Happy Birthday to Me!!

I am in an amazingly good mood.

I am 49 years old today. My goal for a long time has been to turn 50 in the best shape of my life. (Sadly, that's actually setting the bar rather low!) As part of that goal, I decided to try to get my weight down to 130 by today, then follow that up by actually maintaining the weight loss (for a change) for an entire year, while simultaneously exercising and getting in better shape.

Well, I didn't make my goal. But since July 1st, I have lost 12 pounds (!!!) and I made it all the way to 131.5, which is close enough for me to feel great about it. And I do feel great. I mean, I feel better. It's amazing how much of a difference it makes, not having to drag around those extra pounds of lard.

I got another $50 rewards check from Amazon Visa, which mostly just tells me that I'm still spending too much money at Amazon.com! So that brings me $80.68 towards my next hundred dollars.

They're stinkers. All the credit card companies are. I just got an offer in the mail from Amazon: an extra 2500 bonus points (=$25) if I spend $1600 between October 1st and December 31st on my credit card. They just live to help us rack up the debt, don't they?

And within the last few days, I saw two credit card offers in magazines: (1) Every time you charge a restaurant meal to our card, we'll enter you in our drawing 5 times!! (2) Buy with our card and your purchase may be free! Every few minutes, one of our customers gets their purchase for free. It might be you!

Time to pay it down.

On October 17th, I'm going to log right back onto Paypal and get out my next $500.

I just had a bunch of eBay auctions close. I only sold two small items. But since listing is free until early January, I just turned right back around and relisted everything. It never ceases to amaze me how one week something can generate no interest whatsoever, and the following week it suddenly sells well.

I just finished reading Room. Really good book.