MichaelandChrissy.com

I finally settled on a new online broker, E-Trade. I decided to go with E-Trade because they allowed me to trade Canadian stocks without any hidden fees, even though the per-trade rate was a little higher than the competition. In stark comparison to FirstTrade, I was able to open an E-Trade account and enable bank account access in a few minutes.

Although sending money to my new account was easy, their policy is a five-day wait until you can trade with it. So I won’t be able to do any trading until Monday. I went ahead and set up a “watchlist” with my favorite Uranium stocks though, and something exciting happened. Overnight, my watchlist went up 7%. The next day, it went up another 10%. I was pretty aggravated that no real money was in play, since this would have been a huge initial win.

Then the Shanghai stock market crashed, taking the Dow Jones with it. Yesterday, the Dow dropped over 400 points! My watchlist is now down 10% from where it was two days ago. The downfall of the American markets affected Canada in a big way, apparently. I guess I have until Monday to see where this downward trend is heading. The US markets are already recovering, so I remain hopeful.

With any luck, I’ll be able to jump in at the bottom of it and ride it back up. The watchlist was up 17% from the beginning of the year, so even at 10% down, it’s still 7% ahead in the first quarter. I’ll be “backing up the truck” as soon as I’m able to invest.

I set up a YouTube account this weekend. It occurred to me that we have all these photos of Aiden up on our web site, but have no way to post the movies that we take with our Canon S3 IS. Sure, we could put a link on our site to the movie file, but wouldn’t it be cool if we could stream the movies on the site itself? Enter YouTube.

After successfully being able to embed movie links on my blog, I decided that I’ll post the movies of Aiden to YouTube and then embed links on our site. This will be very cool. However, I first have to edit the movies for time, content, file size and aesthetic appeal (and I’ve never used a digital movie editor). Once we get past that hurdle though, we should be able to present digital video of Aiden eating mush to the world. And what world doesn’t want that?

Chrissy has returned from her scrapbooking retreat, marking the end of the Daddy and Son Weekend. In retrospect, I think that I worried too much over the three days alone with Aiden. Aiden followed his regular schedule, was very obliging at feeding time and didn’t complain much when I put him down for naps or bedtime. I had plenty of time to watch all the shows that were piling up on my DVR. And Aiden let me sleep in til 8AM on both days.

I did have some help along the way though. Mom came over on Friday to take the boy for a bit and give me some chicken soup for lunch. Felice brought over Panda Express Friday night. Chip and Karen served up a lunch smorgasbord at Ryan and Elena’s first birthday party on Saturday. Aunt Linda and Uncle Marve brought KFC for dinner on Saturday night, which doubled as lunch on Sunday. I had to feed the boy, but I didn’t have to feed myself at all, which was nice.

Chrissy is out of town on a scrapbooking retreat with friends this weekend. That leaves me alone with Aiden. I wasn’t entirely certain that I would be capable of taking on the parenting duties all by myself. I’ve done pretty well in the last five months in a supporting role, but I’ve never had the boy by myself for more than ten hours at a time.

Today wasn’t that bad though. Aiden was a very good boy and stuck to his usual schedule without any fuss at all. Chrissy’s mom came over and got him around 2 PM, giving me some time to get out for a haircut and watch some recorded TV. He’s such a well-tempered boy, I don’t see why I was so worried. We’ll see what happens between now and Sunday though.

Netflix is the best gift that one can give to someone who loves anime. I've been ordering sets of anime, some good ones and some bad ones. One of my new favorites is Gunslinger Girl. By way of explanation, I thought I'd try to embed some YouTube clips to my blog, since I've never done that before.

That is the introduction to the show, with a very beautiful song called "The Light Before We Land". I always watch the intro to each episode of Gunslinger Girl, since it's such a pretty song and the animation is so well done. To give away the plot, here's the trailer.

I'm usually pretty strict about my Netflix ranking. I rarely give movies the full five stars unless I'd consider adding them to my restrictive DVD collection. Gunslinger Girl set one and two both got five stars from me, and I recommend them highly. The last set, three, is on its way here now from Netflix.

We loved tearing the house apart so much last time that we just had to do it again. Chrissy ordered new kitchen cabinets yesterday from Omega Cabinets, which Consumers Reports ranked as the best. However, we may not actually get the cabinets for another ten weeks because Omega custom builds all of their orders. So that makes today the best day possible to tear down our existing cabinets.

