Putting the brakes on and being focused

I’ve been having a blast on the bike. Definitely not overdoing it so that I am not overly tired. I’m thinking of putting the kibosh on a few things and I’m mulling over it to make sure I’m doing it for the right reasons. In any case, I think that I will be fine with whatever decision I make. I’ve made the first steps and I feel good about that. I’m attending a shower (my first ever!!) for Mrs. J and I’m excited about that. I’m planning on busting out the camera and taking tons of pictures. πŸ™‚ It makes me wish that I could also be around my own sister who’s got visited by the stork too! One of these days… I know I keep saying that, but it will happen. Little drops of water make puddles and puddles turn into ponds and so on.

In financial use, our usage of the credit card is down to 25%. I recently got them to increase the limit purely to inflate the credit to debt ratio so that our credit scores don’t nosedive. As a matter of fact, I’ve cracked past 710 on Transunion and Experian! Equifax reads a bit lower, but I’m not bothered. Again, you do not want to up your spending simply because your limit has been increased. So nothing has changed except that we’re waiting on a certain buyer to pony up money so we can send a relatively large snowflake to the credit card. I’m also committing to savings and I’ve been treating it as a ‘debt’ that I have to make payments to. So far, it’s working. I was so close to not making a payment this month, but I reminded myself of my goal for this year which was to have an emergency fund. I have to say that we had a month of some large expenses, but Uncle Sam’s tax rebate helped buffer a lot of it without us having to dip into our emergency fund. Not to mention that we have been consciously keeping tabs on spending. Nevertheless, I still think a budget will go a long way in curtailing things further.

In other news, I just wooted this morning and got myself a Garmin Mobile 20 Portable GPS receiver for $54.99 which is $10 less at Amazon. If you recall, I upgraded to a Treo 750 (refurbished) for the princely sum of $100. This smart phone can become a GPS device. All it needs is a receiver which is what the garmin thingamabob is. Of course, this was an impulse buy, but it is currently at a low price than I’ve been seeing all year. I can’t wait to play with my new toy. πŸ˜€ Speaking of toys, I still haven’t gotten proper bike gear. Right now, I’m wearing the pants off my shorts. As I’m doing more challenging trails, I will need to get biking gear so I’ve started a sub-account to fund the purchase of my biking gear. I’m glad that I’ve stopped thinking about simply charging things to the card. It’s a Ferris wheel that’s hard to get off once you get on it. My other goal for the year besides building our emergency fund will be clearing the credit card balance.

In other other news, I just got done watching a performance by Pilobolus at TED (a conference) which is awesome. I just downloaded the movie file to my computer to watch again to ponder its meaning. Right now, I would willingly pay $100 to see a live performance. I’m sad they won’t even be visiting Georgia (based on their schedule on the web). Right now, I’m obsessively going through their videos. Very impressive.