Month: August 2021

I went to war with my Eldest today, and I dare say I won, despite her taking a scorched Earth approach to things. I’m not one for de-escalation, what can I say?

I warned both girls last night before bed that there would be some work to do in the morning. Usually they do personal chores before breakfast, and I make them wait until 9AM till they watch TV for a couple hours while I try to get some serious work done. Since I’ve been sick and mainly incapacitated with the man flu for the weekend, thing have gotten a bit out of control around the house, and I felt it necessary to spend some extra time picking up. So I told them that instead of doing our normal morning routine, we’d be doing some extra cleanup. I figured it appropo in light of the fact that their mother let them get away with it last night.

Sibling rivalry is something that they take very seriously. It’s seriously hard to manage things between the two of them unless I go to great pains to make sure that they’re treated equally, unless one of them take offense and hold it against me. God forbid that I give one of them an extra gram of mac and cheese at dinner. Elder especially has problems considering that I might treat her different than her Younger sister and give her more responsibilities. Trust me, I heard enough about it today.

I spare you the details and just say that it was war from the moment I tried to gently wake her up. She wound up destroying her entire room. Needless to day, I did not even attempt to get any serious work done, as I was prepared to spend my entire day showing her who is boss. I don’t think I’ve ever grounded her before. Usually it’s timeouts or spankings, but today it was no TV, not treats, and no video games. I wouldn’t even let her out to play with her friends. She moaned and moped and wailed and screamed bloody murder, but I held my temper. It was a rough morning.

By the afternoon her tantrums were over. I couldn’t punish Younger since she had seen the writing on the wall and was on good behavior — birth order means something — so I eased up and let Elder do some things in concert with her her sister, and Missus took her out for a shopping trip. So it wasn’t all hell raising. Elder watched a couple Great Courses lectures with me, and even snuggled me, and by then end of the night she was demurely asking me what she wanted me to do. So there’s hope for tomorrow, at least.

Well this is either the end of one of the most worthless weeks of recent memory, or hopefully a new start to a week of productivity and, dare I say, normalcy. I feel like I got nothing done this week. I’d have to go back and look at blog posts, but I feel like I’ve been sick for a week. Hard to imagine that last weekend we made two trips to the amusement park. That seems like a year ago.

I took a Nyquil last night. Missus gave me one after my COVID test came back negative. I hate taking them because of the way they make me feel in the mornings. This time was no different. I woke up first in the house, followed by Younger, then Elder, and then I was ready to do my weekly numbers. My Perpetuals did a record haul again, and I compounded them back into the positions. I made a slight mistake, doing a 4x on my BTC position instead of a 2x, but the principal is so large right now that it only made my liquidation price about a hundred dollars higher.

Anyways, I’m not sure what’s going on, but the funding for the last twelve hours has been almost double. I’m not sure if it’s just a fluke because of the weekend, but I’m loving it, even with the slight pullback we’ve seen today.

I also cleared out some USDC from my mSTABLE BUSD vault. I fretted about where to pull the funds, I was going to do it out of my Curve pool, but the withdrawal fee seemed a bit steep. It doesn’t look like I’m making much of of any of the reFIREment funds allocation. Integral being the exception. By the time Ethereum fees are taken into account, I’m losing pretty much everywhere. That might quite be the truth, as I still have a couple larger allocations in Yearn that might turn out okay. Anyways I should have enough cash available that I’ll be good for at least three more months. I’m moving it to BlockFi for the interest and to use it to pay off the credit card that I got from them. More on that later; I plan on writing a comparison between them and Fold at some point.

But right now the kids are still up and are showing no signs of winding down, and I’ve spent entirely too much time playing video games today and need to go to bed.

Today I woke up, again, feeling like garbage. I had convinced myself that I probably did have COVID, but that I wasn’t in any danger. I mainly wanted results so I could be sure. My appointment wasn’t till after noon, so my intent was to take a sick day and rest as much as possible, letting Missus take over the business of dealing with the children for the day. I was the first person up, besides the cats who were doing their best to let me know that they were out of food. I made it downstairs and plopped my butt on the couch, and fell back asleep until Younger came thumping downstairs.

