…beyond nice.

I’ve worked out my mountaineer training schedule for until the climb and it is not pretty.  I’ve got one more day of training with 35lbs, then I’m moving up to 40lbs for 2 trips, then it’s 45lbs.

Yesterday, I hiked up Si with 35lbs, it went really well in the beginning, I didn’t wish to be mercifully killed in the first mile.  At about 0.5 miles to the end, I ran out of fuel completely.  I didn’t have a big dinner the night before, and I didn’t eat a big breakfast before the trip.  Bad idea.  I forgot that becoming a beast of burden means consuming enough to feed the beast.  I had to take a break and choke down some Peanuts M&M’s for fuel before slowly shuffling the rest of the way.

Note to self: It’s not a simple day hiking anymore, eat a big plate of spaghetti the night before training.

I know it’s wasteful to pour out perfectly good tap water, but there’s a certain sense of…pride? when you get to empty out jugs of water at the top.

It only took 3 years, but I am finally rolling over my 401k. If you are an investment savvy person, please leave now, so I don’t embarrass myself with kindergartener’s guide to investing. As mentioned, I’m on some crazy personal finance book binge, because taking on a mortgage payment feels a bit scary without understanding how to look at my finance. Without a drop of knowledge in investing, I let my 401k plan do its thing and let it grow on its own.

Over the last couple months, I’ve read over ten personal finance books. Don’t be too impressed, because a lot of them focused heavily on getting out of debt or teaching your kids to be financial guru. After a few books, I figured out how to check if my 401k investments were performing up to par, which is to compare it to the market in general, against S&P 500. I used Mint.com to help me do a compare, there’s a little button that charts it for you.  My investments in my 401k “Aggressive” and “Growth” plan was chumping along.  They’ve been going up with the recent market up, so I thought for a long time they were doing fine, but when I got a good picture of what they “could” be doing, I have to drop them like a half-eaten apple with a worm poking out.  The plan was charging up the caboose for management fee too, it’s all in the paper stuff that I never read.

In the end, I found two books that I really love and I will probably dog ear them to death:

1) The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing
Don’t let the silly looking cover fool you, I love this book.  It’s the first book that made me feel less overwhelmed by all the investment options.  Stocks scare me. I don’t understand them, and I thought that investing means learning how to trade stocks.  No, no, no.  Investing means buying and holding, preferably holding the whole market.  I had no idea you can buy pieces of the market as a whole. The market as a whole has an upward trend, and if that ever collapse, you will be worrying about a lot more than your 401k plan. The author does give you the option to day-trade if you really want to, but he tells you to open a specific “gambling” account. If you lose that money, don’t add to it, just walk away from the table with grace.

2) The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio
If you can get this book used for cheap, do so, apparently the new “updated” book is pissing people off because there’s just a few pages added to the end.  The book itself is great, the original material stands to this day.  This book will guide how I plan to invest my rolled over 401k. I plan to start with his lazy diversifying portfolio, and then switch things up as I learn more about investing. I now have an account with Vanguard waiting for the 401k to roll over.  The plan is simply to go 25% Vanguard 500 Index Fund, 25% Vanguard Total International Fund, 25% Vanguard Small-Cap Value Fund and 25% Vanguard REIT Index Fund.  I will likely re-balance soon after, but this will serve as a starting point.

Whew!  I feel all adult-like now (only took me 35 years), talking about my retirement plans, I’m going to have some gummi bear for breakfast now.

I did the first of two glacier refresher course yesterday.  I played hookie from my prep course in favor of playing around in the snow, it’s not a tough choice really.

Things started really well.  We met up at North Bend, then drove to Hyak which is a ski resort that is closed for the season.  We quickly hiked up to the training area and I started seeing white.  It’s not just the snow, it was everything was going white.  I didn’t eat breakfast and my body rebelled by shutting down my vision, I almost passed out.  After a short water break, I started seeing color again.  If you ever want to appreciate color, run up a snow covered mountain on a sunny day with zero energy in your system, watching all color drain from the world with black outlines is not the cool potential for a coloring book that it sounds to be.  Bonus: I got free color appreciation out of the class already.

There were so many things that I had forgotten already.  You really do not want to be on my rope team, if you fall into a crevasse, I will just panic and not know what to do.  I barely remember how to walk properly in the snow.  Mountaineer walking isn’t quite the same walk you would do walking down the street, between your ice-ax and feet, you have to maintain 2 points of contact while in motion to maximize your safety.  There’s a set pattern for which foot to move and when to move your ice-ax and this changes depending on whether you’re traveling uphill or downhill.  So mountaineering is more like if you were crip walking down the street with your pimp cane, and like mountaineering, bad things will happen to you if you fuck up the crip walk.

