Before you go into business with someone…take them to lunch and call them a bad parent!

Why do such a terrible thing? 

My wife (many others) is going to hate the title to this blog post and its content.  Why I am writing about it though?  Cause of this quote I came across.  “You can say what you think, or you can have people like you.”  So if you hate this just move on.  In this defiant light I love this quote too.  “What other people think of me is none of my business.”

Often when people go into business with someone they’re both putting their whole heart and soul into it.  They’re putting TONS of time into it.  They’re putting their family on hold.  They’re pouring tons of money into it.  I know several people who went into business with someone to only end up getting screwed out tons of money, sanity, and respect.  This is one approach to circumvent all that.  How do I know?  I shall tell you.

My brother is interested in 3d printing.  I happen to have a co-worker who sold and was deeply involved in 3d printing for years.  I thought it’d be cool to go to lunch all together to discuss it.  We discussed quite a few things amongst which was 3d printing.  What was interesting/revealing about this lunch was my coworker.  How do I even begin?

As soon as we started talking in line while waiting to order our food my coworker went off.  First it was claiming that his buddy had more production/manufacturing capabilities than my brother’s buddy who was/is helping my brother manufacture an idea of his.  Problem with this is that my coworker had NO idea how much capacity/ability my brother’s guy had in the first place and yet he claimed it no matter what.  Wtf?  Do you want to go into business with someone who thinks they have the best contacts when indeed they may not?  No.  Alright…further on down the line we went to get food.

Eventually we sat down and continued the conversation.  My brother is a fan of making bets, as am I.  He is also a fan of James Altucher.  Recently James did a blog post on answers to 100 questions readers posed to him.  One was whether or not to get a patent and another was whether or not to get an NDA, both of which my coworker “shoulded” on my brother to get.  Now I don’t know if these things were going through my brother’s head as we were discussing things during lunch, but they were going through my mind.  The answer James gave to both was an emphatic NO!  Well why not?  Especially if you have an amazing idea?  “Someone might steal it!” (scarcity mentality) 

Cause, as a whole…we’re friggin’ lazy.  Like Mike Rowe says on Dirty Jobs, “People shun opportunities because when they show up it’s dressed in coveralls and looks like work.”  I love that.  What was interesting is that my brother then asked my coworker what his best idea was.  It took him a second to drum up a couple.  Then when he spoke he legitimately had some good ideas.  What was interesting is that while these ideas are legit he’s not even close to beginning to work on them though they seemed pretty legit in my opinion.  Now for the next interesting part.  Notice how I said I thought the ideas were legit?  Notice how I have no real desire to implement and pursue his ideas?  Well if you didn’t now you do.  And noooow you see why James says what he says.  Forget this “traditionally” smart entrepreneurship crap and just go go go! 

People are very reluctant to let go of old paradigms and are able to embrace new ways of thinking and again I blame this on the scarcity mentality.  This is an especially interesting mentality to be found amongst the LDS community as we often hear in church how the earth was prepared to have enough for everyone/thing and to spare.  I just came across that thought as I writing this.  Sad.

In a lull in the conversation I told my brother that I sold my tv last night.  My coworker found this really interesting/surprising.  He revealed that he’s got over 800 movies on his external hard drive that he loves to just plug into his tv to watch whenever he needs to relax.  That is the “thing” his family “does together”.  Trust me watching a movie is not an interactive experience one has with another human being.  He also revealed that they’ve got several laptops, Netflix, hulu, internet, all the kids have smart phones, and two xbox 360’s.  I don’t even remember if he said they have ipods/pads, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they did.  He said that when the internet goes down that, and I quote, his kids “freak”.  I told him this was a problem and asked him if he thought that that was normal.  His response was mumbled and unintelligible. 

We then talked a little more about schooling and how I was planning on having my kids home schooled.  He couldn’t believe that either and started saying that kids are missing something when they don’t get to go to school.  Yes he would be right.  They’d be missing out on all that great indoctrination.  Not to mention all that bullying that we’ve been hearing about that has been so good for those kids killing other kids and committing suicide on bridges in front of their “friends”.  He said that he thought that getting pushed around/bullied was a good thing and helped them.  I wholeheartedly disagree. 

