Victory

Ms. Packratty's little digital camera broke a couple of months ago and she has sorely missed it. Despite getting T-Mobile to give her a new phone (when it's been 3 years since your last new phone and you are out of contract and musing about other companies, it is *amazing* how generous the fellows at the cell phone store can be) which included a camera, Ms. Packratty really wanted a dedicated camera AND something a bit more like a real film camera (part of her sort of misses her reporting days when the Nikon FM went *everywhere* with her.

After reading and looking and admitting her long term bias for Nikons and sternly assessing the available cash situation, Ms. P started watching Nikon Coolpix 5700 cameras on eBay and today she scarfed one up for less than $75. Even if it needs a cleaning and servicing, Ms. P is elated to have snagged a deal for about a quarter of the fixed price. Yes, it's a model that's a couple of years + old. Fine. Ms. P does not care about being on the bleeding edge of technology. The iconography should be the same as her existing dead Coolpix, which should save on the learning curve and she admits, freely, that she's a Nikon user by preference.

And instead of dumping the poor camera in her capacious handbag (which may have been a factor in the demise of the previous camera) Ms. P immediately went and bid on a small camera bag.

In other notes, Ms. P is more than 25% of the way through paying for the painting of her father and niece on the beach that she commissioned - should be close to halfway paid for by the end of the year. That and having the car paid for and closing down the sole credit line, well, let's just say, with any luck at all, perhaps Ms. Packratty will have paid off all debt other than house debt in the next year - without resorting to some miserable financial strictures. She recently increased her 401K contributions and started putting $10 per paycheck into the employee stock purchase program and plans to resume automatically funding her Ameritrade account once the hot season and the humongous electrical bills are past.

The wisdom of purchasing the rollaround portable a/c unit for the bedroom was proven out in the current bill. The cost of cooling per day dropped - and last month before the portable was set up, the bedroom upstairs seldom dropped below 82 degrees. Now it is staying right around 78 even early in the evening and the main a/c system is not running around the clock. With the burden of the upstairs removed, it is cycling off regularly in the evenings and overnight and is able to cool the rest of the house down after the heat of the day passes. The day it was 98 outside in the late afternoon, the house was at 82 when Ms. P returned home, but the minute the sun set, the temperature moved back down toward 78 quite promptly. The fan still needs replacing and Ms. P is quite torn between replacing the fan motor for $300-500 or saving up for the whole thing. If she can find a contractor who will apply part of the fan cost toward a new system IF it does not resolve the slow cooling function, she may go ahead and repair it. Otherwise,l the wisdom of putting $400 into a 28 year old furnace escapes her (even if said furnace has been run about half the time a furnace belonging to a more cold-sensitive person would have).

And now it's time to drive home ...