When I logged onto my bank’s web site this past weekend, I learned that they’re now finally offering electronic statements.

I’m now one significant step closer to not needing a physical mailbox at all.

So, about a month or two ago now, we decided to buy a bunch of my parents’ land from them. This should be about as simple a process as a land transfer could be, since we have an agreed-upon price, and we’re not planning on building on the land. However, we’ve had issues with one thing after another, as the plans have gone to the Planning Board, who required some corrections from the surveyor, who did so and sent it back to the Planning Board, who approved the plans but didn’t have enough people there to sign it somehow, and then it eventually got signed and sent to the lawyer, who tried to take it to the Registry of Deeds but couldn’t record it since somehow they don’t have an updated signature list of the people on the Planning Board since the elections that were at the start of May.

I have a Prime Money Market account at Vanguard, which is where I keep my emergency fund as well as money that I’m accumulating throughout the month for large monthly expenses such as my mortgage. It pays a pretty good interest rate, and is handy for automatically funding my Roth IRA there as well.

So when I need to transfer money from the money market account to my bank for something like my mortgage, I really have two options:

My hobby web site on sending junk mail back to the Post Office is rather quickly climbing the rankings on Google for relevant queries. It’s kind of fun watching the analytics data and watching people find my site for some very relevant search queries. This project is partly ending up being an experiment in creating a site about an obscure topic and seeing how people find it, which is kind of interesting in and of itself.

On Saturday I was the head judge of Magic Regionals in Hartford. We had 189 players, and despite some mishaps that made things take longer than I’d like that probably weren’t avoidable, it worked out alright, and was a good experience for me.

On Sunday I went bowling with my family, and it was a lot of fun. After playing bowling on the Wii more and more and doing pretty good at it, I wanted to go out and play some “real” (that is, candlepin non-virtual) bowling. It was enough fun that it may be something my wife and I do more often.

I put together a web site with the information I’ve learned about refusing unwanted mail.

Refuse Your Mail: You don’t have to take it anymore.

Maybe this will be the start of a huge nationwide trend that’ll make a difference in Postal Service policies and get major media coverage.

Or maybe it’ll just be a cute site only read by me and a couple Random Strangers on the Internet.

(Edited afterward: This was originally posted with its own domain name, but that has since expired, and it’s now on a subdomain of cooperjr.name.)

“Approvals-Not-Required: … • Cooper-Berry Corner Road” — Charlton Planning Board Agenda for June 6, 2007.

Hopefully, by the end of the week we’ll be the proud owners of 46½ more acres of property.

Some background for those unfamiliar but might find this interesting anyway: The basic timing system in Magic is that when a player has “priority”, they can choose to (a) take an action, or (b) pass. If both players pass in a row, then (a) if there’s something on the stack (waiting to resolve), the top item on the stack resolves and active player get priority again, or (b) if there’s nothing on the stack, the current phase or step ends and the game moves on to the next phase. Usually, this formal description of timing is shortcutted quickly by the players, and most actual players wouldn’t be able to describe the details of how this timing system works.

I’ve now reserved hotel rooms for our trip to Magic Nationals in July and Gen Con Indy in August. While we’re out West, we’re going to stop at the new Creation Museum for a day on the way back.

Anybody want to join us for any of these trips?

After the ratings have been processed from our most recent Dreamblade event in Montreal, Jessi is ranked 2 out of 49 in the state, and ranked 284 out of 5659 in the world. And, she now officially has over 1000 points, which earns her an invite to the Dreamblade Championship.

The plan now is to try to convince Wizards to sponsor me as a judge there to help defray the cost of both of us going to Gen Con Indy.