If someone berates me and is rude to me when I have the ability to stop or change it do I continually go back and ask for more?  Heck no.  That would be ridiculous.  In a de-briefing phone call with my brother after the lunch he correctly stated that that was indeed not necessary and that kids will get plenty of that w/o having to deal with it in school.  He also wasn’t probably too far off with his statement that it was a defense mechanism of sorts since he was probably picked on in school and that nobody was there for him and to protect him and so he was saying what he was to validate his crappy experience in school.  Sad diagnosis, but I think it isn’t too far off of one.

What I got out of this exchange is that my coworker wouldn’t have even remotely listened to my reasons for home schooling, which are many, even if I presented them in a non-bias factual manner because his experience was “good” and couldn’t possibly be improved upon.  Why is this a problem to have in a business partner?  Say I want to present my partner with something new and innovative that will cut costs and boost revenue.  Problems though might be that he started the business, been there longer, is the president, etc and could give a rat’s behind as to what I’m saying because what is working currently is enough to survive and is “good”.  Consideration for something better though wasn’t considered and that is a problem when you’re trying to win and innovate in business.

On the way out of the restaurant I confirmed that we don’t have internet at our home and we don’t have smart phones.  He could not believe this.  Later on down the road he tried to mini-shame me by saying, in response to my saying that I’ve cut off violent and sex movies, “Are you a monk or something?”  My brother pointed that out to me.  Why is that a problem in business and a business partner?  In this case my reasons for getting rid of my tv and smart phone and what not is for improvement and progress.  If in business I tried, with my business partner, to try and cut waste and focus on more productive activities and they were shaming me the business would flounder quickly and slow to a crawl.

We talked about his kid’s electronics usage.  He said that we don’t have kids and couldn’t possibly understand what it is like.  We don’t understand that you just need to shut them in their rooms or in the basement so that mom and I can have some time to ourselves.  Well…actually I do.  One, I was kid.  Two I grew up with two parents, thankfully.  The amount of time his kids were/are putting into electronics though boggled my mind and he deflected responsibility for it (and his 800 movies previously mentioned) as a way to escape.  That is when I called him out...“You can say what you think, or you can have people like you.” 

I straight up told him that he was a bad dad and needed to fix it.  I then quoted the above quote.  He deflected his responsibility and doesn’t want to own up to it, and unfortunately it sounds like, to a degree, that his wife is the same way.  This is a problem in a business partner because if you can’t rely on them to handle their portion of the business, if their contribution is vital enough, you may well be out of business sooner than you think.  If they blame their lack of performance on the weather, the internet being down, the game was on, or any other million things that could go wrong how are you ever going to survive and thrive?  You’re not.

The last thing we talked about was how he’d come across questionable material on his kid’s phones.  He then said he had taken things away.  I laughed and said that that totally futile as even kid addicts can get things they want with or without the monitoring of their parents.  He asked us both, rhetorically, mind you what one was to do then if you can’t always monitor them and control them?  We almost unanimously responded saying that you must teach them correct principles and let them govern themselves.  In a business partnership having a controlling, micromanaging partner will very quickly erode the trust and growth of the parties involved and the business will flounder.  You do not want this.

You do not want any of this.  So what I want you to do before you go into business with someone is to go to lunch.  Then while you’re there say something provocative, even if you really don’t mean it or believe it, to see what kind of response you’ll get out of the person and then compare it to my notes here and see if you’ll still be ok going into a partnership with this person.

Website master tinkerer of all!!!

So I'm pretty excited.  I signed up for teamtreehouse.com as you'll know from this post.  During lunch today I worked on the current project I have and wanted to get the pictures that I had referenced in my text editor that haven’t been showing up to show up in my website I’m building.  I thought that it would’ve been just a simple issue of fixing where the text was referencing back to as far as the tree to get to it. 

That may not make sense, but either way I added what I thought would be the tree/branch path to get to my images to my text editor file, hit save, updated in my browser, and…angels sang!

  It worked.  I was/am very happy about this cause I thought it might have been something to do with the text editor or the browser I was using, but twas not the case.

Colemak Finale!

A few weeks back I was talking to my brother on the phone and I was doing a practice session on Type Fu and while talking to him in the background I was doing a few lines of practice and I hit 60 wpm at 100% accuracy.  So this thing is all locked up.  I hopped on Type Fu again and I’m hovering right around the 60 wpm mark.  Done and done. 

Interesting side tid bit.  I type for crap on the regular format.  I’d have to practice to get that back if I ever wanted to go back.  Otherwise I have to type by looking at the keys.  That is so weird cause just a few months back I could type that way w/o looking at 60 wpm.  Interesting how our brains work.