She wanted food, but I just wanted to crawl back upstairs to bed. Missus wasn’t rousing, so it fell to me. There was evidence of a party, mainly dishes and cups, strewn about the living room, as well as trash from my dinner pizza that I hadn’t put away. I think I slept at some point, but wound up getting back up and cleaned up, brewed a pot of coffee, and plopped my butt upstairs in front of my computer to check my Perpetuals and Twitter.

I wound up playing video games for most of the morning, with breaks to read a couple hundred pages of REAMDE. Around noon I killed a couple of baloney sandwiches and drove off to get my test. The pharmacy was well across town. The one nearest to me wanted five to seven days to return a result, and I knew that such a wait would be unbearable and too long for me to try and isolate the kids. I actually got there about twenty minutes early, which was good, as there were about five cars in front of me. I finally pulled my car up to the window two minutes before my scheduled time.

The woman at the window took my information, gave me the test materials and asked me if I’d done it before. I said no, and she told me to take out the swab so that she could walk me through it. It was a bit worse than I expected, and caused all sorts of adverse bodily reactions. My eyes started tearing up, my nose felt like it was going to start running. I asked how long for my results, and was told one to three hours.

I got home, told the girls I was sequestering myself in my bedroom and read. I managed to wait almost a full hour before I started checking my email, waiting for results. When they finally came through I was relieved and went down to tell the girls.

I spent the rest of the day the way I had started it, lounging in front of the computer, or laying in bed. I’m hoping tomorrow will finally the the day that I wake up and can get back to my regular schedule. This cold or whatever it is had outstayed its welcome. For real.

Well, despite yesterday’s optimism, I am still sick. After some discussion with Missus and Googling of Delta variant symptoms, I have decided to get a COVID test. I actually scheduled one for today with a local pharmacy, but found out that it would take five to seven days to get a result. Instead I rescheduled one for a different pharmacy tomorrow, a rapid test that would let me know in an hour or so.

So again today, I was not too productive. I had to spend most of the morning enforcing yesterday’s decision to revoke the girls’ usual TV time, so I paid for that by having to spend more time overseeing their chores this morning instead.

This morning was pretty miserable, I didn’t do much. A couple of hours for my morning work session on integrating web3modal into React, but after lunch I didn’t do much. Crypto was mooning, so it was mainly refreshing TradingView and checking my Perpetuals. Of course the big news today is the crypto provision in the infrastructure bill. Everyone is up in arms, rightfully so, but I don’t have the energy for it right now. The vote is tomorrow.

I spent this evening doing my usual Friday night video game night. I downloaded Destiny 2 and bought a new D&D game off of Steam. Oh yea, and I spent a grand on these avatar NFTs, Cute Pig Club.

https://t.co/xISMxZYL8B pic.twitter.com/EqlBSanfiU

— BCM – The Blockchain Man (@dahifi) August 7, 2021

Not that I’m too terribly impressed with these things right now, but this is NFT season apparently so I’m throwing in some cash at this point to get in on the ground floor on these. It’s a risk, but I think I should be able to make my money back relatively easy. I might keep 5412 for Elder. I knew it would be her favorite. If I had to pick an avatar it’d probably be 5409. I’ve been trying to find a mint to get in on and this was the only one I’ve been able to find thus far. Once they mint out I should be able to recoup my expenses. Hopefully.

I had just laid down to bed, when my brain kindly let me know that I had not blogged today. So here I am, just after eleven. My schedule has been shot to shit the last few days as I’ve struggled with the last bit of this summer cold. It’s mainly been a sore throat, but I can also feel some sort of bronchial infection working its way through my lungs. It’s sapped a lot of my will. I haven’t meditated or worked out in two days, and most of my afternoons have been spent watching Great Courses or playing piano. I’ve been laying on the couch or taking naps, although I did cook a decent dinner tonight and cut the grass. I was in no mood to edge the yard, even though it badly needs it.

