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Live free

silhouette of person standing on rock surrounded by body of water

Dreaming of a life of financial independence

Today I’ve occupied myself mainly by watching the price of Bitcoin on TradingView. I went to bed last night with the price having settled a bit above ten thousand, and woke this morning to find it up another three hundred dollars. It had been bouncing around a bit this morning before just blasting up and testing eleven thousand a few hours ago while I was out making a short trip out for work. Days like this I become obsessed with my IRA, checking in several times a day to see if I’ve breached another ATH in my retirement account.

We’ve got a dry erase magnet on our fridge, about the size of a sheet of paper. I’ve written “FIRE by 2024” on it, along with a list of debts: mortgage, student loans, and my car. At the bottom is the price that bitcoin needs to hit before we can wipe all of that out: $67K. Not that I have a solid plan to sell everything and just retire at that point, it’s more of a psychological reminder of freedom, where we’ll be secure, and be able to walk away from everything if we need to. Of course that doesn’t take into account for taxes and ongoing expenses, and selling all of our bitcoin would have the tremendous downside of well, not having any bitcoin, but it represents the promise of being secure in our future, not just for myself and my wife, but for my kids as well, who have their own accounts set aside on my cold wallet and with BlockFi.

I’m in a bit of competition with my wife, who took a very different track earlier than I did, going into grad school and getting her Masters’ and working hard to secure a government job with immense benefits such as healthcare and a pension. I spent much of my adult life under twenty five fucking around, honestly, getting by with life on easy mode, partying and boozing it up until our orbits came together. We’ve spent sixteen years together now, and I owe much to her for getting me out of my comfort zone these last few years. I credit becoming a dad as probably the biggest single factor in that equation.

We still have remarkably different approaches to life, I’ve always used the term complementary to describe how we mesh. She’s playing the safe, long game, intending to collect her government pension, socking away her contributions in whatever index fund offered to her, stacking a modest amount to the kids’ 529 college funds. Me, I’m buying bitcoin instead, running miners and picking stocks based on my knowledge of technology, trying to follow trends and carve out more aggressive gains from my more modest contributions. I’m hoping to win big, she tells me not to jump off of any buildings should the market crash.

Another example is a bet we have about autonomous vehicles. She told our daughter Elder that she’ll make sure that she gets a driver’s license when she turns sixteen, in about eight years. I bet her that Elder would never need one, since I expect autonomous taxis to be cheaper than private vehicle ownership. I hedged on whether manually driven cars would still be on the road, whether Elder could still get a license. I even did a book swap with her, giving her a copy of The Future Is Faster Than You Think to make my case, but she hated it so much that she didn’t even finish it.

And now our current COVID landscape has brought everything into question. Everything is up for re-examination, all of our assumptions up for debate. We’ve been reconsidering our jobs, our house, how we live, our relationships with friends and family, and what we want out of life. She’s always been focused on working for the future, and all of that has been called into question. Maybe part of it that the stability she’s cherished and sacrificed for has been called into question, while I’m finding myself in an environment where I’m thriving.

There’s a lot to suss out. Over the last day or so, my brain has started coalescing around an idea for my next longform newsletter. I had been focusing on the future of work, but I think this time I’ll branch out a bit more and look at the the future as it relates to these new possibilities. There are a lot of books that the two of us have been sharing recently and I want to explore some of the thoughts around stoicism, minimalism, and life design in a post. It’s going to be a challenge, and I want to put some notes together around them before I start writing.

I’ve never had a want for hobbies, and have basically lived my life as I could if I was retired. I won’t say that hermit is an apt term, but the lockdown hasn’t really affected my social life, if you know what I mean. I’ve been content, troubled only by the way I’ve allowed my temper to flare in response to the way the kids misbehave. For me, I’ve always found solace in reading books or blogs, or putting that knowledge to work in front of a keyboard. Missus has always relied on vacations or trip to the spas for rewards, and all that has been taken away by COVID, so it’s been more challenging for her. She’s been forced to adapt much more than I have, and is finding refuge in gardening, for one.

The kids are young enough that they’ve dealing fine. Younger will probably forget before the pandemic in a few years. All the local teachers unions have come out for virtual classes for the start of next year, which means we’ll probably just pull them completely and do homeschool. This furthers our desire to opt out. Choosing a school was one of the main reasons we bought this house that we did, and with the entire family effectively turning into digital nomads, we can effectively live and work anywhere with a fast internet connection. The fact that Americans are effectively restricted from entering most of the rest of the work is another problem entirely, but at least we have domestic options.

For now I will write, and teach the kids, work on our mini-homestead and learn how to function in a COVID world, all while waiting for $67,000 bitcoin, and dreaming about what we’ll do when we get there.