There was much practicing of self-arrest, which is stopping yourself when you’re sliding down the mountain, we did it normal position, then face down head first, then on your back heads first.  On your back heads first sliding down the mountain is actually less scary than it is awkward.

We practiced tying ourselves to the rope and moving as a rope team, adding pickets for safety, then clipping in and out of the picket.  We did crevasse rescue where we each took about 30 minutes trying to rescue our “fallen teammate” AKA Instructor’s Ice-Ax.

One thing we practiced that I fear the most and I still fear is the simulated rope team falling.  In this simulation, we walk up the snow covered mountain, if we’re lucky we hear “Falling” right before the instructor pulls with all his might down the mountain.  We usually slide a good few feet before catching ourselves with our ice-ax, the instructor will continue to pull on the rope to test if you’ve self-arrested properly.  To recap, we are clinging for dear life to our ice-ax, quite often pulling every arm muscle to do it, while your lower half of the body which is harnessed to the rope is being dragged downward.

I can barely put on a shirt today without crying pathetically. The boyfriend helped me with a jacket and laughed at my pathetic baby t-rex arms, so I started laughing too, but my abs hurt so much from being placed in the medieval stretch rack that I had to slump against the wall for support. While mountaineering sounds all macho and shit, I’m like a pathetic helpless baby bird flapping its sad useless wings.

The next glacier course is the day before my LSAT, so wish me good luck with that.

The boyfriend has been on an Ebay binge for the wonderful discount it provides on things we want for our new place.  As mentioned, one of his splurge of choice is a Dyson vacuum and he won an auction on one.  He tracked its delivery all day today until it got here.  When I got home from running errands, the vacuum had arrived and the boyfriend introduced it to me proudly like it was going to be the new family pet.  Then he proceeded to vacuum with it, like they’re playing fetch already.  I’m afraid to ask him if he named it.  The boyfriend once said if we ever get around to having kids, we should name the first boy Thor.  Maybe if he names the vacuum Thor instead we can get that name out of the way.  Surely, he wouldn’t want to name two of his kids Thor.

It’s my 35th birthday! I just leveled up in cougardom!  The boyfriend is quite a bit younger than me, so it’s an ongoing joke that to maintain a good cougar status I need to trade him for younger models as he ages. A few days ago, when I was trying to remember what year he was born on, I was off by a lot, and he told me he wished he was born that year, because that would mean he’s twenty, and not in danger of being traded for a new model any time soon.  I told him, instead of aiming for guys close to the older of the two brother’s age (he’s 29), I should aim for my youngest brother’s age (he just turned 16). They are easier to impress at that age.  I can work in my more original high school pickup line of, “Hey baby, with me sitting next to you, you can drive my car.”

I took my youngest brother to open an account with BECU yesterday, he already has an account with Wells Fargo, but I think BEU has a better interest rate savings account.  At my request, the restaurant is also cutting him a work check every month to contribute to his Roth IRA, so the online depositing with BECU will come in handy.  I told him to sign up for Mint.com to track his savings with all the different accounts, and he thought it was the coolest thing (see easy to impress).  I like Mint.com, I figured if someone wants to hack my accounts, I’ve packaged it all nice like in one place with a bow on top for them, plus it’s a great budget program for someone learning how to budget for the first time.

For my birthday, the boyfriend got me a Kindle.  I did the terrible gift receiving thing at first and ask him to not waste his money and return it, because I really do love real books.  Of course despite the fact that I’m a heartless bitch, I did feel bad and gave the Kindle a whirl.  I got a bootlegged copy of Tina Fey’s book, which I already have a hard copy of, so don’t judge me.  I really do prefer the hard copy better, especially if it’s a book that I like.  As someone who appreciates graphic design, I feel that a lot books are not simply about the content, it’s the design and organization that goes into it too.  You lose that with eReaders.  In Tina Fey’s book, there are quite a few wonderfully embarrassing pictures of herself that looks better with ink on paper.  However, there are lots of books that I bought that I wished I got a chance to sit down and read a bit, like I used to do at Barnes & Noble.  Where I would walk through aisles and find a big stack of books then sit down in a comfy chair and weed them out by giving them each a good half hour read.  I would spend days doing this and thoroughly enjoy it.  I get to do that with the Kindle.  It’s quite enjoyable.

