If you watch it a couple of times (once to absorb everything I’m saying, then again to absorb the production techniques) you’ll see that … at the beginning of working on this video, last Monday, I had never done any 3D animation and only a modicum of modeling (mostly in SL), and had never used Kinemac before.  (I bought the Macheist 3 bundle earlier this year, for access to that and BoinxTV, mostly.)  As I worked for about a week and a half on this video, I became more and more experienced with the software, more aware of what it was capable of, and more comfortable doing more advanced things with it.  So at the beginning, the big 3D text is pretty neat, but by the end I have an entire bookcase of individually hand-animated books leaping in and out of a box.

There’s things I’d like to change about it.  Not just improving the animation in the first half, either.

On Demand Books is now saying they’ll have two million titles available by years’ end, rather than one, for example.  Plus, I feel like I may have represented the kindle more strongly than the iPhone – while I believe the 41million iPhones/iPod Touches in circulation worldwide, each with hundreds of individual book apps and at least 4 different major eReader apps, each with robust eBook catalogs and (coming soon) in-app purchasing will do significantly better and reach wider and have more of an impact than the roughly half-million, all-US-based kindles.

I’m already working on the script for the next couple of videos.  More thoughts on what it means to have over 1400 new titles published every day.  More thoughts on print on demand.  Something about eBook pricing.

Yesterday I only did three or four hours of audio work, and even though I know I worked on other things, it feels like I didn’t get anything done, since it’s harder to tally the hours and to quantify what’s work and what isn’t. Does Twitter count? Reading publishing & other blogs? Blogging? It’s all part of connecting with people, with building an audience and building myself as a “brand” and educating myself about what’s going on, what’s working, and driving ideas forward. So in a way, yes. Then there’s the oft-repeated idea that everything an author does and experiences is a sort of reasearch for future books; this is somewhat true, but feels like a sort of excuse.

In addition to feeling that perhaps I’m not being productive enough, I also think a lot about my not being profitable enough. Even with the reduced up-front costs of doing business the way I am, not a single one of my books has even reached break-even, yet. The art, comparably, has been doing great – not bringing in enough to live on, but if not for the cost of going to Tools of Change in New York (ie: if not for a big, extra publishing expense), I’d already be profitable this year on art sales alone, with only bluer skies on the horizon. The margins on the art, even with prices basically cut in half & then frozen since 2004, are great – not just in money, but in time. It takes me hundreds of hours to produce a book, and somehow it’s harder to sell a copy of the book for $14 (or less) than it is to sell a painting (that took me less than 10 hours to create) for $150.  Lately I’ve been creating a lot of “Mini Paintings”: 8×10″ for $20, 5×7″ for $15, and 4×4″ for $10, right now.  Most of them are done in under 1 hour of work (though admittedly, some have taken up to 3), and they earn me as much as or more than a book does, usually without having to try to sell them at all.

Obviously, the art sales can only scale to the limits of my creativity & time to produce original works – I’m not sure what the upper limit is, but perhaps dozens a month. Certainly not hundreds.  Whereas the book sales can scale without proportional extra work on my part – Lightning Source prints however many copies people order, whether it’s dozens a month or thousands.  If/when I “hit it big” the books will quickly win in this regard.  Not to mention I can sell a book more than once, and without doing prints (something I am currently opposed to), I can only sell an original work of art once.  So it takes orders of magnitude more work to produce a book, but I can keep selling it over and over again forever, instead of just once.

If only my sales numbers were orders of magnitude better.  Did I mention not a single one of my books has yet earned back the costs associated with its production, yet?  That’s with $0 value associated with my time, no less.  Which is to say: if I were more productive (of books), I’d perhaps only be digging myself deeper and deeper into a hole.  Being more productive of art is good, but when I really need to figure out is how to be more productive of profitability.  I need to produce more book sales.  That’s a hard one.  The podcasting thing is meant to be helping with that – it certainly puts my writing in front of a lot more minds than everything else I’ve been doing, even if it is for free, right now.  Something approaching five hundred times as many people have downloaded Dragons’ Truth from Podiobooks.com than have purchased a copy of the paperback (not counting sales to family) – that’s a huge multiplier.  Unfortunately, for whatever reason, it hasn’t translated directly into interest in my other podiobooks or in sales of my paperbacks or eBooks.  Gotta keep it up, though.  Gotta keep working on it.  Gotta get back to work, right now – I’m supposed to be editing together next week’s episodes of Forget What You Can’t Remember, right now.  Gotta go.

