Everybody Loves Your Money

It’s week four of the weight loss contest.  If you recall, I’m having somewhat of a contest with my brother in law where we set a target to lose 17 pounds each at the rate of a pound a week.  If either of us weighs more than we did the previous week, we have to pay the other person $10.  At the end of the contest (in Nov) if either of us isn’t at our goal, we have to pay the other $10 per pound that we are off.

I’m disappointed to tell you that I had to pay my brother in law $10 last week.  It’s a long story but is filled with many mouth stuffing incidents.  You see, they had a party out at the lake.  I drank too much and ate too much after being good all week.  That was all it took to pop my weight back up prior to the weigh in.  During the party I actually found myself thinking, "This is so much fun, it’s worth the $10".  Talk about terrible.

Besides that one "slip up", I’m actually doing well.  We are keeping a spreadsheet with the weekly weigh in numbers and I have charted those out so that we can follow our progress along a trend line (goal vs actual).  I was above the line once (when I had to pay my brother in law) but I’m now tracking on the line and should be able to keep myself below it from here on out.

Psychologically it was quite painful to pay the $10 to my brother in law.  It wasn’t because of the money, but was more because I had gone in to this with the goal of not paying him anything.  I underestimated how strong the temptation to eat and drink would be.  I suppose it’s a good lesson for me and I’m hoping to use that week as a reminder of why I need to keep on track.  I’m still much happier to pay my brother in law for slipping up than to pay a weight loss company every week.

I have been having a terrible time knocking off the 20 pounds I really need to shed.  For the last year or so I’ve been creeping up on the scale and all my clothes are getting rather uncomfortable.  Every time I drop a few pounds, the clothes start fitting better and I give up, only to put the weight back on quickly.

I had been contemplating joining Weight Watchers because I figured that would motivate me to lose the weight.  Weighing in every week in front of people I don’t really know would probably be a pretty decent motivator.  The cheapskate in me just can’t bring myself to spend the money.  Basically I’d be giving away money because I lack the discipline to drop the weight on my own.  My relatives have been doing the Weight Watchers thing for years and have been pretty successful with it.  I’ve learned a lot from them and am able to calculate the point values for various foods which made it even tougher for me to justify paying just to weigh in once a week.

Just when I was about to join, I got another idea.  My brother in law is also trying to drop a little weight and is actually on the Weight Watchers program.  I called him up and asked him if he was interested in having a little competition.  The plan was to weigh in once a week at his house (he only lives a couple blocks away) and track our progress.  I built a spreadsheet and we enter the weight in weekly.  We also agreed that the target would be to drop one pound a week for 17 weeks.  If either of us weighs more than we did the previous week, we have to pay the other person $10.  At the end of 17 weeks we each have to pay the other $10 for every pound that we miss our goal.  So, I need to weigh 190 at the end and if I weigh 195, I have to pay my brother in law $50.

So far this competition has been working great.  We intentionally set the weigh in date for Monday so that we would have to eat better on the weekend (which is when we both have the toughest time eating well).  It’s been two weeks and I’m down almost 5 pounds.  My brother in law is too.  It’s funny how a little bit of money at stake can alter my behavior so much.  If I was intelligent, I’d look at all the other benefits for losing weight, such as living longer, being healthier, being more comfortable and having higher self esteem.  Instead all it takes is a measly $10 risk every week to keep me on track.  Pathetic but it’s working!!

There I was.  Patiently waiting in the turn lane at an intersection.  I was about 4 cars back at the light.  Traffic had built up behind me and there was a brand new green Toyota Camry right behind me.  All was well.

As the light turned green I started to anticipate being able to go forward.  I hadn’t moved an inch when I felt a "slam"!  At first I thought maybe my foot had slipped off the clutch and I’d stalled the truck.  As soon as I thought that, I realized that the impact was too hard for that.  I checked in my rear view mirror and there was the lady and her two kids.  Looking at me with that look of, "Oooops".

We both pulled off the road.  I wasn’t sure what I’d find when I got out but was happy to see that there was no damage to the truck.  Driving a 4wd Toyota Tacoma does have it’s advantages.  In this case it was that her new Camry sits lower than the back bumper of my truck.  In fact it was a perfect marriage of my trailer hitch and her front bumper.  Poor thing.  That brand new Camry has a nice scratch, smudge and dent on it’s front bumper now.

Apparently what had happened is that she was stopped behind me and had turned around inside her car to help her child with a fresh large red drink that she had just purchased for him.  When she did this, her foot slipped off the clutch and that forced her in to the back of my truck.  Not only was her bumper messed up a bit but there was red fruit drink all over inside her new tan interior.  I’m not sure what she was more upset about.

Anyway, it shocked the heck out of me when it happened but all turned out well.  Yet another great reason to drive an older truck.  Although there was no damage, even if there had been a small scratch or dent, I might have been more likely to have not worried about it.

