- RT @mymoneyshrugged: The government breaks your leg, and hands you a crutch saying "see without me, you couldn't walk." #
- @bargainr What weeks do you need a FoF host for? in reply to bargainr #
- Awesome tagline: The coolest you'll look pooping your pants. Yay, @Huggies! #
- A textbook is not the real world. Not all business management professors understand marketing. #
- RT @thegoodhuman: Walden on work "spending best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy (cont) http://tl.gd/2gugo6 #
Regret
There comes a time when it’s too late to tell people how you feel.
There will come a day when the person you mean to talk to won’t be there. Don’t wait for that day.
“There’s always tomorrow” isn’t always true.
Public Service Announcement: Anger, Children, and Cars
If, in the course of a basic morning, your three-year-old decides that you need to pick out her clothes, even though she’s been handling that every day for months, don’t be surprised if she rejects your first three choices. She’s just being lazy.
If, after you’ve settled on clothes, you tell her to pick out some socks, expect the same behavior. She’ll lie on the living room floor saying “You pick them out” for 20 minutes, only to throw a fit if you don’t pick the ones with fairies. At this point, it’s okay to yell at her. Really.
When she tears them off and throws them across the room, you don’t even have to be gentle when you put them back on and strap her shoes down to keep her socks on.
Then, when you’re walking across the yard, and she refuses because she’s mad, it is again okay to hold her hand to guide assist drag her to the car, but it works best if you are strong enough to keep her suspended above the ground when she tries to sit down to stop you.
Of course, when you get to the car, she’s going to run back to the front door because she can walk by herself.
Literally throwing her into the car at this point isn’t okay. Tempting, but not okay.
As the man said, I told you that so I could tell you this:
It would seem, now, that it would be a good idea to flip the child latch on the door to keep the contrary little brat from escaping while you circle the car to the driver’s door, or worse, slow down for a stop sign. It is a good idea.
The thing to remember is that, in your anger, when the world has gone red and you are cheering on the biological traits that make it nearly impossible to hurt your children, it is easy to stick the screwdriver in the wrong slot in the door and jam your door latch.
When that happens your door won’t close. Your little monster won’t stop aggravating you, and the child who has chosen to play the role of little angel this morning will start getting crabby about the wait. That doesn’t help.
After you throw the kids in the spare car–the car which doesn’t have air conditioning on the hottest day of the year, so far–and get the brats to daycare, the internet can show you what does help.
If, when you close your car door, it bounces back open because the latch is jammed, no amount of poking at it with a screwdriver will fix it. You’ll bleed for no good reason. Grab the door handle and hold it in the open position. Then, when you poke the latch with a screwdriver, it will pop into the correct position with very little effort.
It’s amazing what a door that closes will do for your morning.
Mortgage Race, Part 2
As I mentioned last month, Crystal and I are in a race to pay off our mortgages. The loser(henceforth known as “Crystal”) has to visit the winner. Now, since–judging by the temperature–Crystal lives in Hell, I think it would be good for her to visit in the winter. There something about the idea of going ice fishing, staring at a hole in the ice while sitting on a 5 gallon bucket, cursing the day I was born.
Today, she threw down the gauntlet again. She has apparently decided that, since her prerequisites are met, she’s going to win. Sure, she’s closed on her house and built her savings back up to $20000, but it doesn’t matter. I’ve sent a small army of arson-ninjas to keep her from getting ahead. They are so small, they can only carry tiny matches and single drops of gasoline, so the damage they can do is tiny, but it will add up. Just a word of advice: if you hire an army of arson-ninjas, go for the upsell and get ninjas that are at least 2 feet tall. Anything less is just inefficient.
When I announced the race last month, my mortgage balance was $26,266.40. Today, it is $25,382.53. In three days, there will be another $880 applied to the principal.
In February, our renters will move in and we’ll conservatively have another $650 to pay. When that starts, our balance should be around $23,000. Adding a portion of the rent payment should mean we pay off the house in May 2014. However, when I bring in our side hustle money, that will bring us back to September 2013.
Crystal’s projected payoff is July 2013, so I’ll have to hustle.
How come my back hurts?
My favorite book series is the Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind. It’s a good sword-and-sorcery, good-versus-evil fantasy.
But I’m not here to talk about that series. Rather, I’m going to talk about one particular scene in book 6, Faith of the Fallen.
There’s a scene where Richard, the protagonist, ends up in a socialist workers’ paradise, where the government controls distribution and everybody is starving. Jobs are hard to come by, because everything is unionized and unions control access to work. That’s a non-accidental parallel to every country that has embrace socialist principles, or even leans that way. Go open a business with employees in France, I dare you.
So Richard goes out of his way to help someone with no expectation of reward. This person then offers to vouch for him at the union meeting, effectively offering him a job.
This is the conversation that follows:
Nicci shook her head in disgust. “Ordinary people don’t have your luck, Richard. Ordinary people suffer and struggle while your luck gets you into a job.”
“If it was luck,” Richard asked, “then how come my back hurts?”
If it was luck, how come my back hurts?