Tim O’Reilly makes the argument for Open Publishing @ TOC 2009 from Open Publishing Lab @ RIT on Vimeo.

The PDFs are easy.  I already have to do the work in InDesign to create the paperback, and Adobe software loves to output nice PDFs.  Adobe recently announced that they’re updating their software soon to create epub files easily, which would be nice, but Smashwords seems to do a better job, right now.  Note to people not in publishing: epub is the future of eBooks.

Making a well-formatted document for the kindle is … well, I’m getting better at it. Luckily I’m not doing anything fancy with my books.  No charts, no pictures, no tables, no complex layouts… well, not in the books I’ve been putting in, so far.  My poetry can wait.  Because it’s going to be a headache, and probably won’t ever sell in volume sufficient to cover the value of the time I’ll have to spend to get it looking right on the kindle (and will never look good in most other eBook formats).  I’m just putting novels in. Still, I have to go through each book line by line manually marking it up.  Then, because the kindle has a limited range of fonts and doesn’t support extended characters, I have to go through basically character by character and -in some cases- not only change to characters without diacritical marks where I’d used them in the original text, but also rewrite entire sections where the use of specialized fonts and unsupported characters are actually integral to the text.

bleh.

Last year, before Smashwords, I would have had a similarly frustrating process to go through six more times, once for each of the other formats’ idiosyncratic proprietary requirements.  Now, by simply doing a quick find-and-replace of Amazon’s proprietary page break tags with a few line break tags, I can upload the well-formatted HTML file I created for the kindle version to Smashwords and -pretty much- get a good output within a few minutes.  It’s still lacking the extended characters and custom fonts of the original/paperback version, but most of the eBook formats don’t support that stuff, either.

I’m still developing a “workflow” for eBooks, probably go through and do the main markup in one pass, then save it out as two files & add the kindle markup to one (& remove special characters) and the Smashwords markup to the other.  I’m not really much for “workflows” but its something I’ve been thinking a bit about, lately.  At Tools of Change 2009, there were multiple, competing products in the exhibition hall & various presentations trying to help publishers manage their “workflows.”  At the upcoming ABPA conference (which I don’t plan on attending), one of the six sessions (the rest of which are trying to address the future of publishing via subjects like: alternative and online sales channels, online and social marketing, et cetera) is about creating and managing production workflows.  Apparently this is a problem area for publishers.  Apparently, solving the “workflow” problem is a very cutting edge, future-of-publishing sort of issue.

So I’m thinking about it.  Workflow.  Huh.  I’ve got some notes.  Maybe if I “plan” a “workflow” for my next book, it’ll go more smoothly?

What am I talking about?  The main hiccups in my last two books’ production were 1) Lightning Source not meeting their contractually stated production schedules and 2) volunteer, unpaid proofreaders taking unpredictable periods of time to get back to me.  One of these things I can’t effect, and the other I can only fix by spending money I can’t afford to spend.  Maybe I should add “wait an indefinite period for proofreaders” to my workflow.  Or maybe I’ll research reasonable time periods professional, freelance proofreaders take and how much they charge and negotiate expectations and/or my budget to find a reasonable solution.  Otherwise, my production of books works pretty smoothly.

I seem to have gone off topic.  Sorry, it’s late.  Maybe I’ll go to bed.  Ooh, but first I should link to my latest eBooks.  The eBook of Forget What You Can’t Remember is available in the Kindle Store for less than $8.99, at Smashwords for $3.99, and for those of you who can’t afford that price or don’t have a credit card, as a free eBook in a whole mess of formats.  The eBook of More Lost Memories, a companion collection of short stories, is available in the Kindle Store for less than $8.35, at Smashwords for $3.99, and if you can’t afford that price or don’t have a credit card you can email me for a free copy.  Enjoy:

• Forget What You Can’t Remember eBook
• More Lost Memories eBook

I’ll be re-working all the eBooks I did last year soon, too, to get them on Smashwords.  I’m excited about Smashwords largely because of their partnership with Lexcycle – which is to say, because it makes my eBooks available for sale to iPhone users, in an iPhone-compatible format, and through an increasingly easy-to-use iPhone app-based storefront.  If you have an iPhone, download Stanza and take a look for yourself!

