One day

So, I thought, since this day had such a great start and I keep reading about every other mom's daily routine, I will give it a try. Here is a snapshot of my day (and just about every other day for the last almost 6 years...)

5:17 am: Wake up. I hear Aaron crying. I realize it's technically morning, but too early for our day to start; especially since Doug and I fell asleep on the couches watching TV last night and didn't actually get into bed until 2am. Dang.

5:25am: Decide to make a bottle. (Yes, he is almost 18 months old, don't judge me.) Holding onto hope of another hour of sleep.

6:00am: Take crying Aaron out of boys' room. Try not to wake Jonathan up. Lay down on couch - again - listen to Aaron cry. He lays down on the floor and stops crying. Oh wait, no, more crying. Oh, wait, happy... uh, no, more crying. Dang, again. There goes my hope. Try breakfast. Aaron points to yogurt in fridge. Get said yogurt. Two spoonfuls later and I will spend next 10 minutes cleaning said yogurt from tile floor. Thank God we have tile floor.

7:05am: Hear Doug upstairs. Decide to leave crying baby to see husband. Good choice. Aaron cries for a bit then follows me upstairs where a pile of toys distracts him momentarily. Doug asks if Jon is up. "No" I reply, "he still has an hour before school. Plenty of time." (I had used downstairs crying time to pack Jon's lunch and make myself a cup of coffee and was feeling quite productive.)

7:40am: Jon is up, eating Kix for breakfast. Starting to feel rushed. Trying to get dressed and avoid holding Aaron (he follows me and whines). Yelling downstairs to see if Jon has his shoes on. Find his shoes. Find Aaron's shoes. Everyone, get in the car! Now!!

7:56am: On the way to school. Must be there by 8am. Sure, plenty of time.

8:02am: Walk Jonathan to school holding Aaron. Say good-bye. Made it just in time before the door closed. Now, off to the doctor. In Encinitas.

8:15am: On the freeway, Aaron fell asleep.

8:23am: Arrive at doctor's office. Have to wake Aaron up and relaize now he probably won't take another nap. Dang. Again.

8:45am: Leave doctor's office with cranky baby. Rash is roseola or possibly another allergic reaction, but not likely. We decide to leave that off chart. Pass Target and wish my brain worked half as well before I had kids, because then I could stop and get what I know is on a list on my fridge at home. Grrr. Decide to go home and get list.

9:06am: Grab list from home.

9:23am: Arrive at Target to discover Aaron fell asleep 2 minutes before I pulled into the parking spot. DANG! Wake him up anyway since we are here.

10:04am: Leave Target, unload stuff to car. Putting cart away when I realize there is a container of baby food I did not pay for. The great debate. It's only a dollar. I'm sure they owe me a buck by now. My conscience wins out and I walk back in carrying Aaron and pay $1.09 in cash for baby food. Think as I walk to car that I would have felt guilty forever, so glad I did it.

10:10am: Rain. Just as I closed the door to the car. Feeling blessed.

10:19am: Stop at Starbucks for second coffee of the morning. Aaron fell asleep. (Woo-hoo!)

10:32am: Home, sweet home. To do dishes. Sweet dishes. Went to unload dishwasher. See that it was stopped mid-cycle last night (For TV viewing) and not restarted. Dang. Handwash all dishes in sink and run dishwasher.

11:20am: Dishes mostly done. Decide to make some wheat bread since Target did not have the right kind and I don't want to wake Aaron for another store trip. See on calendar that this week is all minimum days. Silently thank God for the fact that I saw that before I was late to pick up Jon.

12:02pm: Finished dishes. Leave to pick up Jonathan from school. Hope to get a parking place. Aaron is awake.

12:50pm: Aaron will not be happy on the ground, so I am holding him. Jonathan is doing a new puzzle in the garage and now... what to eat? Heat up some leftovers and eat. One-handed.

1:10pm: First of many afternoon tantrums by Aaron. He throws the yogurt he so nicely asked for. (pointed to and said "gugur?") Take him out of highchair, clean up yogurt. Aaron throws himself back and hits his head on the tile. Jon is asking for help with puzzle. I give up. Pick up Aaron, help Jon finish the puzzle. Fix a snack for Jon and some more food for Aaron now that he is calm.

1:25pm: Kids are finally eating. Together. At the table. A miracle!

1:44pm: Start more laundry. Kids are playing in the garage. Nicely. Wow. Cater to demands for bubbles, balls, and walks.

