May 27, 2008: Back to Work

Time to get back to work after the long weekend.  There was a little bit of work to do this morning getting caught up for all of the people who were still working yesterday causing a little backup of work first thing today.  Overall it wasn’t that much and the rest of the day was rather slow.  Holiday weeks tend to be a little slow up front since the week before doesn’t have the level of prep that a normal week does.

I think that I forgot to mention over the last several days that I finished reading Bill Bryson’s “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid” – the memoir of Bill Bryson’s growing up in Des Moines, Iowa in the 1950s – and “Core Java, Volume One, Eighth Edition” – the 850 page Java reference manual from Sun Press.  I started reading “Core Java” back when I was taking my third Java programming class (my master’s class at RIT) but didn’t quite finish it.  So I went back last week and finished it off.  Amazon just shipped me Volume 2 on Friday which is well over 1,000 pages and I have already read a tiny bit of that.  Pretty dry reading, however.  It will take me a while to get through it.

I am very happy to be done with my spring class at RIT.  I tried to register for the only class being offered in my major this summer at RIT and discovered that not enough students were interested in it and it was canceled.  That is pretty crappy.  I talked to my department head and we are going to see if the class gets reinstated but that is very unlikely.  If not we are going to attempt to get me into a hospital management course this summer or I might just begin work on my master’s thesis now to get that out of the way.  Either way I will be doing something this summer but it could easily not be regular coursework.  In the fall I am scheduled to take “Process Management” which is the second of my Software Project Management sequence.

I am taking this week as pretty much a break from all of my extraneous activities.  I need some down time to just relax, get my brain back together, catch up on SGL, clean the apartment, think about house hunting, do some reading, etc.  I did some bill paying today as well.  Dominica and my move towards more frugal spending to facilitate purchasing a house this fall is going well.  Our goal is not really to save for the house but rather to eliminate all debt, starting with student loans and then the car, which will give us more “real” buying power even if the bank doesn’t necessarily think so.  Our goal is to err on the side of financial safety even if it reduces the amount that we might be able to borrow.  Best to borrow too little and get a smaller house now than to borrow too much and have financial problems or lose the house (like so many people are doing now.)

What is really awesome, and I probably mentioned this but just don’t remember, is that Dominica’s student loans have been put into deferment because she is attending Empire State.  That means that we owe nothing and the loans are not accruing any additional interest while they are in deferment.  So instead of paying them off directly we are able to put the money away into a saving account and gain a little bit of interest on the money in addition to being ready to pay off the loans.  The difference is very little but in the end it gives approximately a two percent interest gain in our favour over the course of several months – maybe as much as four or five!  Sure beats paying out interest as we pay off the loan.  It also allows us to “pay” it more aggressively as we are just setting the cash aside in a savings account where we can access it if needed.  If we “knew” that the deferment would last long enough we would get a CD to put the money into but we need to keep it liquid for now, unfortunately.

Dominica did some shopping for me today over her lunch break.  She picked up clothes for me to wear in Walt Disney World this weekend.  I don’t have much in the way of cool, casual clothing and this weekend is going to be exceptionally hot in central Florida so we need to be prepared.

We ordered in pasta from Nino’s and watched some episodes from the first season of Are You Being Served? on the AppleTV and called it an early night.

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