Seneca, a 2000-year-dead Roman philosopher said, “Luck is where the crossroads of opportunity and preparation meet.”
I won’t lie, I’ve got a pretty cushy job. I make decent money, I work from home, I love my company’s mission, and I kind of fell into the job.
By fell into, I mean:
- I started teaching myself to program computers when I was 7.
- I worked in a collection agency collecting on defaulted student loans to put myself through college while I had a baby at home.
- When I graduated, I went out of my way to help anyone I could, which positioned me for a promotion, getting my first programming job. The first one is the hardest.
- I spent 3 years studying the online marketing aspects of what I’m doing, with no promise of a payoff.
- I launched a side business in the same industry as the company I work for.
- I built a relationship with an author to include his books in the classes I teach. He happened to move to the company I’m with.
- I offered advice–for free, on a regular basis–on certain aspects of his business and his responsibilities with this company.
- He offered me a job.
That’s 25 years and tens of thousands of dollars spent earning my luck. How come my back hurts?
I have a friend on disability. He has a couple of partially-shattered vertebrae in his back, but he keeps pushing off the corrective surgery because the payments would stop after he heals. He refuses to get a regular job, because his payments would stop. He lives on $400 per month and whatever he can hustle for cash, and he will make just that until the day he dies. And he complains about his bad luck.
His back literally hurts, but not metaphorically. His bad luck is the product of deliberately holding himself down to keep that free check flowing.
I have another friend who made some bad decisions young. Some years ago, he decided that was over. He took custody of his kid and started a business that rode the housing bubble. When the bubble popped, so did his business. Instead of whining about his luck, he worked his way into an entry-level banking job.
He put in long (long!) hours, bending over backwards to help his customers and coworkers, and managed a few promotions, far earlier than normal. His coworkers whined about it. He’s so lucky. If it was luck, why does his back hurt?
We make our own luck.
If you bust your ass, working hard and helping people–your coworkers, your customers, your friends, your neighbors–and you are willing to seize an opportunity when it appears, you will get ahead. When you do, the people around you who do the bare minimum, who refuse–or are afraid–to seize an opportunity, who always ask what’s in it for them, they will will whine about your luck.
When they do, you will get to ask, “If it was luck, how come my back hurts?”
Power
At 8PM Friday night, our power went out.
We had 70 MPH straight-line winds and horizontal rain. Trees came down all over the neighborhood. Two houses down, 3 tree played dominoes, creaming the house, the fence, and two cars.
How did we do?
The skeleton I keep hanging in my tree lost its right shin-bone and we lost power. So did 610,000 other people in the area.
It’s interesting to watch what happens when the power goes out.
I’m assuming every generator in the area sold out. I don’t know, because I already had one. I do know that most of the gas stations near me ran out of gas on Saturday. Most places were out of ice, too. Batteries were hard to scrounge.
The restaurants that either didn’t lose power or had backup generators were raking in money all weekend. Sunday morning, McDonald’s had a line of cars backed up an entire block.
Our power came back on Monday night. 74 hours of living in the dark ages. We had to read books on paper and cook all of our food on the grill.
We did okay. A few years ago, when the power went out for a day, I bought a generator. Saturday morning, I finally had a reason to take it out of the box.
The generator cost me $450. Over the weekend, we put about $40 worth of gas into it. That kept our refrigerator and freezer running, saving at least $5-600 worth of food. Two neighbors filled up our available freezer space, so that’s another $200 worth of food that didn’t die.
That’s a $500 investment to save nearly $800 worth of food.
Pure win.
The generator also allowed us to keep a couple of fans running, which is great when the power goes out when it’s 90 degrees outside. We also fired up the TV and DVD player at night to help the kids settle down for bed. This is one time I was glad to have an older TV, because cheap generators don’t push out a clean electricity that you can safely use to run nice electronics.
We have a couple of backup batteries for our cell phones, so we got to stay in touch with the world. We borrowed an outlet at our rental property to charge the batteries when they died.
We had about 5 gallons of gas on hand, which was convenient, but not enough. I’m going to grow that. A little fuel stabilizer and a couple of 5 gallon gas cans and we can be set for the next time gas runs out.
We cooked everything on the propane grill. I keep two spare propane tanks on hand, but we didn’t use them. Sunday night, my wife made spaghetti on the grill. The hard part was keeping the noodle from falling through. Nah, we threw the cast iron on the grill and cooked away. Had pancakes and bacon made the same way on Sunday.
We had to buy more lanterns. We had two nice big ones, but at one point, we had 9 people in our house. That’s a lot of games, books, and bathroom breaks to coordinate with only two main lights. This weekend did teach our daughters that the emergency flashlights are not toys. Two of them had dead batteries that needed to be replaced.
Going out to dinner Monday evening was a treat. We sat in a building with air-conditioning!
All said, we spent about $250 that we wouldn’t have if the power would have stayed on. That’s $40 for gas, $80 for dinner(you try feeding a family of 5 for less than that at a restaurant that doesn’t have a drive-through) and $130 on new lanterns. The lantern bill caught me by surprise, by a lot, but now we are set for next time.
How would you do without power for three days?
