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Saturday, November 29, 2008

Road Apples, #5

Shopping - I almost never go shopping the day after Thanksgiving; I did once years ago and it was a foul experience, to say the least. Yes, I was dumb enough to be one of those folks who waited for a WalMart to open at the crack-o-dawn. I think I've already covered this in past postings. Anyway, I am taking my oldest daughter shopping today. Let's hope my wallet survives the experience.

I've Got A Feeling - Actually it's "had a feeling" (although the Beatles song "I've Got A Feeling" is pretty good), and it was best described as cruddy after eating Thanksgiving food. It just doesn't agree with me for some reason. My stomach is funny like that; on some level I am sure it's just the natural rebellion of my innards against the abuse I heap upon them by not eating as right as I should. Mylanta and hot tea usually do the trick for me. Note that I don't mix the hot tea into the Mylanta.

Yahoo 360 - I've had a Yahoo 360 page for a long time, and I almost never go there anymore. What I have to do is to copy all of the old blogs there (there are 246 separate entries) that I want to copy and archive onto CD. There are a few there that I want to re-post here, almost most of it is too time-specific to really make much sense in this forum. Just trying to simplify and consolidate my life a bit. I'll probably leave the MySpace page as is, at least for the time being.

It's Almost December - I like December. The month usually goes by pretty quickly, and I have a long list of planning types of things I need to do both personally and professionally. On the personal front, I'm starting to make some changes for the betterment of long-term financial planning. This includes purchasing more Long Term Care insurance (as much as I can buy...just waiting for the health information to come back) and taking advantage of my company's very low stock price by buy purchasing more stock. On the stock front, I've changed the percent of my match that goes into the stock (from 50% to 100%) and I'm diverting 2% of my after-tax pay towards purchasing the stock outright. It is something of a risky move, but it could pay off in a very big way over the long term if the stock recovers (the IPO of the stock was $27.50 & it's traded as high as $100+/- share; it's now around $20/share). On the professional front, I have to really devote some time to thinking about what I want to accomplish for next year, especially in the area of professional development. I need to invest in something that will help me over the long term, not just a few classes, etc. Some kind of professional certification I think.

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