Today was six long hours of back-to-back calls, interspersed with a couple of breaks. They sent a small list of people home early on in the day, but then it got busy.
I was grateful for the craziness, for it tells me that all is well with my job – and my world. I will work six more hours tomorrow, and then next weekend I am picking up the shifts of a friend of mine who is having surgery. I hope she does okay. That will be eight more hours added to my paychecks.
Since moving here from my apartment, at times it seems as if my bills have gone up, but I do believe they have gone down. My rent included my utilities, and was over $325 every month – sometimes getting as high as $400, but here so far I have barely breached the $300 mark – not including my deposits and moving fees. As such I feel that overall I will save money here, money that I can use to move toward a better, more sustainable life for myself and my daughter.
To keep utilities down, I have promised myself not to use the clothes dryer this month, to instead hang my clothes up to dry instead. I am testing how it is to hang clothes inside to dry, so have a small clothes line hung in the back storage room and the clothes hung on it. This experiment will tell me whether or not I really NEED a dryer in my life. If we can manage by drying them inside, then it will be a simple matter of not replacing the dryer should it die, and then I won’t have to worry about moving to an area that forbids outside clotheslines. Or I can simply dry my clothes inside to keep people from knowing my business. An even better reason.My neighbor decided to get a magicjack of her very own. So far she likes it. She has it running on Windows vista without a single issue. I’m glad for her. I dislike Windows vista personally. It takes too much machine to do too little stuff. For instance, this netbook is running my magicjack, a word program, a notepad program, and Google chrome with several pages open. It is working fine. If I tried to do that on my vista computer, which has over twice the power of this little machine, it would literally choke and freeze.M
As I frequently say, less is truly more. I would invest in one of these little machines that run linux, save for the fact that my magicjack needs windows to run. Well, there is another reason. I can find these little things running windows for a lower price than I can the ones running Linux. If I really wanted, I could install Linux myself and save money!
I love these netbooks. They have a small screen and small keyboard, but both can be easily remedied by hooking up external devices, so I honestly cannot complain. They are powerful enough for my day-to-day needs, and I do a LOT. They don’t use a lot of electricity, they have an incredible battery life, especially if you get the bigger battery, and they are VERY portable. Perfect for a wandering Geek like myself.
Well, it is time to fire up the grill and fix some burgers. I’m thinking of getting a propane stove kit, one with a small oven, where I can use it instead of my electric stove now, and in any home I have in the future (or little cabin, if it comes to that).
Hope you are having a wonderful weekend!