Either way, I can't really chew gum. I lost a couple teeth. Only prayer for me is the tooth regrowth medicine from Japan finishes medical trials in my life and is approved.

Either way...life so far is getting better and back on track.

My sleep is no longer disrupted beyond the normal biological reasons.

I am keeping tabs on my emotions.

I am working on a health diary.

Calling this week weird is a understatement.

One example: The electric company decided it would be fun to try to toss me into the middle their drama. They've been told repeatedly not to do this. I don't care about their drama, fights and toxicity. More importantly than that, it is really unprofessional.

Speaking of being unprofessional, in the years we've lived in this house, we've never had a problem with people driving through the yard. The occasional U-turn would happen, but it didn't happen often enough to pay any kind of attention to it. This week, it hasn't only been contractors cutting through the yard, it has also been the mailman. Mail carriers and contractors are not supposed to be doing this. I don't know if it was our regular mailman or his sub.

All that to say, we've got some projects to deal with that I didn't plan on. One side of the driveway is going to become a green, privacy hedge. I contacted the arborist that we've been working with all summer to ask for suggestions of what to plant. He told me what to buy / plant. Our local plant nursery not only has what we need, but they also put them aside making picking them up easy as we won't have to look for them.

For the other side, I want to put in a gate. It isn't going to be for privacy, rather it is so if we need to get a truck in the yard for some reason, the contractor or whoever can come and go without too much fuss. The privacy hedge that we're creating with plants isn't for privacy either. It is a prettier way to keep people out of places they don't belong, while also helping with things like dust and noise.

The gate won't go in until next year. If the "traffic" problem continues, we'll have to find a temporary way to deal with it. Whether that means putting down a railroad tie or two, some beefy tree logs, I don't know, but it is going to be something. There are plenty of places for contractors and the mailman to turn around without bothering anybody. They're using my yard because its easy and they don't have to go out of their way.

Currently working side hustles to fund my life.

Nothing crazy.

Hell, if it involves a commercial for an online bean store with George Wendt as the spokesman
OR
a survey on a movie with George Wendt eating beans...

...it's worth the 2¢ if I fail to meet any criteria.

(The beans and George Wendt association was actually from Animaniacs, where, at the last minute to buy a birthday gift for their therapist\legal guardian, they are hounded by two persistent survey women. I had that happen to me once...it was AWFUL! No wonder the gag of getting rid of them went on for 7 minutes.)

Then again, I am known to be working hard at hardly working and I am a self-taught voice actor for nearly 31 years.

Better buy a bag of Granny Smiths. Someone told me vocal recovery speeds up with a green apple from the tree.

I know risks are involved with any venture. But if you don't take a gamble, you're not living... you're existing. Life is full of gambles. Like "Regular or Decaf?" "Up or Down?" "Red or Blue?"

The reason for my side hustles is to rebuild a trust fund that was set up for me, but was gone in a flash when the 2008 economic downturn came. I was glad I still was able to live in the house I had moved into that year.

I also want to buy the house I am living in right now because I feel like I belong in my community. I am taking to side hustling because I have much bigger fish to fry than just my jealousy over people with lame claims to fame.

I never really like the Kardashian sisters. There's enough plastic in the ocean if they want to act in movies involving a story of mermaids.

Also, self-made millionaire doesn't really exist as a term as wealth is accrued in some way, shape, or form with the assistance of someone else's finances.

Still, I probably would be a good candidate to teach why cash is still King, even when electronic means are widely used. (One example for cash is when shopping in-store, you can actually see how much you are spending and make better financial decisions. With electronic means, it slips through like sand.)

With my 37th birthday coming up, I am reminded of the fact that I am something special, particularly from my parents.

They tell of how that Friday all those years ago led to me being born and my mother felt like, with my father, her family was complete.

My father wrote a poem that sits on my mother's vanity dresser. Bought roses and a card.

He was busy while I was getting the bilirubin cooked off (my liver wasn't fully operational at the start) and my mother recuperated over an easy birth, well compared to my older sister, whom I haven't talked to in 25 years.

My mother dreamt our sisterly relationship would be like the one she has with her younger sister, my aunt. However, some things were not going to be.

I have to work on buying a veggie sushi platter for my birthday and a tiramisu cake. We're celebrating a day early because my parents work on the real day.

