It’s been awhile since I wrote an update about my week with money. Previous weeks have been relatively uneventful, but this week has been full of events.

• As I mentioned in my alternative income stream update, my wife’s car was broken into. The damage and the items stolen added up to $500 – our deductible, so our insurance is useless.
• That night didn’t get any better. The incident meant that we didn’t finish vacuuming out the broken glass until around 8PM, where most of the parking spots fill up in my gated apartment complex. This happens every night and though we were promised ample extra parking in the “overflow” area (around 50 spots) it simply isn’t the case. I went out four times last night after 8PM to put my car in a proper spot to avoid parking in a fire lane determined to not lose the game of musical chairs. My determination was not enough. I ended up having to park with 3 other cars in a fire lane. I’d never heard of getting a parking ticket by the city in a gated community. It turns out to be a $35 lesson.
• Maybe karma has a way of evening the score, as I had my best week in bringing new advertisers on board in quite awhile.
• My wife has been boosting Ebay’s quarterly earnings with our sales this week. Sadly, I’m not sure how much actual money we’ll see from this flurry of sales. We weighed all the items meticulously, but didn’t add extra weight for the packing materials. Some of the items that we sold for just a few dollars probably aren’t profitable at all. However, we helping the environment by giving the items a second home. Also, postal worker Lita and I at the Palo Alto post office have never been closer.
• I’d like to thank Plonkee Money for including me in the 111th Carnival of Personal Finance. Another thanks goes to Frugal Babe for including me in the Festival of Frugality.
• As a bit of a teaser, Lazy Man and Money might be getting a new look soon. I’m thinking of allowing a few readers a preview to get some feedback. Send me an e-mail if you are interested.

My non-financial thoughts this week…

• The Red Sox got Eric Gagne at the trade deadline.  Suddenly the team that had a disasterous “bullpen by committee” campaign a few years ago, have one of the best bullpens in baseball.
• Next Friday, the Patriots have their first preseason game.  I’m so excited to see the team that it feels like the playoffs.  I don’t know what will happen when the regular season starts.

Here are some things going on with me personally this week.

I may be the most busy person in the world this week. What makes me so busy:

• I’m trying to square away things on my rental property. I’ve got a new tenant coming in for July. It turns out there was disconnect on part of the agreement, probably mine and the renter’s fault. I had to scramble to find someone available to fix it on very short notice. Just when I think I have that solved, I need to get the condo board’s permission before they can do their job. This alone has taken me quite a bit of time, but three things are frustrating me. 1) There’s nothing I can do here, I’m dependent on the policies of all the other parties. 2) The responsibility falls on my shoulders as the landlord and 3) Each time I think I solve the issue, another one appears.
• That rental property needed a new water heater. It cost me $1,150, but I at least talked them out of the $150 1-minute diagnosis service call they originally wanted me to pay.
• I’m getting married in less than two weeks. That’s a full-time job in itself. My future in-laws are divorced (not amicably either) which creates many additional problems.
• I’ve gotten unpreceidented attention from this blog. Two national newspapers have contacted me for interviews this week. Two writers have sent me pre-release copies of their books. I’ve been corresponding with the sponsors of yesterday’s contest to pull it off. I’m not saying this because I want to impress you guys, I’m just mentioning that there’s a lot of behind the scenes work that goes on into making this blog work.
• I’m starting to think about looking for a new job. I went as far as feeling out an old contact to see if they are hiring. Nothing like adding a job search to the whole list. However, I flip-flop each day and I’m curently really enjoying my job.

Here are the two random business thoughts…

• Fox always cancels my favorite shows (Andy Richter probably being my all-time favorite cancelation). I particularly loved the show The Loop before it went on a year hiatus or so. It’s back now, but it’s simply not the same show that it was. One might imagine that a show that was borderline in the ratings (I’m assuming since it was on hiatus) would come back improved in some way. They’ve made a couple of odd decisions that I can’t just figure out. They eliminated the main character’s two attractive, fun, female roommates. One was a love interest of the main character, so there’s now a whole plotline disconnect. They’ve added an annoying guy who appears in the elevator and belts out a series of cliches and quips. The show is like a zombie – it should have just stayed dead, instead of coming back in weird nearly unrecognizable form.
• I’m impressed by a Mini Cooper billboard on the 101. It’s basically an old school sports stadium display – lots of light bulbs which can be turned on to display a message. The awesome idea is that it seems to have new content every day. Yesterday I drove by and it read that Bruce Lee only weighed 135 pounds. That obviously have nothing with a Mini Cooper, but they’ve made me look at it every day, which is so much more than I can say for all the other billboards. And of course, they’ve got me writing about it right now, so they are getting some residual advertisement towards people who may not never drive by it. Very smart move, Mini.

