We’re back from our out of town trip, the family is up in the den, the girls are watching Frozen 2 for the umpteenth time, Missus reading the paper. I’ve been up for an hour planning my day out. We’ve got a lot of work to do to unpack from our trip, plus we have tropical storm Isaias tracking our way, and is expected Tuesday, and today is supposed to be the last day of sunshine for the next five days or so. Since it’s the first weekend of the month I have some other financial stuff that I have to take care of, including balancing the house accounts. There’s a lot to be done.
Our trip was pretty good. We left early enough that I didn’t have to drive past my bedtime, and late enough that the girls slept on the way up. They woke up when we got there and we had a bit of trouble getting them back to bed.
Missus’s dad loves to cook huge amounts of bacon for breakfast when we go up there, so we always wind up pigging out. He cooked what must have been two pounds of it and it just sort of laid out all day until we ate it, piece by piece.
We neglected to check the weather before we went up there, which is pretty big fail considering that we were up there for a canoe trip. The weather was forecast for rain all day Friday, but we managed to sneak in a quick forty five minute trip in the afternoon when the precipitation let up. We thought we were going to be holed up for the whole trip, so earlier in the morning we had left the girls with Grandpa to go for ice cream, and Missus and I drove out to a bookstore to pick up some games and activities. I grabbed Exploding Kittens and Munchkin. Missus got Yatzee and some other things for the girls to do on the car ride home.
On Saturday the weather cleared up, so the four of us did a full seven mile stretch on the river, and made pretty good time, less than three hours. We had a picnic near the start, and even let the girls float behind us for a while at one point, which they really enjoyed until they caught some shallow rocks on their legs. After we got home, I took a nap while the girls watched a movie, then we packed and headed home. The girls fell asleep almost immediately, and we got home just before eight.
I listened to some good podcasts on the drives:
Eric Vishria – The Past, Present, and Future of SAAS Software [Invest Like the Best, EP.183] There’s some really good explanations of API and SAAS services in here that I’m going to be sharing with people in my professional network. It gave me a lot to think of, both as an investor, as someone who is looking to build a SaaS platform, and as someone who provide services to SMB clients and has to explain what all this API stuff is about. Basically, when a person consumes a service, they use the UI, when another application uses a service, it consumes the API. It’s about the shift from business using software, to businesses being encoded in software.
Brad Feld — The Art of Unplugging, Carving Your Own Path, and Riding the Entrepreneurial Rollercoaster (#448) – The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss There’s so much to take away from this one. Feld’s quarterly off-the-grid vacations and digital shabbats were right up my alley, and his discussion of his relationship with his wife, their monthly life dinners and the way they deal with conflict in their relationship were all very interesting. Feld talks about his struggles with depression and OCD, as well as finding a therapist. And he knows himself, very well, and this self-knowledge comes through brightly.