It’s been kind of a mixed weekend. Saturday morning was the first meeting of the car group for the new semester, and it went quite well… Went to Rudino’s for lunch (great calzones), before which John changed the oil in his Camaro and I made a trip to the hardware store to pick up some odds and ends to fabricate a tool. Most of the pieces I needed to make said tool (to press out the Audi’s front control arm bushings, which are completely shot) were associated with plumbing, like pipes and caps and adapters and such. Turns out that they’re made of a remarkably hard grade of steel, and while bearing down on one of the caps, held by the bench vise, the drill bit snapped and I fell on the drill, giving me a nice bruise right in the center of my chest. Didn’t knock the wind out of me, but it didn’t feel too pleasant, either. But I got the tool made in the end–will use it later this week for the needed repairs.<\/p>\n
This afternoon I ran in a local 5K. Deceptively downhill initially, and a couple of pretty steep inclines near the end made it not really condusive to a good time. I ran around a 21:50. Not fantastic, but not terrible either. I tried to relax during the run, which was a big difference from the UNC run back in December that I was considerably more amped-up for. My pace was pretty near dead-on relative to my current fitness level, I think–I could have picked it up a little bit near the end, but not much. I seem to be stuck at around a 7 minute mile. There’s a 10K coming up near the end of the month…that’ll be good motivation to train a little harder.<\/p>\n
My computer’s been on the fritz all weekend. I downloaded an automatic operating system software update on Friday night, and my video card hasn’t worked properly since. So my Mac is indisposed and I’m typing from Donald’s computer. I tried to take the machine to the Mac store in the mall to have the burgeoning hackers there look at it, but it’s by appointment only, so I was turned away. Tried to drown my sorrows in a stack of recent car magazines at the Barnes & Noble next door, but it didn’t do much except give my eyes something to gloss over while my mind wandered about that situation and others that I find myself in lately.<\/p>\n
I am terrible at managing money. That’s a hard admission. My checking account is constantly bobbing above and below the line of solvency and I can’t seem to achieve any stability. It’s just getting absolutely ridiculous, and I need<\/i> to take care of it, need to manage my income and cash flow and savings, etc. I can’t go to Winston-Salem in this state; I can’t<\/i>. I have a threefold plan: First, organize. I need to sort out all my bills and statements and figure out exactly how much money I have now.<\/i> Next, I need to keep tabs on how much money I have at any given time. This is the area in which convenience is key. If I don’t have an immediate, down-to-the-penny accurate answer to someone who asks me how much money I have in my checking account, then I’m failing in that area. And finally, I need to budget. I have to look a couple of months down the road, anticipate expenses, and plan accordingly. Yep. This is the time to rein everything in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s been kind of a mixed weekend. Saturday morning was the first meeting of the car group for the new semester, and it went quite well… Went to Rudino’s for lunch (great calzones), before which John changed the oil in his Camaro and I made a trip to the hardware store to pick up some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}