If you're talking about Hollywood and so called self-made millionaires, then yes. The Kardashians are billionaires from doing nothing. They peddle product lines, people soak it up because they believe that if they buy some article of clothing or whatever from them, they too will be billionaires just because they're wearing a Kim Kardashian piece of clothing.

This is how marketing works. People are paid lots of money to project to the masses that everything under the roof of a brick and mortar store or a warehouse is a need. On average, most people don't use 80% of the stuff they already own. Society as a whole has a problem with figuring out what is a actual need and a want. It's the same crap that happens in the video game industry with their loot boxes and macrotransactions. The mental gymnastics is slightly different, but not by much.

There is such thing as self-made millionaires. Contrary to what TikTok and the internet sez, people that have busted butt making a life for themselves and have a bank account to go with it don't go around flashing their money. They walk around in normal clothes, they don't go out and buy the most expensive cars, ect... Some of them would prefer to live in a run down house that nobody would touch before they would pay in a dime in interest to a bank for a mortgage. There are plenty of these kinds of people walking around, they blend in, on purpose.

Here lies the difference between the true self-made millionaire and people that want other people to think they're rich. The average self-made millionaire knows their worth and doesn't waste their time flexing on the internet trying to impress other people.

As for the cash vs using plastic thing, people that are disciplined can use plastic and never pay interest. I don't sit in camp self-made millionaire, but I haven't paid a dime in interest on our credit card in a number of years. I use my card like a debit card. I use it, I pay the bill within 24 hours. There is no reason a person has to wait a full month before paying their credit card bill. My bank grumbles at me from time to time because I carry a negative balance that was created by rounding up purchases made over a couple of months. Example: If the grocery bill comes to $96.88, I'll pay $97.00. The overage was built literally with "pocket change".

The bank can mumble and complain all they want. I leave the extra on my card if I need it for something. Whether that be to bring Chica to a emergency vet because she won't stop having seizures, to fix a flat tire on the car... whatever. Yesterday I used part of the overage to pay for the 2 shrubs we bought. We have a emergency fund, but I don't like it use it unless it is a dire emergency.

Money is not complicated. People make it complicated.

The more you can pay for without using a credit card (the wrong way, where you end up paying more than you otherwise would) or taking up loans (unless it's for something that's eventually going to be paid off, and/or is of value itself - a house/apartment, for instance), the better it is for your economy.

Taking up small loans or doing the "fun now, pay double later" route is never going to set a person on a path to a good personal economy, and certainly not on the road to becoming a millionaire (if that's the aim). A lot of people who end up in economic trouble start off with little things - small overdraws on credit, small loans, buying (often expensive) stuff they don't really need, having very expensive hobbies (where materials or gear eat up all savings), or bad habits with high costs (drinking/smoking), and it just spirals out of control.

I think kids when they're young are going to have some value in training with real money. Depending on age, they can struggle to understand money and numbers as a purely electronic concept. As for older kids/teens, the concepts of budgeting and cost of living should definitely be a bigger part of maths.

These days everyone and their mom (and probably grandmother as well) think they can just become influenceers and everything will be alright, but the world isn't run by influencers or youtubers or the like. If all the people who were -just- influencers/youtubers/etc. stopped streaming/writing/etc. one day, and went back to whatever dayjob they otherwise would've had, I'm pretty sure the only change would be in a lack of followers...

I don't know about where you are, but kids are not taught about money here in the US. I'm sure there are parents that have these kinds of conversations at home, ( I still do. My son is one of those people where money runs through his hands like water. It drives me crazy...) but they don't teach about money in schools anymore.

When I was in high school, I took a economics class. Did it do anything? In hindsight, not really. It taught how to balance a checkbook; that was the extent of it. They didn't teach about things like compounding interest, the calculation of how much interest would cost on something like a car loan or mortgage, ect... I had to learn those things via experience. That includes dumb things like credit card debt. It took 3 times of being in credit card debt before I figured out that no amount of stuff was worth what I was paying for it at the time.

I got a credit card application the other day. Since The Boy was home and we were hanging out in the kitchen chit-chatting, I read to him what it said. The interest rate was 30% ( average interest these days) for people with "good" credit. The rate went to 40% for people that didn't pay their bill on time. I asked him if anything was worth paying a additional 40%. He told me no, then went on to talk about how he's glad he doesn't have credit cards. He knows he'd be in a whole lot of trouble if he had one.