Ok, I understand. I know that no one wants to sign up for something without understanding the fine print. So click these links and read the fine print. Then sign up to get your $25 free!!(limited time, according to the refer-a-friend website it expires on May 15th) The money is there immediately after your account is accepted-which for me was also immediately. If you have a significant other, they can sign up as well. Basically one account per person. You must be 18 or the age a majority in your area. And it is currently only available to US residents. There are no fees to open the account, link the account to your checking account, load money to the account, or withdrawal money from the account to your linking checking account. The schedule of fees is defined as follows:

Terms of Use
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Referral links removed so as not to offend

Well, I had to be the Judge, the Jury, and the Executioner again. I had 4 and one half dozen eggs. Their crime was being boring white eggs the day before Easter. I found them guilty of blandness and colorlessness (heh heh) and sentenced them to .....DYE.

We prepared 7 small vats of boiling vinegar water, in different colors of course, for them to dye in. The children took great joy in assisting in the process of making sure that each egg had dyed. A few of the eggs were drowned in more than one vat! I myself took responsibility for holding one unlucky egg over the edge so that only half of it were in the green vat. Then I repeated the process putting the other half in the blue vat. It was eggsellent fun. I then hatched up a plan to dye the middle of an egg by rotating it in a spoonful of the red vat's dye. I did not ask the egg what it's dying wish was, I simply dipped the ends into two other colors!! Oh the humaneggty!

Those eggs dyed right in front of my children, who were egging me on. And for the first time in years I did not tell the story of the cowboy dying eggs that was 'cooked' up in my Father's sometimes soft-boiled mind. See my Dad envisions a lot of scenes or skits in his head, as do I. He concocted this scene of a not so intelligent cowboy in a western comedy. The cowboy is staying with a single women and her children (Widow most likely thanks to the local unlawful men)and they are preparing for Easter Sunday. The cowboy asks if he can help and she says he can. He asks what they are doing and she says dying eggs. He says do you need help with that. She says yes and he pulls out his six shooter and starts blowing the eggs away right there on the counter as he yells , 'DIE you rotten eggs, DIE!!'

The apple didn't fall too far from the tree I suppose.

Hey look it is September, guess I should post some goals or something. First I want to remain completely on-board the no vending machine wagon. This is hard to do as I now eat lunch with Joe a lot and he has Reese's peanut butter cups every day. I want peanut butter cups...but I am not buying them.

By the end of the month I should be a certified Cub Scout Den leader.

I suppose a goal of mine ought to be to make sure the kids in my den have the most fun that they will have through their entire scout career during this year.

I want to finish watching the rest of the Firefly episodes on the current run I am on (disk 3), so I can watch the collector's edition of Serenity.

I want to get the bike's out of the garage to get my car in their before the weather gets cooler and the feral kittens decide to keep warm under the hood in the driveway.

I want to get my kids to help me make some terrain again, that was fun. So far they helped me to make trapdoors and helped to glue the foilage onto the tree armatures. I want to get them to make boulders or rocky outcrops out of some of the styrene insulation that I have in the garage.

I want to make fences out of balsa, pillars out of foamboard, and rocky terrain out of styrene...paint, finish, and SELL...just to see if I can.

I still want to write more...never enough hours to spend time with the kids, finish whatever my wife signs me up for, and have enough left for work and fun.

I still want a way to record my 8mm video tapes onto DVD.

I would like to play poker on poker night...

I am still not telling my wife what I got, but I have one of her Christmas presents already... in one of the boxes that she hates so much!!

I want to want to do some cub scout things...sounds silly but I really do want to want to camp out...I just do not at this time. I do want to fire a bow on the archery range, but I would like to want to do some other things...I am after all going to be a den leader, I should want to be more involved.

I want to talk to my Nephew about his first day as a tax-paying employee. He is seventeen and had his first day of his first job yesterday!! I worked seasonally in a very similar store when I was 18 or 19 myself.

I want to find out when my Wife's Brother is leaving for his next trip in the battle against terrorism abroad and take my Wife to visit him and his family before he does.

I want to have better communication with a few of my friends back up North. I talked to my friend, the one who introduced me to my wife today on instant messenger. I would like to talk to him and the best man at my wedding more often.

Goal number 1, I am going to post my goals for the month. Check

One down...That seems silly but since I did not post goals for several months, it is a step in the right direction.

