The Miles Rausch Family Website

Well, since the little lady posted about her post-holiday purchasing, I’ll do the same. I made a special Wishlist in Amazon that I used to collect, ruminate over, discard, and, eventually, purchase my items. I finally concocted a collection (nay, plethora) of presents that came, with shipping, to $96.97.

The List:

• Walkman Car Connecting Pack for MD Walkman and CD Walkman (Model# CPA-9C) – my “boring” purchase
• Star Trek (Three-Disc Edition) [Blu-ray] – my “friggin’ awesome” purchase
• Futurama, Vol. 1 – my “complete the collection” purchases (we own volumes 2 and 4)
• Futurama, Vol. 3 – (see above)
• Stella – Season One – my “about time!” purchase
• Get Fuzzy: 2010 Day-to-Day Calendar – my “daily sanity” purchase

Most surprising, I think, is the fact that I didn’t purchase any PS3 games. I’m as surprised as you are! There certainly are such games on my list, but I feel like I need to complete a couple more of them before I go purchasing additional ones. Also, time is a factor, as video games can benefit from multiple days’ momentum. Case-in-point, Bryan Johnson was kind enough to lend me, by way of driving to my house and handing to me, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. I have yet to drop the game in and play a level. Now, that might change with Holli’s class schedule, since it’ll give me a fair chunk of down time on Tuesday evenings, but I still can’t feel justify purchasing a whole new game with what I currently have available to me.

Also surprising is the lack of music on the list. There was an mp3 album I had in mind, but the shipping pushed me past the point of purchasing it. However, I’ve been nickel-and-dime-ing (I mean, ninety-nine cent-and-one-dollar-and-ninety-nine-cent-ing) my way into a respectable amount of new music lately. Much of that new music is reflected in I’m the John. It’s more than that, though. I find it harder and harder to buy albums of music. My favorite bands, certainly, will get a full album purchase, but it’s so easy to listen to new music that I don’t need to own it. I can fire up any number of music services, some of which the artists, themselves, may have uploaded to, and play whatever hot new song or band is coming out. This is free. Those songs I can’t live without, get a $.99 purchase from iTunes or Amazon MP3. The rest get forgotten.

Also absent were baby items. That’s because Baby Rausch got his own financial and physical gifts this Christmas, which he has yet to thank anyone for.

What did you guys get for the Holidays?

We got money for Christmas from several individuals – all put together, with Miles’s bonus, we had a pretty good amount. We wrote down a list of various ways we’d like to use it. Some would take up all of it, others only part.

This “wish” list included:

• MacBook (or MacBook Pro) to replace Miles’s current MacBook, purchased in 2006, which does need replacing sometime.
• Maternity clothes for Holli (we’d get clothes anyway, but it was still on the list).
• Paying off Miles’s car (we’re pretty close to paying it off, and my car will need to be replaced within the next year or so).
• New video camera (a small one that will be quick and easy to film moments with the baby – currently in the running: Flip Mino HD, Kodak Zi8, iPod Nano).
• Droid (or maybe the Nexus?) for Miles (his cell is pushing four years old).
• Plane tickets to Ohio (to visit Bryce and Lindsey).
• Put all of it in savings (since we’ll have major expenses coming up in a few short months).

After making this list, we found that some of these might not work out – paying off Miles’s car would take up a little over half the amount, I’ve got only a few more weeks to be able to travel via airplane (and motion sickness has been a big issue) and I need to save all my vacation days for maternity, and just decided to hold off on a new laptop. We gave me a budget for maternity clothes, and I only went $0.65 over that. I got one cardigan, two camisoles, 8 shirts/blouses, and one pair of brown dress pants (the only color I still needed). Yippy!

Since the money was given to us as a Christmas gift, we know those persons want us to spend at least some of it on fun things for ourselves. Our first plan was to save 2/3 of it and with the other third we would spend it on a video camera and split the remainder between us to spend how we want. With this plan, I would have gotten chairs for our dining table. We currently use card table folding chairs. Gag me. The problem lies in that the table will be hard to find chairs for (it was Miles’s grandparents and his mom stained it and gave it to us) and I’ll want to get six. Ultimately, we decided against the two-thirds/one-third plan as we aren’t ready to make a video camera decision and we’ll just need to consciously save up for dining table chairs. As for matching (or possibly strategically mismatching?), I’ll just need to go into a store with one of the leaves from the table I think.

So we put it all in savings and decided that right away, we both could take $100 of it to spend however we want. We’ll still possibly get some of the things on the list eventually, like the video camera and cell phone (and we already got me maternity clothes) but for now it’s going to stay in savings. Miles is still working on his $100 wish list, but I’ve already spent mine.

• $20 – Purse from Gordman’s with a coupon. Something on my Christmas list that I didn’t get and would have had to pick out myself anyway.
• $30 – Rugs from Target so my favorite rug at our entrance doesn’t get destroyed by winter and to warm up the upstairs living area. The hard wood floors make it very chilly.
• $35 – Electric griddle from Amazon, something on my Christmas list that I didn’t get. I love to cook for us and friends, but sometimes I just want to do it all in one shot.
• $10 – Dry-erase calendar board from Amazon, also something on my Christmas list that I didn’t get but I think I’ll like.
• And with the remainder of my $100, I got a special hot chocolate from Caribou.

Most of you looking at my list probably think it’s a little lame. But it’s totally me. Yes, the lame part. The things I want are almost always practical things. (i.e. dining room chairs, maternity clothes, etc.) All the fun things on the first list above came from Miles. (You can bet I’m the one who put “Pay off Miles’s car” on that list.) His list will be more interesting, and will include PS3 games and Blu-ray movies, when he decides what he’s going to get. But I’m excited about what I got and the deals I got for them.

But why am I defending myself to you? It’s my blog, anyway!

In case you missed it, we’ve got a new Christmas card in our sidebar. Or, you can just view it here!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Dinos dinos dinos dinos! Preliminary sketches for canvases to be painted over Christmas break and hung in the nursery. A little something blue coming soon.

…his Christmas wish list on Amazon is four pages long and 98% of the items are priced outside of our gift budget.

That’s when a girl’s got to get creative.