A Week in Harrisburg, PA

So my new client is in Harrisburg, PA. I spent my first week out there in a hotel doing some real work finally on the client. Lorry and Katelyn came with me, which is always better then being in a hotel by myself. Katelyn loves to swim in the pools which Lorry also loves, so coming with me to the hotels offers this little treat for them. I guess we did just receive our pool passes, so they will be enjoying there time her at home this summer as well. We'll see how crowded the pool gets hopefully it's fun for them.

I actually only work 4 days a week this week because we decided to work 10 hours a day so that we could have a short to non-existent Friday. So I do have to listen in on a call for a bit to tell them we are actually doing stuff. One of our managers (the more junior one) has a desire to stay on top of us on the work in progress. The more senior one actually knows what's going on. So, I am a little annoyed by the meeting, but it's my jobs so what the hay.

I actually found out about a website http://watchseinfeldonlinefullepisodes.com it has some annoying thing I think tries to steal your personal information, but I just skip over it and keep on watching the episodes. I love it.

I bought a sweet bunk bed so I don't have to worry about buying a bed for another decade. It has a full on the bottom and a twin on the top. I think it's funny because the full is big enough for Lorry and I, but it hold our little girl in it, which is cute. Lorry always falls asleep in there with her, which is where she is tonight so I'll probably get this bed to myself. It's nice to be able to really stretch out once in a while.

Well universe, I have my free Friday tomorrow, so wish me some relaxation.

Church & BBQ

So this weekend was great. The four day weekend was spent at home with my awesome family. I also spent time doing my lesson, which I procrastinated until the last minute. That was a little stressful, because I typically get my lesson prepared far in advance, I had just been working a lot of hours the last month, so it was hard to get myself to do it.

Memorial day was spent at a BBQ that a member of our ward puts on every year. Apparently this is the 13th-ish time since he couldn't remember when they started. The story of when they started he remembered though. Some friends of his wanted to have a get together on Memorial Day so that they would make and share some recipes they had wanted to make. They discovered that they would end up making six meals for six people, which was a bit too much. So they decided to invite whoever wanted to come over. 13 years later this is a well populated event. There was probably close to 70 people in attendance. They had some okay food, a typical LDS potluck.

I enjoyed seeing everyone, and Katelyn ate way too much desert. She is getting extremely independent and enjoys running away from us to the extent that she can still see us. If she can't see us then it's scary (scary for her and myself). There is no doubt that I'm very protective of my little girl and always try to take the extra step to insure her well-being.

Lorry also enjoyed herself, she got to talk to quite a few people. We also made some new acquaintances while we were there. Some people from a different ward came as a guest to the activity and it turned out they were from Spokane, WA, which is about two hours north of where Lorry grew up. They actually came to find out that they are related to her brother's fiances who he will be marrying in a little over a month. They actually said "I can't believe she's old enough to get married" I thought that was funny.

It was a nice weekend, and now I'm back at work. My client is taking some time to get off the ground, because the first steps of an audit have to be completed before we can go crazy and really start tackling the tasks we need to complete.

Well, universe have a good day and I hope to see you tomorrow.   

Relaxing

So I had a pretty relaxing day today. I just slept in until about 10AM which was super nice. Lorry was babysitting for someone this morning and she locked the door so that I could sleep. The kids did break in earlier and Lorry said "Be quiet he's sleeping" the kids "SSHHHHHH... SSHHHH!!" It made me laugh silently, I was trying to pretend to be asleep, because I really did want to go back to sleep.

I then woke up and just spent some time with everyone and it was nice just to watch them play and for Lorry and myself to just make sure they didn't get too crazy.

We also rented a movie last night it was the mission impossible 4 movie. It was okay. I had to take it back and Katelyn and I decided to stop by Goodwill. We spent some time reading books in the kid section. Katelyn read some books for about 20 minutes. I just watched her and waited. She was cute and I was planning on buying some any ways. Board books cost a lot of money to buy new, yet you can get them for 3/$1.00 at Goodwill. I always buy about six books when we go. Sometime they have writing in them but she doesn't care and I still enjoy reading them with her.

We then walked through some of the toys. She found a little ice cream truck that should could ride on. It had about 12 buttons that said different things like "Look both ways before crossing the street" and "Push the fudge ice cream" which there is a button for. She sat there for about half an hour just pushing buttons, and following me around a couple of other sections on her little ice cream truck. Then I knew we needed to go. I was hoping that she would have gotten bored with it by this time, but she didn't. I took her hand to go and she took about ten steps away, and then it hit her, she wasn't going to get the ice cream truck. So let go of my hand and started to run away. I chase/walked around a clothes rack, in the women's section, while she ran a couple circles around before she crawled under the clothes rack. Katelyn has develop the understanding that if I run one way she runs the other. So I know if I move she will just go the other way, so I just stayed still. She looked up at me very cutely from the other side of the rack. I couldn't follow her underneath because the bars were too close together for me to get threw. After waiting for what felt like 5 minutes she finally just got up and ran for the ice cream truck. I figured I'd give her a few more minutes, and then I took her off of it. She started to cry her sad, yet cute cry and I took her to the counter so I could pay for the books.

