Monkey wrench

Nothing like spending a few hours working on a car only to get to a problem you can’t fix and have to back out. That’s just what happened to me. The kids went off to church and I decided I didn’t have enough projects going on and decided to start a new one. I ordered a trailer hitch for the CRV last week and it came in yesterday. I wanted to get it installed for our road trip this weekend.

I managed to get the rear shroud off the undercarriage, cut a hole in it for the hitch, reinstalled it, dropped the muffler, then spent another hour trying to get the hitch in place with the help of a floor jack. After cutting some more of the shroud off, I finally got the driver’s side attached. Then I went to attach the screws around the muffler… and couldn’t. The receiving threads were too corroded. They weren’t protected by the shroud, and ten years and seventy thousand miles was just too much. Then the storm clouds started rolling in, so I had to detach the bar and get everything inside before the storms came in. I managed to get the muffler hung back up, but there’s not much else for me to do on my own.

In the morning I’ll have to make few phone calls to the local indy shop and see if there’s anything they can do. Otherwise I’ll have to call the stealership and see what their protocol is. We’ll see how that turns out.

I managed to do a good bit of griping about the situation, both to Missus and to D. when he came back to drop off the kids. I’m not really too frustrated about it, but it seemed the only appropriate response, to bitch about it. I’ve been reading Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle Is The Way, which I suppose can be classified as modern stoic philosophy, and the last few chapters which I’ve been reading are about how to act when all of your plans go awry. It’s about perseverance. One of the chapters even described the highest ambition of this philosophy about being glad, truly glad, about all obstacles and setbacks that happen in life. I kind of I’m glad that this happened to me so that I can deal with the challenge kind of mindset. I’m sure there are versions of this in other philosophy, Job in the Old Testament, for instance, and it’s good to be reminded about it.

Another book I’ve been reading, Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists, has been on my mind a lot as well, especially as the kids have been attending church more often. They’ve been singing Sunday school songs constantly, asking me if I was saved or believe in God and Jesus and that kind of stuff. I’m trying to tread a fine line between letting them know how I fell and shitting over everything that they’re picking up there. I think I tried to explain to Younger that stories of Jesus’s miracles are basically myths, like ancient versions of the Avengers or Sailor Moon, but I don’t think she really got it. What else can I say to a five year old?

My point here is that de Botton makes a good point that secular society does a lot of things well, but there are a lot of things that religion does better. Imparting a philosophy of life being one of them. That’s not to say that they don’t exist in secular society, it’s just that our institutions, namely schools and government, aren’t designed to provide them. And while I’ve been trying to find a way to impart some sort of family values to my kids, I’m afraid it’s been hard going so far, and although I hate to say it, I can’t really compete with the Baptist church.

So I don’t mind my kids picking up a bit of philosophy from the church. And it’s cute when they start singing their songs on our road trips. I just fear at one point it’s not going to be cute any more. I just want to make sure I keep their faith tempered. I do have a bit of worry about what they’re being indoctrinated with, but for now it seems harmless enough. We’ll see.

Daddy daycare

I tell my kids to go out and play, they bring their friends over and play inside. I didn’t care much, but Younger was not behaving and made it very difficult to get work done. I managed some work with React in the morning, and Rust in the evening, but I didn’t get too much done otherwise.

The Rust Exercism that I’m working on is to build a bowling game simulator, just to keep score. The logic of frame scoring is proving a little bit harder to suss out than I imagined initially. I’ve taken a habit that I picked up from some TDD videos, mainly to do the bare minimum necessary to pass the test. So if a test for a function expects a certain result, then I hard code that result. Then, when the next test expects a different result — say for a boolean — then I’ll go and implement the bare minimum logic necessary to return the proper results in those to cases. It’s been working ok for me, but in with this bowling exercise it’s been a bit more difficult. Trying to figure out the proper data structure to help me compute the scores for frames with splits and strikes is hurting my brain. Or maybe it was being interrupted by kids fighting every five minutes. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll get some actual deep work done.