I plan to include my children more in my hobby. More details to follow in a later post, but I spent naptime with my 5-year old, and allowed him to help me make a trapdoor and paint some trees. It was a lot of fun and a great bonding experience for both of us. Of course now my daughter wants me to paint at night instead of naptime, so that she can paint too. I foresee a lot of trapdoors, and fences being made soon.

As usual I want to be able to devote more time to writing. If I do some of the terrain modelling and building during the day with my children, it will free up more night time for writing.

I want to take a few packs of ramen noodles to work, to avoid having to buy a lunch if we are running late and dinner does not carry over into a lunch for me the next day. I have only had to buy a lunch maybe 6 times in the last 3 or 4 months, but that is still $30 or so more than ramen noodles and/or a few cans of tuna.

I want to sell the last few things on Ebay that I need to clear out the boxes and make my wife happy. I have repacked the minatures that I have been buying with my Ebay profits to get them to fit nicely in the closet. I am still selling a few more peices that I got great deals on as well as a few old comic books and items that I used to sell at flea markets over a decade ago. I need to finish organizing the Star Wars cards to get them listed.

I plan on making a few pieces of terrain and listing them on Ebay just to see if it is viable to make a little side money doing so. I do not think that I will sell the ones that my kids help with, but my Son's trapdoor has a very good crude look to it, and that is important to a lot of players of orcs / goblins / other crude factions. I can make a few crates, trapdoors, fences, or barrels for very little out of pocket expense. The time it takes is considered my hobby time, so if I am going to spend an hour making a few fences, I can spend a little more time and make three times as many. If I can sell them, all the better. If the hobby can become self-sufficient, bonus.

While working on the terrain, I would like to get a squad or two or the miniatures based and primed, and maybe work on a little paint on them as well.

Once I clear out the living room and sell all of the items that I currently have set aside for Ebay, I want to get a few good deals on the things on my want list: I want an 8mm camcorder and a converter to copy the tapes I currently have onto my PC to burn to DVDs. I want a digital sound processor to play my guitar through my PC and record the tunes. I want to fix my old laptop or replace it. The wife somehow allowed the kids to drop it one too many times. I bought her a new display to fix the crack from the last drop two days before the final drop damaged the Hard Drive connector on the Motherboard (to the technically challeged read that as: I fixed the broken glass on the monitor just before they broke the computer real good)

Turns out I had the Original of this one and not the Original of Halloween Lights. Party Preparation was written to be very detail oriented and give the feeling of October and autumn. It is a lot less horrific than Massacre at the Pumpkin Parade (both stories can be found at

Wixx's Wasteland)It is 7 pages in this form. Later I went back and added even more detail and particular told more of the story of the villagers that were invited to the castle as 'guests' for the party.

I started a romantic plotline between the narrator and one particular villager that had several twists in my mind. I was not sure how to proceed as all of my ideas were processing in thought but not in type, so there the story sits,waiting for a decision on what will become of the beautiful Ravari and our main character as he completes his Party Preparations.

Halloween Lights was written to give the reader a feeling of early afternoon on Halloween as the characters are finishing up on their Halloween decorating. It was a campy short story with an ending that made me smile and chuckle. It then eveolved into something a lot darker as I tried to bring out more of a contrast between the good exterior and the evil within...it also became more erotic and as such I am not quite ready to release it to the general public. I may tone it down a bit and release it shorty...or save it for next Halloween...

The kids had a great time trick or treating, as expected and most of the kids were actually wearing costumes this year.

The story was published at

wixxswasteland.com last night as advertised. Background information. The story was originally written in summer 2001 and edited/updated just before Halloween that year. It has been on my computer/USB flash drive ever since, until last night when it was posted for all to see. I converted it to PDF so you need Adobe acrobat reader to view it. A link is provided to get the latest version of that software under the link to the PDF of the story.

I also wrote 2 other short stories in September/October 2001. One called Halloween Lights and another titled Party Preparations. Party Preparations was then rewritten in to a longer story that was never finished, because it evolved into an even longer story...

Halloween Lights also transformed from a short 7 or 8 page story that appeared to me to make an excellent short movie such as on Tales from the Crypt on HBO back in the day, into a longer work that also never quite got rewritten to its entirety. I have the original version of Halloween Lights that I may very well post tonight on Wixx's Wasteland. I have not found an old enough version of Party Preparations yet, and it would take a few nights of dedicated writing to complete.