2:35pm: Try to lay Aaron down for a nap. He reluctantly falls asleep in crib. Play with Jonathan outside. Check on Aaron - still asleep so I ride on the big scooter with Jonathan and then check on Aaron after 2 loops.

3:35pm: Aaron is awake and crying. Dang.

3:38pm: Outside with all the neighborhood playing.

3:48pm: It's only been ten minutes. Really?!?

5:46pm: Going inside because Aaron wants a snack. I think.

5:58pm: Cleaning up more yogurt off the floor. Dang. (Thinking, "But he pointed at it, grabbed it from the refrigerator and got himself a spoon. Surely he wanted it!")

6:12pm: Doug is home! Doug is home! Hooray!!!

6:30pm: Dinner is served. Leftovers. Yay. It was good though, so there is no complaining. All of us are sitting at the table. A rare sight. Someone should photograph this so I could have a chance of remembering it. Oh well. It's over. Aaron is down and throwing stuff, Jonathan announces he is finished and I am ready to climb into bed. Alas, there is more work to be done.

7:08pm: I e-mail Aunt Linda so she won't think I am ignoring all her wonderful messages. Try to get a start on dishes that have piled up throughout the day and evening. No luck. Will do tomorrow. We hear Adam outside. Flashlights!! (Suburban fun.)

8:00pm: Doug is giving Aaron a bath. Jonathan is getting his pajamas on and his teeth brushed. Read 2 stories to Jonathan. Wash Aaron's hair. Doug pulls him out of the bath and dries him off and sends him running naked into the bedroom. I get him dressed while Doug warms up a bottle.

8:37pm: Bedtime has arrived.

9:02pm: Freedom!!!! I start this Blog. I hear Doug downstairs playing XBox, so continue until I hear the TV go on. Go downstairs and hang out with Doug and watch Winter Olympics. Fall asleep on couch. Remind myself to go to bed earlier tomorrow.

My other job update 1

If you have no desire to read through what I would say is about as exciting as Macro Econ 101, then you should stop reading now.

I decided that the best way for me to improve and refine my forex trading strategy was to write it down. I thought that doing so in a public forum even if no one is reading it would be best as it will be more likely for me to be honest and disciplined in my approach.

Moving forward I am going to break up my time between now and the real go-live date (the May-June-July time that I will be measuring success for the year by) into 2 week goals. Each 2 weeks I will have some outcome that I am hoping to get. I will then hopefully figure out what worked, what didnt, and make refinements.

So now that I am in my first 2 week period I figured that I would come up with a basic strategy, make a few trades against that strategy, and hopefully finish reading my first forex book.

The trading strategy is to break each day into 1 of 3 categories; Major news event, mid news events, minor news events. On Major news events, its just go with the flow. I am looking for a sustained trend in a particular direction. For mid news event days, I will look to stay out of the market and just watch and learn. On minor news days, I am looking for range based trading and markets to respect strength boundaries which I will define as the MACD line and Bollinger bands. I will look to do market + 10pip trailing stops. In this first session, I am just going to be looking at the EUR/USD pair and doing 1-10 mini lot trades.

My next job?

Recently we went through (another) round of layoffs at my work. I think that unless something dramatic changes, which can happen, the writing is on the wall and layoffs will continue. That being said, its now time to come up with plan b.

I need my plan b to:
1) pay the bills
2) be in san diego

would be nice if it also:
1) allowed me to work for myself
2) flexible schedule
3) do much more than just pay the bills
4) is fun and engaging

For a while now my bro and I have been talking about doing more day trader stuff in the ForEx market. Its funny, I get almost the same reaction from people when I tell them this as I do when I tell them I ride a motorcycle. Its always "I had a friend who was doing great until the crash".

I started out exploring ForEx by just jumping in. I got a free 30 day paper trade account. My intent was to determine how viable this is in making money in a short time, if i like it and if it meets the other requirements. I started this beginning in June and thought that I would evaluate how to move forward while on vacation. During my little 2 week stint, I started with $2000 in monopoly money, never leveraged more than $800 at any point in time, and finished with ~$2,700. That included a ton of mistakes like clicking the short button instead of long, or entering back into a trade with a currency pair that I just got out of. Stoopid

Now that I am back from vacation, I have a plan.
1) Write down the plan on the blog so I keep myself honest with it.
2) Give it the college try for 1 year. This means learn as much as possible and be ready to sink some money into it for the sake of learning.
3) Fund a real account with money we can afford to lose.
4) Use the next 9 months to develop a trading strategy that can be executed part-time (since I am still employed).
5) Demonstrate month over month positive earnings in April, May, and June.
6) Figure out a way to stop making stupid mistakes, gain some maturity (yeah right).