Trying to keep the kids “in school” over the summer is proving a bit harder to manage, but I think it’ll be worth it in the end. Elder seems to be more interested in playing video games on her laptop than she is at paying attention during her Galileo clubs, but I think I should just let it go. She’s making progress with her ‘magazine’ article on weaving, and we bought some more supplies that she wants to use to make potholders, bracelets, or door-hangers. She wants to sell them at a community yard sale, so we’ve been going over the numbers to figure out what her costs would be and how many she’d need to sell to recoup them. We bought $10 worth of polyester loops today so she can make some more that we might figure out how long it would take her to make her inventory. When I told her that she needed to sell a cotton potholder for $10 she scoffed. (I’ve been spending a bit of time on Etsy…)

I’ve been pulling twelve hour days, it seems. Probably longer than that, actually. I’ve been so tired lately that I’ve been turning in before 10PM. It’s mostly a combination of physical activity and waking up earlier. I got up early enough today that I was able to meditate and workout before the girls woke up, I even added two additional exercises into my arm routine.

Missus came home early from work today and went straight to bed, she’s been fighting something, so I’ve been my fair share with the kids in the afternoon. I took them out to the playground with their friends after dinner tonight to give them their evening activity, then cut the grass. I also spend a good half hour scraping paint off the back door in preparation to repaint it. I couldn’t spray the deck today as it rained again and I was worried that it was going to do more.

There’s a bit more news, about RVs and theme parks that I’d jot down, but I promised the girls I’d be upstairs to put them to bed. Until tomorrow.

Is it only Monday?

I guess I was really tired, because I went to bed at nine thirty yesterday. I slept great and has some vivid dreams.

I got up pretty early a bit before seven, and put in a great run. My body is acclimating nicely and I’m pushing myself harder for the final sprint, trying to see how far I can go. I was running flat out past the house and had a flash that I could run like this forever. I meditated after I cooled down, with the sweat just dripping out. Very satisfying.

I managed to keep everyone on schedule pretty well. I got two work blocks in. About two hours on the Codecademy React tutorials (almost done), and later in the afternoon a shorter period doing Rust Exercisms. I finished one I’d been working on last week and another that I knocked out as well. I’m not getting them quite as idiomatic as can be, but I am getting better. Progress continues.

Elder had an interesting idea, she wrote down a bunch of activities on slips of paper and put them in a cup. They were to give them things to do when her and her sister got bored. So we had a bit of fun with it. We had a dance party, she played piano, they did some crafts, read books, and watched TV and played video games — of course. Both the girls did their work, Elder had her arts and crafts club on Galileo, and I managed to get Younger to do her dad school stuff by bribing her with episodes off her Peppa Pig DVD that Missus picked up from the library.

One of the slips in Elder’s cup was ‘choose a new recipe’, and since I had a large pork loin roast to cook today, I went ahead and pulled out a book that I hadn’t used in a while and spent three hours making a orange juice and mustard marinade and sauce. It was a lot of work and used way to many dishes, but it came out fairly decent. Not as great as I had hoped, but there are plenty of leftovers.

Missus came home exhausted from work, so I just wrapped up some special time with the girls, part of my effort to get them to bed on time by exposing them to the sunset light in the evenings. We rode out bikes down to the pier to try and scope the sunset, but it was obscured. Hopefully it will help them get the last of the energy out and get them in the mood to wind down.

I know I’m exhausted.

Daddy daughter day

Today was Younger’s quarterly board meeting, a habit I picked up from the Business of Family podcast. We started out in the mid-afternoon at Dairy Queen, then I drove out to a park to let her run around in a wooded playground. I wanted to keep out of the sun, but we spent about five minutes there before she told me she wanted to go to the beach. And since it was her day, off we went. We ran back to the house to collect our things and slather on some sunscreen, then we spent an hour or two in the beach. She was pretty cute, with her hat, goggles, and floaties. We had a pretty good time, at least until I got a bit rambunctious throwing her up in the air and she swallowed too much water. We finished the day up by running by McD’s so she could get a Happy Meal.

That was the main part of my day, anyways. I went to bed early last night to get an early start staining the deck, but it rained last night so that was off. I worked out instead and let the kids have some screen time before they went to church. Missus slept in. I compounded my Perpetual positions, taking out my weekly funding profits and pumping my positions a bit higher. 2x on BTC, 4x on ETH. I also have a smal CREAM position that is at 1x, so added a few dollars at 10x to start scaling that up. My profits for the last week was about $630, a few dollars more than the week before. Not bad for (mostly) passive income. Now we just need to see if I can avoid liquidation.

