Coping with life as a poor graduate student

As I made clear earlier this summer, the debacle with my credit card in Europe was a truly trying experience. Unfortunately, the worst effects of it are only now being felt. I can reasonably say that entering my 5th year of graduate study this is the first time I feel like I am on unstable ground financially. Yes, I won a research grant this summer and have a fellowship in the coming academic school year, but the former only helps to pay off the credit card debt I do have and the latter only really helps with cost of living expenses. There is little to help replenish my devastated savings. Perhaps I should have taken out a larger student loan this year, but it looks like its too late to adjust that. Honestly, I'd prefer to have a higher credit card bill that I know I can pay off over a longer period of time and be more stable, than to be able to pay off the bill quicker but face financial straights. The timing couldn't really be worse for all this, but there's not a whole lot to be done at this point except to ride it out.

On the research front, in addition to the database program I found, I also got a copy of MacSpeech Dictate. This is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, dictation software. It lets you speak to your computer and it will type out what you say. I figured since I have so much stuff to go through, a lot of which is in JPEG format and thus unable to be copied and pasted to a text document, this would be good and efficient alternative. The only real problem is that my iBook G4 runs a PowerPC processor and the program needs and Intel Mac. Luckily I can use Katie's MacBook while she's at work. Right now I'm just waiting for my microphhone headset to arrive and I'll be good to go. It will be good to start getting through this material so I can delete some of it from my iBook's hard drive. Sure I have it all backed up on an external hard drive and archived on DVDs, but I can't bring myself to delete the 20+ Gigs of photos from my hard drive yet, even though they're sucking up almost half of my hard drive space and contributing to slow performance (even worse than I was experiencing before, which were the result of putting Leopard on such an old machine). Add a new Mac laptop to my list of things I need but can't afford at the moment.

Throughout all of this I've tried to keep a "Candide" attitude telling myself that everything will work out. Let's hope that Voltaire's satire isn't just that in this case.