Creative Exercise #6: step out of your comfort zone

I mentioned how inspiring Red Leaf Studios was, right? Am I sounding like a broken record? At the beginning of the weekend, they challenged us to step outside of our comfort zones - to do something that scares us.

But I've been thinking that this doesn't have to just apply to photography (although it does perfectly). It can apply to our lives as a whole. I love creature comforts, I'm the first to admit. I live for comfortable jeans, being barefoot, a couch you can just sink in to with lots of pillows...but let's try, at least once this week, to do something different from what we would normally do - wear something out of our usual style, go somewhere different, try something new - challenge ourselves to make one small change. Go ahead, I dare ya! ;)

So I did. I decided to take the plunge and shoot in RAW instead of JPEG. Some of you are laughing that it was such a "risk" for me! I don't know why it scared me so much - I was afraid my camera would eat my images if I switched to RAW or something. So I cheated a little...I shot in RAW and JPEG (which uses an incredible amount of memory, by the way). So here's one I shot in RAW:
To be honest, the verdict is out. Using Adobe Camera RAW has its advantages - it's faster to tweak my WB and exposure and then transfer to photoshop to do the rest. And, granted, this image was exposed pretty well to begin with - and I hear RAW is great for saving poorly-exposed images. But it doesn't seem that different to me, and I don't know that I'm ready to run out and buy another 20+ gig of memory cards...any thoughts on this? Anyone really prefer one over the other and can tell me why?