Back to School (coding)

I’m trying to move on from my credit analyst career and am wanting to move into the technology arena as a developer.  I’d been doing codeacademy and had been learning quite a bit.  I decided I wanted to give treehouse a try for while it is a paid thing I’m hoping it could give me a little more direction and even allow me to start building more pertinent projects that can help me build my portfolio of work so that people looking at my skills can have something more relevant to judge my skills off of.  I shall keep you updated on my progress.

I’m scared. There I said it.

Now that that is over I’ll explain myself a little more. 

Today at work we had our weekly meeting for how we did the previous week.  We killed it.  Ok great.

One of our top guys booked 54k in margin (revenue, for the uninitiated to EL, is what we really go off of here and what commissions are based off of).  This guy is a top dawg and his payout is just about 10% of margin he books.  So he made 5.4k on top of his already $500-$1000 paycheck that he has weekly as his base salary depending on his exemptions/promotions etc.  That is just crazy to me.  I mean I know about half of that will go to taxes and some will go to his team of helpers, but man alive that is a lot of money to me.  Turns out that is chump change.

I knew/know we have some big agents that work for EL, but I didn’t really quite grasp how big until this meeting.  As I was sitting there listening to the report a buddy of mine started talking to me about how 54k is small change to how much our top 2 agents make.  One splits his margin with us of him getting 80% and us 20%.  Basically we get our 20% because we offer our name as a front to customers and the agent can have access to slightly better rates that they may not get.  Our top agent does approximately 70k in margin a week and only has 12 people in their office.  That means even if paying each person 1k a week leaves that guy making at least 40k himself, every week.  Well over a million per year.  Apparently he’s got a full sized basketball court at the office…lol.

The next guy in line has a 70/30 split, generates 25k in margin each week, and only has one other guy in their office so he’s closer to pulling in 20k a week in paychecks himself.  That is just crazy to me.

I want a 70k in margin week.  I want it real bad.

I get scared though of trying for it for several reasons.  I’m scared of failing.  I’m kinda scared of succeeding, but I don’t know why.  Maybe cause I’d feel bad to succeed while others struggle.  I’m scared to try and fail cause if I failed then that would “prove” an aptitude test I took a while back that it was wrong and I don’t want it to be wrong.  My aptitude test said I’d be good at small specialty businesses, which after working in corporate America for several years now, would be a welcome change. 

I’m also partly afraid of making this come to fruition:

"In our dreams, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply…The task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are. So we will organize our children and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops and on the farm." - General Education Board, Occasional Papers, No. 1 (General Education Board, New York, 1913) p. 6. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Education_Board

What I mean by fruition is that I’m afraid that my failing in one or any kind of business would prove that these douches have won the battle with me specifically in that I’m not a “man of…” and I really really really dislike these guys and don’t want them to win, but part of the battle is already won with them in that they’ve got me so woosed up in my head that I don’t even want to try things.  How jacked up is that?

So what is the problem with all my previous thinking?  Well there’s probably more than one.  A big one, however, is the mentality of all or nothing.  Either or.  That isn’t how life is though.  If I don’t get my tank filled with gas before work doesn’t mean I can’t get some after (at least not yet lol).  If I don’t pay my credit card bill today doesn’t mean I can’t pay it later.  I’m not accepting the fact that there is not only either or, but “this AND that”. 

I may fail many times at many different things, but doesn’t mean that is the only thing I can try and do.  As it pertains to business, my brother stated that while 9 out of 10 businesses fail, that just means I need to start 10 businesses to get one to work.

I’ve been wanting to build an app building business and learn more coding and had approached it as either or.  I hadn’t been approaching it as “and”.  I also hadn’t been approaching it as small baby steps, which I need to do for those things.  My first baby step for coding from yesterday is that I signed up for treehouse.  The next baby step I think I need to do on my business is a plan and goals.  Then maybe some powerpoint demonstrations of what kind of apps I could build for people.

Nice cheap clothes

I love nice, cheap clothes that look good and are very comfortable.  This last weekend I went to our local thrift shop just for fun, and to see if they had a good food processor…they didn’t, and as I was leaving I figured I’d check to see if they had any good dress shirts for me, which they did.  I picked two.  Both were $5.  One was a Banana Republic shirt, which when bought new would’ve been about $60-100 new.  Love that.  

