Army Post Road

     I'm really beginning to feel good about saving money and not blowing it at the bars and on silly stuff now that I've started reading so many peoples blogs about personal finance and what not.  As an example, by joining into my parents' phone plan, I'll be saving nearly $60/month!  Since February, 2005 when I had my first Cingular payment, I've paid on average $92.50/month for my cell phone and now that will be cut down to approximately $30-$35/month.  Additionally, I discovered I don't have to completely surrender my current Iowa City phone number either.  I found on Cingular's website that I can suspend my account with them since the military has redeployed me to an area that they don't have service, thereby keeping my number with them until I get back to Iowa City.  Who knows, maybe by then T-Mobile will be selling service in Iowa City and I'll be able to move my number over and not have to go back to Cingular at all.  Wouldn't that be nice?  I imagine that would involve T-Mobile having to purchase one of the providers that serve that area (or just buy their license for that part of the radio spectrum) and who knows what the chances of that are. 
    I did however increase one of my monthly bills yesterday when I added comprehensive coverage to my car insurance after weather reports of impending doom-and-gloom weather (the Wizard of Oz was filmed not even 50 miles from here for goodness sakes, storms like that ain't no joke around here) and my desire not to be left entirely on the hook for the repair of hail damage, failing trees, wicked witches of Ft Riley, and whatever might've blown my way (the current forecasts say the bad stuff has pretty much blown by for the time being without hardly any carnage that I've observed around here).  The increase that I'm paying in this car insurance bill is definitely being outweighed by what I'm saving with my cell phone bill.  Between now and October I'll spend an additional $125 on car insurance but save more than twice that much on my cell phone. 
   I just came across a pretty neat website that will show you Google Earth maps and photos of any address you put in and on top of that will spit out all the demographic information you could want from the 2000 Census within a five-mile radius of the address you enter.  Did you over 111,000 people live within 5 miles of my parents house in Des Moines?

     I came across this article this morning about this town in Pennsylvania that has a fire burning beneath it.  This has been going on for close to 40 years.  The town is all but completely deserted now but wow, that'll teach'em miners not to light trash on fire.

     So the reason that some of you know I was in bed by 10 last night (who can remember the last time that happened?) was because we told we were going to go for a task force-wide esprit-de-corp run this morning and we had to meet at the office at the airfield at 0600.  Not that had ever made much sense to me (when do they really ever say loddy-doddy-everybody must come to a battalion fun run two days before a pt test? that was the fishiest thing and should've set off even more alarm bells) but I didn't question it much and yes indeed, we ended up having to give a sample for urinalysis this morning (and now you understand my subject line…).   Only about 50% of the task force was 'randomly' selected but of course all of us who had just arrived in the past two weeks were selected, imagine that.  I don't have anything to hide, atleast in terms of what they'd find on any sort of drug test, so I'm not concerned.  It's always just a pain when they do these things because you have to stand around, drinking lots of water to accelerate the process, and then suddenly you have to pee and because you've been drinking plenty of water (or coffee as I had) you have a strong urge to pee but you're in line and it takes a while and by the time you get to the front of the line you've got 3-4 soldiers, full-grown men, doing the pee-pee dance and just like “ya ya ya, the cup is empty, that's my social now shut up before I whip it out and pee on your table and fill everybody's specimen cups.”
     I will be getting a new phone number once I receive my new phone from my parents.  Dad said he was going to FedEx it to me overnight (whether he meant overnight tonight or tomorrow night I'm not clear on) so I expect that it will be here tomorrow or Friday. 
     I do hope that I'll get some sort of pleasant surprise soon where I'll be able to go home before the 14th of April so I'll be able to retrieve my TV because, to paraphrase Homer, “No beer and no TV make Mikey go something-something-something.”  The no beer part is really a result of me choosing not to buy any but nonetheless, no beer is no beer.  
     So I'm still in this mental tug-of-war on whether my next purchase goal should be a new(er) car or some new electronics.  As I say that, it occurred to me that buying new electronic toys in dabbles here and there over the past 2-3 years is about half of what has prevented me from keeping up with/paying back my bills.  The other half largely being beer.  A nicer, more reliable car I think would serve me much better (and do more to keep my blood pressure down) than an XM Radio or an iPod would.  I think I negated a desire for an iPod because the new phone I'm getting plays mp3s and has a CompactFlash memory slot so I'll get my mobile music fix that way.  
     I must be productive before bed, goodnight.

