When I turned 20, my friends reminded me I was half way to 40. They forgot to mention 30. People often seem to forget 30, it’s the age at which you’re old, but not so old that people think of you as old. Your 30’s are the decade you can benefit from all the lessons you learned in your 20’s before you hit your 40’s and have a mid-life crisis, reverting back to the stupidities of your 20’s (just kidding). At 30 people respect your opinions and ideas just because of your age, you made it out of your 20’s so you must be doing something right. Only 3 years separate someone who is 28 from someone who is 31, yet the gulf between them seems so wide, whereas someone who is 38 seems equal to someone who is 41. The 20’s shouldn’t get too bad a rap however, it’s your 20’s that shape your adult life. If you can figure things out, work hard, stay out of trouble, and use the excuse of your youth to ask questions and charge heedlessly into the unknown, you can learn a lot and get ahead. Who you are when you enter your 20’s and who you are when you leave can be unrecognizable, hopefully in the positive sense.
Me
Once a year comes a day when we are specifically reminded to give thanks (at least in the United States). Hopefully most of you out there are thankful more than once a year, but if that’s all you can manage then it’s better than nothing. I want to take a minute to list in no particular order some things I personally am thankful for.
- My beautiful wife
- The people who surround me and support me (You know who you are)
- Employment that pays the bills while letting me do something I love
- Al Gore – for inventing the internet (Actually, that’s a joke)
- Modern medicine
- Freedom – It wouldn’t be possible without the sacrifice that many have made
- Role models – For taking the high road when it wasn’t easy
- Bicycles
- Choice – The absence of choice is tyranny
- Sight (it makes it all possible)
- Genuine conversation with another person
- Positive people – We wouldn’t have Thanksgiving without them
- Pumpkin pie with whipped cream
This list could go on and on and for that I’m thankful.
Thanks.
Houses are cheap! Interest rates are low! Buy a house now! According to the experts (and the idiots) now is a great time to buy a home. Interest rates will never be this low again, or at least that’s what they say, so if you plan on buying, buy now. I hear this over and over from many different sources. People whisper this to me as if they are passing on a secret; I hear it shouted on the radio, experts on TV impart the knowledge as if they are announcing the cure to cancer. So what am I waiting for?
I’m trying not to make the same mistakes as the individuals who lost everything several years ago in the housing bust. My basic understanding of the housing “crisis” is that people bought more house than they could afford with no money down. I don’t want the type of house I could afford (a shack), and I can’t afford the type of house I want (not a shack). I am willing to save (and to wait) until the house I want is the house I can afford. But what’s really so bad about renting a place to live anyway?
Renting has its perks. When the roof needs replacing, it doesn’t take the money I was saving for my Caribbean cruise. Weekends are not spent mowing the lawn (or trying to get my kid to mow the lawn). If I don’t like my neighbors I can simply move at my convenience. On a month to month basis, renting is usually cheaper than buying, leaving extra cash for investments in low yield bonds (har har).
Even with the appeal of renting, I assume that eventually I will buy a home. However, it is not something to rush into, or to allow others to rush me into. If interest rates are higher, or homes more expensive, it will be ok because I will be buying what I can afford. By the way, now is a great time to buy a home, a guy I met at Starbucks just told me about the low interest rates…
Get excited! Powerogre.com is now a year old, a year wiser, and statistically past the blog failure zone (most blogs die after 6 months, I have no source, go Google it). There have been some ups and some downs (literally, powerogre.com was 404 over a week in September 2010). Through it all, the article’s kept coming and so did the readers (all 15 of you).
It’s really not easy to blog consistently. To write even a short article usually takes an hour, and a longer article takes…longer. Writing is important to me however, if it weren’t, I wouldn’t spend my precious time doing it. The best way for me to understand/comprehend something is to write it in my own words. This is not to say that when I write about something here on Powerogre.com, I don’t understand it until I write it (If this were the case, it would be a particularly embarrassing revelation considering some of the stuff I have written about in the past), rather I mean that writing is a way for me to organize my thoughts, to see things in a different light, to express what is difficult to express except through written words.
So what does the future of Powerogre.com hold? It will make me rich beyond my wildest dreams (or poorer), it will solve the global climate change conundrum (or contribute to it), it might make you smarter (but certainly not stupider), and it will entertain you at the most opportune moments (or at least provide you with toilet paper if you are so inclined to print it out for bathroom reading material).
Thanks for reading,
Josh
“So what is that Twitter thing anyway?” This is a question I would ask myself not even a year ago. Like some of you out there, I thought that by avoiding all things social on the web, I was maintaining my anonymity and ensuring that when the internet police started to take people away, they would have nothing on me. Why would I need Twitter anyway? I was sure that I would have nothing to say, or even worse, I would reveal too much personal info.
So why did I jump on the Twitter bandwagon? To this day I’m still not sure, I just know I’m glad I did. I have interacted with some cool people, learned interesting things, received insider info, and had tons of fun.
Let’s take a look at a random scattering of things I tweeted about during the past year.
So what do I tweet about? Pretty much anything.
One of my close friends mentioned I tweet about food an inordinate amount.
I tend to get on Twitter the minute I receive poor customer service from a giant corporation. Typical.
Like everyone else, I tweet about current events.
By far my favorite things to tweet are random tidbits that must seem strange to….strangers.
To follow the fun all day long, click on the button at the top of this page,
or go to twitter.com/joshjallen.
I will keep on Tweeting, while at the same time loathing the term “tweeting”, and keeping one eye out for the internet police. I think they are onto me…