Posted by: fitzgeraldsteele on: February 5, 2010
Taly’s really become interested and aware of different kinds of music, and she has an opinion on what she likes and doesn’t like. It has fun to explore different genres with her.
In a sense, we have become her personal Pandora…she tells us what she likes, and we try to give her more like that.
I’d say it started with her pre-school, which introduced her to Peter and the Wolf. She also took a liking to Habañera from Carmen (as seen in Pixar’s Up)
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Those two got us talking about instruments in the orchestra, and we learned she likes the sound of double reed instruments, particularly bassoon. Ok, so then we got her Fantasia to listen to Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
She’s also likes songs that “rock out” or “are pretty funky.” This list includes:
Black Eyed Peas – just about anything that her parents will let her listen to, or can find clean versions of (harder than you think)
Nikka Costa – Funkier Than A Mosquito’s Tweeter
Nirvana – Come As You Are
Janis Joplin – Me and (Taly) McGee
DeeLite – Groove is in the Heart
Led Zeppelin – Pretty much any of their fast songs
Destiny’s Child – Independent Woman (we first played this when she went potty on the toilet by herself)
Posted by: fitzgeraldsteele on: January 16, 2010
Daddy starts a dance party, puts on Good Times by Chic.
Daughter: Ooh…That’s the JAM!
Daddy: Wow…that’s really good, Taly! You’re right…this IS the jam!
Posted by: fitzgeraldsteele on: January 15, 2010
(this will add $10 to your monthly cell phone bill)
In 2005, Sara and I volunteered at a Red Cross shelter in Mississippi that housed refugees from Hurricane Katrina. We helped build a mobile home park for temporary housing, fed and talked with people staying at the shelter, and just generally tried to be useful. I came out of that experience with two things:
The earthquake in Haiti this week is another terrible and tragic natural disaster, killing thousands of men, women, children. The problems are exacerbated because of the extreme poverty in Haiti, and that huge portions of infrastructure (buildings, hospitals, roads) that were already in poor condition are worse or have been destroyed.
I encourage you to contribute to the immediate and long term effort to help the people in Haiti. The Red Cross is accepting donations through various channels:
(this will add $10 to your monthly cell phone bill)
The Red Cross uses over most-if-not-all of your donation toward the relief effort, and my experience is that they use it well. There are, of course, other worthy organizations that are on the front lines of the immediate rescue mission and the long term recovery mission:
Posted by: fitzgeraldsteele on: December 29, 2009
Daughter: Water and Soter rhyme!
Daddy: Are you working on rhyming words?
Daughter: Yes!
Daddy: Ok. Finds piece of paper. Can you think of any words that rhyme with ‘Floor?’ Writes ‘Floor’ on paper in big block letters.
Daughter: Whore!
Daddy: Pause…remembers that we’re working on a rhyming lesson not a vocab lesson. That’s right. Any others?
Daughter: Door!
Daddy: That’s right! Writes ‘Door’.
Posted by: fitzgeraldsteele on: October 26, 2009
Daddy (singing daughter’s current favorite song): I got a feelin’….that tonight’s gonna be a good night…that tonight’s…
Daughter: Be quiet! I’m trying to go poopie…
Daddy: Oh, ok.
Waits in silence…
Daughter: Poopie comes out of the big hole, and potty comes out of the little hole…
Daddy: Yeah, that’s right!
Daughter: I really, really, really wish I had long bits…then I could go potty standing up…
Daddy: Yeah, that’s pretty cool…
Posted by: fitzgeraldsteele on: October 5, 2009
We’re huge fans of www.alice.com. Yes, they have great prices on tons of daily household goods, and always free shipping. More importantly, the box provides our toddler with hours of entertainment. We play with it, climb in it, wear it as a hat. When we get bored with that, we tear it down and color and paint on it. When we’re bored with THAT, we recycle the box and a new one comes.
Alice Panda Photo Set (8 pictures).
Posted by: fitzgeraldsteele on: September 7, 2009
T came down with a bit of a fever after the football game this weekend. We’ve spent most of the time at home, watching Disney musicals: Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty, Aladdin.
