I'm a slacker!!

Its been over 2 and a half weeks since my last post. I'm doing exactly what I tried to prevent with the purpose of this blog, falling through! I have one post already written, albeit very poorly, about a weight loss competition that I am in with the Oyfa 07 class. Hopefully I can get that up tomorrow before my typical weekend extravaganza. In general, so many things have happened that are blog worthy within these past two weeks that I feel too overwhelmed to update. Actually I'm just making excuses, I'm more useless than a guy who has thumbs for fingers and fingers for toes -- though, the thought of being able to type with my toes is pretty appealing. Or I could scratch my butt while sitting Indian style... but I digress.

Thanks to some motivation from my friends, I'm going to pick blogging back up!

In terms of resolutions, I dropped a few, and picked up on a few. I still manage to read current events everyday, and I am now a reading a book for about an hour every night. On the other hand, I haven't drawn anything at all recently, nor have I played the guitar. Unless of course, you count the guitar hero controller as playing the guitar.

Let me know if you want me to serenade
you with acoustic guitar hero

As a general quick update:

• This weekend I went to Massanutten for Miguel's "Silver Selebration"
• Miguel doesn't know how to spell.
  
• I gained 4 pounds.
• It was awesome!
• If by awesome, I mean sucks ass. (Thats two to three weeks worth of exercising!)
  
• Indeblue was too long ago for me to remember, that article isn't coming!
• I got paid 3 dollars by 6 people to be quiet for 30 minutes
• I won!
  
• That being said, I'm still working on controlling the decibel LEVEL OF MY VOICE. People on the other end of the table often join in on my "whispered" conversations.
  

Anyway, a bit of a random post. It feels kind of good to be writing in my blog again, especially since I'm an enginerd and lack writing skills. It's more of a go-with-the-flow feel now.

Budgeting for February 2008

There was an interesting article in the Washington Post about the spending habits of young professionals in the DC Metropolitan area circulating yesterday. Basically, people of varying income levels tracked their expenses for a month and realized how much / how carelessly they were spending their money. Luckily, I'm a step ahead of the game here because I have been tracking my expenses for all of January using my iGoogle Tracking System . Even if, my reaction to some of these numbers for this month are pretty jaw dropping:

My Expenseview Report for January
(actual numbers have been removed)

197.78 spent in gas in ONE MONTH. WOW. It makes sense though, because just in the month of January I drove round-trip to upper Maryland (Wisp) , and twice round-trip to Charlottesville. There is also a large chunk of spending for the Gifts category, but that because I ended paying off my credit card for a couple Christmas presents in January.


The good news is that I still seem to be able to deposit a significant amount of my money into my savings account. Still, I'd like that savings number to be higher than 54% of my total spending; I'd like to shoot for 70%. So the next step from here?

I am going to try to make a budget based off of my ridiculous January spending habits where I ended up spending more money Snowboarding than I did on random gadgets or Bars/Clubs. We'll see how this ends up, I hope my February 2008 Expense chart looks better than this one!