And I finally started staining the deck this afternoon, after we got back from the beach. I’ve had the sprayer sitting in my garage for ages, and I managed to put down a coat on the lower part of the deck, spraying as close to the hot tub as I could manage. I’ve got to mask it up and do it again later this week to finish the first coat, then comes the challenge of doing the top section. It’s going to be a lot more work than I anticipated. The steps and railing are falling apart, most of the wood needs to be replaced, and I’m going to have to mask everything around the house. Not to mention moving all of the furniture and plants that we have on the deck. Doing it by myself is proving a bit overwhelming, but it’s not like I don’t have the time.

I was actually unsure of what to do with myself earlier, while the kids were gone, so I wound up working on some holes in the walls — my plaster patching skills are not great — and also started scraping paint off the back exit door. The wood is decaying so I need to try and salvage it and avoid having to replace the entire door.

So yea, I was pretty busy today, and am totally exhausted. And I’ve got a little girl who wants her daddy to finish her day with a story in bed.

Cleaning day

Today was our monthly cleaning day, four hours of scrubbing, sweeping, mopping, and deep cleaning of the house. The kids were mostly useless, most likely a result of us letting them stay up way to late last night to party. Rookie mistake. I managed to get the kitchen and foyer done, then attacked the mess we call a living room. Kids toys and clothes everywhere. I think I threw out two bags of trash from there, as well as a small box of things that we dropped off at the Goodwill store.

For their “reward” we took the girls to a buffett. I found a new Chinese place across town on Google Maps, but it was actually a takeout joint, so we went to Golden Corral. We had a decent time there the last time we went, but I don’t think I want to go back there anytime soon. I wasn’t even really hungry, but I stuffed my face, and all the girls wanted to eat was carbs. It took an act of congress to get the two of them to eat anything with protein. I swear my kids are such picky eaters it’s driving me crazy.

I’m really understating how atrocious Younger’s behavior has been lately. I think it’s because her best friend has been out of town and she has no one her age to play with. (They should be back tomorrow.)

We have an orchid that we received as a gift over two years ago. This thing has been knocked out off it’s pot so many times, either by the girls or the cats, and Missus managed not only to keep this thing alive, but actually got it to bud. Five of them in fact. Two have bloomed the past couple days, and I took a picture and sent it to the friend that gave it to us. I hadn’t talked to him in ages, so it was good to catch up. Earlier today, Missus discovered that someone had take a pair of scissors to the orchid and cut the stem right in half. Missus was severely disappointed.

Both the girls denied it of course, and I had them both crying after I accused them each in turn of doing it. We’re fairly certain that it was Younger. She loves cutting wildflowers, and also has a tendency to break stuff or destroy it when she’s mad: drawing on walls, scratching things up and so forth.

So it was pretty much a shitty day, all said. That’s the punishment we get for letting things get wild. No more, no good comes of it with these kids. We stick to the schedule from no on.

Streak-preserving history rewrite

Forgive me Father for I have sinned, and let my writing streak lapse. I have posted every day since March 20, and forgot to post yesterday because I was having too much fun drinking beer and playing video games. Woe is me. Thankfully I have developed the technology to send this post back in time twenty four hours to the past so that I can keep the streak alive. It will take me some time to prepare the energy necessary to complete this.


I went for a run this morning, despite the fact that yesterday was leg day. I was worried that I might be too sore or could injure myself but it seems that the only thing holding me back was my attitude. Limitless, indeed. I managed another 2.7 miles with a flat-out sprint at the end for almost 300 meters.

The rest of the day was mostly routine, as they have been lately. I knocked out a Rust Exercism and spent some time out in the yard with the girls. After lunch their grandmother took them for a few hours and I worked on some React tutorials on Code Academy. Then I went to the fancy grocery store and spent way too much money on sushi and IPA. It was all downhill from there. Missus wanted to watch the new Space Jam, I wound up playing the latest freebies on Epic Games: Obduction and Stardock’s Offworld Trading Company. We watched Infinity Train, and ate popcorn then played some games with Elder, Roblox and a bit of Dragon Age: Origins, then watched a bit of the last of the Matrix movies with her before going to bed. I’m not sure what time it was but I know I was worried about pissing Missus off if I let Elder stay up too late, so I’m pretty sure it was before midnight.

