I stumbled across this article while surfing the web yesterday. It’s one of those inspiring articles that makes you want to start taking action immediately. A few good points that I’ve taken away from the article:

1. If you never spend more than 99% of your income, you’ll always have more money than you know what to do with
2. If you always spend 101% of your income, you’ll go further and further into debt.

This seems obvious, but by presenting this as a difference of only 1%, you realize how important it is. Anything greater than 1% saved is fantastic, anything less than 0% saved is horrible.

What else will I do? I’m going to quit coffee. I’ve said this many times, and have actually given it up for several weeks at a time. But, I always find the social aspect of coffee brings me back. Plus, I really like have a coffee cup in my hand while I’m driving to work. I think there’s a solution here: Don’t drive to work! That’s a ways down the road. For now I’m going to try really hard to get off the caffeine train.

I’ve made a lot of bread-machine bread in my time (31 whole years!) but I never made it completely from scratch. It was fun to mix everything up, knead the dough and watch it cook. I’m not sure making one loaf of bread in a modern kitchen really benefits the environment. The oven is set around 400 degF for almost an hour, which must be a lot of energy. But, I can be assured that there is no high fructose corn syrup or nasty additives. And, I get to make bread, which is a skill that man has had (or should have) since forever and a day.

Last night as we were leaving a bbq up on the mesa in Santa Barbara, Anna and Oscar found a skunk and decided to give chase. Anna wound up with a decent coating of oily skunk stink across her face. It was really quite nasty and was my first personal dog spraying. She was spitting and drooling and her eyes were burning and watering. We washed her up with the hose and dish soap and let her spend the night on the porch.

I had to take Anna to the vet today. She hasn’t been eating well since Sunday and we were very worried about her. After $610 worth of tests and medicine the vet believes she probably has gas! Damn. Well, at least I talked the vet out of these really cool digital x-rays!
Anna’s X-rays