Richard’s Personal Blog

The last 30 days have been unusually interesting, and quite expensive:

• Our family was trapped in Mexico for an extra three days due to tropical storm Julio. ($1,050)
• One of the family cars had an almost total meltdown. ($3,200)
• The network server hard drives filled up, requiring extensive upgrade. ($1,014)
• One of the laptops was infected with several viruses. An hour or so later, the network hub died. Coincidence? ($325)
• I took a trip to the local Urgent Care facility due to moderate chest pain. ($15)
• Then there’s the subsequent ambulance ride. (unknown, but probably high)
• The rest of the day in the emergency room. (unknown, but undoubtedly insanely high)
• Dinner at Outback Steakhouse to celebrate my “release”. (priceless at only $86)

Total (so far): $5,690. And, of course, that does not include all the normal stuff — mortgage, gas, utilities, regular bills, school clothes, etc. It is so dámn hard to keep up with all these never-ending crises.

I’m pretty much fine, or as “fine” as I usually am. Yes, I have a series of cardiac tests scheduled starting next week, but I doubt anything serious will be discovered. Beginning to think that my priorities are off a bit.

I will update the costs above after I get the bills.

It’s not every day you say, “Ðámn, I can’t have falafel for dinner because I’m out of hummus.”

Producing only one blog entry per month on my Richard’s Ramblings blog for several months in a row has been an unfortunate side effect of being busy preparing the two rental properties. Gladly, both are now rented, and my time is now spent catching up on the myriad other things that fell through the cracks during that time.

I have a few significant things in the pipeline:

• Finish and publish the rrEasyTooltips Library which, as aptly named, allows developers to easily add tooltips to their web applications. I’ve got about 500 lines of code to refactor and a few methods to add before I’d feel comfortable sticking my name on it; it is kind of like an online resume, after all.
• Finish and publish the next version of the MagicKeywords plugin for WordPress. I started working on this before the acquisition of the rentals. I have a feeling that a lot of the work I did was over-thinking to achieve only marginally better results, and I may end up scrapping some of what I’ve done.
• Home/rental accounting. Boring, but necessary.
• Clean up the tornado that was once my office. And the garage.
• 999 other things.
• Relax. Lowest priority.

Well, if Ryan Seacrest deserves a star on the Walk of Fame, why not honor a monkey with one?

OK, there’s always more than two:

• purchase/replace door stop at front door ($10)
• install fire extinguishers
• replace weather stripping around doors in garage
• clean out weeds in side/back yards
• create and have approved long-term architectural plan for back yard, required by CC&Rs

A much nicer, more manageable list.