I rotated another grand out of spot BTC in my Voyager account. My leverage price didn’t change so my liquidation price didn’t move much. It’s still around $17k. My ETH price is at $1555, but I decided that I’ll sell spot ETH if that gets in danger. I don’t think it will, but most of CT is waiting for some big nuke so that we can go back up. The funding this week is close to where I need it. BTC is paying out real well, but I’m not happy with ETH’s rates. I should probably calculate my runway and see what it’s looking like. Between my perpetual and my stablecoin yield I might be close to financial freedom. I’m probably on the short side right now, but I’m sure it’ll turn around with the market.

Dad pages

The days are long but the years are short, or something like that. The weeks are certainly flying by. I’ve been keeping a schedule in a new notebook that I bought, filling it out every morning with what I want my day to look like. I do this on the left side of the page, and on the right side I fill in notes about what I really did. It’s an interesting exercise I’ve been doing for the last couple weeks. I picked it up from Deep Work.

Today was leg day, I listened to a podcast that detailed some interesting links between sunlight and circadian rhythms; the gist was that one should expose yourself to two or more minutes of sunlight within thirty minutes of waking. I do this meditating outside, but I made the girls step outside after they woke up or a few minutes. The other part about winding down properly was to do the same during sunset, to get that wonderful orange light in your eyes to signal the body that it’s time to wind down. So instead of watching TV with the girls like we usually do, after dinner we packed up our bags and headed out to the beach and stayed out there while the sun set. It was wonderful.

At least until it was time to go.

Younger has been a beast all day. We were trying to incentivize the girls with some single-serve boxes of cereals, Frosted Flakes, Fruit Loops and so forth. Elder just needed to wear panties and not pee the bed — I’m tired of buying diapers — and Younger just needed to go to sleep and stay in her bed throughout the night. She didn’t do either of those things last night and woke me up around five this morning, and she woke up expecting one of these cereals because I moved her to her bed last night. That started a tantrum.

I did a pretty good job handling myself and keeping cool while remaining firm. She was good for most of the day. She tested me a lot, but when we got home from the beach earlier I’d had enough. She didn’t want to listen or do anything I asked her, and I was ready to go to war. Thankfully Missus stepped in and is putting her down right now. That’s teamwork.

Overall though it was a pretty good day. I got some Rust work done; I managed to get one Exercism done relatively quickly, and started a sorting algo implementation that drove me a bit mad. More on that tomorrow I suppose. I feel like most of my day was spent cooking though.

I make it a point to put special time on the calendar every day, a time when the girls are in charge and get to tell me what to do, about fifteen minutes for each of them. Of course all they want to do is wrestle me or roughhouse. Elder was doing her Galileo check in while Younger and I were having a tickle fight. It gave Missus a bit of FOMO, she told me later this afternoon that she’s a bit jealous that I get to have all this fun with the kids and don’t have to work, and she’s frustrated that she feels like management at her job is more concerned with making her life hell via micromanagement. She wonders what it’s all for.

She’s also been asking me about Bitcoin lately. She’s got cash — quite a bit, sitting in her checking account and she knows it’s not doing her any good there. (She also finished reading Daniel Price’s Choose Life, about geoarbitrage and digital nomadism and the like, but more on that later.) So I’m putting together a plan to start deploying some cash to BlockFi and setting up a DCA purchase strategy. It’s actually quite refreshing. I’m not quite self-sufficient with my Perp.Fi funding yet, but it’s good to know that she’s going to make it.

Evening pages

Spike Lee commercial for a crypto ATM company CoinCloud that doesn’t mention crypto.

