A little bit of everything

Wow, I’ve totally been spending too much money. Throw that previous entry about being financially responsible out the window. Heh. I think I mentioned that I/we bought a treadmill about 2 weeks ago (or not? I don’t see anything about it now that I look.) That was a fun experience. I went into the store (Dick’s Sporting Goods) with the stock number of the one I wanted. We found it and when the salesperson got around to us he proceeded to inform us that the one I had chosen was a piece of crap. Adam had already expressed his preference for a different model – one that was about $100 more than the one I had originally been looking at, but the salesperson said it was an excellent choice. So we went with that one. It didn’t fit in his car so we tracked down his parents who were having dinner with his younger sister and her fiancé. We took their Santa Fe and headed back to the store only to find that it didn’t fit in there either. It was apparently a lot longer than the other one that he had taken measurements on. They ended up shoving it in as far as it would go and tying the trunk down. We went home on the back roads but I still had fears that it would fall out of the way. Adam called his parents back up and asked if they’d want to come down and help get it up the stairs. The model we bought was about 40 pounds heavier than the original planned one was. So his parents came down to our house (in his car, therefore simplifying the swap) and his dad helped him get the monstrosity up the stairs. It was not the easiest thing in the world and Adam got his foot smooshed in the process (he’s ok though.) Once it was upstairs it had to be taken out of the box and assembled. My original thought was to have it in the living room so I could unfold it and watch tv while I was on it. Adam wanted it out of the way, back in our bedroom. So to the bedroom it went. After we got it where he wanted it, he decided he didn’t like it because our bed was no longer centered with the window. So we moved it back out to the living room. Assembly didn’t go too well either. We had cut the straps in the box that said “Do Not Cut” before we noticed they said that (oops) so it didn’t lay flat on the ground like it was supposed to. That was easy enough to fix. The holes drilled to attach the electronic display to the handles were messed up and the wiring kept getting caught. It took a while (and we could only get 3 of the 4 bolts in) but eventually it was put together. I’m sure Adam left quite the feedback on their registration website. So far things are going well. I’m not a fan of the one-touch programs and I usually end up doing my own thing. Adam likes the golf course one… Hopefully I can keep my motivation going.

The other major purchase of the past few weeks was a couch. I have a futon that I bought when I moved across the hall to C12 in September 2004. I was trying to put off buying a couch because I wanted to spread out the big purchases a little more. But we went to look at American last weekend and couldn’t resist the sale they had going on. We had seen a couch we liked in their ad in the Sunday paper so we zeroed in on that one. Anything $499.99 and up was 25% off, so we got the couch (plus stain protection and delivery) for less than it would have originally cost without the discount. It was a great price which is the reason I decided to just go for it. It should be delivered tomorrow and I’m sure I’ll take a picture of it. We’ll be storing the futon at Adam’s parents’ house until we move somewhere bigger (which won’t be for a while… and when we do we’re hiring movers!)

Here’s some good news/bad news: Bad News: Somehow a Trojan or some kind of hacker virus got into the computer over the weekend. None of the virus or firewall stuff could repair it or get rid of it so Adam determined the only thing to be done was to reload windows. Argh. Good News: I had backed up the hard-drive so I didn’t lose my addresses! Yay me! But (bad news) my Money file didn’t back-up properly so I lost all my history for that (oddly enough it was just mine that didn’t work. Adam’s and our joint account worked fine… *sigh*) but (good news) luckily I had just opened the new account and had only written 5 checks so it was easy enough to recreate. Woo. (Bad News) It seemed as though all the songs I had just loaded onto the iPod mysteriously disappeared while re-downloading iTunes, but (good news) it turned out they were indeed still on the iPod but just didn’t show up on the listing in iTunes for some reason.

Hmm. Let’s see. Not much else is going on. I’m plodding through the history of the Catholic church still. That book seems to put me to sleep almost as much as Proust did. I’m also in the process of reading Oryx and Crake. I’m not liking it as much as I liked The Handmaid’s Tale, but it’s ok.

I’m glad the new season of The Apprentice has begun but I’m not sure I like the fact that it’s on Monday now. I can’t say much right now (Adam hasn’t seen this week’s yet) but so far the season is interesting. I was especially impressed by Ivanka. She seems to have turned out very well despite her upbringing. I’ve watched American Idol a bit and I’m not really too impressed by the choices. I kind of lost interest after the Clay/Ruben catastrophe anyway. (I do own Carrie Underwood’s CD though. Heh.) Apparently one of the guys (Will Makar) is the nephew of someone in Oshkosh so the paper keeps having these articles about him.

I tried out a few more recipes from Rachel Ray’s 365 days of 30 minute meals cookbook. Seriously people, she’s awesome. Pretty much everything I’ve made from the book has been wonderful (scampi excepted…) I also made this beer and cheese soup with broccoli the other day. This was an Emeril recipe. It was good but made me totally sick so Adam gets all the leftovers. I guess I’m going to try and come up with some recipes to try on Friday during Lent to get used to the whole “no meat” thing. Not saying that I won’t be eating meat, but Adam won’t.

Speaking of Adam, his birthday is on Saturday. Since he reads this I won’t go into details of course. We already have reservations at Skyline (comedy club) but the rest of the day is kind of up to me. After this weekend we can go make reservations for May since he’ll be 25 now so we can avoid the huge surcharges on rental cars.

Oh yeah, speaking of cars, we had an appointment last week with his insurance agent to see if putting us both on one policy could save me money. My insurance has continued to go up each year which I find ridiculous since I have the same car in the same place and have never had an accident or a ticket. *Grrr* Anyway, with his current company I ended up paying more but he sure got a reduction. His agent took a look at other companies and found one that saved me a minimal amount, but with his “turning 25 drastic reduction” and the multi-car thing, his rates went way down. We have another appointment on Friday to talk about it some more. The thing is, with this company everyone in the house has to have their insurance. I know he wants to switch because it will save him bundles.

So anyway, as soon as we have confirmed plans for May, I’ll let people know. Hopefully it will be soon. Haven’t checked airfare prices lately, but hopefully they’ve gone down. :)