Happy Hanuchristmakwanzivus.
Family and travel. No posts today.
Make the most of the holiday.
The no-pants guide to spending, saving, and thriving in the real world.
Happy Hanuchristmakwanzivus.
Family and travel. No posts today.
Make the most of the holiday.
Why do you get out of bed in the morning? Is it so you can exercise the privilege of spending 8 hours in a cubicle?
I didn’t think so.
In Okinawa, it’s call the ikigai. In Costa Rica, it’s the plan de vida. It’s your sense of purpose–the reason you get out of bed in the morning. In these cultures, having a strong ikigai can be directly correlated to a statistically extreme lifespan*. All around the world, the plan de vida is the single factor most likely to cause someone to feel they have lived a fulfilled life.
Do you know your ikigai?
For some people, their plan de vida is to successfully raise their children, then their grandchildren. For others, it is charity. Some folks are serial entrepreneurs, always looking for the next deal, the next business. For still others, it is a collection or an urge to travel. There are even some whose sole reason for getting out of bed(other than potty breaks) is work.
The last category is most common with teachers, soldiers, and police. The problem with wrapping so much of your identity up in your profession is retirement. What do you do when your ikigai–your reason to wake up–goes away? In Okinawa, teachers and police tend to have very short retirements because they lose their reason to for living.
What is your plan de vida, your passion? What drives you to keep going? Do you live to write, or to raise your children? Do you <shudder> live solely for someone else’s happiness? When you find it, it will resonate as “this is you”. Finding it is a deep soul-searching, not a light-hearted explanation or a new fad.
Your reasons can, and should, change over time. You can’t live for raising your children years after they have grown up and moved away. Finding this one factor in your life can be the thing that leaves you on your deathbed looking back with a smile instead of regret.
What is your plan de vida?
* From The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest
I’m cheap. I don’t even consider myself to be frugal. I’m cheap. A few days ago, I spent my entire year’s Halloween budget–on November 1st–so I could store my new treasures
for an entire year before using them, just to save $145.
However, there are some things that just aren’t worth going cheap.
When I first moved out on my own, a good friend walked me through the mistake of buying cheap cheese. A slice of the generic oil-and-water that some stores pass off as cheese will not cure a sandwich made from Grade D bologna.
That advice got me through some less horrible meals when I was younger.
Now, I’ve expanded the crappy cheese rule to extend to any meal I pay someone else to prepare. While I do occasionally hit a fast food restaurant when I’m traveling, I almost never do so any other time. I enjoy sitting down for a nice meal in a nice atmosphere while friendly people cater to my every whim. Well, almost every whim.
I’m not saying I go to $100 per plate steak houses every week, but I’m certainly not afraid to drop $20-$30 per meal.
My reasoning is simple: anything I can buy at a fast food restaurant or a cheap restaurant, I can make better at home for less. Why would I pay good money to sit at a sticky table and eat food that won’t let me forget it for 3 days?
If I’m going to spend the money, I’m going to eat something I either can’t make at home, or can’t make as well. Chinese food is one example. I can make it at home, but I don’t stock the ingredients, and I don’t enjoy the preparation, so I go out for it. Cheap Chinese food tends to be worse than anything else I’ve eaten, so I spring for good food. Cheap rat isn’t good rat.
How about you? What are you willing to pay full price for?
First, watch this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_BtmV4JRSc
“It’s not about what you love, it’s about how you love it. There’s going to be a thing in your life that you love, and I don’t know what that’s going to be…it doesn’t matter what that is. The way you love that–and the way you find other people who love it the way you do–is what makes being a nerd awesome. -Wil Wheaton”
In the video, Wil Wheaton gets asked to send a message about being a nerd to an audience members newborn baby, and he does.
Being a nerd isn’t about pocket protectors, or D&D, or chess club. Being a nerd is about finding something you love and loving it no matter what.
My son is obsessed with League of Legends and Minecrack. I don’t get it.
I don’t have to.
My wife and daughters are all horse, all the time. I don’t get it.
I don’t have to.
Growing up, we got our first computer when I was about 7. Thanks to 3-2-1 Contact magazine, I started programming it shortly thereafter.
A few years later, we got a computer that wasn’t Apples green-on-green monstrosity. My first instructions from my parents were “Don’t break it.”
It took me three days. I was 11.
At 14, I got sent to computer camp. Soon after, I was up all night writing code. I remember getting questioned when my dad got up for work. “Have you been on that thing all night?”
He didn’t get it.
He didn’t have to. It was enough that he didn’t stop me.
My obsession–and my parents’ tolerance for it–eventually led to a career that allows me to support my family.
In high school, I discovered roleplaying games.
NERD!
The friends I made there are my friends now, 15 years later. I rent a room to one of the first people I played D&D with. He introduced me to my wife.
My nerdy obsessions have formed the basis of everything I love today.
When you are raising your kids, or shaking your head at something your husband or wife is doing, just be happy that they have found something to love.
Don’t ever tell them they can’t love the things they love, and don’t ever let anyone tell you that you can’t love the things you love.
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.
Once upon a time home theatres were only reserved for the rich and famous – the equipment and rooms necessary were just far too expensive for your Average Joe. Now, the landscape has changed and with projectors and all of the other core essentials being more affordable, home theatres are more popular than ever before.
Rather than pointing you in the direction of the latest equipment, we’re instead going to talk about another way that you can boost your home cinema experience. The windows in this room can make or break your movies, even though they are often left until the very end of a project. However, make a bad choice in this this regard and the whole expense associated with your home cinema will have been for nothing.
Your window treatment decisions should mainly revolve around your viewing preferences and the type of room that your system is located in. If we start with the latter, if your home cinema happens to be basking in glorious sunlight for most of the day, it goes without saying that you’re going to suffer from the dreaded screen glare. Right in the middle of the best scene in the film, you’ll be hit with a glare that means “part two” will have to follow the day after.
In the above instances, new blind technology is your best friend. Turn to something like a solar shade to eradicate the beaming rays that blind your screen and tune into your movie without any disruption at all.
The above solution assumes that you actually want a bit of natural daylight streaming into your home theatre. Of course, some people might not want to rely on this.
It’s these instances where a more traditional treatment enters the picture, like a blackout blind. As the name suggests, these are able to eradicate all natural light that would otherwise be flowing into the building, to leave your room blanketed in darkness. In other words, your home cinema has just mimicked the setting of the traditional high-street cinema. It doesn’t get much better than that, does it?
Depending on the type of room that your system is based in, there are other options. For example, a lot of people decide to install their home cinemas in the basement, completely out of the way from the rest of the house. In these instances, where the room temperature tends to drop, it might be worth considering a blind that can retain some of the room’s thermal efficiency. Insulated shades are one of the best choices and do exactly as their name suggests.
Already, the window treatment options for your home cinema are starting to become endless. As you’ve probably been able to see, this is a room which relies heavily on its blinds or curtains and making the wrong choice can ruin your whole viewing experience. Just ask yourself what you actually want from the room, and what the room requires. Answer these two points and your home cinema will be the real deal.