Cross-County Skiing Every Weekend

Since we first went cross-country skiing in January, we've gone every weekend (usually both days) since then. Excepting one weekend where Forrest and I did a Wilderss First Aid course instead, that is.

So you might say that I'm really rather enjoying cross-country skiing. :) You might also notice that I haven't, ahem, posted about my trips after that first one. My bad. I do have ski photos uploaded to Flickr, at least...

At some point, expect back-dated posts to regale you with tales from the Learning How To Ski department. :)

Budgeting with Shared Expenses

I use Yodlee MoneyCenter to track my personal finances. Its UI isn't all that attractive, but it generally works pretty well. It automatically retrieves transactions from all my accounts, so I don't have to bother with data-entry. This is a huge plus for me; otherwise, I probably wouldn't do it at all.

But things fall apart when you want to follow a budget but you have shared expenses with someone. Say I've budgeted $200 for eating out. Yodlee can generate an "expense report" for that category, no problem. Except, what if I've only spent $100 on restaurants but my boyfriend has spent $400, half of which is my share? Then I'm clearly over budget, but Yodlee knows nothing about Forrest's accounts. Similarly, what if I've spent $300 on restaurants, but half of that is Forrest's share, so I've "really" only spent $150? Again, Yodlee has no way of dealing with this in its expense report or budgeting features.

On the other side of things, BillMonk is very useful for tracking who owes whom for shared expenses, but it has no personal finance reporting mechanisms at all (by design). So this doesn't really solve my problem either.

Enter Buxfer. As a former BillMonk employee, I feel like I'm "cheating" on BillMonk by even considering Buxfer. On the other hand, BillMonk never wanted to be a personal finance tracker, just a debt-between-friends tracker, so maybe I should let the guilt go. In any case, Buxfer does automatic transaction downloading and correctly understands how shared expenses affect budgets.

So I may be abandoning Yodlee and BillMonk in favor of Buxfer. Buxfer even has an API, so I should be able to whip up some script to take BillMonk's exported XML data and import it into Buxfer. (BillMonk almost released its API...) My group of friends still uses BillMonk, though, so I may have to write another script to keep my Buxfer account in sync with BillMonk.

I'll let you know how it goes.

20 Finance Questions

One of the personal finance blogs I read is "I Will Teach You To Be Rich." Ramit (the blog's author) posted an interesting list a couple days ago: 20 questions that your financially unprepared friends are afraid of. Check it out.

It's really too bad talking about money is such a touchy topic; I find that I usually learn something when I talk to others about finances. But I have to judge whether it's safe to breach the topic in the first place. Frank discussions are unfortunately rare, apart from talking with my dad.

Almost-Perfect Roth IRA Contributions

The contribution limit to a Roth IRA in 2008 was $5000. I set up automatic deposits from my paycheck so than X dollars went to Vanguard, and in Vanguard I set it up to divide that single deposit into Y% to the Roth IRA and Z% to my money market fund. I started my job in February, not January, so my math had to take that into account, too — divide things by 11, not 12.

Despite these factors, I ended up with $4998.36 in my Roth IRA account at the end of 2008. That means I was only off by $1.64, and that was only because I couldn't use enough precision in the Vanguard percentages! I so win.

So I bought myself $1.64 worth of shares to round out the 2008 tax year to the complete $5000 limit. I am pleased with my spreadsheet math. :) Oh, and having saved that money is pleasing, too, of course. ;)

Learning Words via Etymologies

I'm using FlashcardDB to study Spanish vocabulary. Generally it's going pretty well, but some similar words are really tripping me up; I can't keep them straight! So, to help myself, I've researched the etymologies of the Spanish words and tried to find cognates, however distant, in English.

This works like silly mnemonics, except that I also find the etymologies themselves interesting. More work than just making up silly memorable stories, sure, but what do you expect from a lingweenie? :)

perjudicial: damaging, harmful, detrimental

From perjudicar: "Ocasionar daño o menoscabo material o moral." Looks like it's related to English injury.

precavido: cautious, prudent

From precaver: "Prevenir un riesgo, daño o peligro, para guardarse de él y evitarlo." May be related to English precaution? Think of the "v" in precavido being that Latin "u/v", so it's really precauido (but not really), which is more like precaution.

precipitado: hasty, rash

From precipitarse: "Arrojarse inconsideradamente y sin prudencia a ejecutar o decir algo." From Latin praecipitāre "to throw or cause to fall headlong," from which English precipitation comes. Rain is water falling headlong to earth, right? That hasty precipitation, has no parachute! :)

And the other set of words giving me trouble:

terco: stubborn, obstinate

The RAE has no etymology for this one. :( Think of someone being a turkey, which as "a stupid, slow, inept, or otherwise worthless person" isn't quite the same, but gets in the right ballpark of semantics, anyhow.

tosco: coarse, rough, crude, unrefined

From Vicus Tuscus, "el barrio etrusco, por alusión a la gente libertina que vivía en esta zona de Roma." So the folks on Etruscan Street were rough, crude, unrefined folks, apparently.

áspero: coarse, rough, harsh

"Insuave al tacto, por tener la superficie desigual, como la piedra o madera no pulimentada, la tela grosera, etc." Compare English asperate (which you didn't know existed): "To make rough or uneven in surface, rugged or harsh in sound, manner, etc" from the same Latin root asper. Although unrelated, think of an aspirated voice being rougher.

asqueroso: disgusting, filty, revolting

"Que causa o tiene asco." From Greek ἐσχάρα, which literally meant hearth. English scar is ultimately from the same origin as Spanish asqueroso: ἐσχάρα hearth → the mark of a burn (from said hearth) → scar the trace of a healed burn (or other wound). Scars and burns can be disgusting, right? So scars are asquerosos.

