Today is $nephew_3's birthday.  He's 8.  He's a smart kid.  As and Bs so far.  He excels at spelling.  He has like a 118%.  I told his mother she should have waited another 6 hours and had a leap year baby, but she rolls her eyes and mumbles something about pushing all damn day.  I remember going to the hospital to visit that night.  He was a chubby little baby.

Back to cold cold windy weather here in NE PA.  Little snow on the ground.  Meh.  Likely March is going to be very very snowy, maybe April too.  I hate snowless winters.

Work is still meh.  I was actually pretty damn productive today.  Mostly because I had to write actual code to get the data and the look that was needed for $evil_project's $myspace section.  I still have a bit to go, make the info links that are clickable plus test to make sure that the data is correct.

My BMG selections came today.  Four CDs.  NiN's Year Zero.  Chemical Brother's We are the Night.  Feist's The Reminder.  and The Soundtrack to O Brother Where art thou?  I bought NiN and Feists CDs because I had heard songs thru free P2P methods.  Listen up record labels.  Sheesh.  I'm ripping them via abcde to flac as I type.

My Dad retired, full time last week.  They had a meal and some balloons and a cake and they took up a collection.  The next day my Mom is wondering how they're going to survive on just Social Security.  Today he got his final paycheck and it didnot include his earned vacation time of 40 hours.  Mom called HR and they tried to tell her that he had none to carry over ( although it clearly showed 40 hours in the unused vacation column of the pay stub.)  They called back a few hours later and said that there was a mistake and that he'd get a check in 2 weeks.  He had a 401k with about 12,000 or so in it.  I told them it'd probably take 60 days to have that check cut, and it'd be at least 20% smaller than 12,000.  Dad doesn't quite understand why he's being taxed. His memory loss is getting worse.  He can be confrontational at times.  I try to explain things to him but I can only do it for so long, repeating myself is hard, and I lose my patience, and it's not his fault.  He wasn't the easiest father to grow up with and some of the things he does now he did 20 years ago, and I lose my temper more than I should.

My Mom doesn't want to understand finances and money etc.  I told her that when they do get the 401k disbursement they should open up a money market account, or something that earns even a little interest.  She couldn't see why they should, since they're going to use the money to live.  Yeah.  I get that.  I wasn't telling her to throw it all into the stock market, just to not put it in their 0% interest regular checking account.  I try to help but they're my parents what can I do?

Thinking about my parents usually either gets me fired up about getting rid of the debt I have and then socking away all that money into my retirement nest egg.  Sometimes it just gets me thinking about how I'll be stuck at this low paying job forever. Never having any more than a fleeting bit of fun.  I buy a bag of Sun Chips and I feel guilty all day.   Then I think that getting a new job might be possible and then I remember I had to go into a little bit of debt to move out here.  Sure it was not a lot of debt and barring anything major it should be almost paid off this time next year, but I can't keep getting little bits of debt that take 3 years to pay off, and not have anything to show for it.  Ya know?