The whiteboard on our fridge a white dry erase magnet, slightly bigger than a sheet of paper. On the top of it is written “FIRE by 2024”, along with the amount of student and mortgage debt that we currently have, along with the interest rates we’re paying on them. (The auto loan was erased last month.) Below that is the current price of BTC, along with an arrow pointing to the price it needs to be erase that debt completely, about $60,000.
Yesterday I decided to put a new number on that board, and calculated the value of my BTC in my cold wallet plus the Ethereum wallets I’m tracking in Zapper.fi
I don’t know if such a visible reminder is good for my mental health or not. I’m already obsessed with price action beyond what’s healthy, and I’m not sure if this is a good aspirational exercise I’m indulging in or compulsion.
Zombie, LLC, the walking dead that I call a day job, lost another client yesterday. This one was due to the client firm shuttering. It’s a small account, one that was more of a pain to deal with, but it had been steady recurring revenue lately, and didn’t require too much from me. When I got the call from the business manager, asking to cancel services, I could hear the depression in her voice. I’m sure she had been making several of those calls to other vendors and I managed to muster some sympathy in response. It was a small, family-run operation, and I didn’t ask for details. I assume it was a mixture of loss of business or the patriarch’s age, or desire to retire.
Side note, this guy actually wrote a book about how modern science is wrong about carbon dating and evolution, and how man co-existed with dinosaurs. He spent $15,000 to publish and market the book, but was always hard to convince when it came to capital outlays for the business. So it goes.
We seem to have reached some sort of equilibrium here at the house, with certain rooms falling into a sort of stable chaos between clutter and cleanliness. Missus made me bring out our Christmas tree last weekend as she wanted some cheer in the house. What we got instead is a leaning tree with one strand of lights thrown on it, and half the ornaments strewn around the living room floor for the past several days. The cats have taken to either chewing on the metal branches, or trying to climb or hunt from within them.
The kids have been somewhat more behaved lately. We seem to have reached a bit of understanding, they won’t do half of the things I ask them to do, and they won’t get to watch TV at all. We’ve settled into a sort of rhythm: we do our own things in the morning, chores (to an extent), breakfast, I have calls for work, they have their project du jour, lunch, and then schoolwork from noon till three.
I’ve been letting them use their laptops or tablets for Khans Academy in the AM if they want, but they don’t get any of their shows until after school. Elder is doing her third grade Zoom sessions, and I’ve got Younger doing IXL math and language arts. I’ll have her reading in no time. I’ve also bribed Elder with an ice cream party when she finishes the Khan Academy third grade math course.
Thanksgiving is next week, and Missus and I are still trying to figure out what to do about it. The girls go to her mother’s every Friday, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to avoid Thanksgiving at her house, even though the rest of the in-laws are there. I’ve got a lot of anxiety about it though. COVID cases seem to be spiking through the roof, and we’ve been lucky so far, the headlines about large Thanskgiving dinners and small Christmas funerals” seems to be stuck in my head. I think part of it is that I haven’t seen my mom since pre-COVID, and had been looking forward to seeing her during the season.
Missus’s father bought a tract of land a few weeks ago and has been steadily working to make it into a homestead. There’s a fully-stocked lake there, they caught over thirty fish in a couple of hours, so we’re going to take a day trip up there this weekend to check it out. It’s a three hour drive from here. My father and law has been busy putting some sheds up there for people to stay in, and making the path in more traversable with some gravel. I’m looking forward to it.
The rest of the house is awake, and I’ve got an hour until I need to be “at work”. I’m signed on and taking calls, but I really have no taste for it anymore. I’m fully immersed in smart contract development when I’m not looking at charts or on Twitter. There’s a lot to do.