Today was an interesting day. We took the girls and their friend J. over to the community center today for a few hours. There was story time with and old friend of ours, Mrs. S, who used to babysit the girls when I was running for office, and another woman doing alterations. I got two pairs of shorts mended. I feel pretty good about the latter as one pair had holes in both front pockets, and the other had the front button missing for over a year. I had been keeping them closed with a safety pin, but hadn’t worn them for months. Feels like my wardrobe just doubled.

I have another bit of self-satisfaction from repairing the dryer a few weeks ago. It had started damaging clothes and Missus was ready to buy a new one. We were about to pull the trigger on a seven hundred dollar dryer around the fourth but I decided to do a bit of research to see how I could fix it. Turned out it was a twelve dollar part. I wound up paying about sixty because I wanted to make sure I covered all my bases, but it’s been a week and we’ve run half a dozen loads through it and no damaged clothes. I feel pretty good about it.

Today was a rest day for me. I figured I would need a bit of recuperation after today’s long jog, so I didn’t work out. Plus I think I might be experiencing a bit of a bug. Missus had it, the girls and I have had some sore throats, and my neighbor across the street spent five days under the weather. I actually took a nap this afternoon in front of the TV while Younger was watching a show. That’s really unusual for me. I didn’t get much deep work done.

A Twitter acquaintance messaged me an hour ago. Looks like Index Coop has decided to tokenize something similar to my reFIREment fund. They’re calling it the Pulse Aggregate Yield fund, or $PAY. It seems like a great idea, one that I should have figured out how to do a lot sooner. Que sera.

Evening pages

Today seemed like it might be a new typical day. I turned early last night and got up around six, set a new personal best for a run (2.7 miles) and did some yard work before anyone work up. I guess the books I’m reading are helping; several volumes on neuroplasticity, Limitless-type of stuff. Elder had several did her Galileo work and I managed to get Younger to do some dad-school as well. And I managed to get some deep work done working on GraphQL stuff and React.

Missus came home a bit early from work as she wasn’t feeling well. We’ve all had a mild bit of sore throat. She was “exposed” to COVID at work, possibly delta, so of course we’re paranoid about symptoms and the like. My take it that it could be, regardless of whether we’re feeling typical symptoms, but at this point I just don’t care. I’m not wearing a mask any more.

The girls had a playmate come by this afternoon, so I let them play video games until the yard was in shade, then they played in the pool while I heated up some dinner. Then I cut the grass. I am exhausted. Missus is trying to put the girls to bed right now but I’m just ready to have a couple more beers and pass out for the day.

Missus and I are rearing up on our twelfth anniversary later this month. The traditional gift is silk, but we both have kimonos that we haven’t worn in years, and I’ll be damned if I’m buying silk sheets when we’ve still got kids peeing in our bed at night. I’d like to get her an Oora Ring as her sleep seems to be the most important thing for her health, but they’re three hundred bucks and that’d be way more than anything we normally get each other. Mainly I just want a fitness tracker, but I have no idea which one. An Apple Watch, probably, but it’s probably too pricey for me.

Evening pages

Today was almost a routine day. A bit late to sleep last night led to me sleeping in, but I still managed to get in a workout and a few hours of deep work. Worked out in the yard and continued prepping to stain the deck. Made a big dinner and am just enjoying a minute alone while the girls take baths and get ready for bed.

I finished an Exercism today, and it was one that I felt some satisfaction from as I though my solution was a better than most of the more recent ones that had been posted. It wasn’t quite as clever as some, but I feel pretty proud as I was able to do everything using iterators instead of some kludgy imperative match clauses that seemed to be the standard way of doing it. Btrees seemed to be the idiomatic way of doing it, so I’ve still got a lot to learn. I’m progressing though.

Elder did an arts and crafts club through Galileo, and I dare say she enjoyed it. Tomorrow is going to be a busy day for her as she has three clubs tomorrow, one student led, but I think it’s working out for her so far. Her mood was a bit more back to baseline today — more defiant — but I think it’s working out. Younger has been a bit harder to deal with, but I think it’s because she got up before everyone else this morning and was watching TV before I even came downstairs.

The crypto markets are coiling. Everyone is expecting a huge move, fussing over every little move and S/R level. I’m just chilling, keeping an eye on my funding levels. The best income seems to be overnight, but it might just be because it’s the only extended duration when I’m not checking the price hourly.