Justin Germino Ramblings

My youngest son transitioned from sleeping in his crib to sleeping in the bottom bunk of his brother’s bunk bed on Friday night, this is the first phase as we needed to have him sleeping in a big boy bed before we started potty training him (or trying to). At first we had thought the two brothers would keep each other up all night playing games and fooling around the first few nights they slept in the same room together but instead the oldest fell asleep first and the youngest calmly went to sleep in the big boy bed and didn’t give us any trouble. I honestly think he was a little scared to come out of bed so he just stayed in the bed until he fell asleep, his older brother had told us that he asked if there were “any monsters in his room” before they went to sleep.

This means that our youngest child’s room now has an empty crib which feels a little strange, we have had at least one “baby” in the house for the past six years with the two children.

-Justin Germino

Tonight is the Casa Grande Electric Light parade and while it isn’t as large as the Phoenix Light Parade there are still dozens of cars and floats decked out in Xmas lights rolling down the main Florence blvd here. My kids have been wanting to go, especially my oldest son whose school will have a float in the parade this year. The nice thing about having Christmas Light parades in Arizona is that the temperature will only be in the 60’s and will be mild and comfortable with a jacket.

Nothing beats holding a cup of hot cocoa with the family while watching the parade and then going home to warm up.

-Justin Germino

After just recovering from the flu that assaulted the family it seems I am coming down with another cold even after my lungs aren’t fully recovered from the previous flu. Nothing is more annoying than getting sick with a 2nd illness before you even recover from the first one. This second bug appears to be more head and sinus related and I am at least able to function, just sound very nasal and feel congested. At some point I am thinking of getting those ultraviolet light devices you install in rooms around your house to vaporize bacteria and viruses in the air. I wonder if they actually reduce the chances of getting sick?

-Justin Germino

Last Weekend I reached another Twitter milestone by arriving at 3000 followers on my dragonblogger twitter account.  I have been doing my Random Twitter Poetry game for so long now that yesterday was my 250th Random Twitter poem.  I have new people play my game every day it seems and my average contributions to the game are double what they were when I started just over a year ago.  I am just thrilled that 3000 people have found me interesting enough to follow and stay with me whether it is for my technology blog, Heroes reviews, Poetry, small talk or my personal diary and reflections.

I speak to about a dozen or so twitter followers almost every day, they are my “regulars” while others drop in from day to day.  Some have crossed over and follow me on Facebook as well, but my facebook account only has just under 200 followers compared to my twitter account.

-Justin Germino

One of the things I do is contemplate how much differently I would have spend the last decade of my life financially had I had the foresight to see how I would end up today. Too many people end up in the trap of working and barely being able to pay the bills, only to have one emergency or unplanned expense drive you past due on payments and threaten to topple your whole financial infrastructure. Most of the time this is the fault of the individual or family who allows this situation to happen, but in even those cases it can mostly be due to ignorance and lack of financial education. Somebody had asked me the following question recently:

• Today, if you were to inherit or win a million dollars (after taxes), how would you spend a million dollars?

I can tell you that when I was eighteen years of age I would have thought that money would have lasted forever, and I would have splurged and gotten all my material wants and desires. Now in my thirties I am much wiser and realize that a million dollars will last a short time if you “live rich” but can last your whole life if you “live middle class”. The key here is financial security being more important than any single or small time material want. Forget about jewelry, cars, million dollar house or a boat. These items would drain through the money and you would have little to show for it in fifteen years. That is at least how I think about it now that I have been in the financial struggle over the past decade.

I would spend a million dollars by first and foremost getting rid of every monthly payment that I owe. This would involve paying off my house, my car, student loans, credit cards…etc. This would consume about 45% of a million dollars to achieve this goal. Then I would devote 30% into variety of savings and deposits including some in an ING account (50k or so), mutual funds, bonds and maybe some physical assets like gold in case something dramatic happened to American currency or the market. 10% would be put toward my son’s college educations and deposited into their 529 accounts.

The last remainder (lets say 20-50k) or so I would spend on vacations with my wife. I do this because spending quality time on vacations and enjoying the experience of a week breathing and exploring life and the world is worth far more than any tangible item. I would rather spend five thousand dollars on a memory with her than purchasing a 70″ LCD TV or something like that.