Weight Lifting Update

Two weekends ago I worked for my father-in-law for a few hours on a Saturday morning.  The work wasn't too bad until the end when I was hunched over for quite a bit of time scrapping a wood deck.  The problem with that is that a few months back I was lifting and I didn't hear a “pop/crack” per se, but I knew my muscles had just experienced an issue.  For a couple weeks after that my back was huuuurtiiing.  It had since recovered, but then was acting up again after helping him out scraping away.  So I took one lifting session off last week and just lifted once with yet again more progress so that is nice.  Here is my chart of progress. Two Fridays ago the wife and I met up with some friends at the park.  One of Ashlee’s friends has competed in bodybuilding tournaments and what not and so I asked her for any tips or perhaps some resources she could point me too, which she did.  She mentioned that bodybuilding.com is a good resource.  She then asked about my routine and what I was doing and what I wanted to accomplish.  I said my goal is to aim for 250 on squat and then 225 on bench.  

She then mentioned that the body doesn't really pick and choose how it wants to look and so essentially the best thing to do is to do a complete body workout.  She stated that there are four main areas to work on that one could do in four separate days.  She then offered to even write it up for me for what I should do and on what days. This link is to download the workout she crafted for me.


  Feel free to use it and let me know how it worked for you.

My plan is to stay the course on what I’m doing now to get to my goals and then once I've reached them I’ll start working out this workout she gave me.  This will be several months I think before this happens cause my bench seems to be taking longer than my squat to go up in weight, which is fine cause I’m total weak sauce and haven’t consistently lifted weights like this since middle/high school.  Also by then my kid will be here and me and the wife are contemplating getting passes to the local rec center so she can exercise and walk around the indoor track if she wanted to during the dead of winter.  It doesn't hurt that this place has a huge pools and a steam room, basketball courts, and racquetball courts, etc so those passes would probably get a bit of use throughout the year beyond just my workouts, but we’ll see what happens.

My work is also building out some new rooms and one of them is supposedly going to have a gym, but it may just be some ellipticals and a few free weights so we’ll see if that is any good.  If it is a good thing though that’d be awesome to save some money and workout before/after work of even potentially during my lunch hour, which would help me avoid traffic jams.

What happened this weekend when we turned off the tv? Homemade strawberry jam tastiness with just three ingredients!!! I shit you not!

This weekend there were a few moments when we both could’ve easily just turned on the tv and plopped down for the evening for a few hours on Saturday afternoon/evening and been perfectly content to watch a RSL game or perhaps one of my favorite shows, Psyche.  Instead I pushed through the lull of the afternoon and thought of other things I could do to with my time.  One of those things was jam.

And boy am I psyched (pun) out of my mind that I did jam! 

Over the past several weeks/month or so I’ve gone back to eating healthy with just a few cheat days.  I cheat currently with cheese, dairy, processed foods, sugar on holidays, birthdays, and one free day a month.  This way I don’t want to blow my brains out when there is a legit celebratory event going on.  I peaked out on my weight gain at 176lbs right after the binge-eating spree I had for the two-year anniversary on July 2^nd.  Since then and since going back to eating healthy this morning I clocked in at 171 and touched a low of 170.5lbs.  Our scale reads in half-pound increments. 

What has sucked about my general healthy eating business is that I miss out on sweet treats, which I’m kinda obsessed with as most who know me can attest.  One of those things has been jam in general, but I’ve always been a strawberry jam kinda guy.  Unfortunately jams we’ve bought with no sugar in them at the store or the farmers market taste like crap or have crazy, unsafe ingredients in them.  The ingredients thing is a big one for me.  Unless I know the ingredient or what exactly it is for and that it is safe I don’t eat it…except when I cheat.  I quickly looked up the ingredients for a couple sugar free jams and got the following lists:

Water**, Strawberries+, Polydextrose**, Maltodextrin**, Contains Less Than 2% Of Fruit Pectin, Citric Acid, Locust Bean Gum**, Natural Flavor**, Potassium Sorbate And Sodium Benzoate (Preservatives), Sucralose (Splenda Brnda)(A Nonnutritive Sweetener)**, Calcium Chloride**, Red 40**, Blue 1**. **Ingredients Not In Regular Preserves. +Adds A Trivial Amount Of Sugar. Allergy Warning: May Contain Traces Of Milk, Eggs, Anchovies, Peanuts, Wheat And Soy.

Water**, Strawberries+, Polydextrose**, Maltodextrin**, Fruit Pectin, Locust Bean Gum**, Natural Flavor**, Citric Acid, Potassium Sorbate (Preservative), Sucralose (Non-Nutritive Sweetener)**, Calcium Chloride**, Red 40**. **Ingredients Not In Regular Jam. +Adds A Trivial Amount Of Sugar.

