No sweat. I've only been mining a few weeks myself, though I've been involved for a bit over a year.  I watch the prices pretty obsesively myself, but this is a slow downtrend, nothing major. It'll likely correct upwards. I think there are a couple of things driving it down right now. The article mentioned in another post talks about the Chinese new year, which makes sense, but also we just had a difficulty change. There is always a bit of a selloff from miners just before a diff adjustment, and I think this is partially good sense and partially emotion. If you've made enough to take profit and buy more equipment, then it's wise to do so before your mining income drops, so you try to time it as close as possible. If you panic, you'll sell too low. Bitcoin is young. Five years old, to be almost exact. In that time it's gone from being worth literally nothing to (briefly) over 1000 USD. a drop of 80 bucks over a week just before the difficulty change is not unusual, nor worrrysome. If it drops like a rock, it's still not worrysome to me. I look on that as a buy opportunity. If I'd had some spare cash when Silk Road got busted, I would have made a LOT of money on the buy opportunity. It dropped damn near in half, but rebounded within days.

I've now tried three of the major pools. Couldn't connect to ghash.io, no matter how closely I followed their instructions, so they're out for me. I found BTCguild made me less profit and was just not my flavor. Eligius is the best pool out there to my perspective. As I get more equipment, I may point some of it elsewhere to see what happens, but this is my main pool. I like Whizkid, got no problem with Luke-jr, and the pool works good. Even when the stats and payouts were broken it kept working. If a quick buck is all you're after (nothing wrong with that), you might consider mining an alt and trading it for btc. I'm going to try some of that come february, though it's more for fun than for profit. (I aim for both, of course).