One thing that I really love about the Kindle, is whatever that fancy pearl ink technology is.  The screen is permanently on, even when it first arrived. Thing is, you can’t tell it’s even on.  It looks like they stuck some fake screen-on vinyl sticker on it.  I tried to peel the screen off. It does create a good book reading feel.  It’s not back-lit which I kind of wish for, but I do love it most for that reason as well.  I spend a ridiculous amount of time in front of a computer screen, not having to look at another back-lit screen with all its eye-straining property is nice.

How’s 35 treating me thus-far?  I think this was the first year that I didn’t curse turning older. There’s just so much to look forward to this year.  New condo closing soon, applying to law school, climbing Mount Baker and scuba school for Great Barrier Reef.  It’s going to be a great year.  Here’s to wishing everyone a great year as well.  Happy 4-20!

I’ve been lazy with posting because I’m contemplating switching host company.  I’ve been satisfied with my host company but I haven’t looked into hosting price since I started this site back in 2007.  Four years of computer development time, it’s like I’m leasing a 486 computer for $4,000 a year in this day and age.  I’ve been paying $20 a month for storage that I can now buy for under $5 a month.  I brought it up my host company that I’ve been overpaying and asked them if they could offer me their promo price $5/month, but they told me they only offer their promo price for new customers, I would have to pay their current price of $11.

I like my hosting company, Dreamhost, and I’m really lazy about moving servers, but they do charge more than other companies and they made the opposite of any effort to keep me.  I found a pretty decent company, FatCow, that wants to charge me $3/month for the first year.  I like the name FatCow.  If you find this site completely broken in the next week or so, it is because I am, what my British cousin calls me, a “Stupid Cow” and I have borked the site while moving.

Did I mention I’m very lazy though?  More than likely, I’ll just hold a grudge against Dreamhost and not do a thing about it.  One really big thing Dreamhost has going for it, is the month to month plan.  I don’t know why I am such a commitment-phobe, I’ve been with the same company for four years, it would make sense to switch to a yearly plan but I can’t do it.  It’s going to be the same way with the boyfriend, I’ll be calling him boyfriend when all my teeth have fallen out and people openly cringe when I call him boy-anything.

I have to admit, I cringe when I hear old people call their significant other “boyfriend”.  Something about the word “boyfriend” implies that those people are still having sex unlike “husband of 40 years”.  Do I really have to explain that I don’t need the mental image of old people having sex?  And did I just go from web hosting company to giving myself the heebie-jeebies?

I am one step closer to never having to leave my home.  Ladies and Gentlemen, even though it has been around for at least a couple years now, I have just discovered online check depositing.  No more racing up to an ATM late at night and glaring suspiciously at the person coming up behind me. I can do drive-by glaring for nostalgia’s sake from the safety of my own car.

In preparation for hefty mortgage payments to come, I’m doing something I’ve never done in my entire life: budgeting. How does anyone get to nearly age 35 and never had to budget? Growing up, my family was not rich, I was the free lunch kid throughout grade school.  However my family opened our first tiny restaurant when I was 11 and I’ve always helped out, so I was always given spending money.  Investment guides will tell you to only spend cash because you will think twice about putting down some twenty dollar bills, this does not work when you’ve been spending cash since you were 11. The emotional attachment to green paper is just not there.

Without looking at my historical spending, I can pretty much tell you after tax and rent, I spend about 50% of the rest at REI and 25% at Amazon.com.  It’s a disease that I half try to hide with Snoopy Band-Aids over self-inflicted wounds. One year my REI annual refund was $550, mind you, their refund is for 10% any items NOT on sale minus 2% if you use a non-REI credit card.  The scars are raised, bumpy and ugly.

Needless to say, when the budgeting santoku comes out, I have to begrudgingly put back the athletic gear and books that I don’t desperately need.  I’ve already used up my budget on books this month, actually, I’ve used it up since the beginning of the year from two pre-orders.  I was desperate!  They’re Tina Fey’s Bossypants and Martin Seligman’s Flourish.  With Tina Fey’s book, well, it’s TINA FEY!  With Seligman, he’s a psychologist that I’ve always loved.  It pains me that a lot of my favorite psychologists have to get published by self-help books, but it does make the data more digestible for someone not up for dry case-studies.

