Tonight I purchased running shoes.  I purchased $100.00 running shoes.  I am going to have feet that don’t hurt when I exercise and knees and a back that don’t kill me after having attempted to get healthy.  I will spend more on shoes, but less at the doctor.  I want to go hiking and hike a 14,000 foot mountain this summer, but my knees are going to need to be able to handle that and I don’t think they will unless I have shoes that support and work with consistent exercise to get my knees back into shape.

Don’t spend crazy amounts of money on shoes unless you’re going to use them, but watch out that your not doing damage to your body by wearing shoes that don’t cut the mustard.  I’ve got to go run to the closet and see if I’ve got something to wear to the ball.

Would you make your own shelves, just deal with the hard to reach spaces, or buy the pre-made units?

Pick one, New York: either make trade, which has been your claim to fame historically, or make healthy, but don’t try to do both.  You’ve got your hands in both tills, but you’re going to close the loop around your hands and get caught with them looking rather red.

What do you do about this in your household?  Should we switch to cash only?  Do you work out things like this with accomplices to make sure that it doesn’t show up on your statements?

• Sprinklers were turned off part way through the month
• The new dishwasher was installed after the month of October
• I didn’t bathe for most of October

OK, so the last two reasons don’t count, but the dishwasher will help a lot, and I fixed a very slow, but persistent dripping valve that lead to our sprinkler system, too, earlier this month.  Hooray for savings where we can get them!

Further, we were using DirectTV’s DVR for recording shows as part of the Qwest bundle, which has a horrible interface.  With cable, which we had before switching to satellite I can use the Windows Media functionality in my family computer to record the shows I want, and even better than that: I can use Windows Media Center to play the shows back, and the Windows Media Center UI is polished, clean, and lets me jump 30 second intervals  in the video instantly.  DirectTV definitely needs to get their act together because the software that I have from Microsoft, which is for general use, is better than the DirectTV junk that they force on their customers.  I did have to buy a second TV card for my Media Center PC to be able to record two conflicting shows at once, so that was an added $110.00.  But for the amount I’m saving, I’m still way ahead of using Qwest for their ‘bundled’ package.

To cap things off when my wife called Qwest yesterday to cancle service they had the audacity to tell us that they’d be glad to try to get us a better rate after having jacked up the price on us just this month!  Why charge customers more if you don’t have to?  Because some customers will just take the rate increase and ignore the loss.  If we run into any other hiccups or problems, I’ll be sure to post them, but I couldn’t believe the savings.

First the security of Mint.com is solid.  They’re setup is reliable, and there should be no concern over the security of your account information on that site.  They use a gateway service that protects your account from being stored on their server… in essence everything happens through several security layers so that if anyone were to hack your account the worst they could do would be to see your accounts’ dollar values, transaction information and if they’re feeling rather nasty they could delete the accounts.  They will not be able to execute any transactions from within Mint.com, and they will not be able to see any account numbers.

Secondly, I’ve been using Mint.com for over a year now and I can honestly say that I love it as budgeting software.  It is the least invasive of the systems I’ve used and it gives me the a lot of information with very little intervention to sculpt the data.  If you haven’t used Mint.com, please consider creating an account and give it a try.  It has a lot to offer in a very simple interface, I think you will like it.

This isn’t revolutionary by any stretch, but we’ve been living without a microwave for 3.5 years now and so having one kinda feel cool and funny.  Various things get hot quickly in the microwave instead of dirtying up several pots and pans, which means I may not have to run the dishwasher as often, or wash as many dishes as often.  Its funny to think how much we’ve been spending on some things because of the fact we didn’t have a microwave.

I actually ended up having to do the following, in case too much information is something you like to have:

• Remove old ventilation unit over the stove
• Remove old cabinet above old ventilation unit over the stove
• Do some electrical magic to make sure the microwave plugged in just right and didn’t cause electrical fires
• Fabricate a spacer/mount for the microwave so as to make sure that it stayed securely in place.  This was not in the directions, but I am overly concerned about things staying on my wall.
• Mount the microwave with help of the wife
• Partially unmount the microwave with help of the wife and fix the direction of the ventilation fan as per the step skipped in the directions I apparently didn’t read carefully enough
• Re-mount the microwave
• Re-mount the cabinet above the microwave and spacer/mount.  This changes our cabinet configuration, but in a good way.

For those of you keeping track I got to do electrical work, wood work, cabinetry (a slight exageration), and install a money saving device.  The only major casualty was my thumb when a random hammer flew out of nowhere and struck it.  I feel like the lovechild of Tim “The Toolman” Taylor and Suze Orman**.

** not really, that’s disgusting.  I’m really glad I have the parents I have.