Now I'm home and she's getting ready for bed. It's been uneventful, yet wonderful. I enjoy my moments at home.

A Four Day Weekend

So I am on an awesome client right now, it's a big one, and it's a first year. I realize to other auditors this seems like a nightmare, I know the hours will be terrible when we get closer to the deadline, but I also feel like I will learn so incredibly much from this client by the time I'm threw I'll be an all-star. So I take my terrible hours with pride. I have spent the last week studying loan securitization, governmental accounting, and trying to grasp this monster of a client.

First thing though is I have a four day weekend. I have minor project I have to do for work, but it will take maybe 10 minutes tomorrow and I'll be good to go. I also need to finish up the lesson I'm suppose to give on Sunday. Then I think I will probably just clean up. We need to make some room in our home, it's getting a little crazy to have so many useless items in this place. Obviously this means that they are useless to me, Lorry has a difficult time getting rid of things and I personally at times and disgusted by the amount of stuff I have accumulated.

We will probably hang out with Lorry's brother's family in Alexandra, VA which will be nice. I generally don't like to do too much on my days off. I feel like my job takes a lot out of me, so I just like to stay home when I don't have to be anywhere. I normally try to clean up and work on skills with Katelyn. I actually was so proud yesterday. I told Katelyn the letters of the Alphabet and asked her to tell me their sounds and she probably knows 21 of 26 letters. We have always used the flash cards, so this was really cool. In addition to her sitting on her potty independently.

She is my little princess and I want her to have some of the opportunities and experiences I never had.I want her to be very smart very early so she can focus on things that matter like volunteering, coming up with business ideas, and basically change the world for good.

Well, goodnight Universe.

Wish me luck in my job.

Unexpected Expenses and Potty Power

I try to be an extremely frugal person. One way that I try to achieve financial success is to remove money from my control whenever I can. I have money that goes to a 401k, I have money that automatically goes into an after tax investment account. I have additional amounts taken out of my paycheck for income taxes so that I get a larger refund and am not tempted to spend the money when I get it.

So I make it so that we feel poor all the time by decreasing our income by so much. Most of the time it gives me a slight discomfort which is exactly how I want to feel. Lately though we have had a couple of unpredictable  mostly associated with out car. We have spent about $3000 this year in vehicle expenses and it actually took up a large part of our tax refund and income in general. So we are dangerously close to going into our meager emergency savings account, and we have been trying very hard to reverse this trend. This week though while driving to my new client who is an hour and a half away I discovered a leak in my radiator fluid, because my gauge when off. It cost us a few hundred bucks to fix and now it's messed up our cash balance and I keep trying to come up with ways to avoid taking money out of that saving account, but it just sucks.

I'm glad I work as a professional and am currently in some slow time on the client so my supervisor let me take most of the day to get it fixed and lucky was able to get it all done in one day. Also there was a really nice auto repair shop close to where I work that was recommended by several people so I really lucked out there. We'll recover, it just sucks.

Potty Power is a video that I checked out from the Library.  Which was one of the ones I saw on Amazon.com as being very effective. We brought it home which a bunch of other videos that I checked out, but this one is Katelyn's favorite. Lorry even told me today that while watching the video Katelyn put her potty seat on the adult potty and sat on it, on her own. This is huge, which is another positive for Dad's love of educational DVDs. I really enjoy seeing her get so smart and learning. There is one negative to this video though it definitely manipulates the kids by saying over and over that diapers are for little kids and going to the potty by yourself is for big kids. I personally don't like this type of persuasion because I feel like this same reasoning gets used by peers to get kids to do things they really don't want to do. If you want to be cool, you have to do what the cool kids do. Overall I like the video, it's very entertaining for little kids and we can see the results. I think I will have to come up with a way to neutralize the effects of this type of manipulation and I haven't really figured out a solid plan for it yet.

I love this family of mine.

Goodnight Universe.

"I've Got Potty Power!!!"

New client and New books

So first off my summer is going to be mainly in Harrisburg, PA. This is where my summer client is. It's a really cool client, they are a government lender so I get government experience and lending experience in one shot. Also this will be the only client that I have been on for a long time that we are actually retaining next year. Some of the companies I've audited have been acquired over the last year, so who every audits the parent company gets the job. Oh, well. Hopefully this will be my client.

I'll be staying in a hotel three nights a week, which means I will get a ton of Marriott points. I eventually plan on saving up enough of these so that I can live in a hotel for a year. Housing cost so much money out here so a year without having to pay rent sounds even more appealing then the down side of living in a hotel. I always try to remind myself, I lived in my car for a while in college, I can make anything work. Also it's nice to live in a hotel because A. my commute is shorter and B. my home is always cleaned. Lorry puts me in a bind, she's not the best house keeper, yet she doesn't like it when it's dirty. Also she doesn't like it when I clean or the idea of me paying someone to come clean. So basically my house is dirty unless someone important is coming over, or Lorry is out of the house long enough for me to clean everything.