I should get an eReader, books would be cheaper after the initial investment, except I can’t because I am an ADHD reader.  I channel surf when I read, pausing to watch old favorite reruns or absorbing new cool facts from some History Channel show.  This attention deficit kid needs pretty book covers to grab my attention. As I’ve mentioned, I’m on a finance book binge.  Good, right?Except most of my finance books are from ten years ago because I’ve been flipping between Comedy Central, History Channel and Discovery Channel when surfing.  A lot of the advice are pretty outdated.  ”You can easily find CDs at 5% or higher.” Yeah, of course. “Real estate is the best investment vehicle.” I laugh with a most unladylike snort.  This is almost funnier than Tina Fey’s book except instead of her life being the punch-line, it’s our economy.

WE GOT PREAPPROVED!  I can finally sleep!  In hindsight, I don’t know why I wasted so many weeks begging for a loan from BofA.  I hear all these nice things about credit unions and how they are “for the people”, and I never truly believe it, but you know, I see the light now.

Now because I actually only have…oh about 3 months of work history out of the 2 years that they normally require, they can only approve me on an FHA loan (big step up from BofA that won’t even look at my income), so I will have to pay FHA mortgage insurance for the first 5 years.  We do have the option to finance the place as a rental property too, which isn’t a huge jump (seriously?  +1%?) in APR like BofA.  The sad thing is, even WITH the mortgage insurance, the BECU loan is less per month than what BofA offered me.  So if I didn’t jump that ship, I would be stuck with paying a lot more every single month for 30 years and not be able to write off my loan come tax day.

The thought of a loan with mortgage insurance left a bitter taste in my mouth initially, especially with close to 30% down, it’s like having someone tell you seem trustworthy enough, but you notice they never turn their backs to you, and one eye is eerily open when they sleep.  However, after sitting down and crunching numbers, it actually works out to be a better deal in the long run because the APR is much lower.  It’s cheaper than even the awesome deal BofA was initially offering us.  So, here’s to hoping I’ll get to move into my new place soon.  It’s supposed to close within 45 days.  Counting down!

Soon, I will have an entire wall with floor to ceiling glass!  Being the ex-candy raver that I am, I told the boyfriend we should have nightly naked shadow dance performance in front of our windows.  Of course, being in the gay neighborhood and all, I will be promptly boo’d off the stage and he will get all the encores.  We promise it will be an eyesore, we are both Asians for starters and have the flexibility of model plane balsa wood, the kind that’s soft and bends a little, but you know it would snap if you bend it any more.  Asians are about as known for their dancing skills as their driving skills.  We might get booted shortly after we move in.

Here’s a video of actually good shadow dancing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DHk4jlUdnk

I’ve been working on overseeing a small construction project at one of my family restaurant.  Our first restaurant was pretty badly damaged in a fire back in 2007.  It has since then been fully reconstructed.  We took the reconstruction as a chance to do something different.  We wanted to do a fancy stained concrete floor instead of the usual dark carpet that almost all Chinese use.  Unfortunately for us, we hired a family friend to do the floor.  It’s been preached so many times, but here it is again, NEVER hire family friends.

He didn’t know what he was doing and ended up costing us a ridiculous amount of money and time to redo his work.  The whole floor project for the entire restaurant was $35k, the only part of the floor left from his work is the kitchen and the bathrooms.  For the main dining hall, he did this glossy stained concrete, which was beautiful to look at, but he topped it with a surface that was so slippery, multiple people slipped and fell on the first day.  We did emphasize to him that the surface must not be extremely slick because we were dealing with food and food grease.  We ended up covering most of the restaurant with cheap carpet.  It sucked having to do that.

We did leave the dance floor area because it had this drawing that I pieced together from different artwork I found online:

Unfortunately, yet again, the guy topped it with some material that chipped off right after the first dance.  He never tested ink compatibility between his material and his artist’s material.  After a couple weddings, you could barely tell what the image was:

So I hired a new stained concrete guy who promised to give us a new floor that isn’t a giant lawsuit waiting to happen.  The new floor is less glossy, but it’s definitely a lot less slippery.  There were talks of redoing the floor with hardwood, which I personally felt it would look more tacky, plus, I really liked having the drawing on the dance floor.  The new guy’s artist uses paintbrush instead of airbrush, which is a look I prefer too.

Unfortunately, my mom does not like the color the new artist used.  The dragon is more brown than gold, it does some golden scale edges but he is mostly brown.  I actually like the color, but I feel terrible that my mom paid for yet another floor that she isn’t in love with.  Ugh.

