O-Dark-Thirty

This is The Only Financial Advice You'll Ever Need . If you can follow one simple rule your financial life will be forever simplified. Ready? Here it is: Don't buy something if you don't have the money. If you prefer more positive statements: Only buy if you have the cash. Everything else is commentary, including the dozens of techniques which tell you how to manage your money so that you have the cash. I don't use the common phrase "only spend what you make" because too many people get a nice job making, oh, say, $40 thousand a year and think that means they can go spend it all right now. Buy a new car. Buy a bigger house. That's incorrect logic. You don't have the money if it isn't in your bank and available to buy what you want. If you have debts, your money is earmarked to pay someone else; it isn't yours to spend. Don't spend the money you need for this month's rent or car payment or groceries or utilities or ch...

I don't usually blog about what and where I eat. For one thing, that would be a lot of blog posts. For another, I don't want people to know what I'm eating. Besides, I need something for Twitter! Yet, tonight we just had the best ribs I've ever eaten. Let me explain. Darling found a coupon for ribs at the local Spring Creek Barbeque, a buy one Rib Meal at the regular price, get one free. Today was the last day for the coupon, so we had to go – use it or lose it. We decided to use it. We've eaten there once before and it was okay. I had the beef, and we had a salad. That seems odd for a BBQ place, but I felt like a salad that day. They brought fresh bread to our table – little loaves hot from the oven. I'm not supposed to be eating much bread, but I couldn't resist those. They smelled just like the bread my Aunt Nora used to make for us as boys. If you've ever seen the movie Ratatouille, when the food critic is transported back to his childho...

A million dollars for a couple of days in London and Paris for the Vice-President? Are conservatives crying wolf again? Let's remember the conservative pundits who claimed President Obama's trip to India in 2010 cost $200 million per day. That quoted cost was ridiculous and thoroughly debunked by Anderson Cooper. No one knows the actual costs, but it was probably closer to $50 million for the whole trip. We do know some figures that are not in dispute: 04-Feb-2013 Hyatt Regency London for $459,388.65 and 05-Feb-2013 Hotel Intercontinental Paris Le Grand for $585,000.50 . Okay, I'm trying to be fair here. Mr. Biden is the Vice-President of the United States. We respect the office and that respect should reflect on the person in office. We elected him, so we owe him that. He deserves protection. A lot of people in this world are unsavory characters and might try to harm him. It probably won't be anyone working in those two hotels, though. He deserves so...

I remember Spam™ but as a food that Mom liked and we boys tried to avoid. Avoidance wasn’t always possible. Mom always shopped at the Base Post Exchange (PX) for food. I remember those trips, especially when I was a little older. We went to the base in our station wagon, Mom and me and my three small brothers. I remember Barry about five, Dave about three and Tim two. That would make me nine or ten. Mom would get two carts and put Tim in the seat of one of them. She put Dave into the seat of the other. Barry sometimes sat in the cart itself, but mostly Mom required him to just walk next to one of the carts and hang on. He wasn’t supposed to let go, and he usually didn’t. I pushed one cart and Mom pushed the other. I had to make sure that Dave and Barry didn't do anything wrong - though Dave was pretty well secured and Barry came back every time he wandered away. He was careful that Mom didn't see him for the wrath of Mom was always to be avoided. The goal was to fill the...

The musical notes of his cell phone pierced his sleep. Frank sleepily picked up the phone next to his bed, expecting another call from work. "Mr. Jackson?"  The voice was quiet, yet sultry. Frank thought it probably belonged to a slim, athletic brunette. He smiled at the image in his mind. "Yes, this is he. How did you get this number? It’s unlisted." He tried not to sound sleepy, pitching his voice a little lower than normal. "Actually, I knew it was you, sir. This is the Psychic Hotline calling." Frank gritted his teeth and almost ended the call, but being awakened by a crank call, regardless of the voice, was just too much. "Listen..." he growled into the phone. "Please, Mr. Jackson, don’t be angry. This is not a crank call." The voice sighed quietly. "Haven’t you always laughed at the commercials for the Psychic Hotline and said ‘If they were really psychic they would call me ?’" Frank bit back a retort, r...

