Baby Finances

Why do I stress so much about the problems of the people around me? Friends, co-workers, family, etc. You really want to know why? Because if we are close enough - then those problems are going to effect me as well. Sometimes it's just a selfish fear of not getting what I want. Most of the time, it really is genuine fear and concern for the other person/people. It really stresses me out. I guess you have to take the good with the bad. Everyone is tragically flawed in some way. You just hope to god that those flaws aren't deal breakers for you. Some flaws I can put up with - like the person doesn't understand the point of a DJ - IE you listen to Akon right next to Pink Floyd next to the Beatles next to Woolly bully next to Pink. Just not a good combo. Music should have themes, and a story to follow along with it. I admit I do put my Ipod on Shuffle a lot, but that is just pure laziness on my part. Some flaws are more tragic - like alcoholism, violence, and ment...

Well, to tell the truth, it's only a very small part vacation that's stressing me out. It's really the fact that I have a crap ton of stuff to do before vacation starts. I was really excited about it last week, now I'm getting to the 'oh holy hell, how is all this stuff going to get done?' I worked half of the day today - from about 1-6pm. I got far enough where I can finish stuff tomorrow and have it look half way decent. It's really frustrating to not have a graphic designer who can actually make the stuff look half way decent. She did stuff, I just have no idea where she put it. Maybe I can tool around on her computer if I go into the office tomorrow and try to find it. It would be like amazingly useful to find it. I have to admit that there are certain things that I like to have planned out, things like presentations and where my money is going. Most stuff, I'm not much of a planner. I used to be, but then I just came to a point in my life ...

I've always subscribed to this philosophy. I think it started when I moved to Rochester. I lived close to work, but far enough away it was slightly annoying. On top of that I didn't really live near anything to do. There were a couple things within a few blocks, but it wasn't the best place to go at night. I learned that it would be better to either live close to work and drive where you are going to go play - or to live where you play and drive out to work. My sense of working and playing has changed a lot since then. I thought being in the city was playing. Not so much anymore. The great part about living in the city is that everything is close and it takes less time to run errands - and I can typically do them on my way home. The bad part is that there are so many freaking people around you all the time. You have to get away from the city to do any kind of outdoor play. I mean you go outside and walk or bike places that you typically couldn't do in the subu...

This is what I have

One of the kids at work is leaving. No surprise there. He hasn't been very happy with the way that work actually works. Changing priorities and having to do things outside of his job description have kind of eaten away at him. The commute has been a bit much too, he's got close to an hour drive in everyday. Overall, I think it will be a better fit for his personality. That and he's not getting paid that much. I'm not getting paid that much, I can't imagine living on what he's living on. Though he lives with his parents. That has got to help. What do you do when you just look exhausted? I don't think that I'm working much more than most people my age. I leave at 8am and usually get back home at 7-7:30pm. That includes the 20-25 min walk each way. I don't think that it's too crazy. It's not like I have to work crazy hours outside of work. The problem is that I look crazy exhausted. I will admit that I'm mentally exhausted, b...

I've posted a lot of pictures on my Picasa lately. I got a new camera a couple of weeks ago b/c the flash wouldn't work on the old one (see Jeff & Britta Wedding photos - they're pretty bad.) I essentially just got the upgraded version of my old one. It's really rocking. It now has a 4X optical zoom - which isn't that much more than the 3X that my old one had - but in terms of functionality it's a major increase. I can now get some of the photos that I really want. I didn't think that the additional like 3MP would mean that much either - but in terms of being able to crop & photo shop the photos it's a huge difference. If I cropped the photos I couldn't always add the effects that I wanted without the photos starting to look weird. Now, it actually works. It's pretty sweet. So, I've put up some random pictures of the stuff that I made at that glass blowing class a couple of weeks ago, and I've put up random Starbucks/sh...

Walking home today - I walked past half a dozen bums, a couple of cute couples eating dinner outside at a sidewalk cafe, a weird guy with a boombox (what is this 1983???), and a couple of crazy people who I see a lot - I'm not sure if they are homeless or just crazy people who are poor. I really don't think that they have/make a lot of money just by their speech patterns. But all I could think about was if all this work is really worth it. I put my 50-60 hours of work in a week just like everyone else. I've kept doing that my entire life like hard work is going to get me somewhere. To be honest, it's kind of paid off in the sense that by working harder in school I make a lot more money that most people my age. It's not paid off in the sense that for the risk that I've put in so far - I haven't reaped any of the rewards yet. It's frustrating. I know that it is supposed to take year and years. I guess I'm just impatient. At least I'm prett...

I realized something today when I was debating about which grocery store to go to. The city really changes around your perspective on things, and really makes you do and think seemingly odd things. I know that I go on and on about living in the city, but it's a strange place in comarpison to the suburbs and out in the country. I really don't need, and choose not to use a car most of the time, I don't need to go to a mall to buy stuff - though I think I've been to the mall more often now than when I was living in Rochester - I blame the company more than the city set up. 1. Choosing to walk to the grocery store because you are too lazy to drive. Yes that's right, too lazy to drive. When you live on a one way street and have on street parking that you always have to fight for a close spot, it's actually just as fast, less work, and less stressful to walk. It also forces me to remember to bring my reusable grocery bags. 2. It can talk less time to walk somewh...