Halloween has always been my favorite time of year. The nights are cool, the air smells crisp, wind blows through what leaves are left on the trees. I have many good memories of Hanging with friends, sometimes up to no good, more often just eating and drinking together while always talking and laughing.

The more family oriented Holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas are just around the corner. The night comes faster with the wonderful invention of daylight saving time. ( don't get me started ...) Carving Pumpkins, especially those picked yourself at a pumpkin patch is fun to do. But you see more and more people wasting a lot of money on costumes. We had a Halloween (they called it Fall Festival to avoid all ties with Pagan Holidays...how thoughful) Party at our church and I noticed many things. Most of the children wearing homemade costumed looked like they were having more fun than those in store bought outfits. This could becasue because while that girl over there in a fancy expensive Disney Princess getup is scratching at the seems where all of the fancy cheap plastic beading was attached, the other girl in the homemade princess dress was laughing and bouncing in one of those giant inflatable bouncing thingies.

Another boy had on a store bought hulk outfit, he had fun sure, but his parents paid a lot of money for that outfit and do you think he had more fun than the girl wearing her communion dress with a tiara or the boy in a jedi outfit. His jedi shirt was custom made to fit for HIM and not one sizes fits all...I was partial to his costume, not because his Father is the Pastor and I want a free ticket to God's graces, but because he was carrying the same lightsaber that I was!

I am not saying that store bought costumes are bad, I am just saying that they can be found r made cheaper. THey have a Pirates of the Caribean Captain Jack getup that is like $30...my Mom found a cheaper pirate dealie for around $15...half price...did my son have half as much fun as if he were struggling to keep the Captain Jack pants on his thin waist, while his broad shoulders were uncomfortable in the shirt that went with it? I doubt it. The older kids all had costumes that they made themselves...by older i mean high schoolish aged, so they had more fun building their costume than they would have at Party City standing in line to pay for one.

Happy Halloween...

I invented Instant Poems...this means I started typing before I thought about the poem. So it might suck because I did not think on it long, nor is it edited or re-written blah blah...here it is

October 31st and what am I to do,

I do not have a costume on to be like you.

I am lying here, pondering my life,

Thinking of times of good, and times of strife.

As I look back I think of many things,

And all of the emotions that each memorance brings.

I will not go out and knock on neightbor's door.

As has been customary from the time of yore.

I also have no candy that I can give away,

To the costumed children, as dusk takes over the day.

I tried to stand and get my keys,

But it seems that darkness is all that either of my eyes sees.

They are not closed, of this I am sure,

but perhaps I need to try and remember a little more.

Autumn is here the leaves are surely changing,

Throughout colors and hues that are very wide-ranging.

As the seasons pass I try to recollect,

Just what I have become as I feel no respect.

But then the thoughts return to my empty head,

I can not trick or treat, because I am dead!

I have been having trouble finding time to write...and by write I mean a lot more than just entries here. I have several novels in my mind that I have started to type up but have never finished. I do however have a few short stories finished...and most of them were written for Halloween...so what better time to put them online. I have finally registered wixxswasteland.com and will publish The Massacre at the Pumpkin Parade tonight...on the Eve of Halloween...if all goes as planned I will re-edit one or two of the other stories and publish them tomorrow. Just so you know these are as stated Halloween stories and are not quite as whimsical and humorous as my entries here.

In the future I hope to publish more of my works as seeing them printed on my browser will hopefully entice me to complete more of what I have started, and then start more that I have drempt up.

Happy Halloween

I was being a good shopper. I found 2 meat rebates in the beer section...why else would I be in the beer section right...Anyway 1 was for Johnsonville sausage $2 off instantly, the other was a mail in rebate good for $10 off of $20 meat purchase. I found 2 packs of sausage expiring that day marked down to 99 cents from original $2.79 so that was $5.58 for free! Also I found a roast that was around $14 on sale for $7 then marked down to $3.44!! I bought 2 of these and some steaks that were above my $2 per pound threshold, but still regular $5.99 per pound on sale for $3.99 per pound with my I have your card in my wallet too card, to get me to $20. So I got $28.10 worth of roasts one as roast one to cut up to make fajitas, and stew, and $21 worth of sirloin steaks for $20.66 and will get $10 back by mail. $54.68 worth of meat for $10.66. That was by far my best grocery deal to date.

