A happy thought on which to end the week.

As you may know, we’ve been working Dave Ramsey’s system to stop paying debt interest to big banks and improve our standard of living. Well, this past week, I finally got paid for some contract work I did last year (yup—more on that in a bit), and this check will finally put us over the top. We’re not out of debt yet, as we still need to pay off Sallie Mae, but this will eradicate that last credit card payment, for the cards we cut up in June. Behold the power of extra work!

And just as significantly, we now are no longer worth less than $0.

I think this is the last Dave Ramsey story I’ll tell for a little while. (Or at least the last big one.) But I have to at least tell this one, because I’ve already told it to several friends, several times, and it’s turned out to be a hoot.

Dave Ramsey is famous for cutting up credit cards on stage. And for using the word “stupid” repeatedly during the process. And this is a story of the first credit card I ever had. I had gotten it while still a teenager, through a deal with AAA. And I still had that credit card years after I had dropped AAA. I kept it after the account had been sold to MBNA—Yikes!—and finally to Bank of America—Crikey! I charged up that card, and paid it down, and charged it up again, and paid it back down, and charged it up— like a freakin’ yoyo. That poor card was so tired, I had put it through so much: it had a dog-ear in one corner and a tear on the opposite one. But it kept going, and I kept it around, for “emergencies.”

(You can see where this story is going, right?)

Babylon 5 Fans: How many of these people can you recognize?

Bill Mumy is probably best remembered as young Will Robinson on the original Lost in Space, but he’ll always be Lennier to me. Nowadays, he’s pursuing his music career. (You can catch some of Bill Mumy’s music on Spotify.)

Anyhow, this past weekend, he posted this cellphone photo on Facebook, with Walter Koenig, Claudia Christian, Patricia Tallman, and J. Michael Straczynski.

Big B, little b, ...

According to Dave Ramsey, money arguments are the number-one cause of marital strife.

Now, I’m not sure where he got that factoid. And I don’t actually know whether it’s true, because marriages—as all relationships—are more complex and nuanced than a single cause. Regardless, it is surely true that money arguments are a leading factor in failing marriages.

In early 2009, after a series of bad software development jobs, I sunk into a deep depression. At the time, I attributed my mood to the bankruptcy of the software industry— And I still believe the industry in general is broken in several key areas, and needs to be fixed. But I later discovered, my problem was mostly connected to my own reactions, my own thoughts, going through my own mind, what Perry Marshall calls “inner head trash."