The girls were a bit on the bad side. Elder is doing her best teenage angst impression, and seemed to want to argue with me about everything. She professes to dislike her Galileo clubs, but doesn’t seem to want to do the work to find alternatives. I told her if she doesn’t like it she can go back to public school, but she replied that she wasn’t going to do that either. Oh my god this kid is testing me.

Her sister was much milder today. I didn’t push things too hard since I didn’t have the energy for it, but I felt like I needed to since I let her slide yesterday. She’s been spending a lot of time writing her name and learning how to spell her friends’.

Missus is working from the office Tuesdays through Thursdays, which has made the last two days even more difficult. I don’t even get a sick day. She’s back home tomorrow, but I don’t expect much of a reprieve tomorrow.

I expect I should be well enough tomorrow to resume my standard routine. I’m overdue for legs. One of the videos that I’ve been watching on Great Courses has been on strength training, so I think I might mix things up a bit.

Otherwise, the big news today was the launch of Ethereum’s London fork. EIP1559 has already burned millions of dollars of ETH. The market took off today, and my funding is looking fantastic. Not to mention the position gains themselves. If things keep up I’m looking at another monster week. ETH is going to $10,000 and there is nothing you can do about it, was the message on my TL today. BTC maxis coping and all that. I think I’m positioned well.

So I was pretty useless today following a late night emergency and a bug that I picked up.

Elder woke me up this morning around three AM with a nosebleed. She hasn’t quite learned how to deal with them yet, and the early morning grogginess coupled with her squeamishness put her in a bit of a panic. It would be more accurate to say that she was being a complete drama queen. I’ve been afflicted with thin linings in my nasal cavity, and have had numerous nosebleeds throughout my life, so I’m pretty well used to dealing with them. She, however, seems to think she’s going to die of blood loss, not to mention that she can’t stand to taste her own blood.

On top of that she was adverse to every suggestion that I offered her: pinch your nose, put this ice pack on your back, hop in the shower, and so on. No, no, no, no, was all I got back. At that point she started saying that she couldn’t breathe. I kept the lights off, as the last thing that we needed was bright bathroom lights at that hour. Missus was up soon after and took over. I rang the blood out of the hand towel elder had been using and tepidly went back to bed. I did not go back to sleep for a while. Missus had resolved the situation and was back in bed long before I finally dozed off after tossing and turning for an hour.

Then I was woken an hour later as Younger came and took her usual spot between the two of us. I didn’t get out of bed till eight. Missus called in late. There was no doubt about it. I was sick. Elder had a cold earlier in the week, and I assume that the nose blowing led to the nosebleed. When she had woken me up I had felt what I assumed to be a dry throat, likely due to a bottle of cheap Merlot, but it’s continued to bother me all day, along with a general malaise.

I managed to get close to two hours of programming work done, but I didn’t even try after lunch. I ate leftover pho, then plopped my butt on the couch and watched Great Courses videos for most of the day. I took a nap later in the afternoon.

I did spend some time playing piano, and kept abreast of the goings on in the cryptoverse, checking Twitter several times and TradingView constantly. ETH was on a straight tear today, up over two hundred dollars. I moved another grand into Perp, a tax harvesting sale from my Voyager account into a 2x position. Funding continues to look good, but I am spending way to much time looking at it. EIP-1559 goes live tomorrow, so that will be interesting to see how things go from there. I remain bullish.

Tomorrow I hope to wake up rested and well enough to get some exercise in.

Well it took everything in me to get out and run this morning, but I did it. A little bit harder, just to keep moving forward. I finished up and meditated before waking Missus up; she had to go into the office today. The girls started arguing over breakfast bowls and silverware less than five minutes after she left, and I was not having it. I pretty much lost my shit, but I think they got the memo and were pretty good the rest of the day.

