Minimalism activity check for February
After doing so well in the month of January by not spending much and donating some items, I’m almost ashamed to report on February. However, I committed to doing this every month and you have to take the good with the bad. I’ll rip of the bandaid and just right to it.
What I bought
I had to buy non-slip shoes for my new part-time job, so it doesn’t bother me that I spent $89.00 on some black New Balance work sneakers. I’m not thrilled that I have yet another pair of shoes but I’ll get over that.
I’m more bothered by the four new Wawa-branded polo shirts and a pair of Wawa T-shirts in my closet. I didn’t buy them. Work provided them at no cost. But my well-managed small wardobe just grew by nearly 50%.
My only other discretional expense was honestly a good deal. And I am enjoying it! (Can you tell I’m stalling because I certainly could have gotten by without this purchase?
I bought a mid-range gaming laptop last month.
It’s a Lenovo Legion 5 Slim 16-inch model, normally priced at $1,529.99. The 16-inch display isn’t the brightest but has a solid 2560 x 1600 resolution. Inside is a Ryzen 7 7840HS with 16 GB of RAM that can be expanded. A meager 512 GB SSD is included but there’s a second SSD slot, so I popped in another 1 TB M.2 stick I had. And there’s an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 with 8GB of dedicated video memory. I’ll share detailed thoughts in an upcoming review post but for now, know that I’m thrilled with this device.
Especially because I was waiting for a price-drop. I wouldn’t pay full price for this Lenovo laptop and I wouldn’t recommend you do that either. However, it was marked down by $450 in the middle of February.
I saved even more because my local Best Buy had an open-box model in excellent condition for $988. I nabbed that one and took advantage of 0% interest financing over 12 months. I can spare $100 a month out of my new paychecks to cover this expense.
Yes, I could have continued gaming on my small desktop with Radeon 680M graphics just fine. Or I could have done the same on my Dell XPS 15 with Nvidia 3050Ti GPU. Doing the latter was actually the plan!
However, using the desktop means I’m stuck in my upstairs office. And I had been having issues with a dual boot setup on the Dell: Linux for coding and Windows for gaming.
I was gaming in Linux on that machine until I started running into some game crashes. So I decided to make the Dell XPS a dedicated Linux machine for coding while the Lenovo Legion is a dedicated Windows laptop for gaming.
What went away
In my January update, I mentioned that I’d likely be selling my Steam Deck. I was already gaming more on my full computers than the Deck, so I really didn’t need it. I sold the Steam Deck to a Swappa buyer in Ohio a few weeks ago. I think they got a good deal for $330.
Having been working 28 to 30 hours a week and coding during down time, I didn’t spend much effort de-cluttering any near areas in the house. We didn’t donate or trash anything as a result.
My plan for March is to pick a focus area and go through every item in it. Anything that we need or adds value can stay. Anything else goes away.
That likely includes a Chromebook or two since I have several. At the very least my Acer Chromebook Spin 714 will be up on Swappa within a week or two for around $400 or so. If you’re interested, ping me at [email protected] and I’ll work with you directly.