I got some news yesterday that will be significant to me, but have been asked to keep it quiet in certain circles until it is official in a couple weeks. I will do so for a little while. But wanted to make mention of it here “for the record” as it were, but without the specifics for the moment. More details over the coming weeks.

So, just sat down to go through the bill pile after my vacation. I knew I had gone overbudget, but ARGH! Anyway, when I had finished compiling everything, the amount I was short to pay all the bills that were due was about the same as one months paycheck. Perhaps even slightly more. Now, over the next few weeks I’m expecting to recieve from various sources at least half that amount above and beyond my paycheck. (Things like being paid back for money I’d paid out front on the vacation for my companions, an inheritance check from my grandmother’s estate, etc.) But cash flow wise, it isn’t in the bank yet. So I’m pissed at myself at going over by this much.

Lets see… new A/V setup for the new house… all sorts of new things needed for the new house… a new camera when mine broke on the vacation… several car repairs last month… a vacation including a condo for a week… a new suit for a wedding or two I needed to go to… etc, etc, etc. I probably could of avoided a bunch of those costs if I wanted to, but I didn’t, so now I’m mad at myself for blowing the budget.

But, as several people have pointed out to me, I actually do have the money. I just spent an hour online selling some stocks I had. As soon as the transaction clears, I’ll have all the cash I need. And after all, this is what savings is for, right? When you move and go on vacation and spend all sorts of dough on related things? It’s just that I hadn’t wanted to sell any more. To close on the house I’d done a loan against my 401K and sold some mutual funds and cashed in some of my company options. I wanted to be done at that point. But that really wasn’t enough for all the things I wanted to do in the few weeks after closing. So here I go selling more. Selling some stuff I’d wanted to keep awhile longer. Oh well!

Also, at this point my reserves are way lower than I’d like them to be. With all the events of the past two months, starting with the moment I decided to buy the house, I’ve brought the reserves WAY lower than I would like… although there are still some if an emergency comes up.

So, as I’ve said to various people, I am now *done* for the year. No more non-necessary purchases. Just the usual expenses. And start building the savings back up. Then come January I’ll blow more again on a new laptop. :-)

So, annoyed at myself… but… I wouldn’t undo any of the purchases. I’m not that annoyed. :-)

So, since by yesterday Comcast had not fixed my routing problem between my two computers, and my DSL investigation showed I could only get a low speed IDSL, I went ahead and replaced my old Apple Graphite Basestation with a new Airport Extreme Basestation, which also allows wired machines to attach.

Got it set up pretty quickly. Set up ares with a fixed internal IP and put it as the “default host” on the base station so external traffic would go straight there. Set up a new dyndns host entry for the internal address of my laptop. All was working great, I can do everything I used to be able to at my old apartment.

But… I’ve been having problems with the whole damn thing going down periodically, losing connection on both computers (wired and wireless) until I reboot the basestation. Sometimes this was happening as frequently as once every ten minutes. That is of course unacceptible.

I’ve been playing with adjusting settings and things to try to stop it. I’ve been online almost an hour this time without getting shut out. Crossing my fingers.

But… searching online I’ve seen that this problem is known by a bunch of people. It was fixed for most people by a firmware update a month or so ago (which I already have). But for others, it seems like they had to return the base station and get a new one, at which point it worked.

I’ll see what happens. I hope I don’t have to return it. I hate returning things.

But I should be able to cancel the second IP address if this starts to work and save a couple bucks.