The boyfriend has some crazy mistrust of Craigslist and seems to think every Craigslist transaction will result in someone getting sodomized.  I try to explain to him that it’s highly unlikely that Craigslist would be around all these years if that was the case.  Or at the very least it would have been renamed Craig’s Gay Hookup List.

I bought my Burning Man tent off Craigslist from some guy in a tucked away house in Woodinville and I came out unscathed.  I have a friend that was huge Craigslister and he doesn’t seem too traumatized by all his interactions, although he thinks all Craigslist users are flakes by nature.

In shopping for kitchenware for our new place, I’ve suggested looking at Ebay or Craigslist for Wusthof knives and All Clad cookware because all these “sales” at Macy’s and Bed Bath are really fake sales.  I found a new set of Wusthof knives on Craigslist and I told the boyfriend about the great deal, and he was thinking it was an awesome deal.  Then, because my big fat mouth can’t resist, I told him, “Wouldn’t it be ironic if you got shivved by your brand new Wusthof knives.”  He wasn’t too amused, “Why!? Why would you put that image in my head?”  I made stabbing motions at him.  He’s shouting, “NO!  BAD!  You’re not helping the situation.”  I thought I was showing sensitivity by not pretending to hump him.

Yesterday was the first day of my LSAT prep class.  I’ve already spent close to two hundred dollars on books and been feeling pretty good about my pace on studying for LSAT, so why am I still willing to shell out another $1095 on an LSAT prep class?  I did think to pass up on it initially.  In talking to my best friend about it, he made his recommendation that I take it no matter what, and his reasoning is sound.  He was varsity track lead in high school and a damned fast guy.  According to him, with track running, if you ran one track, you’ve pretty much ran them all. They’re just not that different.  However, when they have the regional or state championship, they will show up early and take turns running that track before the race.  Knowing that all tracks are pretty much the same, they still take that little bit of added advantage of having ran the track that they will be racing on, when it really counts.

I’m taking The Steven Klein Company LSAT Preparation.  It came highly recommended when I was talking to Seattle U’s law department.  While I was working through my LSAT Logic Games Bible, some gal came up to me and shared her recent experience with studying for her LSAT.  She loved the book I was studying from and recommended their other books, which I did buy after talking to her.  She just took the Kaplan prep course but did not recommend them.  If she could do it again, she would have taken the Steven Klein prep because she’s heard a lot of good things about them.

So how was the first day?  I got to feel very old.  I knew I would be old relative to the rest of the class since I’m turning 35 this month, but I was at least a decade older than everyone in the class, not including the instructor.  The assistant instructor was 24.  When the instructor, Steven (yes, he actually teaches the course), used a student’s sports team as a logic game example another student chimed in to let him know her high school basketball team was superior.  We spent a good ten minutes talking about high school ball teams.  High school.  I don’t even remember what that was anymore.  Then in case I had any feelings of plucky spring chicken left, the instructor talked to one of the student about how his mom called to arrange for his taking this course.  His mom.

The class itself was interesting enough.  He takes a much more simple approach to looking at rules, instead of drilling us with ways to memorize shorthands and logic mapping. I thought the course would drill in all the stuff I can’t seem to memorize from the different workbooks, instead he’s telling us to not sweat the small stuff.  It’s a nice different approach.  I did take the Kaplan SAT prep course in high school and I felt that they had a very set approach…like if I bought some Kaplan study guides, I would pretty much get the exact thing when I take their prep course.  It would make sense for them to take that approach since they are a national company and they have to duplicate their teaching methods across the nation.  Steven’s approach is a lot less rigid, just read the rules and put a mark next to it if it’s not a hard and fast rule, so you can go back and check it.  On one hand, I like this method because I don’t frustrate the hell out of myself from trying to remember which freaking arrow I should have used in the shorthand notation.  On the other hand, I really like the beauty of a well-charted logic map with almost all possibility and impossibles plotted.  This beautiful chart can be costly though, I end up spending more than half of my 8.75 minutes charting and not looking at the questions and woe is the chart with a shorthand that I did wrong.

All in all, I think this course could be a good compliment to study guides by showing a slightly different approach to the same problem.  The nice thing is, there are some things that he does deem very important to remember and it’s usually mentioned in the books already, so you have the important stuff laser etched in.  The class is 4 hours long, from 1 to 5 every Saturday, starting from week two, there will be a practice LSAT test every Saturday from 9 to 12, so there goes my Saturday bingo.