This post is about everything else.  This post is about how, in between the last two First Friday Art Walks (ie: basically in January), I painted 6 new paintings, recorded the audio for the podcast version of FWYCR (inlcuding 6 chapters ahead of where I needed to be), wrote 5 (mostly long) blog posts, did my taxes, et cetera, et cetera.  This post is about how, since the February First Friday Art Walk I haven’t painted anything new, have only written this blog post, and have only finished the single chapter of MEPod that was due today.  This post is about how I don’t know when my next book will be ready for publication, or what book it will be.  This post is about how I occasionally notice that I don’t have a “marketing strategy.” This post is about feeling insignificant, helpless.

After this month’s First Friday Art Walk in downtown Phoenix (I show among the vendors known as “Roosevelt Row” – the booths in the blocked off streets of Garfield between 4th & 6th, on 5th between Garfield & McKinley, and starting next month on 6th as well – I’m there every month, I pre-paid for all of 2009, and you can see/buy my art and/or books in person there for cash), I sold two paintings.  Did not sell them at the Art Walk, one because I don’t take credit cards on site, the other because there wasn’t a convenient ATM, but sold them after being seen there.  Gladly drove across town on Saturday to deliver one (after processing the payment through Google Checkout) and to a different part of town on Sunday to deliver the other.  I’m always glad to put my creations into the hands of people who appreciate them.  People who love them.  People who are excited to be able to see them again and again.  These kind of sales are awesome.

Very early Monday morning I left for NY. Thursday evening I returned to Phoenix.  Friday I did laundry and tried to recover from the conference & the trip.

Saturday I had another Art Walk / Art Fair, this time at Angel’s Serenity in North Phoenix/Scottsdale.  The Angel’s Serenity Art Fair is a Saturday, daytime event.  It had better turnout when the economy was in better shape (and when there was an open coffee shop involved – since gone out of business), but I still feel it’s worthwhile to show there.  It certainly doesn’t cost anything but my time and effort.  Sold a few books (You’ve seen the new books, right?), about half to returning customers.  That’s my favorite and most reassuring sort of customer, the ones who have bought my books before, read them, and want to buy the new books, too.  That’s the basis for my publishing model; to build an audience of people who will continue buying my books as I continue to write them.  Didn’t move any art at the Art Fair, but a past customer and I spent a lot of time discussing the 5 or 6 pieces he wants to buy – if only I catch him at the right time of the month.  I’ll follow up with him after the first of the month.

Writing it out, I know it hasn’t been a lot of time – especially since the conference was actually work.  Yet I feel unaccomplished, so far.  Dilligent, yes.  I recorded three more chapters of FWYCR yesterday, and worked on trying to figure out what to do about the final main character’s voice – it needs to be distinct, striking, but not distracting or confusing.  I edited, mixed, compressed & posted chapter 15 today, went to two banks and a book store, and am writing this blog post.  I’ve been working on some other ideas (more below) as well.  Still, I feel I haven’t done enough.  On the other hand, a big part of why I chose not to buy the big TV was so that I would be able to work longer without stress and worry – so that I would be able to go at my own pace without having to freak out about whether my art & writing were bringing in enough money on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis.  So I’m trying not to freak out.

I’m also looking at some new projects.  I’m considering designing a deck of cards – you can think of them like tarot cards or fortune telling cards, though I’m developing them largely from scratch.  I’m working out some planning and manufacturing ideas already, starting work on basic artwork & meanings.  Probably a set of 50 cards – thinking of maybe putting it out as a “deck” of moo business cards, actually, though I haven’t fully considered all the different custom card-deck printing options out there yet.  Feel free to suggest someone in the comments.  Then, in parallel with developing the deck, write a book explaining the cards, their meanings, and how to do a “reading” from them.  Publish the book & make the cards available – because I can, and it interests me to do so.  Not sure how to market such a thing, and certainly can’t bundle the cards with the book via Lightning Source, but it’s an idea.  If I decide to paint the images for the cards, that could mean up to 50 new Mini-Paintings – I’d want to do them at a size I could scan with the equipment I have, so probably 8×10″ or smaller canvas or canvas boards.  Or perhaps illustrations on paper, but then I’d have to mount/mat/frame them.  bleh.  But either way, that could be a gallery show I could shop around.  Hang the originals on the walls, sell the cards & books (& originals), and have me (someone) do readings for guests all night/nights.

