Late Nights, Spending $

Interesting stats from the 48 Hour Film Competition: 490 teams started nationally 77 teams missed the deadline 24 teams MIA (I think this means they registered, but didn't show up on Friday to compete) That's a lot of short films! Our heat is on tonight, so I'll be having a late night. It doesn't start until 9.15pm. I'm looking forward to seeing (hearing) how an audience reacts to the film - Debbie reported back that there was a fair amount of laughter when she showed it at school, so maybe it's not as flat as I feared. I am curious to see how it's received. On the spending $ front, Debbie and I have been talking lately about how it's awesome to save money for future plans, and yet be able to spend $ from time to time on things that make our daily lives more pleasant. There are 2 obvious examples - a heat lamp/extraction fan combo for the bathroom, and a big LCD TV that we've bought this year. It took me a while to get my head around the idea of spending large chunks of cash on nice stuff, rather than deferring spending for some future goal. It's awesome to have made that mental shift though. The stuff we've bought hasn't stopped us from saving, but they are awesome things that we use every day. I like trying to achieve a balance where we're saving regularly, but not missing out on the simple pleasure of a non-steamy house, or a cool big TV to watch shows on (mmm, Heroes is ready to be watched when we get back from the supermarket). Continuing in this trend of sometimes buying nice stuff, I've ordered a new computer. The old beasty we've been using was a low specced machine three and a half years ago when we bought it - it'll be nice to have a mid-range modern PC to use for the next few years. The old machine might make it into a classroom at one of our schools as an editing machine for short films - it's quite capable of handling Moviemaker. I decided to spend the extra $ to get a 500gb hard drive in the new PC - I figure with video projects like the 160gb horror film, and the 150gb school production that I'm working on, 500gb is actually a reasonable size to get. Now, to the supermarket, then back for Heroes. Then, on to Wellington for our heat...