Wow.  It’s amazing how much nicer blogging is now that I’ve gotten the long term bugs worked out of my site.  I have been suffering with some database issues for over 9 months.  It killed my blogroll when it all happened so I’ve been running without a blogroll for that long.  I also wasn’t able to use a blog editor (Windows Live Writer) due to the problems.  For 9 months I have been blogging with the Wordpress interface and I don’t mind telling you, it sucked.

Well, it’s finally fixed and now I can add pictures and other content.  I think I’ve written 6 posts already today.  I’ll spill them out over the next few days.  I wouldn’t wait on the edge of your seat or anything but I think the posts are decent.  I wanted to thank everyone in my blogroll for sticking with me and not removing their link back to me.  Some of you may not have noticed, but I’m sure some of you did.  Either way, thanks for linking to ELYM.

Our friends entered a contest for an American Standard new heating and cooling system and have been chosen as one of the 7 finalists.  Their 10 year old daughter drew a picture of their house and their dad, Jeff, wrote a short essay about why they needed a new home cooling/heating and filtration system.  If they win, they receive a $15,000 system for their home.  They could really use it.  The system that they have now is on it’s last leg and winning this contest would be a prayer answered.

If you can take a second to vote for them, I, and they would really appreciate it!!!

Vote for “The Stannard Family”!!!!!!  from Kent, Washington

http://www.americanstandardair.com/Promotions/ComfyColoringContest2007/default.aspx

For all you bloggers out there, if you would consider putting a short post up to tell your readers to vote for my friends, I know that I would be eternally thankful to you!!!!

This has nothing to do with personal finance but I found it somewhat pathetic:

We have troops deployed in many hostile areas.  Our national debt is skyrocketing.  Politicians are all maneuvering for election day.  There are a million different things that actually matter to our country and our world going on right now and CNN breaks with this?

I’m so disappointed that this is what our country has become.  No wonder so many of our citizens are disengaged from the real issues.  Who are CNN’s peers?  Perezhilton.com? TMZ.com?  I would be embarrassed to be a journalist these days.  The only ones that I respect are the ones that refuse to talk about Brittany, Lindsay, The View, Rosie, and on and on, and that actually confront the people running our country and other real newsmakers. 

The definition of news seems to have shifted tremendously in this age of “continuous broadcasting” and “internet news”.  Gone are the days of covering subjects that truly affect our society.  Now news seems to be defined as anything that will increase traffic to the website or gain a few more audience members in the ratings.  Whether you are interested in these inconsequential subjects or not, it sure doesn’t seem like anything about them should be streaming across the top of a major news organization.

When I saw these images of various consumer products that are vizualized in their various quantities I was struck with how much waste we have in this country. 

426,000 cel phones are retired every day.

http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/galleries/running_the_numbers/11rtn.php

http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/galleries/running_the_numbers/12rtn.php

11,000 jet trails are produced in this country every 8 hours

http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/galleries/running_the_numbers/

http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/galleries/running_the_numbers/02rtn.php

106,000 aluminum cans are used in the US every 30 SECONDS!

http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/galleries/running_the_numbers/05rtn.php

http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/galleries/running_the_numbers/06rtn.php

60,000 plastic bags are used in the US every 5 SECONDS

http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/galleries/running_the_numbers/09rtn.php

http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/galleries/running_the_numbers/10rtn.php

If I ever needed a boost to make sure I recycle, this display certainly brought it to the forefront of my mind.  We do a pretty good job of recycling at our house but I think we are going to try to do better.  I’d like to do my part to keep some of this stuff from our landfills.  It’s not like we have unlimited space there.  Remind me to post about when I was a kid and we had houses around us that could explode at any minute due to the methane gas that was seeping in to homes from the landfill a mile away.  People were having to evacuate and live in hotels just in case their house exploded.  I guess those memories give me added incentive to do my part to recycle as much as I can.

The last 5 days of work have been brutal.  Yelling, screaming, emotions running high.  I wish I was joking, but I’m not.  I learned a long time ago that it isn’t worth losing your cool, but certainly other people that I work with haven’t learned that.  The way some people react, you’d think that people’s lives were at stake.

Back in the days that I volunteered as a police officer, I found myself in a few situations where people’s lives WERE at stake.  I always think back to those situations when I come across a stressful situation in my regular job.  No matter how ugly it gets, nobody is going to die.  It’s amazing how well that works to put things in perspective.  So, while people were yelling at each other today and talking about how hard things are, I couldn’t help letting my mind wander a bit.  “Good old Bill (names changed to protect the innocent).  Work seems hard right now but at least he gets to go home.  No one is pointing a gun at him threatening to kill him.  I wonder if he realizes how lucky he is to be working in this company, making a good living, without anyone trying to shoot him as part of his job.”

