There's something in the water in Orlando

My wife and I went on vacation a little over a year ago to Orlando. We had never been to Disney World before and she really wanted to go, so we went for her birthday. Having never been there, I just went with the most obvious approach to getting everything, from hotel tickets to park tickets. I'm not so sure I got the best price.

Since then, every once in a while all I can think about it going back. It's not like I loved it or anything, but for some reason I want to go back. There must be something in the water. Anyway, this time around I'm probably going to check out this website where I can get the best prices on park tickets and entertinament tickets, including Disney park tickets and Universal Studios tickets. These tickets are surprisingly one of the most expensive parts of the whole trip, and any savings you can get is well worth it.

No wonder newspaper circulation is down

Journalists like the one that wrote this article on Boston.com, could be one reason no one cares to read the news anymore. Why do they always have to talk to people who live nearby, or bystanders, or people that add NOTHING to the story, or even talk about totally irrelevant things.

The beginning of the article is fine, informative (sad and unfortunate), to the point, talking about a student who shot his roommate and then killed himself. Then they talk to some random person who's parents live nearby and instead of saying how sad it is that someone did this, and how bad that person must have been, she complains about students living in the neighborhood near the college causing trouble with partying, and how someone needs to do something about it. The person's thoughts are TOTALLY irrelevant, and outright selfish. The journalist (Katharine Webster) was trying for something and totally missed the point. Why do people have to try and do more than is needed, especially when it just screws up everything.

As a side note, if you choose to live near a college, you have to accept that college students are going to party, and there's going to be issues. If you don't like it, leave. If you expect a college not to grow, or to house all of their students, good luck. Most of the time, this isn't going to happen. Stop being blind.

My condolences to the family of the students and the people affected by this act.

Cell phones

We're always surrounded by people that are addicted to their cell phones. That can't help but to wake up in the morning, call someone, and then stay on their phone most of the time they're alone. It's pretty sad. We used to do fine without cell phones, and now some people can't live without them. I wonder if they have ever shown a drop in depression or loneliness due to an increase use in cell phone. Someone should work on that study.

Any way, I don't care how lonely or important you are, if your cell phone is distracting you from doing things that affect others, i.e. driving, you should be banned from using it. This is why I ahve no problem with laws that restrict cell phone use. In addition, it may be nice to use one on a plane or subway, but it's kind of nice to have some quiet.. there's not enough quiet.

Update

As expected, not much of a networth bump. Our retirement funds did pretty well and gained a chunk last month. Our savings dropped, although this was expected, and this month it will drop a lot more. I'm not worried about it. We have enough money for a few semesters of my tuition, my wife has started interviewing for jobs and making connections. So far we're doing well enough.

My experiment has still been going on, although I made end it early (June or July instead of November and December). It lost a little bit the day before the new month, so things went down slightly. I'm still pretty happy with it overall. I may end it early because we're considering moving, so I want our credit to be better before we have people looking at it to see if we can rent an apartment they have. It'll be a non-gain of a some money, but only like $300 or so. As for the stock portion, we'll probably pay it off using savings and keep the stocks until they have been held over a year. Depending on how I feel about them, we may or may not sell them after that point. I would just rather pay the 15% capital gains, rather than the higher tax amount.

Lately we've been too busy, with the semester ending and a lot of things going on, and upcoming trips. I just don't care too much about our money at the moment. So we're spending a bit, but all to keep sanity and enjoy life.