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Lazy Sunday

Today has been a lazy sunday. I made the foolish mistake of purchasing a nine percent IPA, and wound up staying up late playing video games. I snagged The Outer Worlds on Epic Games for only thirty bucks, which seemed like a good deal. I read that the campaign is only about twenty hours, which seems reasonable, so I went ahead and indulged myself.

I still managed to get up at seven this morning, with more than a bit of a headache, and wound up cooking a large breakfast for my dad and the family. I finished mopping up the rest of the water in our fully-drained hot tub, and have been knocking some items from my personal kanban board while the girls watch Ballet Shoes on the TV, which has reluctatly been returned to its place on the entertainment center.

The rest of the afternoon is still up in the air, but I seriously want to attack the overgrown juniper bushes, which have grown over our back deck and high in front of our porch. I might put the water slide out for the kids as well. Other than that, the only thing I plan on doing is ordering groceries and reading a couple books. I’m still working my way through Hamilton, but I’m still working my way through several other books as well. Continuous Delivery, Digital Minimalism, Designing Your Life have been my go tos before bed, and I’ve recently grabbed a number of other books off Pirate Bay recently, including Niall Ferguson’s The Ascent of Money and William Irvine’s A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. I also need to add Continuous Integration to my Kindle as well, to go with its cousin. I also have a large stack of The Nation magazines, along with issues of Wired, Dissent, and Jacobin that have been sitting on the shelf for some time.

Earlier this morning I noticed that Bitcoin retested ten thousand overnight, peaking at $10,150 before retracing to $9980-9960, where it’s sitting now. If it holds I’ll have a nice jump in my GBTC holdings tomorrow morning. Of course I hope it continues. The TradingView trollbox has people eyeing $11.1K before the day is out, which would be remarkable. I’m of the mind that a close over ten K would be very bullish and confirm an ongoing trend. Especially if we can close out July above it.

This upcoming Friday marks Missus and my eleventh anniversary. We’ll be driving back up to her father’s house in the mountain again, to do another canoe trip, and hopefully do a short hiking trip with the girls as well. I can’t wait.

For now, I’ve got about an hour before 3PM, and I’ve promised the girls I’ll set up the waterslide while I trim the bushes. So it’s time for me to grab a magazine off the shelf and relax.

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Hot Tub Time-Suck Machine

Why having a friend with a pool is preferable to having one oneself

A few years ago my father in law ran across someone giving away a hot tub, and although he didn’t want it himself, he told my wife, who decided to take it. She had been dreaming about one since we moved into this house. When we first viewed it some five years ago, there had been a hot tub on the lower wood deck, but the owners had taken it with them as part of the sale.

She accepted it without talking to me about it. I have never desired one, and realized that even a free hot tub would come with several costs. The first was getting the electrical hooked up to it. There were some problems with it, so we had to hire an expert to deal with some electrical issue, and also paid a friend with an electrical license to come and hook it up. Then there’s been the chemicals that it requires to keep the water balanced.

My wife was incredulous that I didn’t want a hot tub, and tried to argue that if I didn’t want it that I shouldn’t use it. Of course I would use it, but I have not enjoyed it proportionally to cost. Perhaps if she had let me drain it during the winter I wouldn’t be so resentful after listening to the heater trip on four times an hour during the winter nights.

Earlier this spring I noticed that the water level was low, and attributed it to evaporation. We had run into some problems with the cover leaking and capturing condensation and I assumed that it was leaking out through this. Deep down I knew something else was going on. We had to refill it several times over the past few months, but I kept putting things off. I had noticed that there was constant moisture around the bottom of the tub and the deck, and I knew that something had to be done.

That time is now.

Yesterday evening the family decided to have a hot tub party, and while we were in it the tub lost power. I checked the breaker and found a ground fault, quickly realizing that my plans for tomorrow had been superseded by this event. I knew that I either had to repair the electrical issue, or drain the tub. So this morning, instead of doing the bushes as I had planned to, I shut off the electrical to the breaker box on the back of the house, pulled the fifty amp breaker out and made a trip out to a couple hardware stores to find a replacement breaker. I figured this easier to troubleshoot than the tub itself.

Unfortunately, neither of the big hardware stores carry breakers that big, only selling the entire box for a hundred dollars. But after speaking to my father, an electrical engineer, and the staff at one of the stores, I came to the conclusion that the tub itself was the problem. So I went home, put the breaker back in, and then began the chore of removing the side panel from the tub. Instead of pulling off the panel by the pump, I pulled off a different one, closer to where the water had been pooling out of the tub. Several of the screws were rusted and gave me some trouble, but I managed to finally get them off and was able to peer inside.

It was a mess. The intake had a drip…drip…drip… coming from it, and the entire underside of the tub was soaking wet. I showed my wife, not to gloat, at all, and then pulled the garden hose out and began draining the tub.