Alright, other than that. I've been really into some business books I've read recently. I finished start something that matters by Blake Mycoskie and Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. I enjoyed the Steve Jobs book even though I'm not very interested in Macs, but enjoy entrepreneurs, also a senior manager I work with was reading it so I figured I'd pick up some talking points. I really enjoyed the book and came away really respecting Jobs' passion for awesome products. It also reviled what I knew all along, he was a human being. He was wierd and honestly on the brink of failure with Next & Pixar. I think if not for Steve Wozniak there would have been no Steve Jobs'. I also think this work in reverse as well no Jobs equals no Woz. Overall I enjoyed the book.

I also read Guy Kawasaki reality check lately, which I really enjoyed, he's a Mac-boy that is not a venture capital guy that gives a lot of business advice in Silicon Valley. I'll get to that one later.

So one of the most influential books I've ever read was Banker for the Poor by  Muhammad Yunus. If you don't know this book or this man's story, you should get it at your local library or buy it. He was a pioneer of micro-financing for poor people. I also read this book about the time of a BYU-I entrepreneur day where one of the people came from Wikipedia and he talked about business that has a purpose in changing the world for the better. This created an entire new perspective of business for me. I love the idea of starting a business that changes the world for good. Which leads me to my favorite recent book Start Something that Matter by Blake Mycoskie. He is the founder of Tom's shoes. I bet you know someone that owns a pair. Blake started a company that sells shoes and everytime someone buys a pair of shoes Tom's shoes will donate a pair of shoes to a poor kid in Latin America or Africa. This book is awesome because Blake tells a bunch of stories about companies that are trying to change the world for good such as method cleaning products, charity water, and FEED project. He also gives some really good business advice about why doing good is go for the person in need, for the giver, and for business.

I can't wait to be a millionaire so I can leave the jobs where I feel cool and go to the jobs where I can help other people. I actually always look up the executives at every job I work on to figure out where they started out. It seems to be 50% come from public accounting and every time I discover one of them comes out of public accounting I get a little happy inside, because I know someday that will be me.

Well that's my update on things. Reality Check also re-committed myself to writing in a blog, because it's in a blog format and Guy encourages people to write in their blog even if their dog is the only one that reads. I also know I should be keeping a journal, so I'll try a little harder. Also I feel like I'm writing to the Universe when I post a blog online.

So goodnight Universe, may your stars always shine.

Education

I have spent more and more time thinking about Katelyn's education and like I am I worry about it all. I worry about getting in from preschool through college. I want her to aim her sights so incredible high that if she misses the stars she'll still hit the moon.

So I spend a lot of my time researching things that will help her in the future. This started before she was born, of course, so my first book I got on the concept with "home school year by year"  I bought it on amazon for 5 bucks or whatever and it contains a pretty good description of items that need to be learned every year from preschool to high school. I think it's a good book to have just to keep things in perspective. It definitely helped me understand the different steps that are taken in language arts, math, science, history/social sciences. It also helps me to understand where Katelyn should be and when.

I actually want to make sure that I accelerate the whole process, but it lets me see what a 3rd grade reading level actually means.

I also spend a lot of my time compiling online resources that I think she would like, I keep them on a separate wordpress blog, basically because at the time I started the resource list I was experimenting with wordpress. Here's the site if you want it. http://school4katelyn.wordpress.com/

I am constantly trying to get new things and really I'm held back by a few things things. Katelyn is 21 months now so basic communication skills are still lacking, she doesn't understand me well and I don't understand her well. She also doesn't have several basic motor skills that would enable her to learn to use a computer. Also I have financial and time resources that are extremely limited. I spend on average 60+ hours a week at work (public accounting) so I do what I can.

I love that we are starting to see more comprehensive online school such as time4learning.com, K12.com, and headoftheclass.com. I think that education cost enough in time and energy, and the world would be a better place if more people obtained more education.

I also found an online university that is free. The problem is that it's still young and isn't accredited and I personally hope it will succeed. I made a very tiny donation and how I can do more work for them in the future.  uopeople.com.

Also lately I have been loving my job, I have to be honest about the hours and the political situation that goes into public accounting, they suck. I actually love the job because I get to work with some smart young people and I also work on some of the largest client's in the world. We talk about billions of dollars are work and the people I work closely with are making from 10x more then me to 100x more then me, which is exciting when I find out that they started out at the same firm as me. The experience is also incredible, 10 months I have learned how one of the largest insurance companies in the U.S operates, I have learned how a large hospital operates, I have learned a little bit about how a state's finance operate (a very little, most of it was over my head), also I have gotten to learn how a large construction/re-seller of modular building works. I also got to work and a tech company that made their IPO short before I got on the job. I think it's incredibly exciting.

Well I just felt like writing today. I'm about to leave work on Saturday, and just had some down time to write.