Back to School Night

Last night my wife and I started back to school. We attended our first class of Dave Ramsey's bible-based 9-week course, Financial Peace University.

We tried this out a few years back, after I got laid off and we just got married. We had a lot of success with it. We listened to the audiobooks and after following the advise given we eliminated all of our credit card debt. We felt so good about it that we celebrated . . . by racking up even more credit card debt.

Now, with a year-and-a-half old running around it's time to hunker down and get serious about eliminating debt and increasing our savings.

So, part of our homework for the class is to read chapters from the book, Dave Ramsey's Complete Guide to Money.

Normally I would have some reservations about this, I'm a very impulsive shopper. But this class lets me use spreadsheets to track things and the kit we received had a free pencil . . . pencils and spreadsheets are two of favorite things, I'm in.

Time to get a, peace of the action.

Book Perks

One of the great perks of working at a library is that when it's time to take books out of circulation there is a huge sale, like there was this weekend. And after the sale, whatever does not sell is available for library employees for the low low cost of absolutely free!

So, after picking my way through the fiction section, obliging my compulsion for giant Tom Clancy novels, and selecting a few new sci-fi authors to test out I decided to roll the dice and grab a biography at random, just for fun.

The result was: Rubinstein: A Life, by Harvey Sachs.

Forgive the photo, the camera on phone is dying.

It's the story of Arthur Rubinstein, a classic pianist of the 20th century. I'd describe him more, but I don't want to ruin the surprise.

While this particular book is now off the shelf, there is another if you are interested:

My Many Years, by Arthur Rubinstein.

There is also some music CDs available that I will be checking out as well:

Complete concert Carnegie Hall 19 April 1953
Arthur Rubinstein Chopin-nocturnes