Saturday Miscellania

Yesterday I spent about two hours going through financial records.

For a long time, I was pretty consistent about keeping them current, creating a monthly spreadsheet showing our major expenditures by area, that kind of thing, but about a year ago -- roughly about when I broke my shoulder -- I fell off the wagon. Now that I'm technically unemployed (technically, because I got a severance payout that covers my salary until the end of August), I've developed a lot more interest in keeping those numbers accurate. Or at least plausible. Both of us had months of bank statements that I hadn't entered. In some cases, its no big deal -- just take the most current statement and update Quicken with that -- but since the monthly spreadsheet requires input about what checks were written, that meant I had to take about six months of checks for each of us and update Quicken to show which ones were cleared. A side problem was that my wife hadn't been updating Quicken with her checks all the time. I knew that, but even so, I was amazed to find how many checks weren't in there. That gets a little hairy when she withdraws money directly from checking via the onsite credit union, but doesn't update Quicken, so that the only time I realize what she did is when the statements arrive. Its not a BIG deal, because theres always a comfortable buffer, but still, for some one like me, being a little anal about it, theres a period of what the hell is going on here, why don't these balance until I take a couple of deep breaths and get back in control. We both know that I'm more fanatical about these things (well, I was, and now I kind of am again), so I try really hard not to make her feel guilty about it. Its not that big a deal.
I'm always, always amazed that her company, which is a computer company, and my old one, ditto, can't do what I regard as smart things, such as having the option to send a reminder home via email when you do an on-site deposit or withdrawel, or, for that matter, making the monthly statement not only available electronically (which, to be fair, they kind-of do), but also making it possible to slice-and-dice it -- ie, show me all the EFT statements, show me all the deposits, show me transactions by date, by payee, by amount, whatever. I KNOW this is possible, and I would bet serious money that there are people who are not only routinely doing that now, but they've been doing it for years. But these guys with their big honkin' mainframe -- they can't seem to get the hang of it. Amazzin.

One upshot of all of the number crunching last night is that it does appear likely that I don't actually have to work again. Its not bullet-proof -- we don't have millions and millions of dollars -- but its probable. In fact, if my wife lost her job tomorrow, and we made some more-than-minor, less-than-severe changes in our life style, we'd probably be okay. Given that we're both conservative, financially, we'd likely both go out and look for work, of course. We'd do whatever we need to do, if it came to that. Which is, incidentally, the reason that despite what I just said, if the company I just interviewed with comes up with a decent offer, I'd take it. Because until we are independently wealthy -- don't hold your breath -- we'll always want to do as much as we can to keep the nest egg warm and safe. Pretty much no matter how big that egg gets. Certainly, I'd like to stay home, do baking, learn another programming language, work at portrait photography, and all of that... but if the opportunity comes up to earn a good income, I'll take it.

Particularly if it involves the Brazilian Women's Soccer Team.

This kind of financial attitude isn't entirely shared with our daughter, who said the other day that she'd like a cell phone (Not that I'd use it, Dad -- this would be just to have, in case) and I clued her in what it costs just to have one; actual use costs more. So, I said, if and when, we'll ask her to help pay for it. She wasn't thrilled, but she wasn't surprised -- she hears us talking about justifying costs all the time. Truth to tell, we likely will buy her one -- the cheapest we can find (I asked if she would be okay with that, not having camera or video capability, not having a snappy little case, and she said yes, but I'm not sure about that) -- and let her use her own money to pay for the minutes on the phone, but it likely won't be soon. Well, not as soon as she'd like.

I had bought an iGo power adapter for home use of my IBM Thinkpad, including buying the specific power tip to match up with the Thinkpad. When the Thinkpad went the way of the job (though this other company uses Thinkpads too, hmmm....), I packed it up, and replaced it with the Dell power adapter we'd gotten so that we could use the laptop in the car. (We did that once; my daughter was quite dismayed to discover that having the laptop in the car did not mean access to the Net while in the car. When will technology catch up?) Since I like having the ability to start, say, Quicken from the laptop, I copied the files over so I could do that. But the desktop is still the location for anything that absolutely positively has to get backed up routinely, via the service we use that runs a copy every night to their offsite servers, so sometimes I have the laptop active in the library, while I look at stuff on the desktop, and that runs the battery down. Now, thats not a problem. Ah, technology!

Something else that I want to do is get a cable to be able to physically transfer files between the laptop and the desktop. The wireless connection takes forever to do it (I think I dorked it up when I changed the router settings once while trying to increase its range). Turns out if I get whats called an A/A USB Bridge cable, I can make that connection -- but the catch is, those are about six bucks, but the people who sell them on the web charge another ten or so to mail them. Hey, its barely worth six bucks to me, so I think it'll be a while before I get that cable.

And thats it for right now!