I admit it. I talk on the phone in my car on the way home from work almost every day. I do it hands-free, of course, and wouldn't even consider talking on the phone if I didn't have some sort of hands-free device. For the longest time I simply used my upgraded Apple™ headphones, the ones with the soft earpieces that should have been included with all their phones. For the last month or so I've been using my new Bluetooth™ LG HBS730 (yeah, I mentioned it in the last post, too). I discovered I like not having wires. So I usually talk to Darling on my forty-minute commute home. What does this have to do with electric cars? I don't have an electric car. I have a white 2003 Toyota Camry which I bought at CarMax (and then removed the "Max" part of that). I like my car. It's getting a little old but it runs well and I'm comfortable with it. Darling would like me to get a new car. I don't really want one. As I explained to her, if someone bump...

Two days ago I received my Pebble ™ watch in the mail. I was one of the 68,000+ Kickstarter ™ backers and have kept an eye on the progress of Pebble since the crowd-source funding succeeded. A fascinating business case, I watched the memos from Pebble™ as they finished the planning, the designing, the manufacturing and the inevitable redesign and streamlining before the final production run. So now, a few months past the expected delivery date, I received my watch. I'm not in the least bit disappointed. A couple things you need to know about me if you don't know already: I like gadgets and I like watches. I get gadgets all the time, so Darling says I need to stay employed just to buy my toys. I haven't worn a watch in about twenty years, ever since I removed a wrist watch given to me by a couple that I dearly loved and it was stolen from my desk. Still, I have quite a few watches I don't wear. I like pocket watches, too. I have one that belonged to my Grandfat...

Your way "Good Heavens, Man! You didn't write that, did you?" I'm still waiting for someone to put that in my comments and start a furor over something I wrote. That comment may never happen… I always thought that "Blog" was some shorthand for "Binary Log." It is not. It is short for "Web log." The web knows everything… There are some rules for writing blog posts. If you do a web search for writing blogs you get thousands of hits. When I started my blog I had no idea what I was doing. Maybe I still don't. Most of the web sites for doing blogs are aimed at people who want a lot of traffic to their site. That makes sense if you consider that a lot of blogs are designed to be income-producing in some fashion. I didn't find a lot of information for casual bloggers. I'm certainly a casual blogger. So I'll write what I think are some "rules" and we'll see how it goes. 1. There are no rules. H...

I have three younger brothers, and two of them now have blogs. My brother Dave has some interesting stories about our childhood. Don't drink anything while reading them - you might snort your beverage out your nose. I almost did. His blog is called " Dave Bernhardt's Blog " and he uses WordPress (sort of the advanced tool for posting blogs). My youngest brother Tim just set his blog up. So far he hasn't posted much. I look forward to reading his future posts. He's a funny, funny guy and an excellent writer. He finished writing a book a few years ago and started a second one. I'm afraid I hurt his feelings when I reviewed them and he quit writing novels. Maybe he'll start again, but novels are a lot of hard work. His blog is called Brotilla the Hun . He tells a funny story about the name. My next older brother Barry doesn't have a blog yet. If he started one it would probably be called Awesomeness or something. My daughter Liz convinced ...

Maybe I'm lacking perspective. Maybe that's the cloud hanging over my head. I've lost my perspective. I wonder at the daily toil in my life and am curious whether any good will come of my existence. I'm pretty sure the ISS will fly even without me at the helm (which I'm not, by the way). Speaking of the ISS, here are some tidbits for that. The International Space Station orbits an average of about 250 miles above the surface of the Earth. It travels at an average speed of 17,240 mph (7706.6 m/s). It takes the Station a little over 90 minutes to orbit the Earth. The orbit slowly decays so fuel is expended on a regular basis for a reboost.  There are currently six astronauts on board the station. They get up at 6AM and go to bed about 10PM. On average they work ten hour days M-F and five to eight hours on Saturday. They have Sunday off.  Now the real question should be what time zone do they use? I don't know. I'll check on that. The ...

Work seems tedious to me. Don't get me wrong - I like the paycheck and I still do a good-sized workload, especially now that the Sequestration tumbled the government expenditures. Contracting companies like mine will certainly get hit hard by the government cost-cutting measures. Democrats blame Republicans. Republicans blame Democrats. The bottom line is that most of our representatives, regardless of their political affiliation, have forgotten what it means to be a normal US citizen. They forgot how hard it is to make a living in the land of the free and the home of the brave. It does seem the government wants to step in and control more and more of what we do in our private lives. Gun control? Impossible - quit pandering to the supposed poll results and try to find something you   can   do to limit the danger to the citizens. Drones? Are you kidding me? Shades of Big Brother   and   Terminator. Irresponsible spending? I wasn't a big fan of M...