Anyway, enough of this blabbering.  I’ll forget all about this by tomorrow night as we finish packing our suitcases to head to Disneyland Thursday morning.  I am so excited about my daughter getting to go to Disneyland.  I know she is just going to love it.  She’s almost 4 and knows all the characters that she’ll see there.  (And what’s amazing is we don’t let her watch much tv and she still knows them all).  You may be wondering how much this crazy trip is going to cost us.  ZERO.  My aunt, who is basically like my second mom, is taking all of us (including my sister’s family).  She loves to travel and saves up for months and months to be able to take us on trips like this every few years.  Yes, I feel guilty and try to do as much as I can for her.  She’s single (never married) and retired.  She has always been included in my immediate family and, like I said, is like a second mother to me.

So, we’re off to Disneyland on Thursday and will be back late Saturday.  I called ahead and they do have internet access in the hotel and it’s free.  (I wasn’t about to pay $10 for access).  I’m probably going to take my laptop so if anything really interesting happens (at least from a money point of view), I’ll probably blog about it.

If anyone has any great tips for going to Disneyland, please leave them in the comments.  I’m interested in really fun things to do there and great values too!

It’s about time I made a blog update.  I’ve been out at the cabin for the last few days (since last Thursday night) and quite frankly, it’s kind of nice to be home to rest.  I had intended to blog a bit out there but just didn’t have time.  (I did, however, manage to keep up with a lot of the blogs in my reader).  What was I doing out there?

Well, I started Friday morning by getting out early to continue caulking our place and getting it ready to paint.  In case you don’t recall, we have a family cabin that we all built a few years ago directly across the street from where we are building our cabin.  That makes it nice for us.  We can go up and be comfortable in the family cabin and then work on ours.  Now that my dad has passed away, I try to keep up on the maintenance on the family cabin so that my mom doesn’t feel overwhelmed with the upkeep.  So, between doing the maintenance on her place and building our place, I find I’m always pretty busy out there.  Anyway, back to what I was saying.  On Friday I got out early and did a bunch of caulking until I ran out of caulk.  After that, my wife, daughter and I headed in to “town” to get some groceries for the weekend.  I was amazed how busy it was getting out there.  A town that is normally fairly “gray haired” was hopping with tons of families etc.  Apparently we weren’t the only ones that got out there early for the memorial day weekend.  Once we got back from shopping I did a little bit more wiring on the cabin and then we just took it easy that evening.

Saturday was where the hard work started.  We have a ton of dirt piled up on our lot because we had to dig it out for the foundation.  I have been planning on renting a backhoe to move the dirt but got a burst of energy and decided to start moving the dirt by wheelbarrow.  I have no idea how much dirt I moved, but I can tell you it was a lot.  I was at it non-stop for about 4-5 hours.  I decided that I could use the exercise and was looking forward to being nice and tired and sore the next day.  I definitely succeeded at that.  (When you are an office sissy like me, I think it’s natural to want to do some hard labor now and then to make sure you still can)  I woke up the next morning feeling like I got hit by a train.  I decided that the best way to feel better was to stretch a bit and then go right back at it.  After breakfast, I headed out again and did another 4 hours on Sunday.  I think that’s probably the hardest I’ve worked in at least 10 years.  I think about 5 or 6 people must have come by and thought out loud how much easier it would be with a bobcat or backhoe.  I just smiled, nodded in agreement and then said, “But I wouldn’t be getting all this cheap exercise”.  After this weekend, I think I’ve decided to save the $500 and just do the rest by hand as well.  I’m probably about halfway done and I know I’m in better shape for it.  It just goes to show that being cheap can be good for you in so many ways. 

After all the manual labor on Sunday, we got together with some of the neighbors out there and had a big barbeque.  It was definitely a great time and is one of the big reasons why we love it out there.  The people around us are great and the area is just beautiful.  Oh, I forgot to mention that we went out to an indian casino on Saturday night, gambled (aka: gave away) $20 and then went to an all you can eat buffet.  I think my wife got more than her money’s worth with all the fresh crab and seafood she ate.  God, I love a good buffet.  Having eaten 3 times as much as I should have Saturday night probably played in to the desire to go back out and do a bunch of hard work on Sunday too. 

This is a great article about those fraudelent emails we’ve all gotten asking for account information so that someone can transfer us millions of dollars.  All we need to do is send some money to them to cover the cost of transferring the money and we’ll be rich.  Yeah right.

There is a whole organization out there called 419eater.com.  The numbers 419 are used to represent the Nigerian legal code section that these violate.  There is an organized group of people that are actively engaging these people down in Nigeria, and I’m sure other areas of the world.  I found it very amusing that they were able to get a man to paint his chest and send a picture and even more hilarious that they were able to scam one of the scammers for $80.

It’s definitely worth reading.  It appears that the best defense against these people is to simply waste their time.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3887493.stm