Category: General

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.

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.

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.

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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.

For the past couple weeks I've been selling BTC that I bought at $50k (AKA 'the dip') for a tax loss, then using the proceeds to open a perpetual 2x long on https://t.co/wV7JSndC7K.

— BCM – The Blockchain Man (@dahifi) July 16, 2021

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Today I decided to distract myself from getting any real work done on the deck by attacking a trio of large holly bushes that line the south side of our house. They’ve been neglected, and have grown taller than my ability to trim them, so went at them very aggressively with a sawzall and lopped them in half. It’s was a hack job, but it’ll grow back. Apparently holly bushes can withstand having their main trunk cut down to the ground and they will come back. That’s probably what I’ll wind up doing, as the inside branches are all gnarled and bent, twisting in every direction. It looks like shit, basically.

I’m not quite sure why hollies were chosen for this spot, since that side of the house gets the most sun of the entire yard. I imagine that they’re probably contributing to some sort of cooling effect on that wall, but I’d much rather put that area to some more productive use. Apparently hollies, in addition to being used for hedges, can also be used to feed livestock during the winter months, assuming the leaves can be cut and allowed to mellow for a couple of weeks.

I’ve actually been on a bit of a permaculture kick the last day or two. Missus’s little garden is producing cucumbers and tomatoes now, and I’m thinking a lot about how I want to redo the yard. I hate cutting grass, and have been trying to figure out ways to make the yard more natural. I’ve let the back quarter go, near the small drainage ditch in the back. I’ve been keeping the tall grass down, letting natural bushes pop up here and there, letting seedlings grow. I just wish I knew what to do with the front yard. We’ve got a small crepe myrtle, which is a native plant, but we’ve got a row of juniper bushes — another bane of mine — against the front porch, as well as a flowering pear tree in the front. The pear tree is not the fruit producing kind, but is apparently an invasive species that was planted there when the house was built. When it flowers in the spring, it smells like a dead animal is rotting in the front yard. It’s not very pleasant and Missus and I have both decided that it needs to go. We’ve just been having a hard time deciding what to put there, although to day she said she wants a fig tree there.

Otherwise, today was pretty lazy. I did my monthly household accounting, and did my weekly rotation on my Perp.Fi positions. I pulled in over six hundred fifty dollars, which is close to my post-tax take home pay before I quit my job. Once the market takes back off I should be sitting pretty. I may put some more capital to work.

I’m also hoping to meet a friend from Twitter who is in the area for a couple days. We’ve never met in real life, but he quit his job a month before I did, so we’re both full-timers now.

Well I didn’t get out of bed until after eleven this morning, so I must have had a good night last night. I drank half a bottle of Monkey Shoulder and played Neverwinter with Elder till after 11:30, Missus was not happy about that latter part. I still beat her up out of bed this morning – she was sleeping in Younger’s bed. The girls had been up watching TV for several hours.

We watched Black Widow, which was not very good, I must say, and I took Younger out to the park and to the store. Otherwise that’s about all that happened today. I didn’t get anything done.

I just wanted to get my words in today before I go climb into bed, it’s only 9:30 but I’m already tired. I’m going to read until I’m sure the kids are asleep then I’m OUT. I’m hoping I can wake up early, get a run in, and get some yard work done and take next steps on staining the deck.

The girls will be going to church tomorrow. The church bus driver knocked on our door this morning to ask if Younger wanted to come, and Missus didn’t feel good about her going on her own so we’re bribing Elder to go with and keep an eye on her. The neighbors, who they’ve been going with, are out of town for the week, so they’ll be on their own.

It’s also going to be hard with Younger’s playmate gone all next week, but we’ll have to do. They’re so much easier when they have their friends around. I guess I’m going to be getting all the extra attention myself. Joy.

The markets continue their free-fall; I remain convinced that we’ve only got to get through July before things start taking off in the opposite direction. I continue to mull over increasing my Perp.Fi position to make sure that I am generating sufficient income to maintain my current employment status, but protocol risk worries me. I may have to consider Nexus Mutual coverage, but I don’t know that they’ve ever had to pay out on a policy.

I’m up early this morning because Younger came to the bed last night and started doing her signature feet-flop maneuver, so I’ve already been quite productive already and got in my workout that I neglected yesterday. Most of the aches and pains I’ve had for the past few days are completely gone.

I knocked out a couple podcasts this morning and did some reading. Every time I hear Balaji Srinivasan do an interview I feel like I should be taking notes. This guy is so far ahead of everyone in the long game that it’s completely amazing. I don’t know how he does it.

I’ve got a few household things to do this morning before I get down to work. I want to focus on Rust today. The Exercism track is pretty challenging. A lot of it comes down to the actual algorithms themselves, I’m working on one now where I’m supposed to implement the Sieve of Eratosthenes. I’ve been keeping myself from peeking ahead at submitted solutions to strengthen my resolve, but this one was kicking my butt the other day. I can usually come up with a solution that is test complete, but it’s usually in some horrible imperative style that is completely un-axiomatic. I’m trying to do more using Rust’s functional style, but I’m having a hard time chaining functions in these elegant, concise programs. I spend a few hours coding out these cludgy things that are test complete, and once I’ve completed it I’ll take a look at the solutions. Usually it’s someone who managed to do what I accomplished in a couple dozen lines of if clauses in one map( ).filter( ) line. And the borrow system is… a bit difficult. But I keep pounding at the keyboard and moving forward. I think by the time September gets here I’ll be pretty far into it, and will have a good base in case I do need to go back to work.