Both of them have been acting up a lot, ignoring me and my directions, just doing whatever they want, basically. After the first blow up I walked in the living room to find them snacking out and told them to throw it away. Younger decided to throw another mouthful in her gullet and that was strike two, so they lost TV for the rest of the morning. They decided to build a fort instead.

I did manage to salvage the morning and made some progress on my Ethereum React app. I ran into some strange problem with the repo that I was working on, so I started from scratch just to make sure. I was able to get it, so I’m thinking it must be a problem due to the fact that I mixed yarn and npm in the workspace inadvertently. It will take some more work to square up.

I spent most the rest of my time focused on piano. I started learning a new piece, a waltz from the back of my big classics book. It’s not too difficult but my finger independence isn’t quite developed as I want. I’ve been practicing Clair de Lune for so long, and I’m so close to the end, but I still struggle with several sections and felt like I needed a break. Watching the women play these pieces on The Great Courses is really inspiring me. I know I’ll never be as good as these masters who started when they were children, but I really enjoy playing. I just can’t keep pieces in my head the way I can with guitar music. Even the Bach pieces that I memorized over the past two years become unplayable if I don’t keep them up. Fur Elise as well. I’ve gotten much better at reading music, but nowhere near the point where I can just read something by sight.

I’m hoping better for the girls.

I’m lucky if I can get Elder to spend a half hour doing her Playground Sessions. She’s made progress, but she fights me on it so much. Today though, Younger said she wanted to do it, so I let her do the first exercise. It’s simple, just pressing middle C in a variety of rhythms, but it was amazing to watch her do it five or six times and get better at it each time. I was so proud of her. Despite the pushback, she’s really been showing progress with her letters as well. And I would love nothing more for a bit of competition between her and her older sister. I’m going to let her keep it up. Not sure how I’m going to manage it if I need two separate accounts for them.

It might be worth it.

I gave myself a pass today, as my body felt like it had been run over when I woke up this morning. I’d ran three miles Saturday morning, walked another three at the park that day, then gone back for another two miles at with the kids on Sunday. I couldn’t figure out why my neck and shoulders were wrecked, then I realized I had carried out a screaming and crying five year old at the end of the evening. So no, I didn’t work out at all today.

I did manage to finish another Exercism, after breaking my own rule of no peeking. I had completed everything but the last test case, as I could not figure out how to sort a vector with a tiebreaker. It was ordering::then_with. This challenge centered around building a program that could provide a result of tournament results. I barrelled through it over the past week and had several problems. The main issue was how to sort HashMaps. The short answer is that you don’t, they have to be converted to a vector and sorted. I hacked things a little and returned a Vec::<String, MyStruct>, the String being the HashMap’s key, e.g. the name of the team, while the Struct held the match results and points. It’s not ideal, since I had to sort first by a field in the struct, then by the String. The idiomatic way to do it is to repeat the hashmap’s key as a field in the struct, then everything is accessible in one data structure.

I spent a good deal of the day making pho. I boiled some beef bones to make the stock, and went all out with beef tips, cilantro, basil, onion, bean sprouts, lime, chilies, fish sauce, and even bought yellow rock sugar. It didn’t come out too bad, but it wasn’t everything I had hoped for. The kids ate the noodles, and Elder actually liked the heat since she has had a cold and it really cleared her sinuses out.

I also spent some time this afternoon working on my web3 stuff. I finally figured out how to get my wallet address within the app (window.etherem.selectedAddress). I think it took me several days to figure that out. Go me. Now I can feed that into my React app instead of hardcoding it. Next step is to figure out how to pull the Perpetual data out of The Graph and pull it together for my dashboard. Progress, inch by inch.

And how could I get through a post without talking about my Perpetual positions. I woke up this morning shocked that my proceeds were well over a hundred dollars. If it holds my week will be over 25% more than last. The ETH/BTC chart is looking really good, and EIP1559 is due on Thursday. ETH just had it’s thirteenth daily green candle, and is still going up. It’s quite insane.

Now that my body has recuperated I’m hoping a fresh start to the day with an early morning run.

