eric135

A World I Never Made, Buy Don't Hold, SLV, a baby crying...

• I just finished A World I Never Made, an ebook by James Lepore. It's gotten an average of 4 stars out of 5 on Amazon. It isn't free any more, but it's still at a good price at about 4 bucks.
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  I've been keeping an eye on SLV, one of the ETFs I've been trading. I got the tip reading Buy Don't Hold, by Leslie Masonson. The book has a companion web site. The main point is that they have identified a universe of 74 ETFs, which they rank by relative strength. For the past while, the top-ranked ETF was SLV, which basically is silver. I got in on it at a fairly good price, but now that ETF is totally taking off, and everyone is watching it looking for signs of the inevitable bubble that is no doubt on its way. My only problem is that the other top ETFs have hardly moved in the past several weeks.
• Our next door neighbors have a little kid. I'd say he's about two. Every time he leaves in the morning, or really any time he leaves the apartment with one of his parents, he absolutely screams. We can hear him screaming out the door, down the stairs, as the parents strap him into the car seat. I swear I can hear him screaming as they turn the car around the corner. I don't know how they stand it. I mean, it really doesn't "bother" me at all but damn all that screaming, three or four times a day... gods how do they stand it? I never hear them yelling at him or acting all mad or upset, they just gradually move from the apartment (an inexplicable 10 or so minutes to lock the door), down the stairs (another 4 minutes -- they must take one step every 10 seconds). The process is reversed when they return. That kid is going to be an opera singer. Parents. God bless 'em.

Hereafter...

•  We watched Hereafter on Netflix. It was sold as a mystery sci-fi thriller, which set me up for a bit of a let down to be honest. It's the story of three characters who each have their own unique experiences with death. Matt Damon plays an unwilling psychic. His life intersects with those of a young woman who survives the tsunami of 2004, and a young boy whose twin brother is killed.
            At first I couldn't figure out where the movie was going, but eventually I thought it was a good story, but not at all sci-fi or thrilling. The scene where the young boy seeks out Damon's character was nicely done, and yes it made me shed a few tears but I tend to do that quite easily when watching movies. The only thing that threw me was expecting a movie like Bourne Identity. After I got over this, I ended up thinking it was pretty good.
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  If plans work out, in August, we'll be flying from Phoenix to the East Coast at the annual beach trip. Of course, just as soon as we started doing online research for booking the flights, on the very day we hit CLICK, a big hole opened up on a Southwest flight from  Tuscon. I mean, literally, as soon as the electric signal went from our laptop to Travelocity, the hole tore open on that flight. In the weeks that follow, we've had cracks throughout airplanes, about a dozen night-shift air traffic controllers have fallen asleep on the job, and the price of gasoline (and thus jet fuel) has gone through the roof. Every time we update our online search for affordable flights, I nervously check for news about a tsunami wiping out Kitty Hawk North Carolina. I mean it is just frakking weird.

A World I Never Made... Tweaking the Budget... Veronica Mars...

•  I've been reading many freebies from Amazon.com for my Kindle. Most of them I'll read the first few chapters and, if it hasn't captured my interest by then, I delete them. But this one (presently free as I write this) is a well-written mystery. It reminds me of the Stiegg Larsson books. Looking back at my download history, I'm batting about 1 book out of 7 that I actually read all the way through. Interestingly, it doesn't seem to matter whether I got the book for free, got it at a steep discount, or paid full price. Most of them suffer the delete button.
• The past few months, I've been unrelentingly focused on fine-tuning our household budget. It all started when I changed my role at work for a bit of a cut in pay, and then pretty much cut out all of the overtime I usually work. If I had to guess, the combination of the two has made about at 12% cut in my gross pay, and it got me to wonder how much of that is being burned up for absolutely nothing. We're actually not doing too bad, but I've gotten us accustomed to a more disciplined saving plan, and we've found a lot of crap items we've been paying for and not getting much use of, and cutting those out.
           One thing I've started to do is to itemize as much as I can on a per-paycheck basis. I get paid every other Thursday, and I plotted these out on a spreadsheet, one column for each paycheck, for the rest of the year. And then I looked at the activity on our checking account and plotted out when every bill is paid (just about everything is either an automatic draft or a bill pay from the same account) and entered that item for each paycheck. I tried to capture just about everything that we pay/purchase on a regular basis (right down to the cat food we buy every two weeks). The spreadsheet figures out how much cash is left after everything is paid for. It's been very eye-opening, but has helped get us back on track for saving a higher amount now than we did prior to my cut in pay. We've even started thinking about taking more out-of-town vacations, which we never do (not because we couldn't afford them but because we are such stay-at-home folks).
•  We've been watching Veronica Mars on Netflix. I just love her.