Year: 2007

Like many Americans who get their taxes done early, my wife and I recently received our federal income tax refund. As soon as I noticed it had arrived, I moved it over from checking to savings. And as I like to try our finances on my computer1, I registered the transfer of funds from checking to savings immediatley. Then for the rest of the month I wondered why the bank kept showing us as having so very much more money in our checking account than my computer did. Mostly I thought it was due to some checks not having been cashed yet (e.g. the mortgage payment). In any case, I trusted my figures better than the banks as my figures would include those uncashed checks.

Then in today’s snail mail was the paper copy of our bank statement. This evening I sat down and reconciled our checking account and low, I spotted a rather large oversight on my part. I forgot to register the deposit of our income tax refund. Whoops! Once I did that my figures and the bank’s suddenly looked a lot closer than they had and I felt much, much better about our finances.

Moral of the Story#1: If you don’t want to spend money, assume you don’t have it.
Moral of the Story#2: Always be sure to enter all your deposits as well as your withdrawls! 😀

1 I track our finances using KMyMoney.

My wife and I bought one of these on our way out of Target the other day. Sure it was expensive, but it was cold and we were thirsty. Having said that, I’d rather drink motor oil than ever have this stuff again. The drink is horribly sweet and nasty. I figure this stuff mostly helps you lose weight by destroying your appetite (as well as your desire to live).

In response to the Enviga post on the ProductWiki.

A long time back my wife found a recipe for cooking up tilapia. It was fabulous. We thought the recipe had been added to this site but when we went to find the recipe to make dinner tonight; it was missing. Now I’ll be amoung the first to admit the search on this site doesn’t work as well as it should1. But I work with MySQL databases for a living and I poked around in the database this site runs off of without being able to find any trace of that recipe. So we did some searching and ended up using a different recipe tonight. To make sure we don’t have this problem again, I’m adding the recipe right now.

Parmesan-Crusted Tilapia

Ingredients

  • 3/4 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
  • 2 teaspooons paprika
  • 1 tablespoon chopped flat-leaf parsley
  • 4 tilapia fillets (about 1 pound total)
  • 1 lemon, cut into wedges
  • Extra-virgin olive oil, for drizzling
  • Salt
  • Freshly ground pepper

Directions

  1. Preheat the oven to 400º.
  2. In a shallow dish, combine the cheese with the paprika and parsley and season with salt and pepper.
  3. Drizzle the fish with olive oil and dredge in the cheese mixture.
  4. Place on a foil-lined baking sheet and bake until the fish is opaque in the thickest part, 10 to 12 minutes.
  5. Serve the fish with the lemon wedges.

© 2007 The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc.

1 I’ve even installed plugins specifically to try correcting this, without much luck.

Some time ago, I was having a discussion with a friend where it came up that I like those nasty, orange candies known as circus peanuts.  I don’t really understand why I like them myself; I just do.  Since then, I’ve used the term “circus peanuts” in my head as mental shorthand for anything that I like which either isn’t any good and/or which I have no distinct reason for liking.  I bring this up because my faithful readers will probably notice I started reading a book which wasn’t on my list of planned books, The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan.  I will not pretend that this book has the greatest story, characters or writing in the world; however it is a book which I have read multiple times and always enjoyed.  I picked it up to read this morning as I looked over my unread book list and nothing on there appealed to me in the slightest.  So I went with a “circus peanuts” book to have something to read over my lunch hour at work. Then as  I was about to start reading the book, I started to wonder what other people’s circus peanuts might be.  What do you think?  What is your “circus peanuts”?