I’ve been waiting for the sun to retreat before I deal with it more. The deck under the tub is rotten in places, so my deck rebuilding project has gotten considerably more complicated. Moving the damn thing will probably take four hands. The deck won’t be that big of a deal unless the cross beams need replacing. I should be able to manage that. But we’re looking at sealing the leak, dealing with whatever electrical issue there is, and replacing the cover if we’re to salvage it. I’m not sure what we’re going to do.

The rest of the day has been a mixed bag of adulting. I had to remove the television from the den, stashing it behind a couch in the front office after I came home from my earlier errand to find the kids driving Missus insane. I managed to prepare another batch of my Mr. Beer home brew kit, this one an IPA from Brew Demon. And Missus has found some joy with her new carpet cleaner, having successfully banished some long-standing spots from our carpet. And as soon as I hit post on this, I’m taking everyone out to a local nature park for a walk and a picnic. When we get home I’ll need to put the cover back on the spa and put the hoses away.

I’m not sure what we’ll do the rest of the day, hopefully I can talk Elder or Missus into playing a board game with me, but I have a feeling they’ll finagle me into putting the TV back where it belongs. I’d rather not. if I was being honest, it does not spark joy in this household, at least not the way the hot tub has.

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Seeking joy

I’m writing this at the end of the workweek, perhaps the last thing I do before I decide that there is nothing more productive to be done today and crack open a cold one and plop my butt in front of the TV or a video game. Today’s has been slightly better than the rest of the week. Yesterday’s storms seem to have broken the five day three-digit heat wave, allowing the kids some outside time with their friends. I was not terribly productive at work, although I am managing to get some things done with my cryptocurrencies that are way overdue. I’ve mostly been knocking out little random things that weren’t necessarily on my lists, distracting myself from working on any big projects for the past day or two.

I’ve been limiting the girls television in the morning to PBS kids, instead of letting them watch whatever they want. Elder gave me trouble about it earlier in the week, but they’ve been misbehaving and being disrespectful quite a bit the past few weeks, and something needed to change. I am seeing some improvement in how they’re responding, and I’m trying to adjust my behavior as well so that I’m not being unfair. I’m having to take more of a hands on approach with Elder’s math and music lessons. Leaving her to herself is causing her to miss some of the more subtle points about what she’s learning. In both cases she’s trying to rush through everything without taking the time to read the question. And in cases where she’s getting the right answer, she’s missing the method that they’re demonstrating which makes it easier to do the calculation in your head. Similarly with music, she’s mostly focusing on the fingering numbers instead of the actual notes. With Playground Sessions, with the instant feedback of the score, she’s paying more attention to the visual feedback than she is to the actual notes she’s playing. She’s not listening.

And trying to tutor her myself seems to trigger some sort of defiance in her, where she either fights me and shuts down, or acts passive aggressive and refuses to answer correctly. Or again, perhaps she’s not listening to what I’m asking. Today I took my time with her and tried to be patient, and we were able to work through everything correctly, even with her difficulties.

My BEAM mining seems to be going well. I’m currently gaining about six dollars a day in crypto. I haven’t calculated my power consumption, but I was able to reduce my power consumption quite a bit and increase my hashrate by ten percent, so I’m doing better than the WhatToMine.com calculations. I’m probably netting more than three dollars a day right now. I’m going to wait another week to decide if I’m going to unload it. I’d have to make sure my Binance account is still good and figure out a way to automatically move the coins based on my pool earnings for the week. After two and a half years, I still haven’t traded any of my coins.

Yesterday I decided to use some of my Microsoft Partner Network benefits, namely my Visual Studio credits, to spin up an Ubuntu instance in Azure and see if I could sync up multiple blockchain nodes on one host. I was able to get BEAM and ARW up and running, but I shut it down earlier today until I can figure out exactly how I want to structure things. I fixed a firewall issue with my AWS node that I’m using for IDEX, so I think I want to run the nodes on it and keep wallets accessible from here at the house. I haven’t accessed so many of my bags in some time, so one of the first tasks is going to be getting my XDNA node up and running. I’ve got enough for a small masternode, about sixteen hundred dollars worth of fiat, so I may as well get that back online and start earning. The IDEX node isn’t using any CPU since the Ethereum node has been offfloaded to Infura.io.

Other than that, I just paid some house bills and checked my accounts. I linked one of my credit card rewards points to Amazon and found that I have over five hundred dollars worth, so I’m trying to resist the urge to blow that all at once.

And at work today I did have a call with the embedded systems firm. I was amazed at how they operate. No version control, no test driven development. I was shocked really. I’m going to start by going over their developer setup environment and converting the build process to something that can be automated as part of a new build chain. It relies on some custom Eclipse version from their hardware supplier, which integrates different Texas Instrument libraries. So hopefully I’ll be able to help them build out a brand new CI/CD pipeline for the project that they’re starting in the fall. I don’t know where it will take me, but it feels good to be able to put my computer science degree to good use in a professional environment. We shall see where it goes.

