Thursday, August 5, 2010

Day 233

I went to see my hepatologist today and got the final OK to begin my Hepatitis C treatment. I took the prescriptions for peginterferon and ribavirin to my pharmacist and he told me not to expect to start taking the medication any time soon. Evidently the drugs are quite expensive and there is a lengthly approval process to get insurance to pay for them. I probably will actually begin the treatments in about a month. My doctor said to pick a day when nothing important was going on to take the weekly injections. Just about any day would meet the "nothing important" qualification, but I picked Mondays because I can never get hold of my clients on Mondays anyway. If there's a day where I've got to feel like shit, Monday would be it. I certainly don't want to feel bad on the weekend when there's so much dog stuff that needs to be done.

You'd think I'd be good at math, since I was trained as an architect and currently spend a lot of my time coding websites. I'm terrible at math though. Today I installed some new portfolio tracking software on my computer to try to get a handle on why I've been doing so poorly with my investments. The software was supposed to automatically import all the transactions from my brokerage account and provide me with a much improved way of keeping tabs on everything. Not surprisingly, the "easy button" didn't work and I ended up having to enter a year's worth of transactions by hand. When I finished entering all the information, I fired up the analysis application and it told me that I'd made two million dollars this year. I wish! This ludicrous figure was so far off the mark that I was ready to throw the software in the trash. I actually lost money this year, but I couldn't figure out why the software wasn't telling me this. Finally, I went back and checked all the figures I'd entered. Whoops!  I seem to have misplaced a decimal place here and there. The big mistake was entering a sale at $45.67 a share as a sale at $4567.00 a share instead. I guess that would make a difference!

National Geographic wants me to film a fundraiser that's taking place this weekend to benefit the dog and goat friends. Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a problem, but my camera is still out at Bexel being repaired. At least I've got tomorrow to secure another camera. There's always a chance that the repairs will be finished tomorrow. Admittedly, there's not much of a chance this will actually happen. Nobody ever fixes my stuff on time.

Dalmatian of the Day

    Watch of the Day