Update, 9:45 PM: It's already working for me! I just did some of the flashcards again, and this time I finally got all of them right! Wootles.

Spanish definitions and etymologies are from the Real Academia Española; the English ones are from the Oxford English Dictionary.

Cross-Country Skiing is Painful!

So yes, cross-country skiing is fun. But it's also painful the next day! I swear, all of my muscles hurt. Even my triceps. Silly little triceps. Every time I move, something aches. I think I'll deal with this by reading about skiing, rather than actually skiing, at least until next weekend. :)

Cross-Country Skiing is Fun!

Snoqualmie Pass Nordic Trails

In college, Forrest and I went downhill skiing... once. I quickly discovered that I disliked the adrenaline produced from zooming downhill with minimal confidence in my ability to recover if anything went wrong. So Forrest has been angling for some cross-country skiing instead. This weekend, we finally made it up to the snow!

Jerry came along with us. Neither he nor I had ever been cross-country skiing before*, so we signed up for the beginner's lesson. We meant to get there in time for the 10:30 lesson, but we took too long at the grocery store getting supplies and wandering around looking for a gas station, so we missed the lesson. We mentioned this to the lady doing registration, and she hooked us up with Betty, one of the instructors, to do a private lesson for us at 11. Very awesome, since we were only charged the standard rate.

Cross-country skiing was much easier than I was expecting! Granted, this is probably in large part because we were learning on groomed trails with convenient little ruts to guide the skis. Even so, I had a lot of fun figuring out the right amount of effort vs glide.

I only fell down 3 times, and all those were within a 5-minute window until I figured out that looking backward while moving made me fall. At which point I stopped doing that, and I didn't fall any more. Jerry can't say the same, falling a total of 18 times throughout the day. But his center of gravity's higher than mine, and his skis were longer and more difficult to deal with, so he's got some good excuses. Forrest fell too, so no one was immune.

After our hour-long lesson, we tracked down Forrest, ate a light lunch, and headed back out on the trail. The only green (aka easy) trail we could get to was the Cold Creek trail, since the lifts up to the upper trails were taken out during a recent avalanche. Including the lesson, we probably skiied about 4km, or 2.5 miles. Not to shabby for our first day, eh?

Not quite true: When I was a kid, my family once went cross-country skiing in the Sierras. But my memories are very dim and mainly involve patches of thin, muddy, half-melted snow. Those memories do not even vaguely resemble the thick, well-groomed trails I skied on today. So I don't think it really counts.

Us: 1, Rats: 0

Dead Rat in Trap

A couple nights ago, Forrest went into the pantry/laundry room and discovered a rat staring back at him from atop the water heater. So over the weekend we spent the better part of a day moving all the pantry food into the kitchen or throwing it out (Pasta Roni from 2003, I miss you!). As far as we could tell, the rat(s) had only gnawed on a bag of rice.

We bought some nasty-powerful rat traps and baited them with peanut butter (per my dad's suggestion) for a couple of nights without arming the traps, so the rats would be complacent and unsuspecting. Last night, Forrest finally armed the traps for the first time. Around 1 AM, Forrest woke up, saying that he'd though he had heard a commotion and a rat-squeal from the pantry. It being 1 AM, he decided to go back to sleep and check the trap in the morning.

As you can see from the photo, we got the sucker! Please note that both Forrest and I had rats as pets when we were kids, so it's not that we hate rats indiscriminately. We just don't want rats living in our pantry, or worse, infiltrating the rest of the house.

We're hoping it was just this one rat — it's a small female, so maybe it was working on setting up a nest. We're hoping there isn't a colony of rats ready to move in to our pantry. But we'll be setting more traps tonight, just in case.

Songsmith Ad: Must Been Heard to Be Believed

Ahhh, Microsoft. You make such great software, and ads to sell them! I like Videogun's commentary on the terrrrific ad for Songsmith:

“ [T]his REAL commercial for Microsoft's new Songsmith software (you sing at it and it creates horrible musak to accompany you) is completely insane. Not only is it apparently earnest and not a parody, self- or otherwise, it seems like it comes from a bizarro parallel universe where irony was never discovered. ”

See for yourself. Don't forget to turn up the speakers! ;)

Update: Forrest points out that this is from Microsoft Research, not the commercial arm of Microsoft. Still, the Cheese Factor is just to much for me. :P

Almuerzo Español

Fui a un reunión hoy, durante el almuerzo, de hispanohablantes. He sabido sobre este grupo hace algunas meses, pero cada vez que occurió la reunión, me acobardé de ella. Esta vez, fui; ¡me alegré de ir!

Hubo un hombre, Rene, de Cuba, que es el líder del grupo. Él organiza las reuniones, manda los emails al grupo, etc. También hubo una mujer china de Ecuador (que nació en Nueva York) que se llamaba... Celestia? No recuerdo exactamente. Y un poco después, nos acompañó otro hombre, pero no se presentó.

Rene me dijo que mi pronunciación es buena, y (como me habían dicho otros hispanohablantes) mis Ses parecen españolas. :)

Google can translate for you. :)