So I’m going to go crack that beer, dig into some hot wings in about an hour and try to watch a movie with the girls. This week marks the anniversary of the moon landing, so hopefully we can watch a show about it. I can’t stay up too late tonight watching Dark or playing video games, cause there’s a lot of projects that need to get done tomorrow morning, and I don’t want to waste too much of the morning sleeping in.

Here’s to a good weekend.

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Toward a personal blueprint

Last night I was just starting to doze off when I remember that I had left the shed unlocked. I put on my sweatpants and went outside, and was shocked to find the sky afire. The heavens were flashing like a strobe light to the northwest, multiple flashes going off every second, one after the other, making the sky seem like daylight. It was unlike anything I had ever seen. I locked the shed and came back to the porch and sat down for a few minutes, tired as I was, wanting to witness this amazing display for a bit longer. There was no thunder, although for the most part I had no direct line of sight to the lightning itself. Most of it was occuring over beyond the treeline to the west of our property, and I tried in vain to find a vantage point where I could see better. Occasionally a small cluster of lightning would light up far overhead in the sky but I never heard the sound of thunder. It was very eerie.

I tried to capture the phenomena on my phone, but between it’s camera and display, I wasn’t able to tell if I was capturing anything other than a blurry flash of light. I’ll find out later this morning when I show the girls.

I had trouble getting out of bed this morning, and only rose when I heard Elder mulling about in her room. I’ve been having trouble sleeping falling asleep the past few days, perhaps due to drinking too much on Friday and Saturday. I feel rested enough, and so far Elder seems in a good mood, and is actually doing her school work right now so that she can watch a show later.

Last night I wrote a lengthy message to my client, trying to salvage whatever personal and professional relationship can be due to the way that things have been turning out. To be honest, I’m ready to move on. I wrote that we had gotten off on the wrong foot, mostly due to the casualness that we entered into the arrangement. I also felt that charging a fee without a proper contract or scope of work was detrimental. I obviously had a longer time frame for delivery of the goods, and envisioned a perpetual arrangement, but failed to communicate this to them. I again expressed my desire to keep working on the project, explained where I thought the failures were, and tried to provide a way forward. I made sure to end on a positive note, trying not to make this a bad breakup letter. I said that I hoped to see an encouraging word from them on my phone sometime this morning and have a call this evening to continue showcasing and testing the work in progress. If I don’t, then I’m just going to move on.

Sending the note relieved the last vestige of stress that I had been carrying about the situation. I’ve been trying to maintain a clear head about it, but on the other hand I am very disappointed. I have learned a few lessons that have spawned a few requirements that I will need to adhere to moving forward.

  • First, I will need to incorporate my LLC first thing this morning. Everything up until now has been through my sole-proprietorship, but I need to protect myself from liability moving forward.
  • Some sort of formal document detailing the time commitment being made by both parties. I can’t afford to spend thirty or even ten hours in a month for the small monthly retainer that I’ve been charging. If I’m to do more than a few hours a week, then I’ll need guarantees that the relationship is going to continue.
  • Additionally, I’ll need to set realistic expectations about deliverability. I can’t have clients thinking that a fully designed web site is going to manifest itself in a month without frequent feedback from the client. And I’ll need to provide a price sheet detailing the true cost of services (compared to the competition) along with the discount that I’m providing. This discount must be considered against my time commitment. No more overages, unless some sort of annual agreement with termination clauses can be negotiated.
  • Also, I need to set requirements about acceptable communications. I pay a lot of money each month for BaseCamp, and have yet to get any traction among my clients with it. I think I’ll continue with it for now, but it’s my biggest monthly expense right now. If I can’t get clients on board with it then I’ll have to dump it. It’s extremely useful for keeping myself organized, but I’ve got to get clients using it to contact me instead of ping me with text messages. Perhaps some sort of primer will be needed.
  • And absolutely no, no work without some sort of scope of work agreement, even if it is just a memorandum of understanding. It’s just bound to end up with miscommunications and hurt feelings.

I am going to work on fleshing out these documents for the next engagement. It’s time to get to work.

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I only see my goals, I don’t believe in failure

white book with text

Another rough night. I went to bed on time but couldn’t fall asleep. Younger woke up around eleven and I was still awake, and put her in a fresh diaper and let her come in the master bed. Then, just after I had dozed off, the fire alarms went off. I don’t know why they only go off in the middle of the night. Never during the day, only at midnight. The same thing has happened in many times before, when the batteries gets low. They’re tied into the house’s power, and I think something about the HVAC kicking on causes the signal to drop below some threshold and off they go: BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP. I actually had some fresh nine volts, so I threw them in and went back to bed. Whether from the adrenaline, or from Younger tossing and turning, I still couldn’t sleep, so I just grabbed my pillow and went to Younger’s bed, and fell asleep close to two AM.

