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…
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…
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…
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…
My youngest daughter is four and still a bit scared of the dark, so she likes to keep a stuffed unicorn named Corny Corny with her when it’s time for bed. It’s a big round tie-dye pillow like blob with a unicorn horn and two stiched on happy eyes (see featured image). Corny Corny gives her security when it’s time to go to bed because she can grasp onto this soft unicorn when she looks out at her shadow ridden…
A few weekends ago I spent some time with my good friend and his family. We drove up to a nearby lake in the Sierra for the day and grilled up food, made a fire for our kids to cook up s’mores, and enjoyed the brilliant scenery that is a mountain lake nestled amongst towering pines. I hadn’t really hung out with him since last October, as we’d been adhering best we can to social distancing guidelines. As we relaxed…
We went this past weekend to buy a fire pit for our backyard. After browsing online through Amazon to get an idea of pricing and styles, we thought it might be nice to see a few in real life. So we went to Lowe’s where we found a decent one, albeit one we hadn’t previously looked at. It was in our price range. And after looking over their stock we told one of their workers that we’d like to purchase…
A few days ago, the unpleasant anniversary of San Francisco’s shelter in place order ominously came and went like a slow drifting summer fog across the bay. I’d forgotten the exact date, March 16th, if you’ll forgive me. I would have been perfectly fine to keep on with my life without that unneeded bit knowledge, if it weren’t for NPR declaring it over and over again on my way into work. So I got to thinking, drifting in and out…
I’ve found myself in a new role at work this year. I translate blueprints into construction schedules. A lot of staring into computer monitors. Actually, I’m only staring into computer monitors. Blueprints these days aren’t what you might envision. They aren’t the lovely, unwieldy paper drawings that I can make notes on, or color in, or casually flip like a good book. Just like our currency, blueprints have gone the digital route. The first few days of this new gig…
My kids have this bad habit of complaining about being bored or calling something they don’t like boring. My girls probably overuse the word a bit, but it emphasizes their dislike for idle time. They are so used to having things at their fingertips, that any wait time instantly becomes intolerable dead time to them. They don’t know what it’s like to have to wait for their favorite song to come on the radio, or movie to play, or tv…