This made me laugh: how comparison is the theft of joy, experimental monkey style. This is how I am with salaries in my own field so in some ways I have to force myself to stop looking at what other people are getting paid other than to set a benchmark for myself to reach. Otherwise, I still maintain that social media is what you make of it. I don’t spend time on social media that makes me compare myself unfavorably to a limited snapshot of another person’s life. This is why long form blogging will always be the best for me. And let’s be honest, Twitter is right up there. Twitter and my tweeps have kept us fed, literally, when I couldn’t dredge up the brainpower to figure out what to make for dinner.
We’re finally getting winter weather hereabouts, and the Sierras are getting snowpack! As a drought state, as much as I don’t enjoy slogging through the wet, I eagerly watch weather reports every winter hoping we’ll get enough snow and rain to refill our reservoirs.
“It’s a strange phenomenon, but millionaires swear that the more they give, the more will come back to them.“: 2018 is all about 6 and 8. For the first time in my life, I’m going to trust more in the belief that giving back, as the right thing to do with our good fortune, will work out for us in the end, and focus less on keeping the numbers under our strict control. This is a fuzzy sort of thought I’ve never had before and I hope it pans out.
Tanja’s after my ultra risk averse heart with the side hustle year now that that they’ve retired.
Didn’t science say that sharing your goals makes you accountable more likely to complete them? Trello’s got several reasons why sharing goals might be counterproductive. I haven’t pinpointed exactly why that’s how it works for me but I usually don’t share too many goals ahead of doing a good amount of work on them first to ensure that I will follow through. When I prematurely share, I never start. Is that you?
The premise of this article, that parenting largely has no real effect on the development of a child into adulthood, as presented is a bit disturbing. He claims that reading to kids doesn’t matter. Hm. Really.
But then the concluding paragraph summed up much of our approach to parenting:
Natural selection has wired into us a sense of attachment for our offspring. There is no need to graft on beliefs about “the power of parenting” in order to justify our instinct that being a good parent is important. Consider this: what if parenting really doesn’t matter? Then what? The evidence for pervasive parenting effects, after all, looks like a foundation of sand likely to slide out from under us at any second. If your moral constitution requires that you exert god-like control over your kid’s psychological development in order to treat them with the dignity afforded any other human being, then perhaps it is time to recalibrate your moral compass; does it actually point north or just spin like a washing machine (see Pinker’s work for this same point made more eloquently)? If you want happy children, and you desire a relationship with them that lasts beyond when they’re old enough to fly the nest, then be good to your kids. Just know that it probably will have little effect on the person they will grow into.
I have no idea how much parenting does or doesn’t matter. We want JB to be a good human; we will model decent behavior and explain why we do what we do, and most importantly strive not to break zir in the popular authoritarian style that the previous generation seems fond of. But in the end, I’m not sure that who ze becomes is really in our hands. How well we cultivate our relationship is but that’s the best we can do. It’s still disquieting but in a different random lightning strike kind of way.
With a system like this, it’s a shock that any guns ever get traced: This is the maddening, inefficient way gun tracing works, and there is no effort afoot to make it work any better. For all the talking we do about imposing new limits on assault weapons, or stronger background checks, nobody talks about fixing the way we keep track—or don’t keep track—of where all the guns are. I had NO idea things were this bad!
This story made my eyeballs leak a little. Apologies that it’s not in a very readable format, but it’s worth it if you can.
We’re getting better and better at packing lightly but I always felt awful at it during JB’s infant years. GenYMoney inspires me to do better at it with her 12 days traveling with just carry-ons!
Boom! Lawyered: Pregnant and Going to the Doctor? You Might End Up in Jail
I remember giving what seemed like endless urine samples during my pregnancy and I am pretty sure that they didn’t tell me it was for drug screening. Simultaneously, they were really persistent in scheduling me with a maternal health drug and alcohol therapist of some sort. I was equally persistent in dodging her because it seemed unnecessary. When we finally had our interview she seemed tense at first but then started to laugh at all my bland incredibly boring answers. They were concerned I was a drug addict and that’s why I was dodging the appointment.
Call me morbid but I’m always reading articles about how people dealt with their parents’ passing looking for ways to make our estate plan and paperwork more airtight and clear cut so that in the event of one of us passing, there isn’t much work for the other person.
A stunning chart shows the true cause of the gender wage gap: “Historical drivers of the gender wage gap — a lack of education among women, for example — are disappearing. But the professional penalty women face for having children is stubborn, and it isn’t going anywhere.”
JB has been asking for a lot of Elmo lately. Normally I don’t mind but for the last couple of weeks, his squeaky voice has been getting on my last nerve so I was pleased to find this version of Elmo that satisfies zir request and doesn’t annoy me!
On baby books: “At their worst, the Baby Trainers seemed to suggest that my son was best thought of as an unusually impressive dog, who could be trained, using behavioural tricks, to do what we wanted: if we stopped responding to his night-time cries, he’d learn that he could return to sleep without our assistance and would, as a consequence, stop crying.”
I laugh because much of raising JB has been like training a slightly clever dog. A much more clever dog, Seamus, assists (judges & corrects) us in the training process when he thinks we’re wrong.
Maybe this is what I’m trying to do in therapy – work on the process of moving on and forgiveness. Saying forgiveness is hard for me because I don’t think I’ll ever truly forgive Dad in the sense that I let him off the hook for what he’s done to me and my family, but rather I need to find a way to let go of the hurt and the resentment that’s lurking. Perhaps the conflict there, the inability to accept forgiveness as defined, is what’s preventing me from embracing it.
This analysis of the recent layoffs at B&N makes me sad. Barnes & Noble and Borders crushed most independent bookstores, so they’re no saints, but it makes me sad that B&N is now laying off employees in the way that does look a whole lot like the executives are trying to milk the cash cow for as long as possible until it dies. It also makes me sad that we’ll eventually lose another cool place we liked to meet friends for kids’ activities.
We tried tax loss harvesting in 2017 and I’m pretty sure I did it wrong in retrospect. I’m not sure if we’ll be trying tax gain harvesting any time soon but just in case you want to know, J Savvy talks about how he did it.
A dramatic story of dodging the FUBAR bullet (Part 1 and Part 2)
There’s a lingering thought that one of these days, I’m going to do something worth selling so I keep reading these articles on selling and pitches to tuck the knowledge away. I’m mulling over what kind of parenting article might be worth pitching to a magazine but nothing has bubbled to the surface yet.
I mentally categorize our money like Jim’s Time Capsules. It helps me decide each priority and what to do with them.