The girls have been completely demanding, despite the fact that they’ve been playing most of the day building a secret hideout in the living room. I managed to get Elder to do a lot of studying this morning before I let them watch TV; I’ve decided that giving them an hour beforehand makes it difficult for me to get them to do anything. The weather has been so hot lately, with heat advisories and temperatures topping the high nineties, so the girls have been indoors almost the entire day. I don’t think they’ve seen their friends since our little house party last Saturday. They’ve been getting along for the most part, but Younger has been acting out and refusing to follow directions.

I’ve been getting a lot done at work. There hasn’t been a lot of unplanned, urgent, anti-work coming at me lately, so I’m getting a lot of my queues cleared, cleaning out old tickets that have been sitting ignored for weeks or months. I’ve made some good progress rolling out Apple Business Manager with federated Azure Active Directory domains, so I might be able to use native mobile device management capabilities between the two and dump this god-awful third party solution that we’ve been using. Once I get that cleared up, I plan on looking at ways to supplement our configuration management using some native and open source tools. There are some interesting solutions that have come to my attention that can help standardize some of our build processes. Hopefully this will make me more valuable to other franchisees in our network, and help me get some more project work.

I’ve decided to start broaching the subject of a raise with my boss. I’ve been kicking ass since coming back from the July 4th holiday and implementing kanban into my workflow, and I want to wait another two weeks or so before I have a discussion. Zombie, LLC. may still have some life left in it. The printer repair subcontract that we’ve taken on seems to be doing well enough that Boss wants me to start taking over operations, and we’re also going to start targeting voice services in the area, which seems to have less competition going than our managed services offering. I re-registered a domain for this purpose yesterday and will be working on the website for it soon.

That makes four current WordPress projects that I’ve got, active or queued up. I hope to be wrapping up the one I’ve been working on by the end of the month, it may be tomorrow, depending on how the conversation with the client goes over the next day or two. If there are any conversations, I might say. There’s been radio silence since they essentially fired me and I responded that I was going to continue and follow through with my delivery objectives. In a way, I don’t recall feeling this heartbroken since my last breakup.

This project has consumed a lot of time the past two months, and I’m looking forward to putting it behind me. I had allocated eight hours a month, based on the retainer that we had agreed on. My timesheet for last month shows thirty hours spent, and I’m going to hit twenty for this month after another call or two, and possibly another ten if things go well. It can’t keep up at this rate, and I was hoping to add this site to my portfolio as a way to garner additional business.

The other sites that I have ready to go after include one for a local civil rights chapter, a rental booking site for my father in law, and now this site for the telco branch of Zombie. And it feels like I haven’t touched a code editor in weeks. I’ve been mucking around with some small tasks, like checking out lazydocker, and trying to get my cryptominer up and running with RaveOS, but I’ve purposefully kept any actual project work off my WIP board until I got this client taken care of.

I’m looking forward to getting my hands back in an IDE and doing some work, starting with some fintech stuff. I’ve got some refactoring to do with my equities trading protocols, work on the TDAmeritrade package has been progressing at a clip, and I haven’t even logged into Github in several weeks. Likewise, I haven’t filled out a job application in almost two weeks as well. I’m sure my Sixty Days to Six Figures deadline has come and gone. I stopped keeping track when this WP project consumed me.

I think I’m doing all I can do right now, honestly. I’ve practically given up all social media use. I haven’t logged onto Twitter in days. In the morning I rise, make my tea, and meditate, then write this blog if I’m up early enough before the kids. I work all day, take a few breaks for reading, cook and clean, and maybe watch a short show with the girls before dinner. Then after they’re to bed, it’s another two hours of work, and an hour of reading before bed. I’m not sure there’s much else I can do other than what I’m doing.

I’m forty-one now, and frequently looking back at where I’ve been and wondering if my trajectory is sufficient to get me where I’d hoped to be in life. I get to spend time with my kids, no matter how frustrating it is, and am able to give them everything they need. What more can I ask for? I was watching a John Oliver segment yesterday and they showed a supercut of TV anchors bemoaning being stuck home with their kids. I caught myself griping to someone on the phone today and caught myself thinking about it. Why should this be the norm?

I’ve been pushing the kids, perhaps projecting my own insecurities on them. I tell myself that it’s a different world that they’re inheriting, and that they’ll adapt to it the way we’ve all adapted to living with COVID these past five months or so. I want to give them the tools and a headstart on certain skills that I think will be needed in this future world, but Missus called me a control freak while we were arguing today, so maybe that’s part of it. No, that is a part of it. Having my kids close by, and able to guide their development at this early stage of life is probably the greatest opportunity to arise so far as part of this pandemic.

It’s hard for them, and it’s hard for Missus and I. We just have to keep working on it.

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Every day is a gift

That’s why they call it the ‘present’.

I came down this morning and got halfway through my morning routine thinking it was Monday. I didn’t get up till after seven, which is later than I like. I asked the computer for the weather, and Alexa finished up with an “enjoy your weekend”. At first I thought it was bugged, but then it slowly dawned on me. The confusion didn’t break until I looked at my phone and saw that yes, indeed, it is Sunday. Now it’s like I’ve been given a whole day to get caught up on things.

