Changing Rides

For the last four years, our family has ridden the roller coaster that is entrepreneurship, with exciting highs that take your breath away and scary lows that make you want to close your eyes.  My husband is a remarkable man, gifted with the confidence to make every twist and turn smooth and carefree.  His capacity for learning new things, solving hard problems and negotiating relationships keeps him ahead of the game.  And though his capacity is far beyond what anyone else I know can absorb, he too has a limit.  You can read his own words about leaving Snoball on his blog.

So we found ourselves stepping off the self-employment roller coaster and settling into more of a traditional ride.  He didn't have to search long before companies started lining up to interview him.  I'm not the only one that recognizes something special in him.  At the end of November, he started a new job with Indeed.com.  I had never even heard of them, but they are apparently the largest job search engine on the web, even surpassing monster.com.  Shows how long I've been out of the loop.

His title is "labs hacker."  Doesn't that sound like him?  If I understand it correctly, his team comes up with new solutions to site-wide problems, and makes sure they work on a small subset of the traffic.  Then they pass it off to the development team to make it work site-wide, and start on a new problem.  So he gets to learn new things and solve hard problems without the CEO-ness that never really fit comfortably.

We were riding the roller coaster together and I was excited with him, but I felt the weight of it too.  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a smidge relieved to step off.  I know we'll take that ride again sometime.  He has way too many incredible ideas to not try it again.  But we all need some time to recuperate. And I'm equally as excited to see him have the opportunity to decompress some and get out from under what was never intended to be a burden.

Only God knows where this new adventure will lead.  But I don't think it will be quite so white-knuckled.  I'm honored to be a passenger with the man that is immeasurably more than I could have asked or imagined when I prayed for a husband.

It's Not Just Gas Prices

J sent this lovely piece of news to me almost a month ago and I've been meaning to pass it on.  If you're wondering why produce prices are climbing, here's your answer:  Food prices to rise...

Kids Eat Free

My brother-in-law sent me these links to sites that help you find good restaurant deals with kids in tow. Thought others might find them helpful and putting them here keeps me from losing them. Enjoy!

http://www.mykidseatfree.com/welcome.asp

http://www.frugalliving.tv/free-stuff/kids-eat-free.html

Too Good to be True

I have spent the last two days in the throes of frustration.  Mint is dead to me.  Not the yummy goodness that is Blue Bell Mint Chocolate Chip and certainly not the Girl Scout Thin Mints that have found their way into my fridge.  No, mint.com in all its seductive glory is dead to me.  I actually gave up on it last October when I realized that some bug in their system makes my data totally unreliable.  Just a minor glitch.  I should have known it was too good to be true.  But the shift from Quicken to Mint was so extreme in methodology, that I feel like I ate from the forbidden fruit and now I know the difference between slavery to the old way and the possibilities of technology that actually works for me.

So I have been searching for a workable solution since October.  Well, I lie.  I actually gave Mint the month of October to resolve my open help ticket.  That didn't happen, so I said I would find something new in November.  I landed on buxfer.com toward the end of the month and was so not motivated to try anything new during the holidays.  So I let it slide, and slide it did.  When I started getting back to it this month, I was shocked at how we had overspent because we just had no clue what we were spending.  So, I summoned all my motivation and jumped back in the saddle.  But buxfer just isn't cutting it for me.  For starters, it appears that it might have a bug similar to the one in Mint.  But more than that, it is obvious that paying for "priority support" means nothing, zip, zero, zilch.  J tried to console me by explaining that most of these new applications are run on a shoestring budget and customer support doesn't really make them any money, so they don't have any customer support.  This is not comforting.  I am so frustrated at the time I have wasted and data I have lost trying to find a good system.

I took the girls to a friend's house today and I came back and spent two and a half hours (!!!) researching almost two dozen different personal finance applications.  Yuck, yuck, and more yuck.  I cannot believe I spent my child-free morning doing that!  I made myself do it because it is my single biggest responsibility as the manager of this household (outside of parenting).  Everything else I wanted to do involved spending money, and I sure wasn't going to go do that because I don't know how much money we have to spend because I can't find a decent budget system!  Aaarrggh!

Since I know you're just as frustrated as I am by now, I'll offer some hope.  I think I might have found a couple of potential options.  I started from Dave Ramsey's list of recommended sites and narrowed them down.  I'm going to field test BudgetTracker and BudgetPulse.  It's 2010, dang it.  There has to be a budgeting solution out there that automates a significant part of the process, maintains my data integrity, and backs up their program with decent customer support.  Is that too much to ask of Web 2.0? !  I am such a computer geek's wife.  Time for some Thin Mints.