Sort of thinking about heading up to Flagg this weekend as I haven’t been up there in a while, and it will soon be too cold for me to comfortably hang. Of course, it would be about $30 in gas just for the drive.
And I just threw down $140 for my 20k mile service, which seems like a lot of money to top up fluids, change the oil and air filter and rotate the tires. Sure there’s a lot of check points, but it was less than an hours worth of work with a car wash included. It was $110 in labor to do very basic things. I’d understand if they were doing real mechanical stuff, but these were all things I could do myself given the time and inclination. I need to start shopping around for another place for milestone service.
I think I’ll probably head up there at any rate just to get out of the PHX for a couple of days and get some mountain air in my lungs, and get some sanity distance between me and work.
Been going over the money situation while trying to budget for a $3300 camera purchase in a couple of months. Turns out I have somewhere in the range of about $350 a month in discretionary income. That means in 10 months, buying nothing not in budget, I could afford it / pay it off. If I can get a 12 month same as cash thing, that would be mucho coolio. This is less free and clear income than I would normally suspect, but I was also highly pessimistic about expenses and rolled in a lot of things I wouldn’t normally consider like possible tax payment shortfalls and yearly re-occuring expenses that I would normally forget.
I need to start getting focused on other money making ventures again, like selling prints and dedicate some time to them when I can come up for air. But there’s also plenty of opportunity to save money on my eating out expenses, and come February we could probably reduce our rent costs by a couple hundred bucks each month by choosing a less choice location in which to live.
In the mean time, I’m trying to push some more stuff up onto ebay. Being the super nerd I am, I have multiple generations of tech crap laying around that I will never touch again, but could certainly be converted into beer money (note: I hate beer. It tastes yucky. But beer money is a great term.) Sometimes selling on ebay seems like a full time job in itself, but I have to say that between ebay, paypal and UPS, they make the whole experience relatively painless these days, although for a hefty 6% total skim off the top.
Need to touch TechGoesBoom and get a new design up over there and get the advertising worked out a little better. I’m really the only one posting on it these days, and I need to work out a better system of getting potential posts outlined and some time dedicated for writing the posts. I should be getting my first check from Google representing 8 months of ads which have yielded that magical $100 mark.
I also need to start getting more work in on learningphoto.com as its ad content pays far better. I should really recruit some college photo students, and lend them dSLRS in exchange for writing at least weekly articles and posting RAW files. College kids have free time. Might be interesting to have a pool of lenses, a light setup, and like 3 cameras. Canon 300Ds can be had for less than $500 at the moment, so the startup costs would not be bad at all, perhaps $1k per photographer. This sound interesting to some of you college people out there?
I’ve gone into another super ninja killer spell when I end up hitting people a lot harder than I think I am. Body movement goes a long way.
Okay, does that make up for my lousy blogging schedule?