How much water do you boil? Like, you gotta make a cup of tea, how much water is in your kettle? My sister keeps filling mine up, but I only like to have 2c in there at a time.

I did a big balance transfer to BofA to take advantage of the best interest rate I could find, but have no emotional attachment to them. If someone else comes along offering me a better long-term rate I'll drop 'em in a heartbeat.

I do my regular banking through a formerly-local-now-regional bank whose people have been very polite and helpful on the rare occasions I've had an issue. (Thankfully they've never done anything like the bank that mistakenly deposited one paycheck in savings rather than checking and put a hold on the next one due to low balance just as my rent came due.)

What in the world, sara? Last time wasn't enough for them?

I only boil enough to do whatever I'm doing. Otherwise it's wasted fuel to boil what's just going to cool down. I used to fill the kettle and then have water in there all the time, but the logic kicked in and I stopped doing that. I don't like not having enough, though.

But during most of the year, I'm boiling water for my tea and for the birdbath, so I have some volume flexibility.

Whoah. Obama just suddenly got a whole bunch of grey hair.

I don't keep any water in the kettle. But I boil an entire kettle because it's what I use to make iced tea. So I guess if I were only making a cup of tea, I'd probably just boil the cup I need + a little more.

Huh. It sounds like the Space Shuttle is go for launch in about 12 minutes. This is the final Shuttle flight.

I've had good luck with PNC, although their Virtual Wallet is so annoying and hard to use that I just canceled it and went back to regular online banking. But it was really easy to cancel and they didn't give me a hard time or anything. They also never dinged me for keeping a student account for like four years longer than I was supposed to. And the actual people at the branches have always been super nice.

I use my kettle only occasionally, but since it lives on the stove, I keep a little bit of water in it just in case I turn on the wrong burner.

I have heard from some of my conservative friends that Obama and Michelle are doing far more personal appearances than previous presidents? (thus spending way too much of our money and not doing anything and acting like royalty... grr) I can't get a sense if that is true- I think it may be that there are more appearances, especially in other countries, because they want to increase the visibility and stature of the US.

My local branch was really good to me when I was more broke than I am now. They would call me at home to tell me there was a cheque against the account that was NSF, and did they have permission to transfer money from my saving so it didn't bounce. They have some ridiculous fees, but I have a crazy low interest CC, and I really can't complain that much.

When I lived in Vancouver, the staff at my local branch of the same bank were completely incompetent. There wasn't a transaction I did that I didn't have to make a 2nd trip back to the bank to fix some error they made.