House painters

I have a new respect for people who paint houses. It's only 9:14pm and I'm just about whooped. Maybe I'll manage to write a post about what we've been up to at some point soon. I'm going to bed now.

Oh noes, it's teh XP-ocalypse

I have spent far more money this month than I would have liked, but I suppose it was inevitable.

I went down to Altex on Tuesday and special ordered a new computer. I had saved up some for it since late last year, but not quite enough to cover the actual cost. I have extra right now though, so it's not a problem. I guess it was wishful thinking that I could get a computer for the amount I had saved that would nicely run the software I use. Anyway, it cost less than the one I'm on right now, which is almost six years old, and the manager knocked some off the price because I had a quote for something similar from Dell. They came in $200 under what Dell was pitching. I hope it lasts as long as this one. I also decided since there's really nothing wrong with the computer I'm on, except that the OS is no longer going to be supported, and it is 32-bit and Autodesk, in their infinite wisdom, er, I mean them being in bed with Microsoft (I told that to some students and they giggled, and then I laughed at them because it was funny) not creating 32 bit versions of their software, despite all that, that I would like to keep using it, maybe as a render farm. I'm not sure how to set that up, but I might can figure it out.

At any rate, I have no space on this little rickety computer desk that I'm currently using. It came from the Wal-Mart about seven or so years ago, and is really a waste of space. The shape makes it so that you can't really put anything but a monitor on it, and it takes up a lot of floor space nevertheless. Right now, my tower is on top of my short bookcase, because you seriously cannot fit a tower on this computer table. So, I got to thinking I'd like some raw furniture that I could stain myself that might be sturdy enough to put two towers and a monitor on, but the stuff is like $300. I had the brilliant idea of looking on Craigslist yesterday, and lo and behold, I found a desk for $80 that was real wood that came from the store I was looking at. I went over and took a look at it after class this evening, and it looks great. And they knocked $5 off the price because the lower shelf was a little loose, and the guy said I'd need to reinforce it. They were very nice. This is actually the first time I've ever bought anything off Craigslist, and I gotta say, if I need furniture I should look there first. Anyway, it fit in the back of my Mazda Tribute, and so I have it out there now. Maybe I can get it set up tomorrow. I don't know when Altex will have my computer ready, but I'm looking forward to it now. When I realized that I really needed to just go ahead and get a new one, I was kinda sad about it. But maybe the VPN won't jack up my IP address when I log off of it on Windows 8.1, and maybe explorer won't randomly decide not to load when logging in.

Now, no more spending. Next up is hopefully writing a nice check to hubby's student loan servicer. 

Debt is good... o rly?

I had meant to write about this the other night, but wound up ranting about something else instead. As I was leaving the classroom on Thursday evening, some students and I were talking about student loans, and I said that I wanted mine paid off, and that I never wanted any more debt ever again, not even a mortgage.

One of the students, who is not my student by the way, but one who had stopped by with friends who were my former students, said to me something to the effect, "Well, having debt is good because it makes your credit better, so that then the bank will give you a loan that you can maybe pay back eventually."

That caused me to blink a couple of times, and I couldn't address what they had said because we were half way out the door, but I wanted to say, 'do you hear what just came out of your mouth?' People, people, people. You've been sold a bill of goods. Quit buying crap you can't afford with money you don't have so that you wind up giving all of your disposable income to the bank in the form of interest payments! I've said it before, but I'll say it again. Add up what you're paying in interest on your debt, and put that into an IRA calculator with a 8% return over forty years (the market has averaged 12%, but we can be conservative on the matter). Don't try to cry too much. It will just make your allergies worse.

The Illusion of Security

Yesterday I went down to my hunting spot at the creek and swapped the card in the game camera. I like the camera I bought, it's a Wildgame Innovations Lightsout camera. I got it in January and have had it out for three months on the same set of AA batteries. The last trail cam I had was crap and ate through D batteries like they were going out of style or something. Anyway, the pictures are very nice, and I had a lot of deer coming through and a couple of racoons, a squirrel, and a pig too. I need to go down there and clear some more branches out of my way before it gets too hot to do anything outside.

Today I had a little bit of a meltdown. I've had a good amount of work lately, I'm an artist, but it's all contract work, and I guess I'd really like to have something a little more permanent. But maybe that's just an illusion, permanence I mean. Sure, someone can say a job is permanent, but as anyone who has read anything of history knows, nothing is really and truly permanent.

I think that the goal of paying off our loans over the last few months made a little distraction for me. I'm fairly goal-oriented, and so while I was working toward paying off the car and the two small student loans we had, my mind was preoccupied on that. However, now that that's all done, and we have two very big loans left that are going to take at least a couple years to pay off, and since we got hit with a huge tax bill this April, it feels like progress has stopped and now my brain has reverted to trying to figure out something else to do with my life. I don't know what that something else is. All I know is that, as much as I love it, a career in animation is unstable and unpredictable, and that the old fall back of teaching for a living is gone forever as a career. Colleges and universities have no intention of hiring permanent faculty of any sort, and are using primarily adjuncts to teach their classes. It saves them an enormous amount of money not to have to pay out things like health insurance, holiday pay, sick pay, pensions, etc. ad infinitum. Truly, with the easy availability of student loan monies to flow into their coffers, they are really focused on quantity rather than quality. The more students they can get in the door, the more money they make. This isn't an indictment of any particular school, but rather of the system itself. This system is in danger of degrading the quality and recognition of our higher eduction degrees. As more and more public money becomes tied up in higher eduction (even in private colleges and universities) the more likely it is that we will see "standards" implemented as we have in our public high schools. And we all know how well that's worked out for us as a society /snark.

I keep thinking that maybe I'd like to start my own studio, but I don't even know where to begin on that one. I'm not sure that I could run a business. My dad has great business sense, but I've never had a chance to try running anything, so who knows how that would go? I'm also over spending money on more schooling. I've already spent more than what many people pay for a house on my BFA. You may ask me if it were worth it, and I'm gonna have to ask that I get back to you on that one, because I think it's too soon to tell even though I've been out of school for eight years. Really, what people should be after when getting a degree of any sort, is whether said degree gives them an ROI or not. Otherwise, why bother? I mean, unless of course you have a trust fund or something, then by all means, waste all the money you want. For the rest of us poor plebes, the results of spending our hard earned money ought to be measured by whether it was financially worth it or not. And let's face it, some degrees aren't worth the paper they are written on.

Security is an illusion. It is marketed and sold to us in multiple forms, from the benign idea that getting a degree gives you some kind of job security (which is a lie), to the more devious sort, that if you give up your freedom, the government will ensure your safety (an even bigger lie).