Army Post Road

I read this post on the blog of NYC Money.  It encapsulates quite eloquently a lot of what I've felt about my own decision-making over the past 18 months to two years.

     Congratulations to both the Iowa Men's Basketball team and the Roosevelt Girl's Basketball team on winning the Big Ten Tournament and the Girl's State Basketball Tournament, respectively.  Begrudgingly I have to admit that the Iowa basketball team deserves some credit for a good season. The Roosevelt girls winning comes on top of Roosevelt winning two individual state championships in wrestling.
     When I was at Roosevelt the only state championships I can remember us winning was boys team and individual tennis and boys cross-country. Ironically, I don't think they won either of those two champsionships the previous season. The baseball team and boys basketball did pretty well one or two seasons while I was in high school but they didn't win any championships. I'm glad they're getting better at some of the more recognized, popular sports. Now they just need to pick it up in football. Too bad they didn't and don't have a state championship in show choir like they do for jazz band. We probably wouldn't have won the championship but I know we certainly would've been in the top 8 probably.

I realized today that I read a lot more than I really realized and gave myself credit for.  I usually have 2-3 books that I'm at some progression of reading at a time and I blow through so many different newspapers in a week.  Plus the huge number of blogs and websites I read in any given day.  My mom thinks my brain is atrophying while I'm not taking classes.  HA!

Why can't they do shit like this around here?  The police were giving away baseball tickets to good drivers.  No fair.

One thing I know that would've atleast mitigated some of the financial trouble I've gathered for myself would be if I didn't have to drop $55 here, $100 there paying off delinquent parking tickets and tow fees.  If it didn't lessen my financial difficulties it would atleast leave me with more beer money.  I suppose if I didn't get parking tickets I wouldn't even have to pay them.
No more tears over that, I've got partyin' tonight to get ready for.

That's Iowa City Socialist Soviet Republic.
After tonight I have about 4 nights left here in Iowa City. Yikes.

I was looking at my livejournal site and I noticed that my last twenty posts span from the Fifth of November until today's post.  In 2005, I posted on average more than 12 times a month.  In three months I posted twenty times or more, including 35 times last April.  My posting has just plummeted.  I'm a failure at this.  Oh well.  We'll still continue to plod along, more regularly hopefully.

     In the Monday, March 6 issue of BusinessWeek there is a sizable article about several different blogs that are almost solely devoted to personal finance and investing.  They make mention of several different people's blogs including MyMoneyBlog.Com by Jonathan Ping, Boston Gal's Open Wallet by Jane Dough, and several others. I've perused several of them since reading the article on Saturday and they've all been pretty interesting, atleast to me the investing and economics nerd. 
    I don't know what it would make for compelling reading for the few (if any) people who read this now but I may sprinkle this with more about my own investing (what little there actually is at the moment) and economics, beyond griping and self-chastisement like I've been known to go on with before.
    Tonight my parents, Keely, and I watched Walk The Line.  I love that movie.  Of course it started off with our own drama; my mother is incapable of watching or even hearing any movie with the slightest gore (she spent most of Two Towers and Return of the King with her eyes closed and her ears covered and that was the slaying of fantastical, evil beings).  When the movie started and I said, “Mom, you may not want to see this part coming up,” (and I said this just about as the movie was literally just beginning) she goes running from the room going, “La la la” at the top of her lungs with her fingers in her ears.  We also happened to be eating dinner right then as well so her food was getting cold and she just got up from the dinner table screaming like a little child.  I told her to come back because it was still a little ways away before anything remotely gross would happen and when they showed Johnny Cash touching the table saw in the shop at Folsom the first time, she once again went running from the room with her fingers in her ears.  Of course my mother continued to carry on in the other room and I told her that in actuality you don't see much of any gore and she doesn't believe me and asks if it's over and I told her to come back in and of course when she does you can hear the sound of the table saw in the mill and she runs away screaming again.  When I finally convince her to come back in because you won't see anything (this is as Johnny is walking down the dirt road) she comes back in and sits down and sees Jack Cash convulsing on the bed she begins to spaz out in her chair and won't settle down until oddly enough the scene where Johnny's dad begins to throw things about their house.  All the while, almost all the dialogue in the movie between its very start until Ray Cash is thrashing about their house is being covered up by my mother and sister babbling and screaming, “eww,” and, “gross,”.  Trying to watch movies with either my mother or sister, let alone both of them, can be very taxing especially if it's one I haven't seen before, has any violence at all, or is dialogue-intensive at all because they'll ask questions throughout or flip out at the first sign of gore or any number of things to disrupt or interrupt or otherwise interfere with the movie-watching.
    I guess I'm back in that stage where I just want to rant and grumble about love and everything along with it.  Most of it is probably wrapped up in being lonely and every bit of advice I'd get from anyone would be to just cheer up and keep on.  That would also probably come from all my friends who are already engaged.  Fuck them.  None of them have been single in years.

     My last post got truncated because the computer wanted to be restarted and I didn't come back to the computer very quickly.
     I was thinking about how ready I am to go to Ft Riley and I thought to myself that I wished I'd made a bit better use of the recent past.  But I don't know how I could have.  I certainly could have managed my money better but in terms of my friends, I think I could've done a bit better but I don't think I could've done anything that would materially change how I feel about any relationships.  I could've tried harder to socialize with Dove but I think that's the only thing that wasn't made all of that it could've been. 
     We'll have to see how much I can make of the time that I'm back in Iowa City  before I get to Riley.

     Yes folks, I have finally reached the point where I am no longer at QuikTrip, albeit I'm still technically an employee (as a fall-back thing when I come back from deployment).  It's a fantastic feeling to know I won't have to go back there for a long time, if ever. 

     It is, however, the first part of the endgame to everything before I go on active-duty at Riley.  Laura left for Ft Belvoir Friday morning and soon I'll be leaving, too.  I don't know what to say about that, I'm really going to miss her and she's going to be a long way away, assuming she makes the Soldier Show which for her sake I hope she does, and she said a few days before she left that she wanted Glen back except for the Soldier Show so the whole deal is full of discouragement.  April and I sat down, drunk at 2-something in the morning, and talked all about Laura and then her and Shane.  I don't think I covered much of the conversation here but don't particularly care to rehash much about it right now.  While I was driving here, I'm at my parents' house for a couple days, I was thinking about how I wish I were fortunate enough to have someone that I could be coming back to when all of this is over because I can't say that I won't be missing people the entire time I'm gone because I've been missing people for most of the past year anyways.