Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste.



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  • My daughter’s last hermit crab died today. She got three for her birthday in 2005. For the record they smell ridiculously bad when they die. He will be unceremoniously dropped in the trash after she gets home from school and I can inform her of her loss.

    When I die, I want it to be a happy occasion. Don’t feel bad for me. Feel bad for yourself if you like, but once I’m dead I’m not going to be sad about it…it’d be physically impossible for me to.

    I’ve told my mother since I was something like 15 that when I die I want a funeral procession to ride around town like a wedding procession – everyone honking their horns and flashing their lights. I want to be in a hearse with streamers and cans tied to the bumper and a big “Just Deceased” sign on the back in colorful letters. How great would that be?

    Celebrate for me – I win. I got out of the game. Yay for Gonch!

    Another great idea* I came up with – kind of, half of the credit has to go to my mother (and yes, I have one of the coolest mothers in the world) – is to buy a huge hourglass and then as family members pass, have them cremated and their remains put into the hourglass. Pass the hourglass through the family from generation to generation with everyone being added as they die.

    There’s something very symbolic about an hourglass filled with the ashes of family – the passing of time, eternity together, all that wackiness.

    I’m generally cool with death.

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    *Note: Do not feel free to rip off my ultra-cool postmortem ideas

    June 4th, 2007 - footnotes - insight - personal - the kids

    A few months ago I had a bunch of credit card points built up that I needed to use. There wasn’t really anything I wanted/needed available for the points I had, so I used them all on something like 12 magazine subscriptions. Just a weird mishmosh of what there was to choose from – Esquire, Rolling Stone, House Beautiful…crap like that. I do dig magazines still and I’m going to miss them once the rest of the world figures out that they’re an obsolete medium for distributing information and entertainment, but I digress.

    One of the magazines I got was Smart Money. The cover story this month is titled, “How To Make $5 million.”

    It’s an interesting read about the new wealth in America and the types of people that get there. (there’s a condensed version on their website, but it’s not nearly as good as the print version)

    But the one thing that struck me in the whole article was this:

    It also pays to consider what the rich are not: the proverbial frugal, steady, “Millionaire Next Door,” described in the 1996 bestseller of the same name. For one thing, a million bucks hardly ranks you among the elite these days; one in 12 U.S. households already has at least $1 million tucked away in home equity and other assets. You can’t swing a dead cat in a local Starbucks without hitting a half-dozen millionaires. To enter the nation’s top 1 percent, you need more than $5 million and even then you’ve got plenty of company.

    Interesting stuff right there alone and that’s just a part of one paragraph of the ten page article. The thing is, I never had hard numbers laid out in front of me like this, but this is something I always sensed* – that there are a lot of people doing very well for themselves anymore. To me the old milestones don’t apply anymore and this article kind of says that.

    A millionaire? Pfft. Call me when you have five.

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    *On a completely unrelated note, it also reassures me that when another one of those cost, pricing or financial threads come around on CoasterBuzz that I’m indeed not the one out of touch with the way things are these days ;)

    May 16th, 2007 - footnotes - random - useful

    I had one of those weekends where I really didn’t do much, but somehow felt busy. Those are the worst because it feels so unproductive.

    Jamie left work early on Friday with the news that the last ‘class’ she has to complete for work is available either in May in Chicago or June in Dallas. First thought was a chance to check out the Texas parks by piggybacking onto her work requirements. (a situation we’ve taken advantage of many times in the past) So I spent a bit of Friday trying to figure how viable it was to think I could get all four of us to Texas for a week. Two days later and we’re still pretty undecided, but I’m really liking the idea of a ‘surprise’ trip to Texas falling into my lap. At this point as I already have much of (ok, pretty much all of) our travel plans set through the first week of July and Texas would require both a restructuring of time and money. I might even be willing to give up the trip to Tennessee (Dollywood & Ghost Town) to make Texas happen. We’ll see, I guess.

