There are so many things I love about you, such as your quiet determination, your gentleness, your wackiness, your great sense of humor, your adaptability, how well you did scholastically this year at school even though it was your first year at a ‘real’ high school after all those years of home schooling and even though you skipped half of grade 7 to get in. I also admire your creativity, not just with writing, your empathy and kindness.  I am also thrilled that we share a common fondness for fantasy and that you are now old enough that I can share some of my all-time ‘favorites’ in the fantasy realm with you.

I hope you have a wonderful day, full of fun and friends (and presents, heh!)

The great thing about IBM is that you can extend the warranty, even after the fact. I can extend the warranty for $275 or I can buy a new motherboard for around $500.   Yes, warranty extension sounds the better deal to me too.

In the interim of deciding what to do I ended up claiming one of the kids’ computers–hey, I had to keep working! And it has been great working on a desktop rather than a laptop.  So, we’re tossing ideas back and forth. We could probably get a desktop for the same price we’d pay for a laptop repair (well, close).  We are not rolling in money right now.  Peter has a new company going without a lot of real sales coming in yet and I’m still getting my fledgling business off the ground. So we’re just sitting on things for the time being.

On the positive side, this situation has forced me to recover all of my passwords (that were ‘automatically’ stored on my laptop, shame on me) and document them. I have learned the value of backups, even if you don’t have anything that important that you’re working on.  I have also got rid of a ton of stuff I never referred to anymore and am currently only keeping on my hard disk what I am actually working on.

Another positive side to things: Remember I said up there somewhere that I have commandeered the kids’ computer (there is still one in the living room that they have to…gosh…share…) Well I was actually so impressed at how well they took things. We have not had a lot of money to spare lately, but they are taking it so well. At first there were tons of complaints and gripes but now they are very resolute about things.  Before they would ask, “Does this mean we’re poor?”  or they’d say about most things they wanted, “But I guess we can’t afford that.”

There has been an almost imperceptible shift in the way they look at things recently though. I am happy about that. They still have all they need, just maybe not all they WANT, lol. But it has been good for all of us. Trimming down, tightening the belt, doing without the non essentials, sharing computers, gluing shoes.  Claire could not afford to get very much for Chris for her birthday, so she wrote out a whole stack of “I will do this for you…” vouchers. The funniest voucher was the “I will do your dish job for you”.  Claire is not an avid fan of dishes at the best of times, so the thought of taking on an extra job…well.  She was talking to herself back and forth, “She’ll probably save this one up for a day when there’s a real mess in the kitchen, or there’s tons of dishes to do…”

But, you know what, she wrote out that voucher.  I was so proud of her. She stretched. She wrote that knowing that it was going to cost her something, and she did it anyway.  Hey, see.  Having to be careful with your money can develop character

Today I teach at a big Elementary school in Taipei City. Claire, assistant teacher, will accompany me. It is a 1.5 hour class, with a mixed group of kids, a big class, and I hate having to perform and keep everyone inspired and learning English.  Thus, Thursdays have become my least favorite day of the week.

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Currently I am working on a new I.M. Challenge–setting up ten websites in one month, complete with five posts, supporting articles and linking.  It’s fun.  I am lagging quite a bit this week though, as I haven’t really done as much as I had hoped. Today all I managed to do was to get a few link exchanges going (I give links to people in exchange for links from them) and write about three blog posts and one article.  It was only the morning, but I can really do a bit better than that.

I am learning not to set financial goals, such as “I will make such and such an amount of money this month”, but to rather set accomplishment goals, “I will write this many articles per day, or a total of this many per month.” Money is transient, you have good days and not so good days (no $/hour pay with this!) thus if you set your goals on money and for some reason you don’t make that much, you can end up getting quite depressed, especially if it happens a few days in a row.  You do not have control over how much money comes in on a daily basis, you do have control over the amount of work and writing you do each day. Set your goals on something you have control over, that way it avoids the emotional roller-coaster that success or failure tends to set you on. It is dangerous if you really have no control over it. If you have control, on the other hand, you know you only have yourself (or outside circumstances) to blame, and it is much more rational and understandable.