A response to Day of Silence, a Viddler Episode by Chris J Davis.

Obviously, the blog day of silence would have more impact when observed by those who actually post regularly enough that a day of not postiing might be noticed. That said, the whole concept of a "Blog Day of Silence" seems a bit wrong to me. First off, I believe that a "moment of silence" is "non-religious" way of offering a chance for people to pray, as a group for something. Because the vast majority of people seem to think freedom of religion equates to freedom from religion, we've been forced to disguise the fact that for most of us, even if only in times of great loss, we feel there is a time when prayer, meditation, contemplation, or whatever you want to call it, is neccessary. So we have our moment of silence. But, to me, a "Blog Day of Silence" is something else entirely. While a few may spend a few moments in reflection or prayer, most who "participate" will not. They will go a day without posting, they will stick a little graphic on their site, and they'll go about their life as usual, but with a little bit of "Look-what-a-good-person-I-am" feeling. For most of us, we blog about ourselves and our lives. It's an interesting thing to do, but our blogs are about ourselves, and to me, something like this is also, for most people, just about ourselves. I really think the impact of something like this is minimal. It's very preaching-to-the-choir.

If you really want to make a difference, by all means don't post, but rather than bragging about not posting, take the time you'd use to post to write a letter to congress ask for sensible and constitutional gun control laws and better treatment for mental illness. I think that will have much more impact than a lack of posts and a little graphic.

(If you want my opinions on gun control, you'll have to ask, that's a whole other (long) post of its own.)

TBWITWW and I were talking over dinner the other night about our financial goals. How much money we would like to have available for ourselves for our various expenses and savings.

Here is what we've come up with so far:
Emergency Fund
This is the money to cover things like unplanned car repair, medical expenses, or job loss. The goal is to never touch this fund. Eventually, I'd like to get it up to a total of 6 months income replacement for both of us, but that's long-term.
Goal: $2500

Vacation Fund
Both of us are the sort who don't relax. We always have to have stuff to do. Even our relaxing usually consists of projects. Vacations allow us to change focus and make our "projects" more leisurely. To this end, we need vacations for mental health. This fund would be annual.
Goal: $1000

Down Payment
We want to buy a house. While a 10% down payement would be nice, I don't think it's likely given what we want in a home. What we really want is a single-family home with a yard and we want a home in the city. We know that realistically, we're looking at an either-or. However, we want the negotiation room that a good down payment will get us.
Goal: $10,000

Retirement
My own 401K is in good shape, however TBWITWW has very little in hers. She has not contributed to a retirement fund since we got married. Her current employer does not offer one, and we've not had much available to contribute. Now that money is becoming available in our budget, we need to start building a retirement fund for her.
Goal: Fully-Funded Roth IRA

Well. I’ve converted my current theme (with a few minor adjustments) for habari and installed it. It seems to be working well at the moment, although the importer did not get the pages (most of which would not work anyway). Also the search function is broken. I’ll see what I can do about those in the next few days. I’m pretty happy with it so far. Still needs some tweaking, but I’m definiately getting there. Check it out.

EDIT: Now, it's up and running as the main site. Please let me know if you find any major problems.

So I feel like I've been a bit of a stalker of Chris J Davis lately. What can I say, the guy is cool. Oh well. I've installed his "Lifestream" plugin and have made some adjustments. Although it's not really supported any more I'm liking it. I added Library thing to it so it'll track when I add books. I'm thinking about throwing in Netflix as well, but I'll probably wait a bit until I can use the Habari version. I'm going to make an attempt to convert this blog sometime soon. If I do it right you should notice very little difference when it happens. (In reality, I'll probably screw it up royally and have to reinstall things 2 or three times, 'cause that's just how I roll.) I actually like this theme enough that I'm going to stick with it. So it'll be a fun conversion process. I'll keep everyone posted.

And, sometimes, they come back a zombies, and you have to hit them in the head with a shovel several times before they'll stay down. What can I say, I've been a slacker this month. I've done very little of what my goals are, and I've found other bad habits creeping back. Here are the problems as I see them right now.

1. I did not set solid, measurable goals.
2. I did not set goals that I can share with, and get help with from, TBWITWW
3. I have allowed myself to be comfortable with things as-they-are rather than as-I-want-them-to-be
4. The weather has been sucktastic

1) Because the goals are not specific and measurable, I have no good way to track them. Which makes it easy to take a "close-enough" attitude towards the goals I have. For the remainder of the month, I am going to ride the stationary bike a minimum of 20 minutes on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

2) This is directly related to #1 as it's hard to encourage me to meet my goals when they're not specific. My secondary goal was general house keeping. Could that goal be less specific? For the rest of the month, I'll focus on the following: When going to bed, nothing on the Dining Room table, coffee table, office chair, or couch that doesn't belong there. Bed made each morning, Dishwasher run each night. Also, on Monday, Wednesday and Sundays, I'll spend 20 minutes working on the middle bedroom's mess. We got new shelves so, by the end of the month, this room should be useable again.

3) This one is mostly financial. We got to the point where we got our savings built up a bit, and after the bills are paid, there's money left. We've taken to spending that money again. We've been eating out, not doing grocery shopping, and generally not being careful. I've also been much less consistant with entering data into Money. That needs to stop. That's how I've managed to ruin my financial health more than once. Reciepts need to be entered daily. When I look at the budget, I'd like to tighten a few things (we downgraded our cable plan this week) I'm seriously considering downgrading our Netflix plan as well. (or replacing it with Amazon UnBox on the Tivo). I'll probably also increase our automatic deductions that I have setup right now. I'm considering adding a bit in the sidebar to track the savings account so I have a reminder every time I log in.

4) Well, there's nothing I can do about the weather, but I need to stop letting the crappy weather put me in a crappy (and lazy) mood. Too often I'm tired and lethargic when I get home, so I sit down at the computer and putz around rather than spending the half hour to get some things done. I need to stop that as well.

All together, I actually am fairly proud of how far I've come. I've still got a long way to go, but I'm getting there. I just signed up for twitter, and I think I'm going to use that as a way of providing other people with an insight for what I'm doing. I'll post my exercizing and cleaning time so you can see if I'm actually doing it. I'll get that up in the sidebar as well soon.