Well, today did not start out as a disaster, but it sure did end as one.

I woke up around eight, feeling pretty refreshed. Missus watched Pig, a new Nic Cage movie, and I wound up staying up past midnight reading REAMDE, but since I had stopped drinking after we got home from our date at the amusement park, I wasn’t feeling hung over in the slightest. Still, I decided to give myself a break from the routine, so I didn’t workout or even bother meditating. I just boiled some tea and watched a Great Courses piano lecture about Mozart while I waited for the clock to strike nine. Then I started tending to my crypto positions.

Negative funding payments for the week was just a few dollars short of my former salary. It's a little less than 1% of the nominal position value.

Going to continue compounding proceeds until we hit new ATH. By then it should be double. Completely passive.

— BCM – The Blockchain Man (@dahifi) August 1, 2021

So I pulled over nine hundred for the week. Pretty damn good. My actual positions were up several thousand dollars overall earlier this morning, but the market pulled back a bit later in the day so I’m down slightly. Enough about that for today. I was throwing potential BTC/ETH prices in my spreadsheets to daydream about my potential gains, but that’s probably a few more months off. For now, it looks like I’m going to need to liquidate my mSTABLE position, which should give me enough runway for another three months or more. That should buy me enough time.

So I woke Missus up at ten since she wanted to get brunch and I didn’t want to leave the kids at her sister’s for too long. I picked a local bistro that had a crab cake frittata that I wanted to try. It was raining, and the place was crowded, but we enjoyed time together and had a good time. The food wasn’t quite as good as I was expecting, and the place wasn’t quite as nice as I had hoped for our anniversary, but it wasn’t too bad. Missus and I were both acquainted with the owner as we had run in the same downtown scene a decade ago. She had opened a donut shop on the other side of the building and expanded to the bistro after the prior owners had shut down. It had character, all the coffee cups were mismatched, the salt and pepper shakers as well. The concrete floor was unfinished, but the place was decorated with all kinds of small potted plants and posters. Techno music was playing overhead. There were a few large groups sitting around us. One guy was wearing a Dadalorian t-shirt and wearing a N95 mask that he kept taking off in between bites of food. I thought it was foolish.

I might mention here that Missus and I have been fighting about COVID lately, mainly about whether to make the kids wear masks when we go out, or to wear them indoors. She works in a hospital, and I’ve obviously been exposed to too many libertarians on Twitter. We had a rather heated argument about it a few days ago, but I might need to save that discussion for another day. Let me just say that she didn’t wear her mask anywhere we went indoors this weekend. Delta be damned.

Brunch was great. The food was ok, but being able to spend time with my wife was tops. At one point in the conversation she noted how getting out was good for us and that we needed to do something similar for the kids to help raise their spirits. Then she came up with the plan. We both had season’s passes to the amusement park, and had almost half of our drink tickets left from the day before. They expired at the end of the week. We decided to pick the kids up, and tell them that we had a special surprise for them. They would need to help us clean the house, then we would take them to the amusement park and let them run around while we used the last of our tickets. It seemed like a genius plan, we would get to be great parents and have our drinks. It would have been a great idea if not for one very important fact.

Our kids are assholes.

The girls seemed in good spirits when we picked them up. They had gone to bed on time and gotten good sleep, but things deteriorated quickly once we got home. I’ll spare most of the details, but Elder made it less than two minutes after I announced that we were starting. She decided that she’d rather be a cat and pick up her silverware with her mouth instead of just carrying them to the dishwasher, and within minutes we were arguing. I should have just called off the whole thing from there, but Younger actually was trying really hard to help out. So then it got in to some crazy power struggle where I was prepared to take Younger but leave Elder with Missus at the house. And so on it went for three hours.

But we got the house clean. By then end of it Elder knew where we were going and was basically hyperventilating I want to go to … I want to go to … I should have just ended it there and reschedule for another day. Between the two of them and Missus and I, it was a bit of a mess. But we eventually decided that we could just pack them up, head to the park for a couple hours, drink our beer, and get home at a decent hour. Alas.