Apparently a “trivial amount of sugar” is still sugar free on this last list.  What the?!  That seems eff’d up to me, especially with all the diabetics out there.  Hopefully they’re reading the ingredients…sheez.

I googled homemade strawberry jam and found this recipe. 

http://www.foodstoragemoms.com/try-it-tuesday-how-to-make-strawberry-jam-a-healthier-way-with-honey/

So we made it this weekend.  Why?  Cause I can still eat alllll the sweet honey I want!  Honey is really good for you in case you're wondering.

Six cups by the way is six pounds as far as it pertains to which packages and how many you should buy of strawberries were you to make this recipe.

So how did it turn out/look?  It looked exactly like the link (I would’ve included our own pics except I didn’t think to take any…duh). 

Our blender worked just fine for pureeing the strawberries so no you don’t need to go out and buy some fancy food processor just to make this recipe.

I bought 12lbs of strawberries, or 6 2lb packages, as I wasn’t sure before how much 6 cups of pureed strawberries would be needed weight wise.  Because of this we essentially doubled the recipe, which made 8 pints* of jam so this recipe would make you 4 pints of jam. 

We cut off the stems, pureed them, mixed the honey in and did the required boiling time, then mixed in the lemon juice and stored overnight.  We bought these jars to store them in. 

http://www.walmart.com/ip/Ball-Wide-Mouth-Jars/16213254

So here is the breakdown of our cost.

1 jar = $1.25 after tax

1 lemon is interestingly enough almost exactly ¼ cup of juice and I think lemons are like $.50 per one.

I think 1 cup of honey is 1 lb and the honey we buy is like $18 for a 5lb pail of it.  So for each pint of jam the cost was $2.70 for the honey. ($18/5 lbs = $3.60 lb. $3.60/lb X 6 lbs = $21.60.  $21.60/8 pints = $2.70 per pint)

The strawberries I bought were on sale for $5 for 6lbs.  So the breakdown to that on a per jar basis was $.62.

So per pint the cost of ingredients would be like $5.08 a pint. 

What is nice about that from our perspective as repeat offenders for remaking jam later is that our cost will go down to just $3.83 per pint.

Considering that the ingredients are very easy to recognize and very very very VERY tasty this was a home run thing for me and the wife.  We’ve got 7 jars on jam in the freezer to handle all our jam needs for the foreseeable future. 

What I think I loved about this experience is 1) spending time with the wife 2) finding a kick-a tasty/safe/super easy recipe to make later with my wife and kids forever more and 3) being able to use this as a real consumable needed skill in the coming collapse.

*1 pint = 16 ounces in case you wanted to price comparison shop…to me price doesn’t compute when it comes to true safety and quality

Bike trailer goodness

The other day I wanted to go to the store and refill our water jug and possibly buy a swing for our upcoming baby.  The difference with this trip however was that I wanted to do it with just my bike trailer that we bought a couple months ago.  It was the first time I hooked it up.

Overall the trip took me an hour, 6:15 pm to 7:14 pm.  That included hooking up the trailer, putting the wheels on, traveling 3 miles round trip, locking and unlocking my bike 4 times and that was because I visited two different stores.  I thought that was pretty good.  And carrying the 40 lbs of water in the trailer wasn't all that heavy either.  I didn't feel like it was really any heavier then just riding around normally.  Just my two cents and encouragement for you to take your bike trailer to do your errands instead of your car.  If you don't have one, get one.  If you don't have a bike, get one.

T-1 Day till TV is gone…

We finished watching the tv show Friends last night and now it is on to selling the tv.  I just gotta take some pics and do a little bit of research to find the right price point and then it’ll be up for sale for hopefully just a short period of time.  I get a little freaked out just thinking about how we’re really about to do this, but when I step back and actually think about it I know that for us currently this is the right thing to do.  I shall keep you posted.

Hypnobabies

We're expecting our first child.

As part of our post indoctrination life, I say "our" cause Ashlee found this one, we've come across things as it pertains to childbirthing.  One of those things that is not mainstream and not really anti-indoctrination is hypnobabies.

  And let me clarify that when I say "really" cause sometimes I feel like indoctrination is not only purposely teaching false/misleading things to people, but also purposely not teaching them things they ought to know about.

