It’s been another couple years since I’ve made any New Year’s resolutions. Here are my current resolutions:
This past week, my wife (still not used to saying that word) and I spent our honeymoon in beautiful Honolulu, HI. We stayed at the Hilton Hawaiian Village on Waikiki Beach. Our room overlooked the ocean and we were a quick walk to the beach from our hotel tower. It rained on occasion while we were there but nothing like the rain storms we get in the northeast. Usually they were sun showers. Only once was the sky kinda dark, but after an hour or so it cleared up. We went to Pearl Harbor but didn’t get a good view of the USS Arizona due to the rain coming down at the time. As soon as we got back on the tour bus, it stopped raining. We also took a day trip to the big island, Hawai’i, to check out the volcanoes. It rained there too but only while we were on the bus. While on the big island, we visited the black sand beach, which was beautiful and we would’ve liked to have taken some home if it wasn’t for the superstition that it’s bad luck. We didn’t wanna chance it. We also visited the Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut factory and purchased some Hershey’s Kisses with Macadamias inside (supposedly they’re only sold on the Hawaiian islands). We didn’t get to see any lava flows like you see in the movies, mostly because they’re rare. The shots you see in movies take weeks to get and they use high power lenses to get a close-up view from a safe distance. We would’ve easily spent another week there, if we could have. We didn’t want to come home and deal with work after spending a week in paradise.
Tonight I got married to my girlfriend of the last two years in the middle of a freak snowstorm. It hadn’t snowed in October since the 1950′s, and it’s only the third time since the Civil War that it’s snowed in October. Luckily, the snow didn’t scare away too many of our guests. Out of the the ~115 who responded, ~105 braved the storm; and we were extremely grateful for that. The night flew by too fast. Now I know what everyone means when they say you’ll wish you were a guest at your own wedding. There’s not enough time to take it all in. The crappy weather we had on our wedding day will make us enjoy our honeymoon in Honolulu even more.
My future father-in-law and I went to his gun club to break-in my new Smith & Wesson SD9. He brought along his Ruger SR9 handgun also. Personally, I liked my SD9 over his SR9 even though I only got to put about 50 rounds through each one. The SD9 felt better in my hands. For most of the time we were there, we shot from the 25yd line. It was freezing cold inside the range even though they had the wood burning stove going for a couple of hours at that point. I hit the target most of the time, which I’m ok with considering I couldn’t feel my fingers after an hour and a half, and I had never fired the gun before.
I’m definitely not going back to the range until the spring time, when I won’t have to worry about it being frigid inside the range. My future father-in-law suggest I join his gun club but I’m not too sure; he believes it’s $200/yr plus you have to work there a couple times a year. It’s a shame there isn’t an outdoor range like when I was up in Maine last summer.
Here are some videos of the guns I got to shoot up in Maine.
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.