As of now, our kitchen has nothing hanging on its walls. Uncle Glenn came over to do the job, and he’s coming back tomorrow to tear out the soffit. Removing the soffit will allow for taller cabinets, but we’ll need to put up new drywall on both sides of the room. Glenn is pretty familiar with our home, as he did the majority of the work in finishing our basement.

The new cabinets will be close to our favorite style, Arts and Crafts (or Mission Style). We’ll probably order some dark granite counter tops to go with the dark oak doors and yellow walls. The new kitchen will be awesome when it’s done, but I fear that we’ll have a disaster area on our hands until then.

I might play Neverwinter Nights 2 a second time as a Warlock. I’d like to put some points into Diplomacy and a bunch into Crafting this time. Towards the end of the last game, I was wishing that I could create a bunch of super-weapons and super-armor, since I was beginning to be disappointed with the stuff that I was seeing in the shops. A lot of neat stuff, but not like I was seeing in the crafting manuals. If the crafted benefits could stack, you would be able to build a weapon that would make everything else in the game look like a toothpick.

There’s a bunch of stuff that I would have done differently — like not spending my own money on the Keep. That’s what the red dragon hoard is for! I must have tossed over a hundred thousand dollars into upgrading the Keep before I discovered the $200,000 dragon hoard. Here I am all poor from upgrading the nearby roads, not able to buy better stuff for my party, and then a dragon hoard falls in my lap…

Also, I would not let Kelgar become a monk. I would take the experience for getting him through the monk trials, but then never let him talk to the priest again. He gets the Ironfist Warhammer in the third act, which can only be used by dwarves. I should have stacked him up full of warhammer proficiencies from the beginning!

And who uses longswords? There’s about a butt-ton of longswords in the game, but none of my characters used them. Just sad. Maybe my warlock will have a proficiency in longsword. I’ll definitely play it a little differently next time.

I’ve been playing Neverwinter Nights 2 for the last several months. It’s been slow-going, since I only get to play when I’m not working, sleeping, spending time with Chrissy or watching Aiden. So not very often. But I loved the game, so I stuck it out to the end. Well, I just finished the game, and was treated to the most anti-climatic ending ever. Spoilers ahead, y’all! Click on “Continue Reading” to hear my rant on a terrible ending for a fantastic game, including a walkthrough of how I got it done.

Continue Reading »

This year, I totally splurged and got Chrissy a jewelry armoire. It’s a beautiful piece of mission style furniture, with lots of places to store expensive treasures. Ok, too many places for the too few pieces of jewelry that Chrissy owns. But this gives me an excuse to resort to jewelry for any gift-giving holiday where I can’t be creative enough to come up with something else. So in a way, it’s a gift for me, too, and it matches the rest of the furniture in our house (bonus!).

Chrissy got me an XM radio set from Sam’s Club. I’ve got a setup for the car and a setup for inside the house. You just plug the reciever into the set that you’re currently listening to. We’ve got XM radio in the new Honda CR-V, so I already know that I dig XM. I just have to get everything working now. The car installation looks particularly difficult — I might have to take my Acura to the dealership to get this installed properly.

I also got a set of tapes for Learning Spanish, which I’ve wanted to do for a while, and a books-on-tape version of Jim Cramer’s Mad Money. Chrissy went all out this year. Aiden is getting older every day, so this might be the last year that we can splurge on each other before we start splurging on the boy. Grandma already started, buying Aiden a huge balloon that sings!

I’m still trying to decide which online trading firm to go with next. I still want to trade in Canadian Uranium stocks, but I’m having trouble finding an online trading firm that will let me do it. Interactive Brokers allows you to do trading directly with the Canadian stock exchange, but they charge a minimum of $10 a month in fees. On the bright side, I can get away with only $2 per trade in commissions and real-time performance tracking.

E-Trade allows you to trade Canadian stocks through the pink sheets, but they don’t do up-to-the-minute tracking of Canadian stocks. I’m not sure if I’d need that, but E-Trade will slam you for $40 per quarter if you don’t make at least 3 trades. Their commissions start at $12.99 per trade, but you have to make 1500 trades per quarter before you get the bargain rate of $6.99. I’ll never see that. E-Trade offers a lot of other services though, including money market funds to store my cash in.