So there are pictures of the beach trip I took the weekend before last, as well as the painting posse that happened the monday before last.

This was a *lot* of fun, and I hope to do it again sometime.

I would be doing a lot of personal reflfection right now, but seeing that i'm too busy to even clean my house, the navel-gazing is going to have to wait for a while.

As is more poetry.

As is updating the rest of this Web site, which has needed doing for like a year now.

Fortunately, i have a day off on Friday, which I am planning on using to get the house as clean as humanly possible. I plan to get up, make breakfast, make bread dough and set it out to rise (or maybe make an apple pie) and then clean my house from ceiling to floor, accomplishing a lot of the stuff I've been putting off over the past few weeks.

I'll take a break mid-afternoon to go apply for my passport, and then I'll come back and finish up.

This is, at least, the plan, because nothing would please me more right now than to have my house in order and smelling nice and to have my passport applied for so I can have less of a hassle when I go to Victoria in January.

I'm kind of on a "setting things in order" kick right now. I've been all about getting the car fixed and my hair cut and things, and now I want to concetrate on my daily life--removing the things that make me unhappy and working more on the things that do make me happy.

I'm also on a big budgeting kick at the moment. I finally realized that, yes, my expenses *do* add up to less than my pay, and I can put away a reasonable amount of money if I work at it. I'm working towards a goal of saving 20% of my take-home pay. I'm currently at about 12 percent, and that extra 8 percent is doable but difficult. I'm working on reducing my expenses as much as possible while still leaving myself a little bit of play money.

My big push towards this is the fact that I've finally figured out what I want to do with the house, and I now know about how much money it's going to cost me. I'm going to buy myself a new bed as a Christmas present, and I need to purchase a hard drive for the new server, and then I'm going to be saving money like mad for the next year.

Saving like this requires some shifts in my lifestyle which were overdue anyway--reducing eating out to about once every couple or three weeks, going to the library instead of buying books, taking the bus whenever possible, things like that. Honestly, though, except for eating out and books I don't actually spend lots of frivolous money.

The thing that will help quite a bit, actually, is my anticipated tax refund--even with W's $300 bite taken out of it, it should still be a healthy sum between this being my first full year with the mortgage, not flipping any stock options, and giving a bunch of stuff to charity. I ran the estimated numbers, and they were *wild*. and I was being *conservative* on the things that I'm not sure about.

I may yet get the hang of this financial thing. we'll see.

By the way, I am taking the month of January off from my social life.

I will be doing the bare minimum of socializing--gaming and nest, and maybe lunch with a couple of people. I will not answer the phone. I will probably not reply to much email. I will cut down on my BBS time.

In short, if it involves people, I will be cutting down on it or stopping it entirely.

I am *so* looking forward to this...

And this is a picture in which my hair looks wilder than normal. I look like some sort of mythological creature in here.



This was taken at the beach a couple of weeks ago. The wind was at my back, obviously.

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