It’s been another couple years since I’ve made any New Year’s resolutions. Here are my current resolutions:
About two weeks ago, I got engaged to a wonderful woman. We’ve been together for almost a year and I knew after about 6 months that she was “the one”. We started looking at engagement rings a few months ago so that I could get an idea of the style of ring and size of diamond she wanted. I was convinced I’d purchase it from a brick-and-mortar store but after talking to a few coworkers, I was directed towards Blue Nile.
I had never heard of Blue Nile before but after a few different people highly recommended it, I decided to take a look. What I found was GIA certified diamonds placed in the setting of my choice for about 2/3 of what I would pay in a retail store. When I was ready to buy, I had the ring in 3 days (ordered on Monday, received on Thursday) with free shipping. I wound up getting an engagement ring/wedding band matching set for my fiancée. Since I had it shipped to my home, I didn’t even have to pay any sales tax. After I got the ring, I noticed the included appraised value was about 50% more than what I had paid. I couldn’t be happier and my now fiancée loves it. I’ll definitely recommend Blue Nile to anyone else I know looking to purchase an engagement ring; and I will definitely try to convince my fiancée to purchase my wedding band from Blue Nile also.
After I was able to finally sell an old engagement ring I had, from a previous relationship, on Craigslist, I decided to put more stuff I haven’t used in a long time on Craigslist. If I can’t get rid of them in a reasonable amount of time, I’ll probably try and locate stores that would purchase the stuff, instead of having a yard sale. The hardest thing for me to sell (and not because of any sentimental value) will most likely be my baseball card collection. I’ve got about 200 cards if you don’t count the complete sets I used to get for Christmas. Unfortunately, the baseball card market isn’t what it was 20+ years ago, thanks to my parents’ generation. When our parents were kids, they would destroy the cards without thinking twice, or their parents threw them out thinking they were worthless. The prices of the cards issued back then is considerable. My generation suffered because our parents wouldn’t let us make the same mistake. They realized that they were playing with a small fortune back then. This backfired on us because not enough cards got destroyed for the prices to skyrocket like they did for cards from 50+ years ago.
I would’ve gone with Ebay but didn’t want to have to pay a commission and didn’t feel like taking a lot of photos of my stuff.
The stuff I’m selling consists of:
I haven’t fully made up my mind if I want to sell my DVD collection. I hardly watch any of the movies and they’re taking up space, but at least they’re accessible if I feel like watching something and there’s nothing good on TV.
There are a few other things I’ll probably just throw out instead of trying to sell, like my 1:24 scale slot Funny car (I used to do this back when I was in high school and haven’t done it since).
I’ve decided that I want to take a deeper look into my finances. I’ve been using Mint.com to track all of my accounts and spending habits but now I want to do that using the financial software I use, GnuCash. Before today, I treated my credit card bills as one transaction on the same day I paid it, so I don’t have a sense of exactly where my money is going, without looking at Mint.com. Starting today, I will begin to enter every transaction I make using my credit card. I wish I had been doing this earlier, but like they say “better late than never”. This isn’t the first time I had been doing something for a while, decided to change something and wished I had been doing it all along.
Total was my last day at DeVry University. After almost five years of going to school part-time (not counting the two years I spent at Penn State), I finally have my Bachelor’s Degree. I received my Associate’s Degree in October of 2008, so everything I’ve been taken since then has been general education classes required for my Bachelor’s. I’m glad to be done but not looking forward to the loan payments I’ll have to start making in a few months. Today also would’ve been my mother’s 65th birthday. I wish she could’ve been alive to see me finally graduate.
It’s been a number of years since I’ve actually made a New Year’s resolution. I decided this year I would make a few. My New Year’s resolutions for 2010:
I finally got to go to my first Devils game at the new Prudential Center in Newark. It’s a very nice arena and I really like how convenient it is for me to get to a game, since it’s only a 2 block walk from Penn Station Newark. I don’t have to worry about fighting traffic to or from the arena, like I did when they played at Continental Airlines Arena (now called Izod Center). The next game I would like to go to would be against the Rangers at Madison Square Garden.
I had off this week from work to use up some of my vacation time, so I thought I would take some day trips.
I started my vacation week of day trips with a visit to the Intrepid Sea Air Space Museum on Sunday. I haven’t been there since I was in the Cub Scouts (probably 6-8 years old), but some of it seemed familiar. I didn’t get a chance to see the Concorde while I was there but hope to maybe see it soon.
On Tuesday, I drove up to Cooperstown to visit the National Baseball Hall of Fame. This was another place I haven’t been to in a long time so some of it did seem familiar but some of it seemed new to me. While there, I also stopped in to see the Wax Museum which is down the street from the HOF.
On Wednesday, I went down to Philly to check out Eastern State Penitentiary. I went there last year for their Terror Behind the Walls haunted house and decided I wanted to go back and tour it during the day. I also walked around the outside of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and saw the infamous Rocky statue.
On Thursday, I got to tour the new Yankee Stadium. 
I got to visit Monument Park (the one in the old Stadium was better), the Yankee Museum, and the Yankee dugout. If they Yankees were on a road trip, I would’ve also been able to visit the locker room. I’ll definitely go back next year when they’re out of town so I can check that out. I just wish I had toured the old Yankee Stadium while I still had the chance.
I ended my vacation week of day trips with a visit to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. The last time I was at the Statue of Liberty, I was probably in middle school. I do remember that we were allowed to go up into the crown then and the stairs were very narrow. We were in a constant line, slowing going up the stairs to the crown.
I hardly post to this blog anymore since I’ve been using Twitter. A lot of other people I know (not personally), have also severely cut down on quantity of blog posts and are using social networking site like Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook to say what they need to say instantly. Over in the sidebar, I have my last five tweets and the last three photos I’ve uploaded to Flickr. I really don’t have much to write about anymore that I can’t do in under 140 characters.
11 months after purchasing my iPhone 3G, I purchased the new iPhone 3GS today at the Apple Store at Fifth Avenue. I reserved the phone through Apple’s website about 2 weeks ago when it was announced. I got a little concerned yesterday when I got an email from Apple reminding me about the reservation and I read the fine print – “Reservation does not guarantee iPhone availability at an Apple Retail Store. iPhone is sold on a first-come, first-served basis.” This made me think there was a possibility that I would have to wait even longer to get the new iPhone. I could either drive into the city with my Cobalt (not really something I wanted to do since the car is only 2 years old) or take the earliest train I could (4:45AM arriving in NYC at 6:15) and pray that the line wasn’t so long that I wouldn’t get a phone. I got to the store at 6:30AM and they had two separate lines, one for people who reserved a phone and one for people who decided to camp out. I walked into the store about 7:10 and by 7:30, I was walking out with my brand new 32GB black iPhone 3GS. I had to pay $499 instead of the $299 other people got to pay because I wasn’t completely eligible for an upgrade. To offset the extra $200, I sold my old iPhone 3G to a coworker.
I’ve played with it a bit today. It’s not much different than the iPhone I had, except for video recording, compass, and voice controls. I also wanted more storage so I don’t have to carry an iPod anymore.