-smoke cigars for a few weeks. (Don't worry--they're not all for me.) So I ordered a humidor which I received this past week. It's currently being seasoned, so I get to wait and fidget until the humidity is nice and stable. It will be good company for the vase thingy we bought in Costa Rica in February.


Next weekend we're going camping with friends; I do look forward to that, even if it will require wearing shorts and other nonsense.

Ottawa Race Weekend 2012

This year some friends and I signed up for the 5km run in the city's annual race weekend. Some of us would have liked to do the 10km (as we did last year), but it's selling out earlier every year and we missed out this time around. I think next year we'll have to prepare to sign up in January already.

I didn't get around to training until May this year. That's better than one pal's efforts, which consisted of one practice run last week (I won't mention Peter's name). Craziness.

Turns out training really does help. Having trained less this year, I didn't have as good a race as last year. But it was still good to get out there.

Training stats:

	2012	2011
Time	2.5 hrs	7 hrs
Distance	34 km	92 km
Number of practices	8	16
Span	4 weeks	6 weeks

Last year I did the 10k in about twice the time it took to do 5k this year. I couldn't imagine going any more than 5k yesterday, so I'm definitely in worse shape than a year ago. On the bright side, I'm in a higher age category this year and I'm ranking better for my age than I did last May. Silver lining!

A few survivors.

Spring and other things

Wow... two months with no posts. What a privilege it is to have no pressure whatsoever to blog! I tend to want to reserve blogging for our travels, but there hasn't been much lately and won't be much in the near future.

Easter

We did head down to see the family on the farm over Easter. It was a short visit, as usual. After an Easter church service, a number of fine gents came over to the farm for what I believe is the second annual Easter "shoot stuff" event. Such an event involves a dozen or more firearms congregating, with a host of grubby trigger fingers helping deplete the region's ammunition supply. Even the minister stopped by for a few rounds!

Shotguns or varying types and sizes, some .22s, a .30-06, the standard hunting fare. This isn't the States, so no crazy machine guns or any such goodness.

This van load was one fellow's contribution.


Manning the trap (the machine that flings clay disks).


Lining up for a shot.


If you look closely at the next picture, you'll see the clay target disintegrating at the top right. Good timing, me!


A tiny sampling of the garbage created.


After three hours of shooting stuff, I understood why most of the guys wore ear protection. Fortunately the ringing in my ears subsided soon enough.

Fridge

Well, freezer actually. Our fridge/freezer in the kitchen has in the past few years made some interesting noises. When we first encountered them I eventually learned from the interwebs that there might be ice buildup behind a panel in the bottom freezer. This apparently is a common enough problem with this fridge, where the defrost cycle isn't perfect, and the defrost fan ends up with ice built up around it. The sound is the fan hitting the ice.

In the past, I would empty the freezer and point a blow dryer toward the back of it. This would melt enough ice behind the panel that the noise would disappear. (It would also cause a frighteningly cool display of green electrical arcs that threatened to end my budding appliance repair career on the spot.)

Anyway, the previous noise incident was only a few months ago, and I've been getting sick of having to go through the routine so often. When it happened this last time, after a few days of noise the entire unit actually quit working and displayed an error message. Various websites told of various expensive parts that would need replacing, but a few suggested it was just more ice buildup. So this time I actually removed some more hardware and got in behind the back panel. Here's what I found.


The defrost cycle fan is top centre, with a big fat infringing chunk of ice to its right. It's no wonder my 15-minute hair dryer bouts never solved the problem for very long! Having removed the massive growth, let's hope this latest fix give us a few years' grace. (Although to us it's just an inconvenience... the landlord's the one on the hook if things die. Go renters!)