Gadgetry and Finance: Brian Saves the Day

howdy.

as i've stated before, readers, on occasion, bein' a teacher does have its perks. summers off, weekends and holidays off, and quasi-adorable license plates to name a few.

another perk for educators, as it would seem, is $100 off a computer for the upcoming school year... along with a free iPod of your choice.

my old laptop is an iBook G3, folks (for those of you who have absolutely no idea what that means, its comparable to yours truly puttin' around in a 1993 plymouth voyager made up of three or four different body frame parts). kris' computer, while still operable, is getting up there in age as well, and is beginning to run slow with age. taking all of this into consideration, i decided that with my part of our 2010 tax refund, we were going to buy ourselves a new, fancy MacBook Pro laptop... thereby bringing us back into the 21st century.

you see, kris and i came up with a system a couple years ago in regards to tax season. generally, i keep about one-third of the tax money and blow it on new toys for around the house, where as kris keeps the remaining two-thirds of our refund money and puts it to more responsible ends - paying off debt, adding to savings, blah blah blah. last year, for example, we got ourselves new cell phones, a big ol' HDTV, and an iPod classic (for yours truly)... and kris put the rest into various accounts and other such boring nonsense. so the plan was to be for the 2010 tax season.

that was before i devised a most ingenious plan towards the purchasing of a new computer.

as you already know, i'm not only a teacher, but i'm also a student (and not a bad one at that either, surprisingly enough). as a student, i had to take out ass-loads of student loans in order to fund my master's degree, and all that money had been sitting dormant in one of our random savings accounts all these long months. and so, i decided that since that money wasn't going anywhere, and the time for obtaining my educational discount on a new computer (and free iPod) was running out, that i'd just go ahead and buy the damn thing now and use my third of the tax money to refund the savings account.

and so, dear readers, i got myself a new MacBook Pro, and i gave the Mrs. an iPod Touch for her birthday. not a shabby bit of financin', if i do say so myself.

Jesus, i should write a book on this crap...

- brian

Grad School = Big Pain in the Ass

i already hate grad school, and i haven't even started classes.

as stated before, i have no head for financial figuring-out, using fax machines, scheduling through various departments, calling different agencies and waiting for 3 to 5 business days for answers to simple questions, etc. etc. - all important aspects of the applying-to-graduate-school process. it should come to no surprise, therefore, that i've been having one hell of a time with the whole ordeal. this is absolute hell, folks. and is turning out to be even more of a pain in the ass than the peace corps application i had to undergo. not very much fun.

as it stands - and again, this is from what kris and i can gather (she's been doing her best to help me out with this, as i'm clinically retarded with this crap) - it looks like all i have to do in order to obtain my professional certification (the five-year renewable teaching certificate that allows me to keep my job) is complete my second year of teaching and take the graduate courses outlined in my masters program. that's it. i was convinced that i'd have to take a crap-load of undergraduate courses, thereby stalling my graduate classes and blowing handfuls of loot just in order to keep my job. that would've sucked big time.

then again, when you owe over $26,000 in student loans, what's another $20,000? i've already come to the realization that these loans are never going away, that i'll have to pass them on through subsequent generations as family heirlooms. i'm sure my great-great-great grandchildren will appreciate this.

...though by that time i'm sure we'll all be ruled by space gorillas and robots, so it won't really matter. (see picture)

fortunately, that's not the case. i get to start right away with the mega-hard classes... which i'm not looking forward to in the slightest. like i said before, folks - i hated college (classes). i'm not good at studying, i'm easily-distracted, i can't stay on top of due dates, and i'm arguably the world's worst procrastinator. so, more or less, i'm screwed with this whole grad school nonsense.

so why am i putting myself through this gauntlet of hell? because the houghs are on a timetable, that's why. when kris and i moved down here to florida in january of '07, we expected to live in florida for four to five years - long enough to obtain teaching jobs, finish grad school, and find work elsewhere. i think i've spelled this out before. ideally, i'd like to find a teaching job in illinois or indiana - somewhere in the midwest, close to michigan (there's practically a zero percent chance i'm going to find any work in michigan any time soon). it'd be nice to be able to make the drive from our place to home in less than 10 - 12 hours. now it takes about 22... and that was driving straight through, without a kid. that drive would be absolutely hell now.

sure, you can fly. but around the holidays, you get screwed with ticket costs and all those crap-fees. $700 - $900 to fly home for christmas for four or five days? not worth it, as far as we're concerned.

and so, with grad school out of the way - hopefully by the fall of 2010 - i'll be in prime positioning to start scouting out job prospects in the great white north.

...at least that's the plan so far.

- brian