Q2-Q3 report on New Year's resolution

OK so I'm not making very good progress toward hitting my New Year's resolution for the middle 6 months of this year. Also, any strange people reading this please note that I don't have a lot of money so I'm not worth kidnapping or robbing. Any undergraduates reading this, please note that grad students don't make much. =P

The other striking thing about this is that I apparently didn't do anything fun in July. And that's the month of my BIRTHDAY summore. Oh yeah, I was stuck in lab doing RNA preps.

Also, still not sure whether or not to count the price of my new bike that was stolen after one week =( If I don't, that actually puts me quite close to my goal on the humanitarian/religious side.

Regarding the animal-oriented part of my resolution, I at least owe the Four Lakes Wildlife Center some blood money for raising (successfully!) this goofy-looking little bird that Lina brought home unhurt back in July. It turned out to be a Red-Winged Blackbird, strangely enough. Princess Furball's not very expensive except that she had some vaccinations in the spring, plus I bought Heartgard. According to my coworker who's a vet student, heartworm-infected cats, unlike dogs, don't show a lot of symptoms...then suddenly drop dead.

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I got into the Amazon Vine program, which is a program where you get free stuff to preview if other Amazon users have rated a lot of your reviews helpful. (Nyah nyah.) One of the 2 books I ordered this month is Passing the Plate: Why American Christians Don't Give Away More Money. In the first chapter, the authors lay out the incredible things that could be done, both in the religious and secular humanitarian [which obviously can overlap] spheres, if even only people describing themselves as "committed Christians"/regular churchgoers gave 10% of their income to charity. We're talking BILLIONS of dollars here. We could literally change the world.

In the second chapter, they provide detailed statistics from several different sources on the dismal reality: Most people give little to nothing. Significant proportions of people who describe themselves as Christians, regardless of denomination, say they give nothing to their church or charities. Americans Christians do give more than non-religious Americans and people from countries with less religious influence, but still less than Americans of other religions (not that they do so well either).

The 3rd chapter presents nine hypotheses as to why Christians don't give more. The "we can't afford to" excuse is refuted with the billions of dollars spent per year on candy, beverages, entertainment, sport vehicles, cars, fast food, etc. (since the majority of Americans are Christian, it's reasonable to assume that a good chunk of this luxury spending is by them).

Anyway, from doing my accounts and reading this book, I realize I need to buck up. I don't want to be a person who goes through life making stupid excuses. Again, if we don't count the stolen bike, my original target is attainable.

Drat - I just realized that since I use Microsoft Money to keep track of my accounts already, I could have gotten it to generate this spreadsheet automatically...