The other day I mentioned we were doing this class to my mom and she had a "oh..." kinda moment.  That "oh" is something we all know/think when we think of hypnosis.  It is the thought of people up on a stage crowing like a chicken and taking all their clothes off and doing crazy/funny things that they can't control or that they're doing just to be funny or "you're getting very sleepy".

Contrary to popular belief most of us are hypnotized everyday.  Via wikipedia...

Hypnosis is "a special psychological state with certain physiological attributes, resembling sleep only superficially and marked by a functioning of the individual at a level of awareness other than the ordinary conscious state."

A couple easy examples of this are watching TV and driving.  Yup.  After two minutes of watching TV your brain waves switch from Alpha to Beta waves.  You know hypnosis TV watching when you see...the mouth open and blankly staring unblinking at the TV screen.  Time flies by while you watch.  Voila!  You were hypnotized.

As for driving, some call it highway hypnosis.  Basically its where you're on auto pilot and you get to your destination and you don't remember hardly anything of driving.  This happened to me all the time when I'd drive back on those long drives from Utah to Idaho to go to school.  Bam hypnosis.

Really Hypnobabies, and hypnosis in general, is just getting deeply relaxed.  May sound too simplistic, but its true.  Hypnomoms have faster and easier births.  

The class is great cause they teach you about all these things you had no idea about.  For example at the turn of the 20th century, i.e. circa 1900, almost all babies were born at home and with the assistance of a midwife.  I want to say the percentage was like 97% at home with a midwife to 3% at a hospital.  That percentage now has completely flipped.  

For disclosure we are having our child at a birth center run by midwives and we gladly embrace the blessing to have a hospital right down the street should there be an emergency and we need to transfer.

What I really love about the class is the focus on healthy thinking and addressing the cultural "scariness" of having a baby naturally and not in a hospital.  I'll be honest I felt like every woman was doomed to a pain and torture inconceivable to the human mind while having a baby, when in fact this isn't the case.  I know I know I'm gonna get haters who say...

Its crazy though cause in Hypnobabies they talk about many women having little to NO discomfort at all when having a baby.  Pain isn't even there for them.  Just this last week our instructor was telling us about a lady who was doing hypnobabies at the hospital for her birth.  She was hooked up to the monitor and apparently a TON of activity, i.e. uterine muscles going nuts, was going on and it surprised/shocked the nurse that the mother was completely calm and relaxed.

We did a breathing exercise.  The one we all know.  "Hee hee whoo.  Hee hee whoo."  We did that for 1 minute on our first day.  I about passed out.  It causes you to hyperventilate.  The ideal way to breathe is actually deep relaxing breathes where you actually get enough oxygen to your muscles.

Turns out having a baby on your back with your legs in the air is possibly the worst possible position to give birth.  Not only cause gravity is no help at all, but the birth canal is longer.  Longer birth canal = longer birthing time.  Just a duh moment for me.  I hadn't really thought about it till the class.  Duh...

There are a lot of crazy things about the drugs used to in inducing labor I hadn't known previously.  Some of the makers of the drugs say to NOT use them to induce birth cause they're actually meant for treating ulcers.  A quick google search brought this up for me and corresponds to what we learned in class with proper citing being done on the class material.

In August 2000, the original manufacturer of Cytotec, G.D. Searle & Co. (Searle), sent a letter to over 200,000 OB/GYNs in the country stating the possible side effects of Cytotec when given to pregnant women, such as hyperstimulation of the uterus, uterine rupture, fetal bradycardia, amniotic fluid embolism, death of the mother, and death of the child. Subsequently, ACOG wrote a rebuttal to the FDA regarding Searle's letter, claiming not enough evidence and scientific studies warrant eliminating misoprostol's use to induce labor. Searle, however, found enough evidence in its trials of misoprostol for the treatment of ulcers to issue the letter. Searle also stated that the company did not intend to study or support the use of Cytotec for induction of labor or cervical ripening.  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2684033/

We've learned about not clamping the umbilical cord till it has stopped pulsating because the cord/placenta holds much of the child's blood.  Clamping at the typical less than one minute after birth literally stops the flow of blood into the baby and they have 30-40% LESS blood than they would otherwise have.  http://www.webmd.com/baby/news/20130711/health-highlights-july-11-2013 Crazy that this is even a practice.  Hopefully though this trend gets reversed.