I did not buy anything from a vending machine.

I managed to curb the car a bit more on Saturdays and got an extra day between refills of gas twice.

I sat down at my computer for the purpose of writing a bit on a story twice. (Ok so writing on a story while I played online poker in the background)

My children made it through the month without really spilling much milk or wasting too much food. This is important because I am trying to teach them that money spent replacing things that we waste is money that we can not spend on things we want.

I renewed the library books online and avoided late fees. This has a similar affect as above, where money spent on fees that could have been avoided is money that can not be spent on a want or saved.

Ohhhh a big one here, I set my paypal up to the mutual fund plan where I am now getting a return on the money that is sitting in my account waiting for me to find those perfect deals on ebay.

Speaking of perfect deals, I bought 3 WarMachine minis that have a combined retail price of $30 for $4.58.

I did good on the food budget...I even got commended by my wife for coming in under budget two weeks this month.

The wife helped me take the pics for star wars cards to sell...no buyers though.

I spent nothing on ebay other then some money I had in paypal account, and actually had a net gain for the month!!

I took the kids out not once but twice to launch rockets...ran out of igniters so I have to buy more before we can go again.

I bought nothing from a vending machine the entire month.

I did not paint a single bit on any of my models, but I did write most of the next update for the Omega story, as well as writing more ideas for other things so that I do not forget them and a paragraph on another older story.

We had games night, more than one friend showed up, and one friend even brought one friend. My Brother showed up with his wife and four kids in the middle of the first game. We have a friend who is like our dealer, he has a lot of great games and brings them with him to supply our gaming addiction. He even brought over a few of his warmachine models and some supplies and I got to glue a few of my dudes together while we played!! Thanx a bunch, I had a lot of fun checking out your brushes and talking to you about painting strategies and such.

Anyway once the clan was there, we switched to a more party type of game, werewolves. Just write villager on a bunch of index cards, seer on one and werewolf on two. Everyone chooses a card, then the game director has them close their eyes. He asks only the werewolves to open their eyes and to choose their first victim. Then the wolves close their eyes and the seer opens his or hers. The seer chooses a person and the director nods if they are a werewolf or not if they are not.

The director, in this case by the way, our director did a great job of playing the part and making it fun and keeping everyone interested, then tells you who was found dead the next sunrise and the villagers pick one among them to destroy, assuming to be ridding the village of a werewolf. The seer can of course identify themselves as such and say I know this person is a wolf, but the remaining wolf will surely feast upon the seer the next night. This continues until both wolves are slain or the wolves equal the number of villagers.

We played through this several times with my wife being one of the greatest werewolves ever. The kids had a blast and I am sure that Josh, our director enjoyed himself quite well, too. Next we played a new game that I received for my birthday recently called fact or crap. Someone reads a statement from a question card and everyone put down a fact or crap card. If you answer correctly you take a token , if not, you lose one. The first person to answer plays for two tokens. The game was fun, I won...heh, and for snacks we had salsa left over from the tupperware party before the games, and a few sliced apples.

A great time was had without great expense. We usually make it through more than just two boardgames, but we spent a while playing wearwolves, and it was worth it. In fact my Brother brought a great old game called Stocks and Bonds with him that we did not even get to play. We found the game a long time ago in our parents games closet, and it appeared to have never been played. The stock certificates were perfectly flat and all. The game is copyright 1960 something and my Brother, his wife, her sisters, our friends, and I have played it countless times since discovering it. Maybe next month...

This afternoon, while my wife was nursing the youngest, I got to spend some quality time on the floor playing with the elder of my children. After the little guy was done drinking, they too came out to join us. My wife was on the couch reading and I was on the floor still. My oldest son, who is four years old, sems to really like the song from Church where the Pastor says 'in peace, in peace let us pray to the' and then the congregation joins in singing 'Lord have mercy, Christ have Mercy, Lord have Mer-er-cy.'

He even adds that extra mer-er-part and all! I think he likes it because I always sing it really deep. Anyway he is singing 'Lord of Mercy, Lord of mercy...' (have mercy, of mercy...he's four!) Then he looks at me and with a straight face he says 'that is the song the ice cream trucks in Israel play.' Naturally I am cracking up, so he starts laughing, but he was serious when he said it. One of the Pastors recently toured Israel so he heard him as well as my wife and I talking briefly about it, but other than that I don't think he knows much about Israel.