It’s already hot outside, although it’s only in the seventies. It’s humid, and the forecast calls for a high of ninety-six. I usually cut the grass Sunday mornings before it gets too hot, and I’m already dreading it. I’ve got to run to the grocery store again today, despite spending over two hundred dollars at Harris Teeter yesterday, because I forgot my list. I will be going to Food Lion instead, sans children.

I don’t anticipate being too busy today. Keeping the kids busy is usually the most challenging part of my existence, that and keeping them from trashing the house. I do have a long backlog of things that I could do if I wanted, but the only thing urgent right now is getting dishwasher detergent.

After some consideration, I’ve decided that I need to replace the deck boards instead of flipping them over. Most of the existing screws are too far sunk into the boards to be backed out, and dealing with that seems like it will be more trouble than it is worth. New pressure treated boards are only going to cost us five hundred dollars, and I shouldn’t even have to cut many of them. I might wind up scheduling the rehab for the fall, so I’m not out there in the sweltering summer heat. The boards will hold up until October, I’m sure of it.

My cryptocurrency mining rig has been sitting silent for several weeks now. I’m conflicted as to what to do with it. The cards are almost three years old, and I might be able to sell them if I clean them up. I saved the original packaging just for this reason. I’m not really up for buying new ones though, as managing the mining operation is a bit of trouble right now and not really of the greatest interest to me. I have over a dozen coins that I’ve mined from it, and I don’t even have it setup so that I can access the wallets for them. Only a third of them are worth more than a couple hundred dollars, but even they don’t seem like they’re worth the trouble of selling at this point. Many of them are doing well, but it seems like we’re far from an alt season.

DeFi is a bit of an exception, my IDEX stake seems to be doing pretty well right now, the tokens have soared in value, but my pricing calculator is screwed up, so I’m not even sure exactly how much profit I’m looking at. I’ve decided that when it surpasses the current value of my car loan I’ll consider cashing out and paying that off. Right now, it’s only providing about thirty dollars in income, which isn’t bad considering I haven’t had to touch it in months. I actually don’t think I could if I wanted to. I think I lost the SSH keys to my AWS instance. Oops. Thankfully I can just move the tokens through my wallet if I need to.

In fact, maybe today I’ll just relax. I’m not even sure what that means, or if I entirely understand how to do that. Relaxing still involves a lot of work for me, usually a lot of cooking and cleaning at the minimum. I think I’ll go run to the store, come back and knock out the grass, and maybe spend the day reading and playing with the kids. Of course at some point I’ll likely open up my Trello board and decide that there’s something that I need to work on, but at least for now I can enjoy the possibility.

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Evening pages

It’s almost ten at night, and I’d rather be relaxing, but I didn’t write this morning and I feel like it’s important to keep my streak going. The past twenty four hours have been really busy. I made a trip to the hardware store in preparation for my deck rebuild, and today was a flurry of activity to get the house ready for our dinner party, which just ended about an hour ago.

I did a full day of work yesterday, then went to several hardware stores. I stopped by Lowes to get the tools and supplies I had ordered to rehab the deck, and then had to stop by another store to get the top rails. I also picked up three eight foot two by twelves to make a raised bed for Missus’s new gardening hobby, and I almost made a big mistake by picking them up in the Honda CRV. The hatch on Missus’s crossover has no hooks to tie it down for hauling, which I should have remembered, so I tried tying it down with some twine I had brought. It was too thin, and I hadn’t even pulled out of the parking lot before it snapped and the hatch flew up. I tried again, looping three times over the hatch before taking off, driving home under the speed limit with my hazards on the entire way. Every time I went over a bump I feared that the twine would snap. I made it home without incident.

After I unloaded I cracked open the first bottles from initial batch of Mr. Beer home brew. It came out great. I spent the evening playing video games, as I’ve been doing the last couple Fridays: Between the Stars, Factorio, and I finally went and bought TS-1000, which is basically a computer assembly code simulator. At some point I figured out that season three of Dark was available on Netflix, and then all hope was lost. I wound up going to bed after two-thirty in the morning, having watched four episodes of the show, half of the final season.

I managed to sleep in past nine, managing to keep my cool even when the girls woke me up in the morning. I let Missus sleep in longer while I tidied up the kitchen and started putting a list of things we needed to do before we had our guests over. I scrubbed down the deck, tidied the yard and even wound up taking Younger to the grocery store to do some shopping. This last task was a huge tactical mistake. I wound up forgetting the grocery list in the car, and wound up spending some two hundred and thirty dollars while there.

