I am Serenity and Sophia's daddy.
Two impressions:
1) It’s not easy to get the coal, both underground (long wall), and surface (excavator, loader, truck). The geological condition (thinner seam) is making the job more difficult. One scene remains in my mind is miners eating lunch in the tunnel, while I was eating lunch in the office.
2) Commercial air travel is changed. No more spare capacity, and if affected by weather, the delay and cancellation will make travel less pleasant. We (travelers) are commodity anyway.
This evening I was talking to my daughter: mommy and daddy will get older, will you help/support (in Chinese, it’s Yang, same words as raise kids in English) mommy and daddy. Because that word “yang” has same sound as “yang” for “itchy”, she started tickle me. But on a more serious note, she did say she will “wei” (feed) us π
I was involved into a car accident in the past weekend. We are all fine, so as the other party. The main thing is both cars got some damage. It’s funny when I drove the broken car on the road, I got quite a few “look back” from other drivers. And yesterday, at McDonald parking lot, the lady who looks after the parking lot, said “what happened to your car”. Not to mention, our daughter Serenity volunteered to repair the car.
Last but not least, my wife insisted I declare “Minjie is the one who got involved in the accident” π
Fun aside, we are truly blessed we were not hurt.
Have not done this for a while. I have changed job again, and in the new year started a developer position very close to home, doing mobile (iOS, iPhone, iPad) development. I love what I am doing now, because I got opportunity to create an app from back end (database, web service) to front end (iOS UI, local database). At the same time, I have set up the source code control system (SVN), and web server (MS IIS).
My wife started as purchase assistant job at a local manufacturing company, the main task is communicate with Chinese suppliers, involves both Chinese language and mechanical engineering. As I was ME major, I got opportunity to talk to my wife about some of her tasks. Back to ME.
Baby is still a very important part of our life. She grew quite a bit, in terms of language (both Chinese and English), and other skills. We think the Hope Montessori Toddler program (Creve Coeur) helped quite a bit. It helped her be more confident as a person.
In my spare time, I still pay attention to the stock market, US politics, and last but not least, volunteer (serve) in Church. I have a change of heart on politics: in the past I think the government should take care of at least two things: health care and education. Now I think the family and individual should take more responsibility. Also I felt some of the welfare program is not necessarily good for the recipients in the long term. As I read from the news one welfare recipient (woman) is alleged helping her husband kill another person (lady) in Maine. On the tax, it seems local tax is always rising as time goes, and the federal deficit cannot sustain if we don’t raise the overall rate for all the tax payers. The buffett rule (have the rich pay a little more) is just a cup of water on the fire.
Last but not least, we bought a new car (Camry, our first), I like the blue booth audio very much, besides its signature smoothness.
More later…
Last week (Friday), when at friends’ house, and the hostess offered snack, she asked “θΏζ―δ»δΉεοΌ(what is this)”?
Today, after we put her to crib, when my wife and I both read iPhone on bed (her crib is next to our bed), she said “ε¨ηδ»δΉεοΌ(what are you reading)?”…Later, she also said “what are you doing?”
Saw it at dealsea. This is a good deal, if one does not plan to travel Southwest using the points soon.
They offer wide variety of giftcards (not limited to Amazon). I got some Wal-mart gift cards instead, per my wife’s suggestion π
(image credit: onlinegiftcardsblog.com)
(Update 10-01-2011) We went to Youyou’s school this morning for “Parents work day”, basically they have some small playground improvement projects (painting, making a new climber), and in the lunch time, we have a BBQ and potluck. The ethnic diversity of the students/parents background surprised me a bit, reminded of Rolla (a lot of Indian and Chinese faculties and graduate students). It took some efforts to pull together such an event, thanks to David and his staffs π
(Original) Youyou is a 18 month and 18 days old. She started the program on Aug 29, and 4 weeks has passed. She has transformed from “crying when mom left her in the school” to today “she no longer cries when mom drop her”.
