From 2008-11-27

This is what I'm thankful for! This is Syd fixing up her little car. We lifted the hood so she could get underneith. She's doing very good work on her way to helping dada work on the car some day. Happy Thanksgiving Sydney!

Sydney and Santa

From 2008-11-15

Since I wrote my last post her vocabulary has doubled. New pics of her are on Picasa through the link above.

Syd had a horrible time at her first attempt to see Santa. We went to Montgomeryville mall and went right in to see Santa. There was no line and we got right up front, as we got closer she got more anxious. Once we got into his little hut she began to go thermonuclear, clinging to mommy and screaming and crying. We put her on Santa's lap and her mood did not improve.

So we took a walk around the mall, got some dinner and played on the Reactrix. We stood in front of Santa's cottage as other little children went up told Santa what they wanted for Christmas. Sydney watched for a while, then we walked up to Santa. Same reaction.

We're going to try a different Santa somewhere else to see if we can get a better reaction. Cross your fingers.

Syd Words

From Sydney 18 Months

Mostly for documentation purposes but also for peoples' entertainment, we've assembled a current list of words that Sydney says. It's really amazing how fast kids learn and how great it feels to teach them a new word. She understands about 10x the number of words listed here. This is a list of the words she says and clearly understands what she's saying.

1. Mama
2. Dada
3. me
4. baby
5. wet
6. rain
7. ball
8. balloon
9. bubble
10. hi
11. bye
12. roll
13. lunch
14. nana (banana)
15. apple
16. rub
17. belly
18. back
19. wait
20. go
21. junior
22. milk
23. night-night
24. kitty cat
25. toes
26. eyes
27. belly button
28. tickle
29. stop
30. sticker
31. book
32. cup
33. cheese
34. block
35. jump
36. cold
37. coat
38. sip
39. shoe
40. clap
41. light
42. boo boo
43. pop-pop
44. wow
45. straw
46. suck
47. up

Current economic situation

Not only am I enjoying watching all of wall street fail I also love watching these Fundamental and Technical investors lose their shirts.

1. Why not bailout people in mortgages? I've heard the argument from Obama that you would be paying the banks lots of money for over lending and overvaluing houses. In other words they would make out with the money and profits. A: You would only be paying them back the principal not interest therefore they make no money. B: The current bailout plan is paying them exorbitant amounts of money for the same mortgages. An argument made on wall street I constantly heard was you wouldn't be getting to the root cause of the problem which is the toxic mortgage backed securities. My question is what makes them toxic? Also these securities are so toxic that NO credible investment institution wants to hold them. So why does the government want them? If everyone in the financial industry thinks they are crap how are the taxpayers ever going to see any profit?

Why aren't banks making more of an effort to work with defaulting home owners? This is no fault of the homeowners. It's 100% the fault of the banks. The bank's ONLY responsibility in granting a mortgage is to make sure the person can pay it back. They ignored that, hoping people would fail to be able to pay and thought they would end up with a property worth more than they paid.

2. Commercial paper not available or too expensive? I find it HARD the believe that if I promise to pay back at 10% after 3 months that I would have trouble finding someone to lend me money. I think it's too expensive to borrow this money and banks don't want it to cut into their profits so they aren't borrowing it, hoping the rates will fall.

3. Borrowing as a business plan. Positive cash flow but high debit. Why not wait till you have the money to do something? Business and government always telling people to save money but they are doing the same thing. A whole CULTURE of NO SAVINGS. You don't NEED to borrow to run a business or municipality. Why not build up capital and use that capital to open another location rather than borrow the money? I have no sympathy for these business plans. Another option would be to use investor (VC) capital. You just need to restructure how you do business.

More stupidity

All this talk about being green, and reducing waste, and reducing dependency on foreign oil. One of the big culprits I hear a lot about is plastic water bottles. How about making them glass. Duh, glass is 100% recyclable you can turn glass into glass again as many times as you want. Snapple does it, plus the water would taste a lot better. If you don't want to carry it around then switch the water to a reusable plastic container for traveling.

Real Estate Tax

If your one of the people lucky enough to be living in a state that has a real estate tax then you know how unequal and unfair it is. The real estate tax isn't based on your income level like most other taxes. Which is what makes it so retarded. It should be based on your income, at a fixed level, say 6%. It wouldn't be any more complicated than state income tax and I think it would make more sense especially for people with low or no income, and the richest people would have to pay more. No assessments, no need for a cap, no need for tax relief, and all that garbage. If you own a property you pay X% of your income. This would only be for primary residences. Investment, and vacation properties would have to be at their own level which could be increased or decreased based on the economy and other factors, vacation homes in jersey could be taxed higher since so many people have them and primary residences could be lower. Investment property tax rates could be lowered to encourage investment in certain states.

Don't forget with real estate tax you never own your property, you only rent it from the government.

syd sick :-(

Our poor little baby had her first bug. Sydney had a bad stomach virus and wouldn't stop throwing up. She ended up getting very dehydrated so we took her to the ER at doylestown Hospital, they gave us some medication to stop the throwing up. Which worked but she kept having lots of diarrhea. So we took her to Grandview hospital because it has a CHOP pediatric unit. In the ER they gave her an IV for rehydration and some sugar because it was critically low. She then seemed to be doing better. That's when this picture was taken. But moments after this picture was taken she threw up everything, so Sydney had to stay overnight.

She was a very big and brave girl throughout the whole experience.