    Friday night no one felt like cooking so we did Chinese take-out. Mongolian Beef is good. Then my daughter and I ran out in search of a new Wii game for little man. He had to have a tooth pulled Saturday morning (long story) and a spacer put in. So being as this was his first ‘big’ dentist visit I wanted to be able to hook him up with a little sumpin-sumpin if he did well – and he did ridiculously well with the whole thing. Especially given that we had to be up and on the road by 7am to make his 8am appointment at the dentist 47 miles away. (another long story)

    They didn’t put him under to pull the tooth, but rather gave him what I refer to as ‘silly juice’ when we got there and we had to sit in the waiting room for about 45 minutes for it to totally kick in. The kid rewarded me with 20 minutes of the funniest action I’d ever seen performed by a 5 year old in my life. I’d try to describe it but it won’t be nearly as funny in words, if you weren’t there and if you don’t know my kids. Three strikes there for almost everyone who’ll read this. But those few moments when he started getting silly until he got called back had us in tears from laughing.

    So he was a champ and we left the office with his tooth and a plethora of ‘prizes’ fom the dentist and I gave him the game for doing so well. We ended up deciding on Wii Play just because it was the short, simple, multiple game type of title that we could all dig and it hooked us up with another Wiimote. We spent a little time playing when we got home. Good stuff. A little shallow. Ok, a lot shallow, but considering the $40 remote is included the other $10 for 9 mini games was an ok value. Nothing groundbreaking and it even feels more shallow than Wii Sports, but it’ll be fun to pop it in every once in a while and screw around. Plus, it includes a tank game that feels an awful lot like a 2007 version of the old Combat game on the Atari 2600. That alone makes it worth it to me.

    I crashed for a couple of hours in the afternoon (I’m not a 6am kind of guy) and after dinner we watched “Stranger Than Fiction” – decent enough movie but with the obvious happy ending. Whatever. The kids crashed and the wife and I decided the catch up on a bunch of episodes of Desperate Houswives that had accumulated on the DVR. (no snide comments from the peanut gallery please)

    So it turns out we haven’t seen it since before Thanksgiving. We had 7 unwatched shows. At 11:30 we started the first one and in typical lame-ass fashion got interested and kept saying, “Just one more” until…well…we finished the last one around 5:30am. Man, that’s so lame. But at least I’m caught up on my Housewives. (rolleyes here)

    Late start for all on Sunday. We dragged our asses to Meijer around 1pm to pick up some things. Stupid crowded and the closest I’ve ever come to physically attacking morons in a store. We were glad to leave, but spent way too much on way too little.

    On the way home as we turned into our little subdivision, we noticed a sign for an open house relatively close to our place. (why we’d be interested is another ‘too long’ story for this post, but we were) So on a whim we went to check it out. Decent enough place. Not something I’d buy in the end. A few things we liked a few things that wouldn’t work for us. Still our first hands-on look at what the money (this was listed at $225,000) buys you in this section of the world. I still have no idea of our long-term plans in regards to the area, so scoring another house isn’t exactly priority until we have a better idea. It blew a half hour, what can I say?

    Spent the afternoon/evening getting some house stuff done. Everyone crashed in the living room watching TV, so around 9pm I got them all to bed. Did the podcast (just Jeff & myself this week) and headed on over here to finally add this entry. Plan on either catching some TV tonight before I get around to bed or hitting shuffle on Winamp and working on the website for a little while…or both.

    That was pretty much my weekend*.

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    *I hate telling stories like this because I either get too long winded and essentially too boring or I try to keep it short and leave out all the details that make reading something like this worth it and it becomes boring. I’d really love to find that balance between telling a good story and telling a short one. Clearly, I’m not there yet.

    March 4th, 2007 - footnotes - fun - insight - nerd - personal - the kids - travel - wii

    I need to head out tonight and score a haircut. I’m like 3 weeks overdue. I should’ve gone early in the month, but the bad weather had everyone going nowhere for two weeks then I got sick as hell last week. So I think I’ll finally get out tonight and get it done.

    The worst part is that with my stupid spikey haircut (that’s right about maximum useable length in that pinball machine shot) when it gets even a little over-length, there’s nothing I can do. I slap my Pirates baseball cap on and head out.

    Funny how thing change in life though and now I consider that ‘long’ hair. (I suppose for my situation it technically is, but still)

    Here’s yours truly chillin’ at a friend’s house around X-mas 1995*:

    Stud

    I guess I’ve always had a thing for not shaving too. I rock! \m/

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    *I loved that Sound Forge shirt. I lost it one year when a bunch of us went to Cedar Point. I was dismayed to return home and find in not in my stuff. No one had it and Sandcastle Suites claimed they didn’t find it either. Sigh.

    February 28th, 2007 - footnotes - personal - photos

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