She can say quite a few Chinese words and some sentences. She has good memory probably due to genetic reason (we are both good at memorizing things). She also can feed herself a bit, and be much more proactive when playing with us. For instance, she came to grab me for dinner when I was on phone last Sunday evening (mom did not ask her). Not to mention grabbing my glasses (she is very fast). When I go to work, she will usually say “Mao Zi” which means “wear a cap”, and say “bye bye” (which she learned a while ago).
I attended a class offered by David (the head of Hope Toddler program) this morning, Dave is quite enthusiastic and I think the No. 1 thing for me is learn, because kid is learning from parents, all the time.
I felt it’s easier to make money from those offers from writing iPhone, iPad and iOS apps. At least this is true for me so far. Another plus side people may not pay attention is the “no tax” benefit of the bonus miles/points. Also keep in mind if one needs to apply for home loan (buying new home, or refinance), he/she should be careful not applying too many credit cards in the near term to hurt his/her credit score (and potentially pay higher rate for home loan). With that in mind, I would describe some of the cards I applied this year.
Airline cards
United Mileage Plus Visa Signature Chase: earlier this year I applied this via my Mileage acct, received the 50,000 bonus miles. UA is doing 30,000 miles with $50 coupon now. Check united.com web site.
Continental OnePass MasterCard Chase: applied this after UA card. 50,000 miles. They are offering 30,000 miles as of now. One needs to sign up OnePass from Continental site first. Continental has merged with United, and the milage program will be merged at the end of 2011.
British Airways Visa Signature Chase: applied this in May. Got 50,000 miles with remaining 50,000 miles pending (needs to spend $2,500 in first 3 months).
Hotel cards
Marriott Visa Signature via Chase: 50,000 points worth about 5 nights at Courtyard. And one free night at category 4 or above. The link is here.
Intercontinental Hotel Group Priority Club: 60,000 points, worth about 4 nights at Holiday Inns. New account only. Link is there.
Currently I am thinking about two cards, the Amex HHonors (62,500 points for Hilton family hotels, as described by Loyal Traveller) and Chase Sapphire reward card.
Note compared to writing apps, one can not expect make this as a business, rather than a nice way (almost effortless) to complement income. I have used my bonus AA miles, and Marriott hotel points for my recent travel to Shanghai. Not to mention the convenience brought by my Amex SPG (Starwood Preferred Guest) when travel in the US.
(Update 07-09-11) I saw this Southwest airline reward card deal from myMoneyBlog. I jumped.
I got those questions from a reader:
Why there is no national 529 plan? Looking at some states plan, it’s pretty much mutual funds like 401k, the investment return is like S&P? Why bother (consider S&P return is so low)?
I am not expert on this, I think why each state has a plan is pretty much why each employer (or most employers) has a 401k plan. The main purpose for such as plan is this: 1) Save some money for future liability (retirement or college tuition); 2) Hopefully the money can grow with the power of compound interest (snow ball effect); The tax deferral (in the case of 401k) or tax deduction (most 529 plans) are just ice on the cake.
As to why there is no national plan and federal tax deduction, I think this partially explained by college savings is still very small compared to retirement savings. Another indicator is the sales (or willingness for people to pay) my iPhone retirement savings/college savings app. Basically I gave away college savings calculator there because very few people are willing to pay 99 cents.
A side note: most people think spx (S&P index) is just boring, and some people think their retirement savings investments can grow 20% year over year. I think those people are too optimistic about their future. WSJ has an excellent article “The other midlife crisis” which explains why people expectations on income growth and retirement investment return are unrealistic.
Latest and the greatest π
1) Fixed “data not being saved” bug in myNestEgg and collegeFund
2) Also, in myNestEgg v 1.5, we added “Auto Pilot” feature, similar to what has been introduced in collegeFund 1.5. The main difference is in myNestEgg I set income ratio to 70%.
Why 70% for income ratio in retirement
I briefly mentioned it on my personal blog, 70% is a magic number because I assume social security and other savings made up the rest (30%) of the retirement income.
