I’ve ignored this blog for the most part. Life has gotten in the way at the same time that the “blogosphere” (man, I hate that word) shifted, which resulted in me going long periods of time without updating here. There are some items I’d like to catch up on and otherwise vent some thoughts.
I blog less because of my son. Not because of the additional time having a young time in the house requires; it doesn’t take much time to whip up a decent entry about something you’re passionate about. No, I blog less because he’s too young to tell me to what degree he’s comfortable with me sharing details about his life. The Internet never forgets, and I’d hate for something I wrote here — even something I thought was completely innocuous — to bite him in the ass later. To fill my need to remember what he’s like at this age, we take a lot of photos instead, and those photos are posted on Flickr and restricted to family only. In this way, I feel I don’t need to blog how his little personality is developing or what he likes to eat this week… we’re capturing that through photos instead. His privacy is mostly intact.
The new baby is still due around July 9, and the same rules will apply to her when it comes to blogging. More generally, we are almost ready for her arrival… we just need a changing table for her room, and a name. We have a crib (thanks to the Bells!) and an epic number of little girl outfits thanks to various sources including my brother and his wife. We’re warehousing diapers, to take advantage of various Amazon deals like Prime, Subscribe & Save, and coupons from magazines.
Our backyard fence project is progressing. The front section was finished a few weeks ago. My Dad and I dug up hedges in the back yard to accommodate the back portion, which Sherri and her father will most likely install during the next week. Once that’s done, we’ll feel better about letting Rowan play outside without bolting into traffic.
I’m typing this on an iPad v2. It arrived on Thursday and we’re getting to know each other. So far so good. I’m a little surprised and annoyed that there isn’t an iPad version of Skype yet, but otherwise expectations have been met. Frankly, I thought the lack of a Retina display would annoy me, but I’ve hardly noticed. There are a few other minor nits, but they’re not worth mentioning here. I’ll do a proper iPad v2 recap in a few weeks once I’ve had more burn-in time.
My new hobby is stock research and stock options. I started reading stock option books, then realized that those only help if you’re somewhat adept at choosing underlying stocks. Not that the stocks have to be amazing companies, only that the shares need to trade somewhat predictably — up, down, or sideways. So after learning about vertical and calendar spreads, butterflies and iron condors, I took a step back to put more time into learning how to do proper research. I’m still selling covered calls on a monthly basis on shares I already own, and I’ve sold puts on a stock I’d like to pick up, but otherwise I’m holding off until I can develop a sound, explainable stock investment strategy. It’s likely I’ll have more to say about this in the near future.
That’s it for now.