There it is, that is the plan. Im interested in feedback and success or fail stories. If you have them, let me know.

1-30-50 Challenge

The 1-30-50 challenge is ridonkulous! It is pointless and is counter to everything I know about sports. There, I have said it. I feel better.

For those that do not know, the 1-30-50 challenge is simply to run 1 mile, do 30 push-ups, and do 50 sit-ups in one day, then to repeat that for the next 30 days (maybe they should rename it to 30-1-50-30). In the event that you cannot do this, you have to buy a chicken for some 3rd world family / village for $20 or some other type of donation.

At first glance this seems ok. I was ok with it at first. But after having a friend bring it up daily I started to think about it more. Since then, I have come to several conclusions. First, I did some researching on the net. I was wondering why I had never heard of this before and what was the fitness benefits of this challenge. I found nothing. Come to think of it, any sports program I have ever heard of or done recommends the exact opposite of this in terms of varied resistance or activities, and to give your body time to rest through the program.

I then tried to think of any sort of program outside of sports similar to this and could only come up with one thing that was similar, the attendance record from school. This is something you get for making it to school on time every day. Doesnt mean you are getting smarter or making the honor role, just means you were there with a heartbeat.

I was asked the other day on why I like sports. For me its because someone is always winning or completing some great achievement. The 1-30-50 does neither of these as when you are done you completed a normal part of a Jr. High PE program and it only punishes failure (in terms of the chicken and anyone you are doing it with talking smack). This is neither a great accomplishment or a win.

The only reasons I can think of for why someone would do the 1-30-50 challenge is because this is an entry exercise to someone starting a daily program and doesnt know what else to do, or that running, doing sit-ups and push-ups is a lot of fun, or you were just plain bullied into it.

One Reason Why I Love Surfing

Its the unexpected adventure that awaits. It starts with the first phone call at 5 something in the morning leading to being picked up and riding to the beach with a bunch of friends. Most times we end up surfing, sometimes we end up at a new coffee stand, and then there are mornings like today where its a bit of both.

We started with our normal routine where Rick picks me up. Only difference was Paul was lazy and didnt roll with us. We ended up at Cardiff after looking at a bunch of other breaks that werent breaking. Jason posted and met up with us also. In the water it was a normal slow day, but we did meet a guy named Matt, a friend of Drew and Keri's (2nd time this week I have been reminded what a small world we live in).

Afterward there was the normal comical conversation about who has to get back home in 5 minutes or their wife will have their head. This time it was Rick that had to bolt. His loss because another new friend, Todd, offered to make us breakfast on the beach. Todd was there with his camper and BBQ ready for holiday. Todd cooked up some eggs, bacon, and an english muffin for both of us. I have never had breakfast on the beach before, but Im convinced the beach makes food taste much better. Since my ride left already, I was glad Jason was around to give me a ride back home otherwise it would have been a long walk.

Happy 5th Birthday, Jonathan!

It's official! Jonathan is now 5 years old. The time flies by so fast... One day he's cooing and needs a new diaper and the next, he's squirting you with a water gun. Go figure.

We had such a blast with him at his birthday party on Saturday! Thanks to everyone who showed up! We rented a jumpie again (this one was 2 feet bigger than last year, so there was some tree trimming going on pre-blow up) and of course, a "Sno-Kone" machine which was used later (after the kids left) to make "adult sno-kones with rum"! Aaron had fun too in his little car walker. He was running around the garage in good spirits for his brother's birthday party. What a great day - the sun was out and everyone had fun!

Its official...Jon is now on 2 wheels

There are a few things that are sure fire ways to make any dad proud and athletic achievement is always on that list. We started teaching Jon to ride on Saturday and he has been all over it. He has gone to just scooting around to riding on cement, turning, riding up and down hills, driveways, bumps, and anything else.



The funny thing is that he lasted longer than his bike. When we were riding last night, the seat on his bike broke clean off. Jon was devastated, he was just now starting to love his bike. The good news was that we had bought him a new one from Performance. So we jumped in the truck and picked it up a day early. This bike is a lot bigger than his old one, but he seems to have picked it up quick. Happy Birthday Jon! I hope you ride this one so much that you destroy it also!


More Jon learns to ride pics.