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.

I don't know what or how the kids are learning these days, but I remember doing all sorts of exercises in maths (on lower levels) with not just numbers, but pictures of coins and notes, and cutouts for pretend-shopping. I even had some at home (I kept finding them everywhere for quite some time).

Money that's just sitting on a card isn't easy to visualize - not for kids, and often not for adults, either. It's easy to swipe a card, and you don't get the same feeling of seeing a number on a screen than seeing the actual coins/notes disappear.

I'd think it's similar to how handwriting VS writing on a computer is. You can manage in your life without doing much handwriting, but handwriting forms different and often stronger connections in the brain especially at a young age. Kids usually learn best with a mix of visual and tactile approaches, preferably letting all the senses be at play.

Yes, money is supposed to be a simple replacement for bartering\trading.

How it got complex, you know, but the pin pointed exact time and place would be worth researching.

I will admit I was glib. For future reference, I know how truly rich people dress and yeah, it's sloppy and broken into when clothing is the issue.

At Microsoft, my father and I made fun of how awful Bill Gates had for a haircut, to the point we dressed up my father's apprentice from Murfreesboro, Tennessee to look like a long-lost son.

Not even the richest man at one point in the world was able to have a decent haircut.

Money can buy fashionable looks, but you'll end up broke.

^ I'd wager his haircut probably was by choice, or he just didn't care too much, since most of the time at most hair salons (even the cheapest ones) you select the basic haircut you want for a set price (coloring and other addons cost more, of course), and I'd think most hairdressers with proper training can do a decent haircut. However, there are plenty of men of that age walking around with that kind of haircut (I can think of at least a couple I know) - At some point it's probably just receding/thinning hair made into something that looks at least halfway workable.

As for clothes, some of the billionaire-genius-nerds tend to pick a style and general coloring where everything matches, and stick with that - it makes choosing what to wear each day a lot easier, so they can use their brain power on other things.

He could have used money on expensive hair treatments (that likely wouldn't work anyway) and expensive clothes, but he probably chose not to. His job wasn't to look fashionable.

We used to joke about Gates and his hair because, well... It looked kinda like a toupee he fished out of the garbage at times. Usually disheveled.

Then again... My father started 7 levels below Gates. When Gates was about to leave, my father was promoted 2 levels higher, made him 5 levels below.

(Yes, I once had the honor of living in the lap of luxury and then, when my grandmother passed 10 years ago, I had a reality check that we could no longer afford to live in the Seattle area. It had been 8 years since returning to reunite with family.)

Then again, Gates has reached old age and is donating money to worthy causes because, like they say "You can't take it with you."

If Bill Gates walked around with a mullet, I wouldn't care. I think he's a creep. I wasn't a fan of Steve Jobs either, but he did start the whole thing about wearing a 'uniform'.

Steve Jobs didn't walk into his office at Apple every day in a expensive suit even though he could afford them. Instead his uniform was jeans and a black shirt. If there is any truth in the articles written about him, he also didn't fill his home with stuff. He died before Temu was a thing, but I'm willing to bet he wouldn't have "shopped like a billionaire" on the Temu app if Temu was around at the time.

Billionaires don't create walls of stuffed animals on their beds for YouTube views while feeding their dopamine addiction. Before somebody crawls up my butt about the dopamine thing, girlfriend has admitted recently she has a shopping problem.

Mellow Sunday TEMU HAUL (not sponsored) | September 22, 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OeHwavPv1s

I don't look to multi-billionaires for money / life advice. Elon Musk is a trust fund baby with a drug problem. Jeff Bezos is no longer CEO of Amazon, but is still on the board. Amazon started out as a small book selling business. Look it at now; it is too big and a hot mess.

Then of course there is the new generation of delulu that loves to put all of their stupidity online via things like TikTok. People getting fired from their jobs because they wanted to win $10,000 from a internet celeb who isn't going to be around when these people need to pay their rent, feed their kids, ect...

Workers Risk It All for $10,000 in Latto’s Viral Brokey Challenge!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66eeXY14qbE

I prefer to stick with Dave Ramsey and Calab Hammer. Dave Ramsey is a self-made millionaire who went broke once. He flew way too close to the sun over real estate. He had to rebuild his life. I don't know what Calab's deal is other than he was buried in debt from college and whatever. He too had to dig his way out. It meant budgeting, living well below his means and not getting himself into that situation again.

True. I admire those who make attempts on their own accord when money is involved with the self made millionaire\billionaire role.

I am currently working on getting myself into a life worth writing about in terms of comfort and needs met.

Besides, I found out that I live in an unfair job market. Mainly because of neurodivergent discrimination where sizeable numbers state the job market sometimes forces employees out, the accommodations are lacking and half the time, the overall feel is obvious that neurodivergent employees do not feel safe when it concerns fair treatment.

Although my neurodivergency shouldn't define me, I still have to care for symptoms of meltdowns, shutdowns and other outward signs that make me feel like I am worried for my livelihood

I also deal with a crippling fear of meeting people mixed with an introverted personality. So finding jobs is a lot harder, because they demand work in an office.

I think the stress of finding a job is enough to drive me crazy.