I've been a little busy, but mostly I've been putzing around reading the Internet. Unfortunately there's an infinite supply of interesting information to read.

Thanksgiving Rundown!

• Thursday - Drove up to spend the day with the second cousins in Grass Valley. After dinner I went to visit my ex-girlfriend Lisa with some folks we know down the road (still in Grass Valley), spent the night there, and drove back for...

• Friday - Angstgiving at Houseness! And Kat's birthday. Late night, due to some miscommunication, but she did like her present. Crashed in San Francisco, until...

• Saturday - Went to a yoga class while Kat went to aerobics. I remembered why I don't do yoga regularly (I find it boring, much as I enjoy the flexibility), and this particularly was a weird class, and my right arm, already sore from canefighting, hurt substantially more after class. So screw those guys. And then we went down to a B&B in Pescadero for the night, including an awesome visit to Harley Farms and a nice dinner at Duarte's Tavern, including olalliberry pie and ice cream in front of the Oklahoma University-Oklahoma State football game in the bar.

• Sunday - We didn't get home until mid-afternoon, at which point we were ready for some alone time.

I've been thinking again about finding something socially useful to do. In talking to a nice girl on Sunday, I remembered my idea of teaching financial literacy to people--I'm currently watching what you might call "The Advanced Class", a movie called Money As Debt, which is a bit of a brain-bender if you haven't yet discovered that money is more of a fluid consensual hallucination than anything real. The 47-minute movie has a lot of nice history and explanation and diagrams, but it's the story of fractional reserve lending, guaranteed to cause kooks like Ron Paul to foam at the mouth with a long litany of evils and an unbending desire to return to the gold standard.

Anyway. I've been thinking for a long time about basic financial literacy that was handed to me from my parents, and the benefits I get from that, and will pass on to my kids, if any. I read stories about poor people who don't understand what a 12% interest rate means for their monthly payment, and I meet people my own age and class who can pay their bills, but don't have a firm grasp on more advanced money management, from the basics of loans up to basic investing. It's tricky stuff: I'm extremely comfortable with how these things work, and I still don't entirely understand how compound interest is calculated (fortunately that's less important than knowing that interest happens).

It looks like there are a lot more financial literacy pages now than the last time I looked, so we'll see what happens.