Two weeks until vacation! I'm really excited. I'm also really excited that all the planning is done. It worked out well between the two of us though. I love planning and organizing and making choices, he can't make a decision without mulling over it for a very very long time. I'm not sure which way is "better" - my way sometimes leads to big regrets for a quick decision. I'm not sure if his way works better and there are no regrets after all the agonizing. I hope that there aren't, otherwise that's a lot of wasted effort. Plus, if I organize I get to make sure that we do all the stuff I want to do. I think a big part of the problem is that neither of us cares about the exact things that we do, we just want to hang out, relax, not be at work, and have fun together. I think we could do it anywhere. We'll see what materializes out of all the planning. I know that we are starting in Phoenix and ending in Vegas, with a whole lot of time i...

Glass school is freaking fun. Like super fun. Playing with molten glass is way more fun that I thought it would be. Today we did a lot of talking and we ended up making just a couple of paper weights. Nothing too crazy, but hopefully they will turn out really cool. Mine are going to look as superly awesome as any other glass paper weight. Crazy fun to do it though. I'm so glad I took this class. I didn't think I'd be so excited about it. It's crazy crazy hot too. I mean, I know that molten glass would be hot, but the furnaces are super hot even when you are far away from them, the heat just can't be contained. It ended up being a really small class too - only four people and two instructors which was really nice. As soon as you finish watching someone else - and learning from their mistakes, you get to go try out your technique. It was nice to go back and forth. It would have been bad if there would have been a full class and then you would have to wai...

I have three small tomatoes growing now! Yeah for tomatoes. I made some delicious chocolate chip oatmeal cookies. I know that most kids had chocolate chip cookies, or oatmeal raisin cookies. You people just weren't special enough to have my mommykins. We all hated raisins, but loved the oatmeal part of the cookie. So we would just eat around the raisins and throw them out. Or we would poke them out before we at them with our grubby little fingers. My mom HATED that. Her parents grew up during the depression and they just are not the kind of people who could allow stuff like that to happen. If you didn't eat the raisins b/c you poked them out or ate around them - you damn well better give them to someone else who likes them b/c you can't throw out food. There are starving kids in ethipia or sudan or something. So my mommykins made the best of both worlds by substituting chocolate chips for raisins; and they are amazing. I've of course added to my mommykins ge...

I figured out at my cousin's wedding a few weeks ago that the flash on my camera no longer worked. I'm not sure why it stopped working - maybe it was all the horrible treatment of the thing. I didn't really take very good care of it. Sorry camera. So now the pictures from Jeff's wedding came out horribly. I mean horribly. Lowlight situations with no flash is a bad bad thing. There were a couple of good pictures of Pat & Matt acting stupid. Unfortunately I don't have mom's pictures that I took from her camera - I think that those were probably better than any of the pictures I got with mine. I'll have to make mom upload them. Give her an email address and set up Picasa for her so that she'll actually use it. I guess that sounds like a Christmas project. It's weird to think that my parents will be in a different house when I go back for Christmas. I felt like I had to ask my mom if I could stay at their place over Christmas. My mom was...

If you haven't seen Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible in Dr. Horrible's sing-a-long blog you are missing out. Entertaining not only for the fact that Neil Patrick Harris sings the entire thing - who knew Neil Patrick Harris could sing? It's well done and entertaining. Good job to who ever thought of the idea. I would also like to think you for using web media and really breaking out from standard TV studio bullshit. I think it's ridiculous that advertisers don't see the benefit in web videos and TV. I think this is a major step forward to moving from standard broadcast video to well done web based content. It does feel a bit like when the video camera was first started. All the home grown videos of stupid things, on youtube, it just like some of the stupid home videos that the first video cameras produced. Then slowly but surely there grew to be a small group of people that tried to entertain via video. Think Charlie Chaplan and silent movies. Then as te...

If I could create the longest list of work to do - that would have been my day. I'm so frustrated with having too much responsibility and not enough resources. Which is probably the bane of all positions - ever. It was also pretty awesome when I locked myself out of work today. Being the last person to leave does have its disadvantages. At least we have real keys that work now; at least for a few weeks. At these moments I'm really glad that I don't live alone.

For the first time in my life, I dressed up in camo gear, put on a mask, and ran around the middle of the woods with a gun trying to hit people I didn't know with paint balls. It was amusing - but not so fun that I would want to do it every weekend. Some of the people there were hard core. They had all their own person gear and guns, and did this kind of thing every weekend. Some of these hard core fans were surprisingly out of shape. Getting hit really didn't hurt as badly as I thought it would. I'm not sure if I would go again. It was kind of fun and kind of just weird. Running around trying to shoot other people is not normally what I go for - but as soon as someone starts shooting at you - you just kind of have to fight back. (Insert Type A personality here.) I think a large part of why I didn't enjoy it as much as I could have was because I was massively hung over. I forgot to check the bottle on the wine I bought to take to dinner yesterday - and after I...

It's so cute. It's really small yet, probably only about 10mm or so. I hope that it will get bigger eventually. I think I have a few other flowers that are just about ready to turn into a tomato too. It's really really really exciting. I thought that the pepper plants were not going to produce anything b/c they were so small in comparison to the tomato plants (which by the way have way out grown the 56" cage. They are freaking enormous. In the pot, they are as tall as I am. Way better than I expected. Next year I'll have to get another pot and plant even more stuff. Maybe I can grow stuff during the winter too inside. I'm just afraid of it not really getting enough sun light. I really should start an herb garden so that I can have fresh stuff year round. Basil, rosemary, chives, sage, thyme, and maybe some dill. I should start that up soon... I'm really getting good at growing things. I think that the success of the African Violets over the l...