The Chronic Consumer

Like most other avid sports fans, I have a personal list of major sporting events that I’d like to attend in person at some point in my life. The Super Bowl. A Final Four matchup during March Madness. The World Cup finals. A gold medal game or match in any Olympic event. Game seven of the World Series when the Chicago Cubs finally break their 100-year-old championship curse. And the Men’s Finals on Centre Court at Wimbledon.

Watching the Wimbledon tournament on television has been a summertime tradition in my family ever since Bjorn Borg, Jimmy Connors, and John McEnroe held their epic battles on the most revered stage in tennis. To say it would be a dream come true to catch all the action from Centre Court would be an understatement!

I actually checked into Wimbeldon tickets this year just to see how much it would cost to make this dream a reality. I went to TeamOneTickets.com, where they had several different ticketing options to choose from — including great seats to the 2008 Wimbledon Finals on July 6. The prices aren’t quite in my budget, but then again this is a premiere sporting event, so I’d expect to have to pay a bit more.

At any rate, I’m not giving up on my Wimbledon dream just yet. We’re building up a nice nest egg for retirement, and will surely have something extra for a Centre Court excursion in the future!

I was checking out something on Amazon.com yesterday and ended up checking out the Kindle one more time. I enjoy reading user reviews to see what people think of the electronic book reader that has been out for about six months now.

When I got to the Kindle page, I was surprised to see that the price has gone down by $40 since its release! When the Kindle first hit the market, it sold on Amazon for $399. Now it’s listed at $359, though I didn’t notice an announcement or anything to explain the price drop.

Even so, however, $359 is still too much to spend for a device that does nothing except allow me to read electronic texts. I really would love to buy one of these things, but in order to do so, I have to wait until the price drops to under $300 (preferably around $250). That’s possible, right? These types of devices always come down in price. Remember how much the first generation iPods were?

Anyway, I’m going to be keeping an eye on the Kindle price and will post alerts here as applicable.

I’ve been working from home for going on four years now, and my husband is now starting to do more and more telecommuting as well. We’ve always had two desktop PCs at home, but we never bothered setting up our own network or anything to make it easier to share data and tasks between the two machines. With the recent changes in my husband’s work situation, however, this is all going to change soon.

We want to set up a nice workstation here at home so we can both operate more quickly and efficiently. I’ve checked into some of the equipment we need in order to get going, and from what I can tell, it doesn’t look like we’ll have to spend too much money. We just have to buy a CAT5e cable economizer/doubler and maybe a better router.

I’m going to try to buy the necessary components this week so my husband can set up our workstations over the weekend. I can’t wait to see how this turns out!