One of the things I liked best is the talk of where pain/discomfort comes from in birth.  They talk to this a lot in class and so I wouldn't do it any justice here.  Basically though it comes down to physical comfort, physical settings, expectations, and fear.  Fear being the biggest factor, which leads to stress, which leads to adrenaline production, and once the adrenaline is there...game over for an easy birthing time.

There are so many crazy things they teach you in the class.  I would highly recommend the class if for no other reason than...the good reasons!  The class empowers the mothers and takes out the fear of childbirth for the mom and dad.  It teaches them positive/TRUE things about birth and their bodies.  They give the birthing mother an affirmation cd.  That thing is legit even for non-mothers lol.  "Babies are born on their birthday, not when a doctor says."  Love that one if for no other reason to stick it the pompousness of a doctor dictating when something should or shouldn't happen when both the baby and mom are happy and healthy.

There is a lot I know I'm missing and so maybe I'll update this post or write another one later on, but ya there ya go.  My little Hypnobabies blurb.  Hope you liked it.

Colemak Speed update

I'm now up to 50 wpm+ with my typing according to my little type fu program.  Pretty cool.

I’ve given up bad movies

A few months ago I read an article by a guy named Gerald Celente. 

 The guy is a forecaster of trends and has been doing it for a long time.  In it he talks about how violent movies are.  His points really struck me and made me think of some other things I’d read and thought and had even written myself and so I decided that I wanted to be the change I wanted to see in the world and stop supporting those movies that really didn’t represent what I believed and wanted to see in the world.

In the same vein of giving up TV, giving up my movies is in part to free up my time and follow people like Ralph Little in my previous post and make some big leaps forward in my life.

One thought I had was whether or not the type of movies (pg 13 even) that are coming out now will still be coming out during the Millenium when Christ is ruling personally on earth and my answer to my own question was no.  I don’t think there will be gratuitous violence, deaths, tortures, sex, swearing, etc.  I don’t participate in those things now and don’t want to support them either and that is a big reason for ditching those types of movies.

What we did with our movie collection is gave away a lot of them to others who wanted them.  I would’ve been fine just throwing em out, but whatevs.

Previously I was renting one, sometimes two or more, redbox movies a week.  In the last several months I think I’ve probably rented 5.

Summer blockbusters and youtube.  I loved them both.  I’d watch a lot of upcoming trailers for all the newest movies.  I’ve cut way back on my youtubing and that has helped with the transition.  Watching tv also sucked when I made my switch to no bad movies cause they were constantly being advertised there.  Now that we don’t have the antennae plugged in and will soon sell the tv outright the draw will be even less here soon, which I’ll be grateful for.  It has sucked hearing about how action packed and cool the new movies looked when they first came out, but now that they’ve been out and the buzz isn’t around I don’t miss the movies and am not looking forward to them coming out on redbox.

What I’d like to do is start replacing movie time with more family/friend time and make more memories that are in person and where we connect and do something memorable.

Books have also replaced a lot of my movie watching.  I finished reading the following books lately/since I’ve kicked my movie habit.

I'm currently reading this one

As info I visit this site for movie reviews to check that it doesn’t have anything that doesn’t agree with me.  http://parentpreviews.com/  You could also try www.imdb.com if you wanted, but I find they have some sketchy stuff on their site and so I try to avoid that one.

Like my previous post on quitting tv I'll try to remember to provide updates on how its going for me and new things I'm doing that I wouldn't otherwise do.

We’re quiting tv land…forever?!?

As part of my post indoctrination life, i.e. time outside of the schooling system and public/American way of thinking in general, I’ve learned about things like government being jacked up like here, internet being a “poor” source for legit information like here, or less is more here.  

One thing I’ve come across as something I’ve toyed with in my head with embracing is getting rid of our tv.  

I wanted to do it only if there were positive reasons and not negative ones.  I didn’t want to do it to show that we were/are whackos, to prove a point, or to make any feel bad or awkward.

There are many reasons I love tv.  I love that it is a very convenient release from thinking about life and owning up to what I really want to do, but not doing it.  I love pro sports and especially playoffs of the NBA and NFL.  If fills my free time when I can’t think of anything better to do with it.  However there have been some things though that I’ve thought about and come across over the last year or so that have made me think that tv maybe isn’t the best idea for me.