     Finally, I'm updating from my room because today my cable Internet was installed.  I didn't get cable TV at the same time because I didn't bring my TV from home with me and that is definitely not something I'm going to by an additional supply of.
     Since my Cingular phone doesn't work well down here at all, I decided last week to switch to T-Mobile and join my parents' FamilyTalk plan or whatever T-Mobile calls it.  That was all well and good because my calls to all of them would be free, calls to and from gov't cell phones (at least the ones of the people in our Task Force) would be free and it would be costing me roughly $50/month less.  The catch that I just learned of a few minutes ago:  I can't port my number from Cingular to T-Mobile because T-Mobile isn't licensed to sell Iowa City numbers.  BLASTED FCC AND YOUR STUPID GEOGRAPHIC LICENSING MODEL!  I've had this particular phone number for more than two years now, I was looking forward to not having to change it. 
     I'll keep you posted as events continue to transpire.

     Yes folks, I am still alive and kickin', the Army hasn't killed me yet.  As is par for the course with the Army, I'm not supposed to outline much at all in the way of details here on the Internet but things are going well.  I'm working in the S4 (the task force supply section) as opposed to for MAJ George in the Urban section which wasn't my idea, and I wasn't very pleased with it at first, but it'll be fine so I suppose it's all good.  
     Right now I'm sitting at the Buffalo Wild in Manhattan, who knew they had free WiFi?, and this is the first I've been able to access the Internet on a private computer since I won't get my cable Internet installed in my barracks room until Tuesday morning.  I think it's a little unfair that everybody living in the hotels in JunkTown get free cable TV and free WiFi and those of us living on-post have to pay for both.  It isn't a perfect trade-off considering all the advantages I think there are with us living on-post but it's close I suppose. 
     On a random note, trying to use your laptop and eat cheese-covered potato wedges doesn't work out the best for keeping grease off your keyboard. 
     I'm trying a new beer at the moment, Sam Adam's Spring Ale, and it's pretty good but it won't replace Blue Moon as my favorite.  
     Right at the moment I'm being entertained by the fact that a girl sitting about five feet from me looks nearly identical to a regular customer of mine from QuikTrip in Cedar Rapids who was a dancer at Woody's.  Same dark brown angel hair, same skinny-as-a-rail-ness, and nearly the same cute face.  This girl even has a nose piercing on her left side as well.  It's quite uncanny.
      Last week I discovered Monk-E-Mail on CareerBuilder and now my mother and Keely have become quite enthralled with it, sending me Monk-E-Mails.  It's quite entertaining because you can make the monkeys say anything you want.  You can either call them and record a message over the phone or their site has a text-to-speech feature (which disappointingly has a daily limit to the number of different things you can make it say) that just makes the whole thing ridiculous.  Now if only someone would do the same thing for Yellow Labs and we could have even more fun having Ell look-a-likes say the ridiculous things in our heads.
     That's all I have for now.  I'll check back in again before I go probably.

    So this is it, my last night before I go forward on to Kansas.  It was a good night, Jen and Dana came over for dinner and we ate spaghetti and played Balderdash (I won quite soundly by the way).  I really think maybe I've psyched myself out way too well at this point.  It's only Kansas, everything will be alright.  As Kelsey is fond of saying, everything is alright in the end; if it's not alright, it's not the end. 
    I got a little bit accomplished this afternoon, but not a whole lot.  Thankfully in all reality all I needed to get done was but my clothes into bags and gather some other assorted items and I got the former done (which was probably the bigger but simpler task).  It's a good thing that I don't have to leave until like 1PM at the latest tomorrow so I should be able to fake it.

     One thing I just realized that I definitely need to do before I leave Monday is FINISH MY FRIGGIN' TAXES.  I had them done back in February just I've been procrastinating on filing them.  I was trying to find a statement from the Student Loan Administration or whatever they're called but I realized even if I did I think it would only increase my return by about $5 so I'm not gonna kill myself looking for it.
     Another thing I wanted to mention was that I've started using Del.icio.us.  It's a 'social-bookmarking' service.  It doesn't cost anything and really what it amounts to is a central-storage place for your bookmarks (in case you're like me and use quite a few different computers through the course of business) and you can also find new websites to go to because you can see everyone else's bookmarks (so if you don't want everybody and their brother that uses Del.icio.us to know that you only use the internet for midget and granny porn, don't use it to save those bookmarks) and search through them via titles and tags.  Quite cool.

