The phone rang and it was the front desk. In broken English, the woman on the other line told me that someone was downstairs waiting for me. I told her I’d be right down. I’d been waiting months for this day. I let my wife know who it was and that I would be right back and then stepped out into the hallway. The hotel was a time capsule. The hallways and rooms have never known anything other than early…
In the year 216 BC, Hannibal pulled off one of the greatest military maneuvers in recorded history at Cannae: the Pincer Movement. This occurred during the Second Punic War in a heated match between superpowers for control of the known world. At Cannae, the Carthaginian general Hannibal was able to encircle the Romans and annihilate them in battle using unit placement strategy and tactical maneuvering. Prior to this battle his army, including elephants, had crossed the Pyrenees and Alps via…
Last week I logged onto Vanguard and tinkered with my investments. I didn’t sell or buy anything–nothing that I would call bad investing practice–but I did reduce the amount of money being shoveled into my beloved VTSAX each week by half. This reduction in after-tax cash going into the markets wasn’t driven by any emotion, though I did have an emotional wave of guilt wash over me when clicking the edit button on my auto-investments. It’s always the same internal…
Even now as I type this on a Friday afternoon, when I should be enjoying the start of the long Labor Day weekend, I feel the weight of one of my work deadlines calling out to me from next week. I can’t relax knowing the deadline is out there, already joining forces with my self-imposed home project deadlines and parenting responsibility deadlines. As soon as one deadline is met, another reveals itself. So that a never-ending to-do list constantly fills…
A few months ago my mother-in-law, hereafter known as la suegra, had a bit of a health scare. Luckily, everything turned out alright for her. It was more of a mobility issue; bad arthritis of the knees. My wife and I both work, and my suegra has been the foundation that allows both of us to work full time: she watches our children during the day. During her flare up she couldn’t watch our kids for a few weeks. It…
I get into work early. At 6 am each morning I’m the first one in our main office and will usually be the only one diligently typing away till around 7:45 or so when others begin to trickle in. This isn’t an abnormal time to start work in construction, but it’s extremely abnormal in the main office setting, where I notice people roll in around 8 or 9. I relish this alone quiet time in the office when I’m the…
While sitting in my backyard on an early Saturday morning reading the news, I came across another one of those silly happiest countries on earth reports. I find them silly anyway. Trying to determine an entire country’s happiness and then ranking them against one another seems to be a waste of time at first glance. But the silliness and the thought of hundreds, maybe thousands of hours spent making this report piqued my interest, and so I decided to dig…
Losing money isn’t fun. It’s even worse when you lose someone else’s money. When I look back over my 17-year career in construction, I think I may have lost somewhere in the range of $100k of my employer’s money by making mistakes or less than ideal decisions. It’s tough to think about it. Even writing it down right now and doing the math is difficult. I want to see myself as having gained all my professional experience and wisdom by…
When my construction project ended in March of 2020, my company sent me to another job that had a notorious reputation as being plagued with problem after problem, coupled with a very difficult owner. This job was running two years over the original completion date and nobody was happy about that. Right after getting word of where I was going, being curious about my new future, I looked up on our shared drive for recent photos and drawings of the…
May felt much like a blur, as I’m at a loss right now for any notable events that occurred. I’ve started refinishing my kitchen cabinets. We bought our return tickets from Portugal and an Airbnb. I’m very much in my grind at work, if it can be called a grind. More like a routine. I love routines and habits, especially when they make you a better person, but I also believe that too much routine is what makes life speed…