I realize that it is only the 6th 6-6-6 but I have not bought anything from a vending machine yet this month. I was surely tempted today, as I was hungry and they had a chocholate covered payday bar in the machine. I am on my way to the grocery stores today and hope to stay under budget. I have also been doing a lot of swimming this month already which keeps me in shape. It is free to go to the pool, but the extra showers to get the chlorine off the kids and out of our hair, is not.

A secondary goal of mine has been to set up an automatic withdrawal from checking account to ING Account, and we finally got around to getting that started. Every month we will be saving, even if it is not much. You feel like you accomplished something great when you finally get around to doing somethign that have have been wanting to do for a while.

I am sure you all know or are the type of person who gets into a hobby, spends a little or a lot of money, invests some time and then puts it away and finds a new hobby. Back when I was in college, the Star Wars Card Game came out. You could collect the cards and play a table top game. I got a few of my friends interested in the game bought the cards by the box and then the case and even sold some at the flea market. I held on to a decent sized collection of cards, packs a few unopened boxes and 1 whole case of the first series called the premiere limited edition starter decks.

Recently I have gained an interest in a miniature game called War Machine from Privateer Press.


That is the Reaper. The jack hammer looking thing in place of its left forearm, with the blade on it is called a Helldriver. Who doesn't want a model of a Reaper to use it's Helldriver on their enemies, I ask you. Anyway that Reaper is around $20 retail and I hope to find one on Ebay eventually a bit cheaper. This brings me to my point. I have, much to the enjoyment and surprise of my wife, decided to sell the star wars cards on ebay in order to finance my War Machine Army. So instead of taking up another expensive hobby, I will trade hobbies. I have quite a lot of the cards, and if I am lucky I can even make a profit seeing as how I have been a good boy and only buying the War Machine models that I am truly getting a great deal on. I even passed on my beloved Reaper because I am holding out for a great deal.

I am going to keep enough of the cards to make a few decks for each the light and dark sides of the force. This is partly because it is Star Wars, and partly because my Son wants to learn to play the game. He is also an avid Star Wars fan, making it easier for me to come to terms with his mother/my wife on keeping a few.

While she is happy about freeing the space from the Star Wars cards. She is not too happy that the models, unless won on Ebay already painted, come unassembled and unpainted. This means I need to have space where the kids can not get to them while I construct (only a few pieces), primer, and paint them. I will also need to buy some paints and supplies, but I will play with the models in their ever so bland pewterness until I get a good deal on some paint, too. The models are small and the box containing all of those cards well boxes, are quite large. I have a large moving box a medium sized box, and some assorted loose cards to sort. I have been pretty good with hobbies, as far as not getting into too many and not forgeting all about them after I start.

My goal for June is to not buy anything from a vending machine. No soda, no chips. In May I bought one bottle of coke and four bags of chips. I have been drinking water and take homemade snacks. If I get hungry I will make a pack of ramen noodles that I have in my desk instead of buying chips. The chips are Herr's salt and pepper variety and they are very good. But they are not as cheap as the ramen noodles, so no more chips.

I salute the veterans who serve/served their country. Thank you for your service!

Well I am at work today, so I am not enjoying a long weekend like many others here in America, but I did enjoy my weekend. We had lots of sun, too much sun for my wife in fact ( THe Mickey Mouse and Donald duck shaped clouds were few and far between!), but the kids got to bike to the pool on both Saturday and Sunday, and all enjoyed it very much. The youngest tried to lean down out of your arms to get into the frigid water!! I tried to tell him that he can not swim and will drown, but he can not talk either so I do not think he cared about what I was saying, as long as I put him in the water. The oldest was soon back to near his comfort level of last year.

He still will not try swimming without a nodle yet, which he was able to do remarkably well as a three year old last year. Jumping into the water with said noodle, he is doing again, and he let me throw him up in the air with a float ring (tube) but not the noodle, probbly because the water was a little cold... I am sure I will be tossing him and his sister again in no time. As for that cold water, we had a lot of rain and even hail the night before the pool opened. All of that ice cooled down my pool, not fair!

I was able to get everythng on my list at BJs, the grocery store, and get gas, without going over my budget. I would not be so happy about this but I have been over budget for the last five or six weeks in a row. I even bought the rose and a few small things that were not on the list. Now if I can keep it up for a few weeks, it would be great.

