Mid-September update

The push-up challenge is coming along nicely. It's the end of day 11 and I have 360 under my belt. 640 more to go in 19 days, for an average of around 33 1/2 per day. I've averaged 32.7 per day so far, or 36 per day if you ignore the first day. So I feel pretty good about my progress.

Day	Sets	Total
9/1 Saturday	None	0
9/2 Sunday	20	20
9/3 Monday	15 10 15	40
9/4 Tuesday	15 20	35
9/5 Wednesday	15 15 15	45
9/6 Thursday	15	15
9/7 Friday	20 15	35
9/8 Saturday	15 10 15	40
9/9 Sunday	15 20	35
9/10 Monday	15 15 10 10	50
9/11 Tuesday	15 15 15	45

I can feel my badassity increasing daily. I've settled on sets of 15 for my "average" set; it feels like the right number. Not too many that my muscles burn afterward, but enough so I feel it. Each day it's a little easier to complete my sets. One day I'm going to gear up and just knock out as many as I can, though I'd like to get a bit ahead first.

In student loan news, my most recent payment of $500 cleared which puts my current loan balance at $11,954.27. My car loan is at $9,807.90 thanks to two extra erroneous payments (basically autopay was automatically set up and I made manual payments as well before I caught myself). I'm already planning some sort of celebration for when my student loan balance drops below my car loan balance. I want an excuse to mention my aggressive student loan payoff to friends and co-workers, basically as another voice in the dialogue to balance out pervasive consumerist talk that comes so naturally. More on that later.

Last, on to investment news, which consumes a good deal of my mindshare. A co-worker heard from my office mate about my interest in the stock market and we're going to discuss such awesome things as dividend growth investing tomorrow over lunch (leftovers, of course). He was excited about buying into Corning (GLW) because he felt it was undervalued. I'm hoping I've found someone at work who I can geek out with about the stock market.

I've also been reading up on options, specifically selling covered calls and (what I think is called) selling cash-covered puts. I think there's very little risk in these moves, especially if you're committing to an action you were planning on anyway (like buying shares if they drop to a certain price, or selling shares if they rise to a certain price). I plan on writing up these strategies in a later post.