Today was a
mental health day.
I had a long hard week at work. I needed to unwind and my shins still hurt from doing shin conditioning drills at Wing Chun.
I did my taxes earlier this week and had discovered that Uncle Sam was going to be sending me a couple of large checks in the mail. I say "a couple" because I mean, of course, both the state and federal taxes and they're both large. The tax break on student loan interest is a total godsend, making me think that student loans may not be the form of indentured servitude I always claim it to be.
After sending in my tax forms I start to make a list of what to do with the money.
- Get a tune up/new muffler/new shocks/whatever it needs for my car.
- Buy new shoes and a set of baat jaam do for my kung fu class.
- Buffer the checking account.
- Buy upgrade stuff for my computer.
That last one should read, in fact, "Buy stuff for a new computer" because mine is so old the upgrade route requires pretty much a new everything.
Alas, after shopping around for the computer bits I want, I noticed that the balance on my credit card was way too hight and I need to throw a lot of my return money at it. Well... I don't need to, but I should. This pretty well prevents the new computer stuff portion of my list.
So today, feeling pretty bummed, I go out and buy a used power supply for my current machine. The old one is dying and making a hell of a lot of noise. The fan is going. In addition to the power supply, the shop also had a used 120 MHz Pentium processor, which is the fastest my motherboard would accept (I was running on a 90 MHz at the time). So I got that as well.
I spent the day drinking Mountain Dew, eating cold pizza, and playing with hardware. I haven't gotten to geek out in a long time, and it was a nice change of pace.