sunrays and saturdays

I've been trying to sell a cheap bedroom furniture set on OU's virtual market and on Facebook for several days now because my Dad is bringing my sister's nicer set down tonight. He doesn't have room for it in the new house, and I'm all for a furniture upgrade. I've received lots of messages about my old furniture set, but nobody has gotten to the point where they've committed to buying it.

I have to get the furniture out of here by the time Dad gets here tonight, so I've resorted to giving it away. I actually feel pretty good about that. The lady picking it up is an OU staff member who hosts international students and helps them adjust to living in Norman. She seems like a very kind and giving person, and it sounds as if the furniture will be appreciated by whoever uses it. I feel like I'm doing something good.

We have cable tv now. This could be a big blow to my ability to do anything productive at home. Homework ain't gettin' done at home no more! I seem to get more accomplished in my TA office anyway.

This is cool.

Oh, I'll be driving 230 miles to get home (home home, not here home) so that Dad can replace the front brake pads on my car. The mechanic that did the "24-point inspection" about a month ago told me that I had about 5% left of them, but they wanted $180 to change them. HELL NO. The parts are only around $50, so if I pay for the parts and give my Dad some money for his time/trouble, then I'm still saving money even if I drive to a place four hours from here to get it done.

PS: How the hell does Mapquest get that it takes over six hours to go 230 miles??? Yeah, sure, there are towns along the way and we're not talking interstates here, but damn. I speed like a maniac and only stop when I ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO. There's really not much to see during this drive anyway, believe me. Well, that is unless you like digging for crystals in the salt flats or staring at cattle. Yes, I've done both. Shut up.

Very cool. More people should be like him and do something positive with their riches. This also makes me think I should do more. We all should.

I got the AMS Student Travel Grant for the Annual National Meeting (it's a conference) at Atlanta in January!!! It pays for all of my airfare, hotel, and registration costs, so now all I'm responsible for is food! YAY!! That's over a thousand dollars that I now don't have to worry about, and they're putting me up at the Hyatt. Hells yes!

It's snowing like a mofo outside.

Gas prices here in Ames as of 8pm this evening:

Regular Unleaded: $3.07
Unleaded Plus: $2.99

What they were when I filled up on Sunday...as in three whole days ago:

Regular Unleaded: $2.59
Unleaded Plus: $2.51

Good gracious. Those are the highest prices I've ever seen in my life.

New userpic! Wheee!

WE GOT A DIGITAL CAMERA YESTERDAY. It's a Canon Powershot A85 (4.0 megapixel), and I LOVE it. It's the first digital camera I've ever had, and I am SO excited about trying it out and seeing what kind of pictures I can take with it. It only has a 15 second exposure limit on it, so I'll have to use my film SLR for long exposure night shots and whatnot, but EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

How could I afford it all of a sudden you may ask? Well, it was $300 for the camera, for starters. The photography supply place here in town celebrated their 75th anniversary yesterday, and as part of that, the first 20 people in the door either received a gift certificate or a free digital camera depending on which envelope they picked. The gift certificates were for $25, $50, and $75. I was number 6 out of the 20 people, and I drew an envelope with a $50 one in it. The only catch was that I had to use it THAT DAY. Jeremy and I have been talking about getting a digital for a long time, so I ran over to his place that afternoon, woke him up (he has been working night shifts, so he was sleeping during the day), and dragged him with me to get a digital camera. We spent a good hour there figuring out which camera was the best choice. It came down to the Fuji Finepix S3100 and the Canon Powershot A85, but we ended up picking the Powershot because it had a lot more modes and features for the same price. Other than that, they were pretty comparable. Jeremy paid for half, and I paid for half of what was left after I cashed in the gift certificate, so I only ended up spending about $135. I talked to Dad awhile back about wanting a digital camera, and he agreed at the time that as a Christmas gift this year, he would just give me half of the cash required to get it and I would cover the other half myself. If he remembers talking to me about this, I will probably get part of my money back for buying the camera. I just jumped the gun a little and bought it before he gave me the money. :p

And no, I didn't take the new picture of myself with the digital. It looks the way it does because of Photoshop.

I just split a hole in my favorite pair of jeans while playing ultimate frisbee tonight. FUCK. Now I have to spend $50 on a new favorite pair of jeans.

I'm going to go pay the rent that was due yesterday.

I think I've figured out why I keep coming up short moneywise in spite of my careful budgeting. The fucking ISU payroll department keeps taking larger chunks of money out of my paychecks. I don't know what the fuck happened, but I went from being completely exempt from all taxes six months ago to being taxed to death now. When I did my initial budgeting earlier this summer, I was counting on checks of almost $500 every two weeks based on my hours, but with the new withholding setup ISU Payroll has for me, I pull in barely over $400 every two weeks. That's a loss of almost $200 every fucking month! That's a hell of a lot of money in my universe. I've got to talk to them about this, because I can't fucking afford to lose that much money this summer. I flat out REFUSE to struggle for the rest of the summer as badly as I am now. I have to pay off my credit card, too, but there's not going to be much left over for that if I need to use that money to buy the fucking bare essentials to get by.

Fuck. It's decision time boys and girls. I called the local photography place to get an estimate on repairing my camera, and he told me it would probably run about $100 to fix it, but it's $20 just to send it in and get an actual estimate. I can purchase a new body for the camera for around $100 off of Ebay. The interesting thing to note is that I can purchase a complete camera (body and lens, some with other accesories) for between $50 and $80 off of Ebay as well. The cameras just appear to be well used, but still work. Then I could sell my camera body for $20 or so as is and bring the expense down even more.

I could also just do some looking around on the net and fix it myself with a little bit of help from people who know what they're doing. Anyone know someone I could send it to who could fix it for cheaper than $100?

Here's where the real decision comes in. I've been wanting a digital camera for some time now. If I were to sell every camera accessory, lens, filter, body, flash, thing I have seperately on Ebay and somehow managed to get the going rate out of them all, I could make between $175 and $200 total. Since I'm a new seller, I'd probably make no more than $140, but since I got the original camera body and lens for free, I don't think I'd be losing much compared to what I paid for everything else. I can get a decent digital camera for between $180 and $200. I'm not talking about the $800 digital SLRs with all the bells and whistles (although that would be nice). I'm talking about the small Sony Cybershots and Nikon Coolpixes and whatnot. I'll probably greatly miss the ability to do long exposures and to use filters and other fun gadgets, but I'd be saving a hell of a lot of money on developing film that doesn't turn out the way I want. There's a problem with digital cameras, though. They depreciate in value far FAR worse than the manual film stuff I have now. There's no way in hell I could ever sell it for what I buy it for, and I'd have to constistently spend $200-$300 dollars to upgrade to the newer, better cameras every couple of years. My little K1000? Yeah, it'll probably worth the same 5 or 10 years down the road that it is now, and there's always a huge plethora of accessories and parts for it on Ebay.

So, here are my choices:

a) Send my camera body in to be repaired for $100.
b) Buy a new camera body off Ebay for $100 and sell mine for $20.
c) Buy a used, complete camera off Ebay for $50-$80 and sell mine for $20.
d) Fix the damn thing myself.
e) Sell the whole shebang and get a digital camera.

Hm?

I'm such a sucker for good deals. My phone/internet company is Qwest, and they have this new plan floating around, so I signed up for it. They upgraded my DSL internet from 640K to 895K and added a few extra features to my phone service, and my bill should be something like a dollar more every month. Not too shabby if I do say so myself. Ha, like 640K isn't fast enough, but meh. I like speeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed. Almost 900K? That's pretty damn fast. How fast is cable?

Time to make a cheesy baked potato for dinner.