Things started pretty well. The park was pretty empty compared to the day before. Apparently Sunday evenings are the best times to go. We got our first round and took the kids to the childrens’ area where they played in a mini water park. I even took Younger on a small roller coaster, and we went twice in a row since there was no line. At some point Elder broke her plastic sandals. Thankfully it was just the front strap on one of them, so they stayed on her feet, but it caused Missus anxiety for the rest of the trip, as she felt compelled to duck into every shop the rest of the trip, trying to find new shoes for our daughter. The only pair she found cost nearly fifty dollars, and thankfully Elder didn’t like them. It would have been unbelievably ridiculous if she had bought them.

We must have spent too much time walking around, and, as a forewarning of what was to come later, Younger dipped out around a side stair that she wasn’t supposed to and was out of our sight for thirty seconds or so. I managed to catch and eye on her and we were on our way, but in hindsight it was an ill omen.

I think we spent too much time looking for shoes. The plan had been to let them go to the kids area, get them some lemonades and popcorn, drink our drinks, and then get the hell out of there. It took us way to long to get the popcorn. By the time we did, Missus was already out of patience and ready to go. We had promised Younger that we would take her on the sky gondola on our way out, but it wasn’t enough. Elder wanted to go to a second kids area, and Younger wanted to do the high-rise swing ride, but we took the gondola back toward the park entrance.

But Missus and I still had one beer ticket left, and there was a station right at the entrance to the gauntlet of shops that led up to the entrance. I had saved some popcorn just for the kids to enjoy while we had our last drink. I put our stuff down in an eating area off to the side and got our drink. Elder stood near the back, staring at us hatefully while I got my drink. Missus, thinking that the area was enclosed, said I left her back there. I turned back to look at her and didn’t see her, so I put my drink down and walked to the back, where there were some lockers. Near the back there was a small maintenance alleyway for staff which led back to the main thoroughfare, closer to the exit. No sign of Younger. I ran through it and back, put eyes on Missus. She ran off, I said. Go get her.

Easier said than done, since I wasn’t quite sure where she went. I ran back down the alley and started asking people if they’d seen her. I got staff’s attention, and a young lady went to go raise an alarm. I walked to the entrance to make sure she hadn’t gone out of the park, then back up the main thoroughfare until I ran into Missus coming back the other way. I cut back through the alley to our stuff and there she was, with her sister.

Missus was furious, and we started gathering our stuff. Me, not one to leave a brew behind, downed what was left of my six ounce cup and took Missus’s, which she had left and I knew was now to furious to drink. Elder was following Missus out the way we had come and I told her to go on, that I would catch up. I spent a few seconds packing the bag, then cut back through the maintenance alley to cut them off.

I caught them right there where I came out, near the small soda shop where I had gotten staff’s attention. Missus was arguing with Younger, who was calling her liar liar pants on fire for some reason or another. I was so caught up watching them that I was startled when a staff member called me. Yes, we had found her, but now I had two security officers standing around us, three staff members, and, I realized, Elder was nowhere to be found. I almost laughed. I backtracked a bit and found her standing in the middle of the square, staring around with no idea where she was. I got her attention, waved her in the direction of her mom, and downed the last drop of the last drop of sixty six dollars of theme park drinks.

Mission accomplished.

I swapped with Missus, backpack for Younger, and proceeded to carry her out of the park. Younger was crying, Missus was furious, and it had become apparent at some point during the trip that Elder’s behavior issues earlier in the day were likely due to the fact that she had come down with a cold. The trip back to the car was a bit of hell, but thankfully Younger fell asleep on the ride. Unthankfully she woke up as I was carrying her in and proceeded to resume her tantrum over the fact that I would not let her have a bath. This was in spite of the fact that I had, not five minutes earlier, given her a bath.

So it’s been quite the day, as you can see, and I want nothing more at this point to put myself to bed.