I’m also increasingly thinking of trying to put together a music “album.”  Probably a “Christian music album,” at that.  I keep having to compose my own music for the podcasts (because I’m quite stubborn and independent) and thus to think about music, to design music, and to practice with its creation.  I’ve been vaguely thinking about creating music since middle or high school, but have rarely stuck with any physical instrument for more than a few weeks at a time & have never studied musical composition.  Having Garageband in front of me several hours a week, listening to music I’ve composed play behind my audiobooks, it’s been pushing me more and more toward writing songs & putting together an album.  That, I don’t have outlines or plans or marketing plans for (yet), unlike the cards/book thing above, but it’s rolling around in my head, closer and closer to the front all the time.

Which brings me around to what may be a lack of focus.  If I’m writing/composing/recording/producing an album of Christian music, am I focused on art?  On writing?  On publishing?  I’ve squeezed the designing of a deck of fortune cards (did you know the Old Testament  condemns divination?) into the art/publishing worlds with the hand-painting of the art & the writing/publishing of a companion book, but has my focus slipped?  What happened to the anthology of short stories I was working on last year?  When is UTFBF-RoaAP: Book Four going to be written?  Will I paint anything other than these cards any time soon?  What about my next podcast novel (due in April)?  What about marketing?

Marketing?  Fuck.  I knew I was forgetting something.  I still haven’t figured out how to do marketing.  Sigh.

In other news, since my books are increasingly apparent as some sort of idealized-communist propaganda, I’ve begun slogging my way through Atlas Shrugged.  The Fountainhead is next.  Then probably the Communist Manifesto, Wealth of Nations and Mein Kampf.  I’ve never read any of these, but time for reading is part of what I bought myself when I didn’t buy a 73″ HDTV.  Speaking of which, I’m going to go work on Atlas Shrugged right now.

Note: this post is over 2600 words long.

As you may or may not be aware, in March of 2008 I left my “day job” (they would probably say I was fired for violent behaviour, but believe me when I tell you my outburst was literally in the vein of “if that’s the way you insist on doing business, I can’t work here any more”) and have been a full-time, self-employed creator of books (Modern Evil Press) and art (wretched creature) since then.  My wife, a high school english teacher, has been the primary income earner for our household since that time.  You probably know teachers don’t earn a lot, and she’s only been teaching for a few years, so far, if that tells you anything.  So: not a lot of money.  But there’s good news: God loves us.  Evidenced by the fact that it’s been almost 11 months and we’re still okay.

We didn’t start off in a great position.  No savings, two car loans, Mandy’s student loans, and my mess of cc debt put us somewhere over $90k in debt as of last March.  About half of that’s the student loan, but it’s still a lot of money.  A lot of debt.  At the time I worked out a budget, we cut back in a few places, and we found that every month Mandy’s income covered all the bills and none of the stuff that isn’t bills.  ie: food, gas, entertainment, medical, et cetera were not covered.  We had just got back a sizeable tax refund (for the poor, marriage seems to make your tax situation better) about a week before I left my day job, so we had that $2700 in the bank to live off.  I needed to spend a chunk of it getting set up to run my business (pro audio equipment to record my podcast audio books, a video camera to make promotional YouTube videos, packaging materials & equipment for doing the physical audiobooks including a new printer, oh, and a sizeable inventory of books to sell directly through modernevil.com) – something between 1/3 and 1/2 of the money we needed to live on, right off the top.

But we did okay.  I made art, I made audiobooks, I worked on writing new books, and most importantly, I worked on building an audience and getting sales.  In May I started showing at the Phoenix First Fridays Art Walk among the Roosevelt Row vendors.  A little later, I also started showing at the not-quite-monthly Art Fair at Intatto Coffee / Angel’s Serenity.  (Note: Intatto has since gone out of business, but if you’re in North Phoenix/Scottsdale on 2/14/09, there’s another Angel’s Serenity Art Fair coming up!)  I started using social media more actively (Twitter, Plurk when I found out about it, Facebook, et cetera) and I actually made several art sales through contacts I made in social media.  Sales haven’t yet been knock-your-socks-off great, but I’ve had sales every month since April, 2008 and most months a bit more in income than in expenses (according to my accounting software).