From the article:

http://www.debtreduction101.com/start-paying-off-debt-today....

There are 4 main excuses given for not reducing debt.

1. I am in control of my debt

2. I do not have enough free money each month to make a difference.

3. I am waiting for a windfall to pay my debt off all at once.

4. Something always comes up.

Where do you fall?

My father has just retired at 59.5.
That is the age when you can begin drawing on your 401K. He set himself up pretty good and was able to retire in good health and relatively young. I hope to be able to do the same but much younger. Well I guess I don't want to retire I just want to author novels or write scripts or something else that gives me lots of free time to spend with my family and friends while still earning enough to live comfortably. The savings and frugality make that comfort level more affordable and hopefully easier to attain.

I am very happy after seeing how hard my father worked - he did a lot of carpentry, electrical work, and general hnadyman work for the neighborhood while being laid off periodically in the 70s and 80s and then when the steel industry came back he worked a lot of OT in a not so friendly environment, that he is finally able to rest. When he first started at the mill in 1973 they had probably 20 men per shift plus a dozen steady daylight and several specialists. One man for the coiler and one each for the front and rear motor rooms, a welder or two per shift crane repair personnel pipe fitters wire gang etc. Now they run about 4 per crew and have one or two pipe fitters to cover the entire day. My Dad's department were all trained or supposedly trained on the coiler the motor rooms, crane repair and so on to absorb all of those lost men. I can imagine how much hardr those 4 men are expected to work.

Some of it ended up being pretty cool. For instance he was sent to welding school and later used the skills that he developed restoring his truck. I know for a fact that he could have lived without ever answering a crane call though. I learned a lot about electricity and mechanics from watching and talkng to him. I hope that he continues to use the welding skill, maybe on a new vehicle to either add to his collection, or to sell to increase his pension income.

I also hope that he knows how glad I am to have a Father like him to look up to all my life, to learn from, have a positive role model and know what being a Father should be like. I would love to be able to retire early and have that same positive impact on my children that he had on me. As a side note, both of my parents and quite simply their being happy and loving with each other, my brother and I, and our children, gives such a strong root to our family tree.

Picture of said truck to be added, stay tuned!

My Father's mantra when I was growing up was to take care of your things that way instead of spending your money replacing broken or worn things, you can buy new things. ok....his other mantra was that 'there just aren't enough hours in the day.' He was a workaholic, working all the OT he could get in the Steel Mill to counter the periods of unemployment, plus doing all of the handy work, carpentry, eltrical, mechanical, plumbing, landscaping, painting, roofing, washing, scrubbing, cleaning, welding, fixing, and maintenance at our house, both of my grandparents houses and for some of the neighbors as well. He would work all day and then in the evening, when my mother would make him stop to get showered and spend time with my brother and I, he would recite his famous litergy.

At first I thought yeah Dad is right, if there were more hours in the day, I could play more each day, watch more TV, relax more, sleep more, and do my homework slower. As I got a little older and interested in things like the Solar System and NASA and the like, I decided that if I lived on Pluto the day is over six times longer, but it is really cold there. On Mercury, it takes 58.7 Earth days for the planet to rotate once, man you could do a lot on a Monday there!! Then again a Mercurian Year is only 88 Earth days.

At eight or nine years old I thought this would be cool, because the school year would only be about 50 or so days, but if I aged every 88 days, which using Mercurian days would actually be less than two days, I would die of old age in less than 25 weeks!! Who wants that?? I had these kind of thoughts a lot, I was a weird kid. Come to think of it, I grew up to be a wierd man. And here is where the story evolves. As I grew into my college years, I remember telling my friends that there are not enough hours in the day. This of course came from the fact that I only had 5 hours a day to split between homework, studying and sleep.

Then I got married and wanted more hours each day to spend with my beautiful wife. After our first child was born, I needed more hours to spend watching him learn and grow, spend with my beautiful wife, and take care of the things that had been moved to the back burner, like cutting grass, washing cars, and the like. Two more children later and I REALLY REALLY want more hours, not for me but for my beautiful wife!! She needs more time to be able to take a long hot shower, get plenty of sleep, relax while I take my turn with the laundry and still have time left to spend with me.