I don’t know if any of you know anyone like this, but my dad sleeps six hours every night and has for years and years and years.  Man how nice would that be?  Who would I be were I able to do that?  One way I could do that, at least partially, is by cutting out tv.  I gotta think my dad is many leaps and bounds wealthier in many aspects of his life due to this extra free time whether it is financial knowledge or means, car knowledge (he’s good at fixing cars), spiritual knowledge, business knowledge, design knowledge (he knows photoshop really well), and a whole host of other things I could mention were I to spend more than 5 seconds thinking about it.

Another guy I think about is a guy I don’t even know.  I think I shook his hand once or maybe even just head nodded towards him at church after my brother introduced me to him.  His name is Ralph Little.  Guy hasn’t watched a movie in years.  Not that he doesn’t own a tv cause the truth is he might, but certainly his not having seen a movie in years has certainly aided him in using his free time to engage in one of his many business endeavors instead of consistently engaging in beta wave trancelike hypnosis each week by watching tv all the time.  My brother is constantly telling me how Ralph thought of another multi-million dollar idea that is so simple and stupid its crazy.  That story alone was a big reason why I stopped watching some of the movies that I did.

There have been three main things lately that have turned me onto the idea of giving up the tv forever though.  First up is this guy.

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/05/06/mmm-challenge-cut-your-cash-leaking-umbilical-cord/

He and his family don’t own a tv.  They do however love Netflix and Hulu and the whole host of ways you can watch tv/movies for a fraction of the price/time these days.  They just hook up the laptop to a projector when the need arises.  Often he talks about one great effect of not owning a tv and that is he and his family actually DO things and have hobbies.  I mean think about it.  What would you do if you just had 28 hours a week extra to do what you wanted to with?  You’d be forced to find new hobbies or blow your brains out with boredom from staring at the wall.

Next up is the documentary I watched a few weeks ago called “No Impact Man”.

link to free viewing if you're interested

http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/no_impact_man/

  It chronicles the journey of a man and his family going a year w/o making an impact on the environment and it was pretty entertaining.  Part of the experiment is getting rid of their tv, which for them was scary as the wife fully admits that she is addicted to reality tv.  They said at the end of the movie that at first there was a literal painful withdrawal from not having tv (I’m not looking forward to that), but that once they pushed through that they…went outside.  They made other new hobbies and had new experiences they otherwise wouldn’t have had.  That is what I want.

Last up is a post I read just today from....

  I’m loving the whole blog actually.  Here it is

http://advancedriskology.com/how-to-add-8-years-and-133369-to-your-life/

This post was crazy to me in that if you're paying for tv your blowing so much money.  Then comes the time wasted, which is even more shocking.  The craziest part is that all his number are conservative, i.e. he uses smaller numbers just to make his point.  The average reality is much worse in America.

Read it and…weep like a sad woosy girly man if you dare. 

So we're gonna cut tv, but I'm still gonna watch sports and tv in general should I be over at somebody's house and I won't be a snob or anything.  I even imagine that'll be a bit of fun to splurge in those occasions and enjoy the time wasted if that makes sense.  Maybe I try and do some updates on new things we get into once we're done with tv so you can see what is going on with us.

Some unexpected events becoming enjoyable due to being in shape

If you read this blog you know I work out twice a week or I owe my brother $10.  Since I’ve implemented this bet I haven’t missed except one workout session cause I tweaked my back nicely working out once.  I’m not going to do an update on my progress, though I am making it even with just my last session showing me needing an increase in weight in both bench and squat, but I wanted to do a short post on surprising things that have happened with working out consistently.

First off: a 5k.  My brother invited myself and others to join him on one he signed up to run.  I’ve run a marathon before and knew I probably needed some training runs to make it through w/o stopping.  Due to general laziness and procrastination and packing to sell my first house to make $17,090.10.  I did not do ONE training run.  Not even one WALK.  I did however, jog the whole 5k w/o stopping once due to being winded.  I did stop once to retie my shoelaces.  I credit this to my legs being in good enough shape to handle it.

Fireworks.  We have this amazing spot we go to each 24^th of July to watch fireworks and to get to the spot we have to hike uphill probably about ten minutes at a good 15-20% incline.  I remember last year my calves being goop/wobbly, but this year…nothing.  I think the next day though my calves were a little “sore”.  It wasn’t a painful sore, just a tired sore.

Recovery time.  When I first started I was sore for days after working out.  Now I’m not sore nearly as long.  I worked out Friday night and it is Monday afternoon and I’m not feeling any sort of soreness anywhere, which is fantastic.

There’s my post.  Maybe if I have some more interesting experiences where I’d expect to be sore, but wasn’t I’ll add them here.