A roundup of the past few days

I've decided to stop doing the weekly expense/income reports. They're a bit of a hassle, and seem to be depressing me more than encouraging me. I think a monthly review will be a bit more appropriate - still often enough to keep me on track but less of a time sink.

That all being said, the start of April has been a rough time.

I went out 2nd and ended up spending more on entertainment than I meant to. I really had more fun than I've had in a long, long time, but I made some poor financial decisions. Maybe a $150 mistake.

Then I learned at least one of my tax refunds (2005 state taxes) was intercepted. It appears to be due to a 2005 auto accident. The entire situation is based on a completely false statement my parents made, so there are some legal fights appearing on the horizon.

If that weren't enough, my laptop finally died. I've had it for about 5 years, so it's not overly surprising. The DC jack broke on the motherboard about 2 years ago. I bought a dock for it, since that was cheaper than repairing the DC jack, and I couldn't find anyone to do it. But now the dock connector has broken on the motherboard as well (not surprising, given that the dock wasn't really meant to be used portably.) So now the laptop doesn't recognize the AC adapter at all. I could get the DC jack repaired for $150 or so. However, I'm still looking at a laptop with a 1.5 GHz Centrino M processor, 512 MB of RAM, and a battery that gets less than 10 minutes. It's old, slow, and I've begun noticing significant obstacles to my productivity. Upgrading the RAM and replacing the battery might give me a usable laptop, but I'd be spending way more than it's worth to milk another year, max, out of it. I absolutely require a laptop for my job - if I don't have one, I don't get paid. So I went ahead and bought a new one.