Right before the money left over from the tax refund ran out, our $1200 stimulus check arrived.  Not too long after, Mandy got a pay increase (at the start of the new school year) and was working extra hours.  Just before the stimulus check ran out (it went further after her raise & w/ Student Council overtime), she received a bonus of a similar amount.  Every step along the way, either with new sales / new customers, Mandy offered overtime, gov’t intervention, bonus checks, whatever, before we hit bottom, right when we need it, God has come through for us with more support.  Within the next two weeks, we’re going to get close to that bottom again.  Which brings us to taxes, and the original subject of this post:

It’s tax season again.  Yesterday I spent a few hours entering all our information into hrblock.com which we filed with last year, and both Mandy and I have filed with in various years in the past.  I knew they were capable of handling my business taxes (since I reported some business income last year, and got a look at what their site was capable of), and probably I’ll go ahead and file through them later this week.  I’m still waiting on a document or two in the mail, but I’m 99% sure I know what they say (and the $0.95 interest we earned on our savings account won’t change anything at all), so I don’t want to actually file quite yet, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got all the info entered in correctly.  And it looks like, for a variety of reasons (my income at my day job was so low I basically get all my withholding back, bonuses have a higher withholding than normal income, & our income was cut almost in half this year over last), we’ll be getting a sizeable refund this year.  Something in the neighborhood of $4500.

And now we have to embark on an examination of this post’s titular ‘opportunity cost’ – the cost of taking one opportunity is in being unable to take others.  Let’s begin with what we ought to do: use that money to keep things like food on the table and gas in the cars (esp. since Mandy drives ~21 miles each way to/from work) and some basic level of we’re-not-going-mad entertainment coming in.  At our current spending rates, with Mandy’s current income, and without counting on any significant sales from me (they’re already coming in – have you ordered my new books Forget What You Can’t Remember and More Lost Memories, yet? Have you seen my latest painting?), and barring any unexpected emergencies that money could last perhaps 9 months – until almost November.  Except that, since I left my day job last year, we haven’t been paying my father any rent to live here (he’d only started charging us a couple of months before that), and he’s been having trouble getting renters to pay on time, when he can find renters at all, for the property he manages / lives on in Pine, AZ – not to mention that just about every piece of equipment up there has broken this year and has needed (or still needs some) expensive repairs.  So, he has the property taxes coming due soon and I told him we’ll -at the very least- help him with that.  From the looks of the size of this refund, we may just pay the full amount, ~$1500, which would leave us with about 6 months’ worth of money for food/etc..

Then there’s the matter of my iMac died this Fall.  I’ve been doing everything on my 4-year-old iBook.  Everything meaning: writing books, editing/layout of books, cover design, audio recording, audio editing/mixing/compressing, video recording/editing, web site design, and more.  My whole business is wrapped up in that little, weary laptop computer.  If we bought the entry-level iMac currently available (& maxed out the ram for another $60), processor and memory intensive tasks (like mixing & compressing audio and video, and working with book-length documents and print-quality cover designs) would go four to eight times faster.  Not to mention I’m currently doing everything on a 15″ 1024×768 screen; I could really use more screen real estate – it would probably speed me up another several percent to be able to see everything I’m doing at once.  We looked into it late last year and decided that the iMac line appears due for an update, and we thought it would come at MacWorldSF, and we should probably wait to see if we’re getting a tax refund or somehow owed taxes before we bought a new computer.  That I could use the larger screen (and lower price point) of the iMac over the Macbook Pro -I absolutely need firewire; all that equipment I bought in 2008 for audio & video connects via firewire- and now … well, now we’re sortof waiting for the update.  If they leave FW out of the updated iMac line, I just need to get the current model (which will then be discounted), but either way it’s a better value to wait.  SO that’s somewhere in the $1500-$2000 range.  The opportunity cost being another 3-4 months of living comfortably.

Then there’s the TV.  This one, despite being largely irrational, has really been bugging me more and more the last few months=>weeks=>days.  The TV we currently use is not small, it’s a 37″ (I think 37″… I’m not going to go measure it) CRT TV I bought back in 1998 or 1999.  At the time, HDTVs were already on the market, but were very expensive.  I shopped around, decided I didn’t want an HDTV  with a diagonal measurement less than my height, and calculated how much I wanted to spend on a TV knowing that analog broadcasts were going to be shut off in 2006.  (They bumped it back a couple of times since then…)  At that time, stores had HDTVs up to about 83″, so saying I wanted one 76″ or larger was only mostly silly – since then, in trying to find a mass-marketable HDTV size and in compliance with plasma-TV constraints, HDTV sizes have settled pretty comfortably in the 40″-55″ range, and there is rarely a TV over 72″, so I compromised my ridiculous requirement a few years back to consider HDTVs 72″ and larger.  Long story short, I’ve been noticing that Fry’s Electronics keeps listing a 73″ Mitsubishi DLP HDTV for $1899.  (Note: DLP is my preferred technology for HDTV, until SED comes out.)  Yesterday I noticed that it’s even “3D Ready” – which I had to look up, since … umm…  3D ready?  I mean, I’d heard that there was a company working with developers to come out with some 3D games for the PS3 in 2009, but it didn’t make a lot of sense because -as far as I knew- there weren’t any 3D TV’s on the market, yet.  Apparently, there are.  Mitsubishi and Samsung both manufacture 3D-capable DLP HDTVs – they work with shutter glasses, available for ~$60-$75/pair.  Huh.  Anyway, so partially since I’ve been expecting/planning on replacing my TV with an HDTV in 2006 for the last decade, partially because the analog broadcasts are finally shutting down, partially because there’s actually a 72″+ DLP HDTV available under $2k, partially because we have a PS3/Blu-Ray player and actually just bought our first Blu-Ray (Repo! The Genetic Opera, FYI), I’ve sortof got a bug about getting an HDTV.  Like, I’m pretty sure it’s why I woke up at 2AM after less than 4 hours of sleep this morning – I can’t stop thinking about this money situation and about this TV.  So I’ve been sitting here for the last 3.5hrs writing this post, somewhat to try to talk/write myself out of the idea of it.