And lastly, here’s the media exposure, I mentioned:

• A newsletter interviewed me awhile back on my Prosper thoughts. Read the article here.
• More recently Canada’s Globe and Mail included the Lazy Man in an article yesterday. I’m hesitant to link to them since they weren’t kind enough to link to me. Given that, I’m pretty glad that I gave them a pseudonym.

Here are my financial and non-financial thoughts of the week:

• Have you seen the coffee table by Microsoft? It’s called the Microsoft Surface (Flash heavy official site, text heavy news story) and it knocked my socks off in a demo the other day on CNBC. It’s a touch-sensitive flat-screen TV that’s also a table. It displays pictures that can be manipulated with hand gestures (like Minority Report). For instance, it can show a pond and a touch of the glass/water, makes it appear to ripple. You can draw on it grab photos and resize them and more. I still want two features though: 1) lift-top to turn into a quick dinner table, and 2) I want to pull a part of it towards me to use as a computer like the laptop that I keep on my coach today. At $10,000, I won’t be buying one for probably 8-10 years as prices come down. I think I’ll rename my savings account for the Sony Aibo I wanted – since Sony discontinued the Aibo.
• I think Lindsay Lohan’s DUI/DWI has been covered pretty much everywhere at this point. Someone tried to cash in by selling parts of Lindsay’s car on Ebay. It reminds me of the “do something crazy” step in my 5 Paths to a Million Dollars. A local radio station noted that an auction for concert tickets – with a meet and greet of the artist – all for charity – had only reached $600. They were less than happy that the public was willing to pay more for pieces of plastic from Lindsay’s car accident. I didn’t catch who the artist was, but they definitely had a point.
• My wife-to-be had a problem with her laptop earlier this week. The motherboard was fried. She went to Best Buy to cash in on the warranty to get it repaired/replaced. Since she’s traveling for the rest of this week, they recommended that she wait until she gets back home. They offered to transfer the data from the hard drive to DVDs for $150. In a panic, she opted for it, but called me in time that I could remind her that we have back-up of what we needed thanks to FolderShare. It’s a great piece of technology, I highly recommend it. This is the second time she’ll have cashed in on the warranty in a year. It may be been covered by the manufacturer’s warranty, but I tend to doubt it since they are generally restrictive. For some products that are prone to damage, I believe extended warranties can be a good deal.

It has been a few weeks since I have given an update on my week in finances. I’m overdue for an update.

A high school student came knocking on my door on Wednesday. He was trying to sell newspaper subscriptions in an effort to get a $500 college scholarship. He was shocked when I said I had no interest in the local paper. He said that if I bought it, he’d come by and have it recycled every day. What an amazing sales technique?!?! Buy something you don’t want and I’ll dispose of it for you. When I continued to say that I wasn’t interested, he said incredulously, “You’re not interested in helping me go to college?” I wasn’t all that interested at $99 a year for a subscription. Does that make me a bad person? If someone knocks on your door and tries to sell you something you don’t want, does that obligate you to buy – even if it’s for a good cause?

I’ve been saving money this week as I’ve stayed late at work to get free dinners. My fiancée is using some of her pile of vacation time to tie up loose ends for the wedding back in Boston. If she were around I’d come home early to have dinner with her.

I’m getting ready to make another $1000 payment towards my HELOC. I’m pretty excited about it as I’ve made nearly $5000 worth of payments since February. The only reason I pause to make the payment is that we have that wedding coming up and costs associated with that.

A non-financial thought for this week:

I’ve talked about the billboards along highway 101 on my commute in Silicon Valley in the past. This week a new one popped up that caught my eye like none before. The company I work for has a couple of 800-gorillas that have niche products in the space. One of them took out a billboard targetting exactly that niche – not a good sign for my company – pun intended.

Here are some of the things that went on financially in my life this week:

• I was included in the Carnival of Shopping. Check it out if you get a chance.
• I paid off $2000 of my home equity line of credit leaving me with under $9000 to go.
• I’m ramping up my writings at Lazy Man and Health, but I’m still waiting for my Men’s Health subscription which has given me a lot of motivation in the past.

On the non-financial side:

• I watch CNBC every morning while I get ready for work. If Alka-Selzter insists on playing that plop, plop, fizz, fizz commercial, I’m going to have to stop.
• Does anyone know of a great color laser printer?  I’ve had an HP 4L for over 12 years now and it’s been great, but I’m looking for more.  Ideally, it would do it all, fax, copy, print, scan, laser in black and white and color – and not cost me a fortune in ink.  It’s a tall order, but I’d be willing to pay a tall price (or at least put it on our wedding registry).  Let me know if you have any suggestions.