     First of all, I would like to sound a celebratory note for Iowa State in keeping their Men's Basketball Coach Revolving Door going yet once again.  Three coaches in six years.  Hopefully that is a good harbinger of the likelihood that Iowa will get rid of His Sliminess, Steve Alford, especially after Iowa's one-and-done performance in the NCAA tournament.  Way to go Hawks, letting Northwestern State come back from being down by more than FOURTEEN POINTS TWICE.  That's some fiiiiiiiiine basketball there.
     Today is pretty much my last day to get anything accomplished (i.e. packing and cleaning my room) before I leave.  Actually I suppose I don't really have to break my neck getting everything done today since after church we don't have anything going on until after Mom gets off work and we go and do our thing with Jen and Dana.  So betwixt today and tomorrow I have to get everything done.
    Yesterday was a good St Patrick's Day, even if Keely and I did miss the parade and the night ended on a fairly lame not.  Good stuff nonetheless. 

     I wish to offer my congratulations to CNBC for having some of the most attractive women in television; in their stable of hot reporteressas they have Erin Burnett, Liz Clayman, Melissa Francis, and Maria Bartiromo that regularly appear during each business day.  Yum.
    Watching CNBC all day long is definitely something that is going to get cut way back starting next week.  That'll be a huge adjustment not being able to keep a fix on what exactly is happening in the markets during the day.  I don't trade hardly any more often than maybe once or twice a month (hopefully that will be something we can improve soon) so missing out on every broadcast moment of CNBC during the trading day won't be much of a material loss but it will be a blow to the part of my personality that is Type-A.
     I decided that I'm going to open an online savings account that pays a super-duper high interest rate.  Why not take up a large, reputable bank on their offer to pay me more than 4.5% for my money?  Jonathan at My Money Blog has a pretty good comparison chart of the four best online accounts.  The information is all good except most of the banks have updated the interest rate they're paying by either increasing them outright or introducing some very nice promotional offers.  Most of these banks offer some sort of referral reward where the new account opener gets $25 and whomever referred them gets $10 or something along those lines.  Once I get my account set up I'll post more details incase people want to get more free money from these banks.
     I'm heading for Iowa City soon (last trip there :'-( ) so I've got some stuff to do before then.  I'm out.

One more thing I'd like to mention (who knows why it's already coming up almost two years in advance but nonetheless) is the 2008 election.  Senator John McCain (R-AZ) (one half of the McCain-Feigngold travesty I mentioned in my post of a bit ago) is not the fantastic candidate he is reputed in some camps to be.  The most simple and strongest piece of evidence to that is his candidacy in the first place.  He cannot win the Republican nomination.  He is not a romantic maverick character in the party like the media likes to portray him as in the greater political arena.  His views are quite askew from that of the great mass of the party and his challenges and defiance of the President's initiatives and policies have made it nearly impossible for him to gain support amongst either the conservative activists, money donors, or the masses in the party who are still very loyal to President Bush.  There are quite a few other candidates who will be much more palatable and agreeable to the large bulk of the party, men and women who are more inline with the views of the majority in the party and who didn't flirt with the idea of being John Kerry's vice-presidential candidate in 2004. 

     I'm reading Jim Cramer's Real Money: Sane Investing in an Insane World and one of the maxims he covered in the chapter I'm reading at the moment was, to paraphrase, don't fear missing anything.  That is something I struggle with constantly.  I can be quite paralyzed by worrying and stressing over what I may be missing by staying home or attending a function with my family or going to work or what have you.  I don't imagine it does me any good in any physical or mental manifestation to be so worked up by self-doubt, second-guessing, and whatever anxiety that comes with hindsight.  As a matter of self-examination, I wonder a lot about which personal flaws and failings I'm going to outgrow and which ones I'm going to be left struggling with forever.
    I think it's quite a bit of disingenuous irony that Senator Russ Fiengold (D-WI) would suggest that Congress censure President Bush over the NSA domestic spying imbroglio on legal and Constitutional grounds.  Sen. Fiengold himself is the co-author of one of the most unconstitutional bits of legislation of the post-Watergate era, the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act.  That legislation has by far infringed on the Bill of Rights for so many more Americans than the national security measures President Bush authorized ever have and ever will.  The free speech and free expression rights that so many liberals defend so rabidly (when it suits them) are trampled left and right like a running back training camp in Sen Feingold's legislation and he has the gaul to suggest President Bush be formally chastised by the Congress for taking some license with the privacy considerations we're granting to individuals who aren't even physically present in the US.