Then our friends the G.s came over. We’d seen them once in the three years since they had moved to Key West, and we were glad that they have moved back. Elder and their oldest daughter had been friends since preschool, and we had a really great evening. The kids did the slip and slide while us parents drank beer and caught up, then we made pizza for the kids and I cooked some veggie burgers on my outdoor griddle. Then we let the kids watch a movie while we played a round of Catan. Missus won.

Everyone had a good time, and we can’t wait to have them back. Now the kids are asleep, and my fatigue is starting to set in. I think I’m going to wrap up here, go lay down in the bed with a book and turn in early. The kids will be up soon enough.

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This Home Is Filled With Love

Just don’t mind all the yelling and crying

I seemed to have jinxed myself yest. erday. After remarking just how idyllic yesterday morning was, things quickly devolved into a battle of wills between Elder and myself that ruined the entire day.

One behavior that I’ve noticed in Elder is her propensity to make “trades” with her sister. She’s usually being manipulative, and often takes advantage of Younger, and this time was no different. I was working in my office downstairs, the girls were in the kitchen eating a snack, when Younger started crying out at her sister. Younger had picked a bag of mini-chocolate chip cookies, Elder Cheez-Its, and Elder had made a trade of four cookies for four Cheez-Its.

So that you might have more of an insight into the mind of my rising eight-year old, I might add that yesterday I caught her taking a bowl of trail mix, replete with M&M’s outside to eat. Since I didn’t want them all sharing from the same bowl, I went to call her back in, and found her reclining on our patio couch in the shade, Younger and the five-year old neighbor, E., rubbing her feet like she was in the spa. She was bribing them with the candy. Incredible!

Summoning my inner King Solomon, I broke out the food scale to weigh one of the cookies, explaining that one cookie was obviously worth more by weight than the Cheez-Its and calculated that Elder actually owed her sister somewhere between twelve and sixteen of her treat for the four cookies. This took about thrice as long as it should have, since Elder kept trying to interject and complain while I spoke. My patience shortened, but I managed to resolve the situation, and went back to work.

Elder has another stubborn habit she turns to when she gets in a stink of refusing to do something that I ask and then fighting with her sister to do it after I ask Younger to help me instead. And that’s what happened next. We were planning a trip to a nearby nature park in the afternoon, so I wanted the girls to get their safari kits that Missus had bought them. When we tried to put all the items on the table, Younger was missing her flashlight and Elder her binoculars. And here is the trigger that’s been bothering me for days.

“Where’s the x?” Shrugs. “Well go look for it.” Silence. It drives me nuts, and I have told the kids that if they don’t know, then I expect them to go look for it instead of just telling me that they don’t know. I asked Elder to go look in her room for her binoculars, to which she pouted back that they weren’t there because she had just cleaned her room yesterday. She crossed her arms stiffly and sat back in a chair. I asked Younger to go look in the Harry Potter closet, where we had made a bit of a hidey-hole in the closet under the stairs, and gave Younger the flashlight belonging to Elder so that she could go look for it. By the time I had made it upstairs and found the binoculars in Elder’s room, the two were fighting over the flashlight and I was a boiling pot of rage spilling over.

I won’t go into the details from here, other to say that my wife was outside on the back deck and came back after hearing the cursing and yelling. We had a bit of quick therapy session about what had happened and how we were going to deal with what just happened. The facts were that neither of us wanted to send our kids back to daycare, but we would have to if we couldn’t find a way to manage our jobs and taking care of the kids. My wife has had her outbursts as well; both of us came from families with explosive parents. In my case, setting grownups to yelling was a bit of sport for me and my cousins. I resolved that the answer to prevent me from having explosive outbursts was to not tolerate those untolerable behaviors in my children.

And thus began the battle of wills.

I began by going into Elder’s room and apologizing or losing my temper. Nothing else, just “I’m sorry for losing my temper.” I said it twice, hoping she might break her icy glare, so I left her and went back downstairs. I wound up going to the library and getting about thirty books, and spent twenty dollars at DollarTree on various things. When I got back, Elder was still in her room. I wound up spending most of the day with Younger, playing with the plastic baseball and bat I had picked up, and reading some books.

Mid-afternoon, a few of the Little Rascals showed up, K. and E., so I called the girls out. I stopped Elder before she went out, telling her that I wanted to talk about what we needed to do to prevent what had happened earlier. I told her that I expected her to follow my directions. Taking a queue from Douglass Rushkoff’s experiences with improv’s “yes and” rule, I told Elder that the words “I can’t”, “I won’t” and similar were not to be uttered from her mouth, and that I wanted her to respond “yes, Dad,” to any directions she was given. She could throw on the “and” with any objections or challenges that she had afterward.

I don’t know how many chances I gave her there in the foyer, but I tired of it and told me that I wanted her to write me half a page on why it’s important to follow directions. This was another, tactic my parents had taken with me as a child. Perhaps it would work better. She objected, and I doubled down, telling her there would be no privileges, no screens, &c., until she complied. She stormed off to her room.