Finally we reach the and son and son part. My eldest, a child with the mental capacity far greater than his 4 years, is figuring out how things work. I loosened light bulbs in the bathrooms to be frugal as per my other story, and when we are in said bathrooms, the little genius tells me 'Daddy has more money to buy steak' as he points to the unilluminated bulbs. He gets the water pitcher out of the refridgerator and tries to close the door quickly saying, 'Daddy does not want to spend his money on the electric bill, he wants to buy milk and things instead.' And, after realizing that we can not go to the park, the playground, Target, and his Uncle's house on the same day because there is not enough time between his sister's nap and bedtime snack to accomplish all of this, he showed me that he truly understands when he said 'Daddy I want the days to be longer.' I asked what he meant having a good idea already and I smiled broadly when he said 'more than 24 hours, so that we can do more every day.'

I remember growing up in a two income family where my Father worked hard in a steel mill but was paid well to justify it. I was always good at math, numbers, calulations, finances and the like came natural to me. My Father used to take me to the bank and I would collect one of each of the pamphlets that they had on the tall turning wheel of information. They do not have those now days because banks want you to go to bankname.com to get the information as they can not outsource the paper pamphlets, or fill those pamphlet pockets with overseas staff to answer all of your questions cheaply.
From reading all of those information leaflets, I had quite the vast knowledge of all things bank, for a nine year old. It became the norm for my Father to discuss things with me that I assume most kids my age were not privy to, so that he could get my input. I helped him decide when the time was right to move his money from the old passbook account to a money market account. I had to do a little persuading, but I drew up the numbers of how much interest his money would earn in each, and he opened that MM account a week later.
I was distraught that I did not have the $1,000 minimum required to open the Money market account, but I did have more than $250 so I switched my own blue passbook account over to what they called the Money Manager account. I got half the APR and my interest was componded quarterly instead of monthly like that MM account, but it beat the passbook acount. I am talking about the early 1980's when that money market account was upwards of 6% interest, a number you would have a hard time matching on a 10 year CD today.
As the years went on, my Father went from moderately well paid when he was not laid off during the 'lean years' from the late 70's to early 80's, to working a lot of overtime and making a very respectable wage. Once the steel mills cut back the staff to a certain point, everyone left had virtually unlimited OT to actually keep the mill running while being understaffed.
What always struck me as odd, was how much money my parents made once this change occured. My Mother worked in the Hospital, starting as so many others in Dietary, delivering patients food, and slowly moving her way up. After two or three such upward moves, she made respectable money, and he doubled her salary. This was a lot of money for a smoke-free family of four. My Dad is a jack of all trades handy man so his car maintenace, home remodelling, and etc are all done for cost. If he bought a case of beer for the summer, it lasted the summer. So where did all of this money go?
There was no internet back then, and therefore no Savingadvice.com. But that is not where the money went. My Dad packed his lunch for work every day, he bought used cars or cheap cars like the Plymouth Horizon. I owned two of those myself as he had a veritable parts store for them in his garage. He did nothing to any form of extreme that would waste money. If he bought a car, he would have it for 10 years or more. He has two that were bought in '89 and '91 respectively to this day, along with a few more newer ones, but I am still thinking about the late 80s, when they went through what I thought was a lot of money and did not live high on the hog.
My Mother has too many shoes, that is a given. We threatened to COUNT them one day and she got VERY defensive. Clothes is her addiction, and clothes shopping, but not all for herself. She loves to buy cute things for her grandchildren. Her excessive wardrobe did not drain all of that money, so I had to look on. I mentioned my Father has a few cars, but back then he had a Truck, and two cars one for each of them to drive to work. Nothing too excessive there. Do you know what cost the most money....time. I had a great childhood, my parents have been married for longer than my brother has been alive, which is saying something.
The time my parents spent with us cost money. They took us to circuses and sporting events and science centers and bought us the things that we were interested in. My Brother and I both shared an interest in music with our Father. We all had nice stereo setups and got upgrades most Christmases. Christmas, that is where most of that money went. We can not afford to buy all of that stuff for our kids, but you know neither could my parents at first either. So instead of wondering where that money went I will remember were we went as a family. My parents are doing quite well financially, and one day, using a lot of the things I learned from my Father, with my Father , or for my Father, as well as from places like savingadvice.com (plug), we will too.

I guess my point is that my parents didn't have a lot besides a family at first and they cherished that family. They gave up a lot for family, and as times got better they never stopped putting family first.