The opportunity cost of buying a $2k TV is… well, frankly, it would mean getting a new iMac is out of the question – because really we do need to eat.  Even if I didn’t feel paying my father’s property tax (or at least some large portion of it) was the right thing to do, HDTV+iMac = no money left for food.  Property tax + iMac = about 3-4 months of expenses left covered.  (And the iMac would actually be a business expense – so that’ll help with next year’s taxes.)  Property tax + HDTV = about 2 months of expenses left covered.  And then we can starve to death in front of a really, really beautiful home theater.  There’s always debt…  This is America, after all.  But since March, we haven’t missed or been late on a single payment on any of our accounts and our total debt is down by around $5k.  And while we could put one of these things on credit and pay it down over time (plus interest, of course – even when the Fed’s rate is at 0%, the rest of us have to pay interest), we’d really prefer to keep heading in the direction of less debt rather than more debt.  At this rate, I know, it’s about 12 years before we could dig ourselves down to debt-free, and the cost of an iMac only adds a couple of months to that, but it’s the principle, right?  Heck, the smartest thing to do would be to pay down as much of our highest-interest debt with the tax refund as possible, since we’re paying interest on it and our checking account earns no interest…

And, yes, there’s the idea of sales and income from my businesses to consider, too.  Before hrblock.com advised me of Sec. 179 Depreciation, whereby all the assets/equipment I bought this year were counted as expenses, I’d actually had a Net Income for 2008 of around $60.  (With the extra expenses it’s more like negative $300.)  Which is to say, after less than a year I’m nearly profitable.  I had some expenses this month that’ll take a while to earn back (travel to NYC for Tools of Change, books setup and inventory for my two new books, and I pre-paid for a full year for a space at Roosevelt Row / First Fridays), but I’ve also got at least one person considering commissioning some art already, too, and have had pretty good interest in the new books.  The closer the income from sales of my art & books is to our actual needs, the better, and if/when the one passes the other, concerns like this become less dire.  Hopefully we can get there within a year or two.  Hopefully the economy recovers enough that people can afford to pay more reasonable prices for my art.  Hopefully enough people hear about my books that sales go up from dozens to hundreds (or thousands) of copies.  Hopefully.  Hopefully.

Ugh, I’ve written almost 2500 words and I still don’t feel resolved on the matter.  The mature, appropriate, best thing to do is some combination of paying dad’s property tax, paying down debt, and using the money to buy food and gasoline.  The iBook works, even if it’s slow & has a cramped workspace.  The CRT TV works, especially since we get all our TV from the internet.  We can get by without either big purchase, and we can get by a lot longer without either one.  Maybe, maybe, I’d be more productive with a faster, better computer with a bigger screen.  And maybe I’d be more productive with a huge TV, too.  (No, really – I sketch, paint, and do most of my web development in front of the TV and -and this is important- do most of my relaxing there, too.  Being happy with my home theatre (as opposed to staying up nights fretting about HDTVs, like I’m doing now, or spending hours and days researching HDTVs, like I’ve done off and on these last few weeks/months) and able to actually relax in my off hours will certainly contribute to the quality of work I do.)  Sigh.  Alright, I’m going to see if maybe I can get a bit of a nap in.  Sleep on this a bit more.  I doubt it.  I feel almost as conflicted as I did last night.  Stupid money.

Note: the opportunity cost of fretting about this & writing this post is the last five hours. I could have been sleeping.