I got rid of a whole lot of books this weekend. I made two trips to the Strand, where I made $50 selling books, and I made one trip to the Salvation Army down the street for books I didn’t think they’d take. (The Strand doesn’t like to buy much fiction because they’ve already got tons of it.) And I took a few books to the post office this morning that I sold on Amazon. All told, I think I got rid of about 40 books this weekend, which is in addition to about 45-50 books that I tossed out during the past week. I’m still left with two six-foot-tall bookshelves filled with books.

I also spent much of the weekend checking out different pieces of personal finance software. First I explored Quicken, but Intuit (which owns Quicken) recently switched to a proprietary file format for downloading data from your banks. This makes more money for Intuit because it charges banks to use the format, but it’s a hassle, and I just don’t feel like supporting a big company that’s going to treat its customers like that.

Next I downloaded and tried out GnuCash, which is free, but I found it ugly. Worse, it requires using double-entry accounting, or debits and credits, which I can’t seem to get my mind around.

Finally I decided to try out Moneydance, which I think I’m going to wind up using. I like the interface, and the application is user-friendly. It’s free for the first 100 transactions you enter, but after that it costs $30. But I discovered that it was created by a UVa alum, Sean Reilly, so if I like it and want to continue using it, I’ll be more than happy to pay him. It’s always nice to support the little guy instead of the Man.

In other money-related issues, I cooked dinner on Friday night for the first time in ages and made enough to last three nights. And I’ve made it a goal to try to make my lunch and bring it to work every day this week.

I don’t know why I get on these weird kicks sometimes. When I get into something, I tend to *really* get into it for a while. Probably has something to do with my overachieving personality.

Although that personality never seemed to apply to things like law school.