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This article has 10 Benefits of Rising Early, and How to Do It. They forgot one big way to get up early:
Get a Baby!
Caleb wakes up every morning between 5:30 and 7:00 and while he's happy playing by himself for a while, sooner or later he wants someone to come get him and make a bottle!
According to the Chiumento Happiness at Work Index the top ten things that make us happy at work are (in order):
I've heard that having a best friend at work is the best way to make sure you are happy at work!
Interestingly enough, the things that make us unhappy are not quite the opposite of that:
So, for example, making a good salary won't necessarily make you happy but making a bad salary is likely to make you unhappy. So a good salary is necessary in order to be happy but it doesn't make you happy in and of itself.
What did we do this weekend?
Can we have a weekend now?
I read an interesting article in the Economist about Marriage in America. But the quote that really peaked my interest was the difference in the number of words children from different types of homes heard in an hour:
One study found that a college professor's kids hear an average of 2,150 words per hour in the first years of life. Working-class children hear 1,250 and those in welfare families only 620.
My grandmother told me I was going to talk her ear off when I was little - I guess that's what comes from having two parents as teachers!
I was driving home from the airport last night when I got a call from Frank saying 'Come to the softball field! I forgot the diaper bag!'
I was driving along all annoyed that it was eight o'clock at night and Caleb hadn't had dinner when I started remembering some of the good times I had with my dad. Like the time we snowmobiled from one town to another in Alaska with no extra clothes or safety gear much less dinner! (Did I mention I was six years old and my sister was four?) Or the time I got a piggy back ride down a cliff to see a "bear's cave." I don't even remember how old I was during that one. Did those experiences make me more comfortable jumping on a plane alone to visit India? Or going horse back riding for a week in Australia? Or meeting a big potential client for the first time? You bet. So maybe unprepared dads and missing dinner isn't such a bad thing. I relaxed and went to rescue Caleb (or was it rescuing Frank?) at the softball fields. At least Caleb was very happy to see me!
You plant grass, you water, you take good care of your lawn and then you have to cut it every week, but you continue to water it. Ever wondered why? (I do - I think I spent too much time in a city without lawns to truly appreciate lawns. I never look at a lawn and say, wow, that's some good landscaping. Instead I think, wow, that's a lot of water in a place like Colorado where we've had droughts the past five years.)
Lawns came to the US from Britain in the late 1800's. It was a sign of wealth to have a large expanse of green grass all nicely trimmed (in the days before lawn mowers!) The really rich used servants; our more practical presidents like Woodrow Wilson used sheep. But we have the American Garden Club to blame for our current standards of lawn care:
It wasn't until The American Garden Club stepped in. Through contests and other forms of publicity, they convinced home owners that it was their civic duty to maintain a beautiful and healthy lawn. So effective was the club's campaign that lawns were soon the accepted form of landscaping. The garden club further stipulated that the appropriate type of lawn was "a plot with a single type of grass with no intruding weeds, kept mown at a height of an inch and a half, uniformly green, and neatly edged."
So next time you are griping about your water bill or the time you spend mowing, just remember, your lawn shows how rich you are!
Paperbackswap is a great site for trading books. I tried several book trading sites and Paperbackswap works the best for me. You list the books you are done reading, ones that you are willing to trade, and for each one you send off, you can request a book from someone else. All you pay is shipping on the book you send, $2.09 for most paperbacks.
Here's how it works:
So now when I'm done reading a book:
So far I've listed over 40 books, sent seven books, gotten four and have another three on the way!
Tim Ferriss' new book The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
What he suggests, among many other things, is:
In order to accomplish all this, he suggests starting a business selling a product. Then outsource everything from creating the product to marketing to order fulfillment to others.
I bet if you read the book, you'd get at least one really good idea out of it. I bet most people that read the book don't end up quitting their job and starting an outsourced product company, but you never know!
I had yummy spinach crepes at Cafe Mason in San Francisco yesterday. They came with an awesome fruit salad that included everything from blackberries and strawberries to melon and bananas.
