August 12, 2009

School approaches

Posted by Scott at 07:11 PM

It's been a day with a lot of things related to money and school.

Money - This morning I got the notice that my old 401(k) from AMD has been rolled into our IRA. I debated whether to roll it into the Qualcomm 401(k) but it was easier by far to move it into the IRA and the IRA gives you many more choices for investing. Most corporate 401(k) plans give you a limited set of funds for investing.

I also got a reminder that I needed to confirm my grant for Qualcomm options. I thought I'd already done that, but I think I was getting it mixed up with the employee stock purchase plan. Mostly it involved reading and saving a bunch of legalese and a few web confirmations.

Meanwhile I sent a note into HR because my vacation balance carried over from AMD doesn't show up on my paystubs. While I know that I'm in the clear, my paystubs show me with a negative balance because of our trip to Michigan.

School - On the school front my nephew TJ head down to college today. Yet another in the "I'm officially old" campaign. We found out what team Abby is on when she starts middle school at the end of the month. Both of my girls in middle school?! We also found out the teachers for Timothy, Michael, and Daniel. Michael has the same teacher that Claire and Abby had when they were in third grade. She'll discover right away that Michael is nothing like Claire and Abby were academically. Right now Michelle is out for the second time today doing school related shopping. (I guess the boys started acting up earlier today so she cut some of the shopping short!)

Yard - We had a local irrigation guy come out today to check and repair our sprinklers. The main problem was one of the heads along the street side wasn't turning. I noticed it last week when I was tweaking our sprinkler heads to not hit our recently installed fencing. He also double checked our other sprinkler zones to make sure everything else was working so that he wouldn't need to come out a second time.

Wii - When we got back from Michigan, Wii Sports Resort was waiting for us. It requires a special Wii Motion Plus module be added to the WiiMote to get the increased motion fidelity used by the game. The game comes with one, but I'd ordered three extra because the kids often play at the same time. So far the game has had a lot of use by Abby and the boys. I get the feeling its the kind of "Wii Sports" Nintendo would have liked to have released at the launch of the Wii, but schedule pressures probably prevented it.

Trip - I'll soon be heading to San Diego again. Most of my work to date has been a continuation of my older engineering integration support work that I did at AMD. My supervisors would like me to work more on the C model of the upcoming graphics design. If I can successfully unplug from the older work, this new area would be a nice change of pace.

Michelle - The other day I came to the realization that Michelle recently crossed the threshold such that she's been married a majority of her life. She also pointed out that this means she's been a Bilik longer than she's been a Gerrits. Of course she'll always be a Gerrits at her roots.