Miscellanea

Criminal intent... or "I Fought The Law and The Law Doesn't EVEN Know About It."  It's still cold out as we speak, like 29 degrees or so.  But we're having the UCR Happy Hour with all the UCR trappings, albeit hovering over the stove with the exhaust fan running and one of the Happy Hour trappings idling underneath when not in actual use.  I figger one a day (in extenuating circumstances), its output filtered by air filters coated by cooking oils, won't hurt anything.  Don't tell anyone, mmm-kay?

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We ran our end-of-month close out today and are somewhat gratified to see our spending is coming down, like this:

One plainly sees the cost of the recent move.  That said, we're on target to hit our budgetary goals and our spending will decrease further once the furniture is paid off.  I deviated from my usual "pay the credit card off every month" philosophy to take advantage of a no-interest-if-balance-paid-in-six-months deal offered by one of the Bloodsucker Loan and Leech credit card companies.  And you can rest assured the balance WILL be paid in six months.  Why?  The "normal" monthly (annual) interest rate this particular company charges on outstanding balances is a whopping 29.99%.  How they get around the usury laws remains a mystery.

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Speaking o' budgetary thangs... I'm debating whether to have the newer desktop peesee fixed (which basically involves paying someone to buy a new hard drive, install it, and restore the OS) or just go ahead and buy a new box.  My normal replacement cycle is three years per IT industry standard and the current desktop is about two and a half years old.  Ergo, it's almost time.  I figger the cost to repair the desktop box will be around $400.00; a well-equipped (but not overly so) new box will run me about $700.00 or thereabouts, including my HP employee discount.  I also thought about foregoing the desktop altogether and just using the laptop but rejected that ideer out o' hand, manly coz I scrimped on the laptop when I bought it.  The laptop only has a 200GB hard drive and that just ain't big enough.  Plus... who can resist a new toy, especially when one can justify it so easily?

I do think we've made a decision.