I realize now I’m screwing up the timeline a bit here. It’s amazing how quickly I’ve forgotten the exact order to events. It’s amazing to think that we can consider our memories accurate after years. Age and importance certainly matter, this was no 911, obviously, I just mention this as a note my later self. Enough digression.

Her friends came back a second time, after I told them Elder was being punished, and this time I let Younger go out without them. Elder eventually came down, whining about some complication as her way of asking for help. I laid out her notebook, and a pencil and sat down at the table with a couple of crosswords.

Elder often claims ignorance to things I have just told her. I assume it’s just defiance, but it may truly be that the words don’t register in the first place. So we go back and forth, and I usually just let her sit there in silence, waiting to see if she’s bluffing or not. I gave her a line to start with: “why I should listen”, but I told her that I was not going to sit there and spell words for her the entire time. “Write fast, write wrong. The goal here is to get the thoughts out of your head, not to be correct,” I have often told her.

I finished yesterday’s crossword and started on that day’s, looking at my watch I told her that if she wasn’t done by three o’clock, in half an hour, she would be grounded for the rest of the day, and that she could give me her essay in the morning. She sat and hrmmfed at me for another fifteen minutes.

I had told her that if she found it too difficult to write something, that I would accept “yes dad, okay and” written ten times on the page. She finally did this in all of five minutes, but before I let her go I wanted to make sure that the lesson had gotten through her head. “I don’t want to hear ‘I can’t’ or ‘I won’t’, or ‘you can’t make me’ out of your mouth again. Do you understand?” She obviously did not, and went right back into her defiant backtalk. I pointed to the page, at the words she had just written, one, two, three times. I held back the inner Red Queen screaming “off with her head,” and told her that I wanted her to write the phrase ten more times.

The wailing continued again, and I pointed out the clock was rapidly approaching three. So she scratched out the lines, and I repeated my questions again. Finally, an “okay dad,” came from her mouth. Obviously a hug was too much to ask for, so I let her go out to join her friends.

I am not going to jinx myself this morning and make any claims about the domestic bliss I am enjoying. To the contrary, Younger, back in my bed this morning, woke me up no less than three times during the night with her tossing, got out of bed before my wife and I, and then decided to return to the room with some loud furball toy her auntie mailed her yesterday for her birthday. I already put her in timeout once for not leaving me to my writing. Elder on the other hand, is in good spirits, and we shall see if we can make it last through the day, and end the week on a high note.

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The Orchid blooms

purple moth orchids in bloom

A rare morning of peace

It’s a quarter to seven this morning, I was woken from a strange dream by Younger a bit before six and went back to sleep to try and gain another few minutes of sleep, or perhaps part of me wanted to return to the dream world. All I remember is some treacherous surveillance AI trying to steal children. I remember searching for something in a lost in a vast field of snow, and lastly, some scene in a small, dark, grimy garage, working on mechanical equipment with two other individuals before pounding into some Swans-like driving hardcore music. I can take nothing from it.

Missus finished reading Atomic Habits last night, she’s really impressed by the book. I spent yesterday evening writing and only managed an hour on my WordPress project. The two of us wound up talking well past eleven, mostly concerned with what to do about the schools given how we are well in the midst of a second wave. As was predicted, this one is way worse than the first, but at least at this venture the grocery stores have toilet paper. Our stores aren’t where they need to be if we are to be locked down, but our state continues to fall in the number of cases, and has drifted from the top ten down to number fifteen or so.

There is no way that we can foresee sending our children back to school. Not even for two days a week, which is likely. Missus just purchased pre-school supplies to make sure Younger learns her letters, and I’ve recently sat down with Elder to draw up a plan for her to complete third grade math and her other studies. We’re still figuring out how to track things on our Kanban board, moving stickers around on the wall, and figuring out the best way to get things done.

We’re expecting some friends this weekend, the Gs. We befriended them by happenstance several years ago while Elder and their daughter M. were in pre-school together. We kept running into them weekend mornings at Target and started hanging out. We discovered that we enjoyed a shared interest in board games and good beer, and hung out often over the years until G. got transferred to Florida. His station is up now and they moved back to the area two weeks ago, and this will be the second time we’ve seen them in close to four years. My first batch of homebrew IPA will be ready this Friday, and I am looking forward to cracking the first bottle with him this weekend.

I haven’t been waking up as early as I like, the girls are coming downstairs before I’ve managed to finish writing these entries. This morning was remarkable, as Elder came right down stairs and starting doing her school work right away, doing Khans Academy, Typing.com and ReadTheory all in one block. She also did the dishwasher and snuggled me on the couch to keep warm, and clung to me lovingly when I went into the kitchen to help her sister unload the silverware. It’s very rare for her to act in such a way, and remarked that she must have gotten a lot or rest last night. (I read her to sleep with Wired magazine, which put her right out). I called upstairs to Missus that our little orchid was blooming.