Today was a really busy day. I started this morning trying to pay bills and trying to get new auto insurance this morning before I even left the house. Coincidentally, the insurance agent that I managed to reach in Orlando, Florida was actually a graduate of SUNY Geneseo and knew our address! Now THAT is a coincidence. I couldn’t believe it.
I got into the office and it was just “go go go” all day long. By two in the afternoon I was completely exhausted.
Dominica sent me this great link about a mystery cat who rides a bus in England to get to a fish and chips shop!
I got new car insurance today. We switched to Liberty because they specialize in BMW owners. We weren’t expecting a great rate but boy did we get one. We are saving a TON. And they operate in all fifty states so we aren’t in a position where we have to deal with switching insurance when we are in different locations. That was an issue before. Just being in New Jersey a significant portion of the time was causing major headaches. Now we don’t have to worry about that anymore. That is a lot of worry that I don’t have to deal with anymore.
I had to run out to the local Bank of America branch to cash a check today. So many errands had to be dealt with today. It is exhausting just trying to keep up with the regular day to day stuff. At least I am getting a lot done today.
Dominica and I finally decided what we are doing with some of our joint Christmas money. We have been talking about it for months now but just couldn’t figure out what we were going to buy. Originally we were going to get a Sony PS3 but then there weren’t any games available for it. Then we decided on a Nintendo Wii but Nintendo completely dropped the ball on that and didn’t keep manufacturing them in any volume so everyone stopped making games and now they have fallen by the wayside. What a bummer. We thought about getting a really nice 42″ 1080p LCD monitor for the living room but that is a lot of money and we don’t really need it yet as we don’t have any 1080p source for it – yet.
So we finally decided that we needed to get something to power the Totem speakers that we have sitting in the apartment. We had talked about bringing down the equipment from back home but that stuff is too much work and too old without a lot of features that we really want. So we finally decided to buy a Marantz SR-4001 receiver (yes, it is just a receiver but it is just for our little apartment.) It is a 7.1 receiver with HDMI switching, lots of digital inputs, upscaling, etc. It should meet our needs in our little apartment pretty well. A friend at work just bought one a few weeks ago too.
My quote for the day is from Ghandi: “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
I finally got around to getting back to the insurance company about the Motorola Q that was stolen back around November 17, 2006. I had tried to get it replaced back then but they needed information that didn’t really make any sense and I had to follow up to get a bunch of stuff for them. By that time and once I had dealt with Verizon over the whole issue it just kept getting pushed to the bottom of the stack of things for me to deal with. Eventually it just got forgotten about. So today, while doing tons of errands, I decided to get this taken care of as well. I am just knocking out “to do’s” today. I hate having so many little “things” hanging over me – even the simplest things can really cause you to lose “momentum” and get bogged down worrying about stuff that needs to be done. I especially hate things that need to be dealt with during the day because I always get busy and don’t get them done and then get home and worry about them but can’t do anything about them until the following day when I am busy again.
I have found that since switching to Zimbra for our email system it is easier for me to take care of things like this because it has a “notebook” or document management feature so I am able to collect information that I need and store it all in one place easily. That makes it easily to get a moment and jump onto a problem instead of deciding to work on it and not being able to find all of the information necessary.
After being on the phone for half an hour with the insurance place I found out that I really messed up and the Q is no longer replaceable and I have to buy a phone on my own now to replace it. Argh. The upside is that I am going to attempt to get a Palm Treo 700wx because the Q was crippled by being a “smartphone” instead of a PDA that it was mostly useless. More like a Blackberry than something actually useful. I need the power and control of a real operating system. So I talked to someone at work who has a Treo and I think that that sounds like the way to go. Silver linings I guess.
I got home at a decent time and we ran over to Food for Life for dinner. I played just under an hour of Dragon Quest VIII and then we watched some Bosom Buddies. Dominica went to bed and I worked on my homework for my RIT class. That didn’t take too long and I was in bed before midnight.