Monday, December 29, 2014
Christmas Letter 2004
A blast from the past... Trying to find all of our Christmas letters from prior years. I've found about 5 of them. I know there are about 6-7 more out there and I'm still searching. This one is from 2004.
Monday, September 15, 2014
Friday, August 01, 2014
Price vs Volume Calculation
Entering this here so that I don't forget. I seem to use this often these days!
Volume effect = (new volume – old volume) x original price
Price effect = (new price – old price) x new volume
Courtesy of http://blog.treadwellmedia.com/archives/13
Volume effect = (new volume – old volume) x original price
Price effect = (new price – old price) x new volume
Courtesy of http://blog.treadwellmedia.com/archives/13
Wednesday, April 02, 2014
Frozen is the best movie of all time
Maybe it's party talking, or the fact that my kids and Rachel are out of town at the moment, but I am feeling very nostalgic about the movie Frozen. When your kids or family is away, the "Do You Want To Build A Snowman" song suddenly becomes a sad and lonely melancholy melody.
A week or so ago the four of us got in the car to rent Frozen from the local Redbox. The first Redbox we visited was out. We went to 4 more Redboxes around Tacoma, then Safeway and then the local video store, but they were all out! So we rented on Amazon. The whole family instantly loved it. Including Jude, who originally thought he was going to hate it. The next day Jude and I went to Best Buy and bought the DVD. We all watched it again that night. Then the next morning. Then a couple more times. Then again this past weekend!
At the same time we've also been listening to the Soundtrack on Spotify dozens and dozens of times. Greyson knows most of the words. Jude keeps replaying "Let It Go," over and over again. It's the cutest whole-family bonding movie we've ever experienced!
As I was doing some research into Frozen, the story became so much more fascinating: That it took Disney decades to bring it to fruition. That the the songwriting team that developed such memorable melodies was actually a young husband and wife couple. That a young composer (Cristophe Beck) wrote such a beautiful sweeping score. And that a young mom (Jennifer Lee) made a mid-career switch to storytelling and became the award-winning director. And who knew Kristen Bell could sing!
I love that our whole family loves this movie. Maybe it's that I'm all by myself this evening but thinking about what a great time our family has together watching Frozen makes me really miss them...
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Note to Self: Don't Forget to Add These Stories
The allure of Facebook and Twitter is that it makes posting microscopic updates simple. It makes us lazy humans. No more thoughtful (longwinded) blog posts... so as the months progress I need to remind myself to update this blog for the following stories:
1) The cost of buying 1/2 a pig and 1/4 cow from a local farm. There isn't a lot of good information on what you get for your money, and knowing this, I specifically maintained pictures and weights of the boxes of final meat vs the originally quoted weight. Plus "before" and "after" prices to provide a good point of reference between buying your own cow vs purchasing piecemeal at the local supermarket.
2) Rachel's 35th birthday party in which a dozen or so of our awesome Tacoma friends celebrated her with food and music. The no-contest highlight of the evening was at the local music venue when the band asked for all ladies with birthdays to come on stage (nice coincidence). Rachel walked on stage with well over a hundred loud and boisterous Tacoma Gen X'ers looking on, and proceeded to back-up sing Def Leppard's Pour Some Sugar on Me. I have pictures! Not because I want to embarrass Rachel. Quite the opposite. I want to celebrate her beauty and youth and sense of fun for future generations. Rachel is not just a super mom and finance / accounting / project manager / process improvement super star nerd brainiac, but she is also a dancing and singing and partying queen!
3) Greyson's 2nd visit to the ER for yet another head wound. Can you believe it!? That boy has a target on his head. Actually this is a good story because we learned from our mistakes the first time we went to the ER and paid something like $1500 out of pocket. This time we went to Urgent Care which was (a) faster, (b) less stressful, and (c) $200 or $300 total out of pocket.
4) Christmas? Not sure if any good stories this past Christmas. I seem to recall it was nice and calm. Oh, actually, the cool story of this past Christmas is this: We stayed at our home in Tacoma. A concious decision on my part not to head down to Oregon when we were down there for Thanksgiving and we were about to go down there for New Years. So Christmas morning was very nice and pleasant. But once the gifts were unwrapped, Christmas suddenly got very boring. Very boring. What do you do!? Well, at around 1:00pm, I suddenly told Rachel, "hey, let's go down to Portland. If we leave in the next 45 minutes we can still have dinner with your family." So I booked a cheap hotel and we loaded the kids up and were gone 45 minutes later. I love being spontaneous and I appreciate Rachel's flexibility and spirit of adventure.
5) Nanny tax spreadsheet. I created a super handy nanny tax payroll tracker that also includes the amounts to include in your quarterly 941 schedules and year-end W2. It is a super awesome one-page spreadsheet for the "do-it-yourself" household employer. In fact, if it takes me a while to update this story with more information and you happen to land on this blog randomly in the meantime and you'd like a copy of this, then just send me an e-mail and I'll e-mail you this spreadsheet directly.
6) Others?.....
1) The cost of buying 1/2 a pig and 1/4 cow from a local farm. There isn't a lot of good information on what you get for your money, and knowing this, I specifically maintained pictures and weights of the boxes of final meat vs the originally quoted weight. Plus "before" and "after" prices to provide a good point of reference between buying your own cow vs purchasing piecemeal at the local supermarket.
2) Rachel's 35th birthday party in which a dozen or so of our awesome Tacoma friends celebrated her with food and music. The no-contest highlight of the evening was at the local music venue when the band asked for all ladies with birthdays to come on stage (nice coincidence). Rachel walked on stage with well over a hundred loud and boisterous Tacoma Gen X'ers looking on, and proceeded to back-up sing Def Leppard's Pour Some Sugar on Me. I have pictures! Not because I want to embarrass Rachel. Quite the opposite. I want to celebrate her beauty and youth and sense of fun for future generations. Rachel is not just a super mom and finance / accounting / project manager / process improvement super star nerd brainiac, but she is also a dancing and singing and partying queen!
3) Greyson's 2nd visit to the ER for yet another head wound. Can you believe it!? That boy has a target on his head. Actually this is a good story because we learned from our mistakes the first time we went to the ER and paid something like $1500 out of pocket. This time we went to Urgent Care which was (a) faster, (b) less stressful, and (c) $200 or $300 total out of pocket.
4) Christmas? Not sure if any good stories this past Christmas. I seem to recall it was nice and calm. Oh, actually, the cool story of this past Christmas is this: We stayed at our home in Tacoma. A concious decision on my part not to head down to Oregon when we were down there for Thanksgiving and we were about to go down there for New Years. So Christmas morning was very nice and pleasant. But once the gifts were unwrapped, Christmas suddenly got very boring. Very boring. What do you do!? Well, at around 1:00pm, I suddenly told Rachel, "hey, let's go down to Portland. If we leave in the next 45 minutes we can still have dinner with your family." So I booked a cheap hotel and we loaded the kids up and were gone 45 minutes later. I love being spontaneous and I appreciate Rachel's flexibility and spirit of adventure.
5) Nanny tax spreadsheet. I created a super handy nanny tax payroll tracker that also includes the amounts to include in your quarterly 941 schedules and year-end W2. It is a super awesome one-page spreadsheet for the "do-it-yourself" household employer. In fact, if it takes me a while to update this story with more information and you happen to land on this blog randomly in the meantime and you'd like a copy of this, then just send me an e-mail and I'll e-mail you this spreadsheet directly.
6) Others?.....
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