- RT @bargainr: Life in North Korea is absolutely dreadful http://nyti.ms/dAcL26 #
- RT @bitfs: Weekly Favorites and Gratitude!: My Favorite Posts this Week Jeff at Deliver Away Debt threw together the .. http://bit.ly/9J0gGo #
- @LiveRealNow is giving away a copy of Delivering Happiness(@dhbook). Follow and RT to enter. http://bit.ly/czd31X # #
- Baseless claims, biased assumptions, poor understanding of history. Don't bother. #AnimalSpirits #KeynesianCult #
- RT @zappos: Super exciting! "Delivering Happiness" hit #1 on NY Times Bestseller list! Thanks everyone! Details: http://bit.ly/96vEfF #
- @ericabiz Funny, we found a kitten in a box last week. Unfortunately, it was abandoned there, not playing. Now, we have a 5th cat. in reply to ericabiz #
A Well-Trained Husband
- Image by Getty Images via @daylife
I am so well-trained.
I was more than a bit wild when I was younger. For the most part, that ended when my son was born. When you procreate, it’s time to put the wild on a shelf and become a reliable provider. That’s just the way it is. Anybody who prioritizes the wild over the progeny needs to be forcibly sterilized and exiled before be sold for parts.
When my mother-in-law got a membership to Sam’s Club, she gave my wife the second card, so we effectively have a membership. For those who don’t know, Sam’s Club is a warehouse store that has some incredibly good deals and a lot of things that look like good deals because you are buying in bulk.
The thing I hate most about warehouse stores is the default accusation of theft when you leave. They require you to line up so the the person by the door can look at your receipt and pretend to count what’s in your cart while they are really scanning for the most-stolen items in the store and ignoring the rest. The only thing they really accomplish is making all of their customer feel like thieves.
I used to bypass the line and the checker and just leave. My wife got sick of the indignant screeches coming from the store as we left. Eventually she got me to stop.
Last night, I went back to pick up supplies for a fund-raiser I’m helping to organize on Sunday. I went with one of the other organizers, who had some personal shopping to do later. We checked out using his account and he paid, while I took the food home to keep until Sunday. Since he’ll be getting reimbursed for the food, he kept the receipt while I headed for the door. Anybody see the problem here?
When the receipt-checker challenged me, I docilely stepped to the side and called my friend to bring the receipt to the door. I hate the feeling of submitting to authority, especially when the authority is pretending to be customer service. I just calmly did what the door-cop told me, just like my wife wanted, even though she wasn’t there.
I hate warehouse stores.
Family Bed: How to Make It Stop
baby on the cheek.” width=”300″ height=”199″ />For years, my kids shared my bed.
When my oldest was a baby, I was working a graveyard shift, so my wife was alone with the baby at night. It was easy to keep a couple of bottles in a cooler by the bed and not have to get out of bed to take care of him when he woke up once an hour to drink a full bottle.
Then he got older. And bigger. And bigger.
We tried to move him to his own bed a few times, but it never worked well. He’d scream if we put him in a crib, so we got him a bed at 9 months old. That just meant he was free to join us whenever he woke up. Brat.
We finally got him to voluntarily move to his own bed after his sister was born. Shortly after she was born, I woke up to see him using her as a pillow. To paint the proper picture, this kid is 5’9″ and wears size 12 shoes. At 11. When I woke him up to tell him what he was doing, he decided to sleep in his own bed.
Method #1 to get your kids in their own bed: Have kid 1 try to crush kid 2 and feel bad about it.
Method #1 isn’t a great solution.
Soon, baby #3 showed up and we had 2 monsters in bed with us again. Once they started getting bigger, it became difficult for the 4 of us to sleep. We tried to get them into their own beds. Unfortunately, even as toddlers, my kids had a stubborn streak almost as big as my own. Nothing worked.
Eventually, they got big enough that I was crowded right out of the bed. At least we had a comfortable couch.
Sleeping on a couch gets old.
When the girls got old enough to reason with, we had a choice: We either had to find a way to convince them they wanted to sleep in their own room, or we had to have a fourth brat for them to attempt to crush at night.
We went with bribery. Outright, blatant bribery.
We put a chart on the wall with each of their names and 7 boxes. Every night they slept in their own beds, they got to check a box. When all of the boxes were checked, they got $5 and a trip to the toy store.
It took 10 days to empty our bed and it’s been peaceful sleeping since. That’s $5 well-spent.
Have you done a family bed? How did it work? How long did it last?
The Story of Sammy: Complete
This is the complete collection of the Story of Sammy. Sammy is a guy I met after my mother-in-law died in the spring of 2012. My wife and I decided to help him launch a….
Read the stories. It’s better that way.
Part 1, in which we meet Sammy, learn of his dreams and offer to help.
Part 2, in which Sammy jumps into business with both feet, teaching teenagers the value of work.
Part 3, in which Sammy shows us what crackheads and the homeless can accomplish if given the chance.
Part 3.5, in which…holy drama, Sammy!
Part 4, in which I am disappointed.
Link Roundup
Doctor appointments, speeding tickets and too much work. That’s what this week has been made of.
Finance links:
Why do the non-politician folks who want taxes raised think a fund for voluntarily paying extra is stupid? If they were sincere, they’d be contributing to that from the start. As it is, it’s just a demonstration of either hypocrisy or a looting spirit.
Paying off your Visa by charging it on…your other Visa doesn’t accomplish anything for you or for Visa. Even if you are GM and Visa is the federal government.
My wife and I are thinking of starting a potluck/boardgame night. Boardgames are a cheap way to spend a fun evening.
Misc links:
The iFixit Blog. Dedicated to teaching you how to fix your own gadgets.
I am not only a geek, I am a Halloween geek. The Stationery of Horror is full of want.
The Pareto Principle works. Even at work. I get 80% of my value from the time I spend writing blog posts. Err. Nevermind.
Be Happy With What You Have…
…or you will never be happy.
A newer car, a bigger TV, a nicer house, a fancier phone, better tickets, more friends, more gadgets, more toys…more, bigger, better…whatever.
It’s all a disappointment.
Nothing on that list will provide happiness. If that is your goal, you will spend your life miserable. It’s not possible to buy happiness, either directly or indirectly through the accumulation of “stuff”. A purchase may fuel your ego or trigger endorphins, but it is all temporary. There’s no sustainable happiness in the “high” of the latest purchase.
The search for stuff pales in comparison to the search for meaning. Find your passion and follow that. Chase that to the ends of the earth, and come back feeling fulfilled. Feel something that will last longer than the drive home or the next product release.
Find contentment. At some point there is a satisfying level of “enough”. More than that, you feel empty. Less, envious. Find enough and stop there. Find the level that allows you to do the things you need to do and some of what you want to do. Find your balance point and be happy with it.
Living life constantly disappointed that you don’t have more is a sure way to live life disappointed. How do you find your balance point?
Also, have you started the Happiness Challenge?