Bottom line:

If I were to win a million dollars I would wisely use most of it to secure my financial situation and I wouldn’t quit my job at all. I would continue to use that income to help keep my situation happy, because happiness partly comes from not stressing and worrying about finances.

So tell me readers, how would you spend a million dollars?  I want to hear from your point of view on what you would do with the money.

-Justin Germino

As if fate isn’t cruel enough, 2 weeks after putting my first dog to sleep I have to take my only remaining dog Porky to the vet. He has been having this skin growth on his chest for several weeks and it keeps getting bigger. I am not a vet but it looks like a histiocytoma growing on his skin. Our oldest Boston Terrier did grow one when he was about 3 years old and we had to have it surgically removed. If you Wiki Histiocytoma you will see that Boston Terriers are a common breed for developing them, in addition to Bulldogs, Greyhounds and Boxers.

Though it may be a benign growth they can grow to be quite large and they feel hard, this will likely be another several hundred dollar surgery if it does turn out Porky has a Histiocytoma. It would make sense as Porky has tons of skin allergy problems and a Histiocytoma is related to the immune system.

I tell readers that pets are expenses and can come down with unforeseen medical costs at any time, it is no wonder that more and more pets are being given up at shelters across the country in these tough economic times.

-Justin Germino

I have a ton of work to catch up on and I dread that feeling you get when you have to dive back into a full workload after having a week off of work. Worse still is that my week off was not really a vacation but spent with the entire family being sick in one of the worst odd flu/cold like illnesses you could imagine. Half the family took ill with fevers for two days, and we all had nasal, throat infections, and now dealing with the lung infection last stage of the illness.

I will probably work a few extra hours these coming days to catch up on the work I have missed, though I caught up on all my emails because I kept checking my work emails daily.

-Justin Germino

I am a huge fan of RPG games but as I have grown older I don’t seem to be able to stomach poor English translation and weak story lines like I used to as a teenager. Tales of Symphonia II was a game with lots of potential that was crushed by such poor voice overs and weak story and writing early on that I just couldn’t stomach playing the game more than the first few hours. The game is so slow paced with forced recaps of what characters have previously said with no way to skip past that even my six year old who was watching me play kept saying how boring it was.

I do enjoy role playing games with depth, storyline and don’t mind slower paced ones that hold my interest, but Tales of Symphonia was just lacking from the beginning. The battles amounting to little more than “block” press A, Press A, “block” in the early part felt more like a timed action game than an RPG.

So far I have yet to find a good RPG for the Nintendo Wii, not to say there aren’t any Wii games but I just don’t seem to have been able to pick up something in the caliber range of “Final Fantasy X” or the original Dragon Warrior series.

This is one of the many reasons why I love GameFly, I can just try a game and send it back if I don’t like it and wait for the next one to come.

-Justin Germino

A few weeks ago I broke my shovel by digging out a plant, I was using my triangular shovel as leverage and it snapped in two trying to pull out a dead palm tree. On top of that I can no longer find a tape measure in my house except for a little dinky 24″ one that won’t suffice.

As if that weren’t enough my wife went to grill steaks the other week and the propane tank on the gas grill died before the steaks were finished cooking, they had to be finished on stove top pan.

I clearly am in need of some hardware supplies and like it or not those will probably be my main Christmas gifts this year, though they can’t wait until Christmas as I need to grill and measure things before then. In addition there are plants to uproot and plant in the yard.

-Justin Germino

Every year I start putting up the Christmas lights on the day after Thanksgiving, while other people are shopping Black Friday I am testing and untangling thousands of Christmas lights. We have near 10,000 Xmas lights and it takes the entire weekend to put them all up, we don’t actively light them nightly until around December 5th but like to be proactive in setting them up.

We have 3 indoor Christmas Trees this year and all of them are fake, real ones are just too much of a cleanup mess, though the pine smell is wonderful. While I do the holiday decorations my wife typically makes her famous Turkey Noodle Soup from scratch with the left over turkey. This is such a delicious and hearty meal and I look forward to it every year.

-Justin Germino