It turns out, Disney musical music lends itself to playing the “Deez Nutz” game.
Discuss.
Posted by: fitzgeraldsteele on: August 13, 2009
Sara and I watch the Daily Show on Hulu. Tuesday’s guest was Austan Goolsbee, chief economist of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.
Goolsbee made one point that I thought was really interesting, and clearly shows my misunderstanding of macro- vs. microeconomics. Gooslbee said that earlier this year we were on the verge of “Another Great Depression” and that we NEEDED the Stimulus Package — “when you’re looking in the face of the next Great Depression, that’s NOT the time to tighten the belt.”
One the one hand, I sort of get it. Left to its own devices, the housing crisis, credit crunch and other economic factors were leading us to a huge Great Depression like problem, so we had to do something to change courses. On the other hand, I’m not sure I understand how simply spending tons more money really fixes the problem.
Like John Stewart, I can only compare it to my own finances. If our family was massively in debt, facing creditors, etc. I couldn’t simply say, “well I’m going to ratchet up my spending to get out of this hole.” No way, the banks and other creditors would come after me and say “you’d better pay us before you go on your spending spree.” The only difference might be if I was making some strategic investment, like going to school to drastically increase my earning potential. Still, that would require me making an arrangement with the creditors…something like “Ok, I’m going to get a new degree, and I’ll be making an extra 20K/year. So let me do that, and you’ll start to see some of what I owe you in like 2.5 years.” Hmm…still dubious I’d be able to pull that off.
I think the Obama Administration would argue that the Stimulus/Recovery Act is a means to 1) inject money into the markets in the short term to stimulate economic activity, but more importantly 2) stimulate activity in long-term, strategic investments (energy, environment) so that we can remove the problems that caused the economic downturn in the first place.
One might argue that the Health Care reform is another long-term, strategic investment in a healthy American workforce that will improve future productivity. I’m not sure even I buy that, especially when the Congressional Budget Office says it is not cost effective to invest in widespread preventative care and wellness services.
So, again from my limited economic knowledge and experience, the best we as a country can do is say to our creditors, “we’re working on it, we’re making some changes and we’ll have your money.” And just hope and pray that they don’t force us to liquidate stuff in order to pay them back. Not great. The only saving grace is that in today’s global, networked economy, our creditors want us to buy their stuff, so they have a vested interest in seeing us succeed.
Discuss
Posted by: fitzgeraldsteele on: May 28, 2009
Today I got a courtesy call from our brokerage company, who has assigned a new financial advisor to my account. He asked me about our family’s financial strategies, and if we had anything we’d like him to look into. I said yes…I currently have some money in a mutual fund that I would be interested in moving to an index fund. But he balked at that, saying that he is compensated for getting me into front-end loaded mutual funds, and that he is not compensated for getting me into no-load funds (like index funds), so he didn’t want to spend time doing that for me.
So basically, he doesn’t want to advise me to do things that don’t make him more money. I questioned him on that. I said I’ve got financial goals for my family, and you have goals as an adviser that’s paid whenever I make trades, and those two goals don’t always match up. So when do I call you? His answer was again, call me when you want me to do something that makes me money.
His advice doesn’t seem very helpful to me. One good thing that came up was the fact that our family last did a detailed long-term financial plan in 2002 (so long ago, this blog doesn’t even go back that far!). That was a newly married Jerry and Sara, living in Santa Fe, with no kids and living off a corporate expense account. I hardly remember those people. So it’s probably time to revise the financial plan. The advisor said he’d be happy to help us with that…for $400.
This was a pretty disappointing call from this company. When we first started with them in 2002, we really like our advisor. She listened to us, and helped us to achieve our goals. About a year ago, we received a neat little workbook from them that again helped us define our goals and ways to achieve them. Now this guy comes along, and now what I hear is, “your goals are less important to me than my commission.”
Well guess what, you’re brokerage is about to lose our business completely. So what’s THAT going to do to your commission?
Posted by: fitzgeraldsteele on: March 5, 2009
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