Just be sure you leave any crying babies at home as they are sure to let everyone know that "Crying babies are not welcome here for other customer's precious peaceful dining moments." The waitress tried to take my menu away before I had a good picture and I said "Wait! I'm going to blog about that." 
"You and everyone else." Maybe that's why I got such unfriendly service. Not bad, just not friendly.
This guy won $5 million dollars and is now living off social security! His problem? Bad investment advice. It sounds like he might have a case although he probably should have gotten multiple opinions! He was getting $98000 a year when an investment company convinced him to:
sell the future annual payments off to a private firm for an immediate lump sum - in his case, about $2 million - that he could roll into investments. He'd just live off the earnings and interest.
All these stories of lottery winners going broke almost makes you afraid to win the lottery!
Some interesting quotes from Steve Jobs about how to live your life. Here are the ones I liked:
“The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.” This one seemed appropriate given my earlier post about trying to figure out what I want to do when I grow up.
“There’s a phrase in Buddhism, ‘Beginner’s mind.’ It’s wonderful to have a beginner’s mind.” Learn!
“We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.”
“I’m the only person I know that’s lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year…. It’s very character-building.” Don't be afraid to make mistakes!
“We’re here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why else even be here?” Make a difference!
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
Some types of coral are now considered threatened under the Endangered Species Act. From the New York Times, Coral is Dying, Can it Be Reborn?
“We have lost 25 percent of the world’s corals in the last 25 years,” David E. Vaughan, director of the Center for Coral Reef Research at Mote, said in an interview, adding that 25 percent more are expected to die in the next decade or two.
In addition to polluted waters, disease, and environmental factors (like fishing and tourists), global warming is also killing coral:
And then there is global warming. So far, scientists say, it has had two main effects on coral, both potentially lethal. First, as oceans absorb more carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas, they become more acidic. The acidity makes it more difficult for corals to grow and may even cause them to start to dissolve. And as oceans warm, algae that live in corals, and on which they depend, may be killed.
The change is so drastic that I've been able to notice the difference over the past ten years. And it was already happening when I first started diving and snorkeling - we'd see huge expanses of dead coral and at the time I was told it was because the water was too warm for them. (When you can dive without a wet suit at 100 feet, you know the water is warm!) It's very sad that our children won't get to see what we've had the priviledge of seeing.
Do you know what you want to do with the rest of your life? No? Well I bet everybody else could tell you what you should do! I've got a great career in the computer software field and I'm about to graduate from massage school. I'm getting really tired of people assuming that I should do one thing or the other. Their assumptions are particularly frustrating because I could use some good conversation and feedback.
There's the majority of people that assume that I should keep my high paying, visible, successful career. They seem to be focused on the salary and the fact that it's a "successful" career. Then there's the group of people that assume because I went to school and I'm graduating, I should do that for a career.
My problem is that I don't know what I want to do and I want to talk to people about it but it's really hard to have a productive conversation when they've already decided what I should do without even knowing how I feel!
For example here's a conversation I had on Sunday:
Friend: I think it's so great that you've put all this time into school and you're about to graduate, start a business, have flexible hours and be able to spend more time with your kids. What a great thing you are doing.
Me: I'm not planning on quitting my job and going into massage.
Friend: Stormy! You've got to. You can do. You'll be able to spend more time with your kids!
Me: Quitting work and starting a massage business wasn't really ever the plan.
Friend: It's tough to start a massage business but you can do it!
And the conversation I want to be having is about what do I want to do. Not how I can do it. I'm completely confident I can work out the details of whatever I want to do, if I could only figure out what that was!
Luckily, I live in a time when we are all going to live long enough to have three or four careers so I don't just have to pick just one! I can be a software geek and then a massage therapist and then a doctor and then a librarian. Or maybe a book scout. Or I could just try to do them all at once!
This husband and wife team is trying to eat off $10 for two weeks. They each have their own $10 and their own stash of food.
It's interesting because Frank and I were just talking about this on the way to work yesterday. What would you eat or buy if you had limited funds but access to a kitchen? Here are some of the things that would be on my list:
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