Workaholic Dad

Working in the financial industry these days isn’t a lot of fun. The anger of the public against anything remotely linked to finance is running high – understandably so. A relatively small group of derivative and bond bankers have ruined the party for everyone and now we all suffer the consequences.

While I don’t want to complain – bankers are still very handsomely paid – but without the prospect of the bonuses like they once where paid it’s losing its happy glow faster than an 18 year old porn star. That is the unfair thing about all this. Even those that have always produced a profit for their firms are taking pay cuts of 70-99%.

As the banking crisis drags on I meet more and more bankers that are starting to realize that they have never learned to do anything useful. Besides moving stock from one guy to the next they posses no skills whatsoever and are now scratching their heads at what else could be in their future.

In that respect I count myself lucky – i have always been an entrepreneurial kind of guy. Back in college I jumped on the internet bubble and started a consulting firm that created websites for Realtors and real estate developers. While the technological advancements have passed me by many years ago I still have the skills needed to run my own business and more importantly how to grow it without going broke.

So it’s definitely not the ideas or the skills that are holding me back from taking the plunge to become self employed. It’s more a psychological issue. At 31 years of age with a family to support – after all, the tiny one will be on my payroll for at least another 20 years – there is a lot of uncertainty without a regular paycheck to rely on for such a long time.

One thing that has to be said for working for a bank, they sure set the barriers of exit quite high during the good years. The long hours and time spent traveling are numbed by nice paychecks. When you are young that is a lot of fun and the saying “spending money like drunk stockbrokers” definitely holds true. But the years go by and I see a lot of guys in their early 40’s that just can’t deal with the workload anymore but have never invested enough to actually retire.

The Mrs. has realized several years ago that the brokerage business is nothing but a rat race and has made the decision that she would work on our Plan B. She has been doing a fantastic job and hopefully in the near future the future without a regular paycheck might be less scary. Hopefully by the day I no longer find the financial world fun.

Since it’s been so long since I have shown this blog some love I think it’s time to share one of my favorite pics of the munchkin and me.

With horror I have realized that I haven’t posted anything on this blog since December when Mackenzie was just 3 weeks old. In the last post she just learned to work a pacifier around in her mouth and now – almost 10 months later she still hates the rubber nipple substitute.

The reason it’s been so quiet around here – aside from family, work, home taking up most of my time – is that there is not very much for me to write about. My beautiful and talented wife is doing such a great job with her blog – No Ordinary Homestead – that there is not much left for me to say here.

It’s not easy being a working dad, as many of you out there know. We miss quit a bit of the milestones our little ones experience in the few minutes we happen to see our children awake on weeknights after we get home from work.

Thank god there are weekends as those are great time to really bond with the munchkin. Mackenzie is almost 9.5 months old now and is developing so fast. Almost everyday there seems to be a new skill she perfects.

I pledge to better myself about my posting regularity and perhaps I finally may have found a few more things to write about.

This morning we had the pleasure of making our little girl a US citizen on top of her German citizenship. It wasn’t nearly as pleasant of an experience as dealing with the German offices.

The new American Embassy is on what looks like an old Army base and has the inviting charme of a Supermax prison. After a we got good and searched, including taking the battery out of mobile phones and leaving them with the security desk. Surprisingly enough, the tiny one AAA battery LED flashlight on the Mrs. was also strictly verboten and had to stay behind.

The service was quite frankly appalling – polite, but with all the nicety of how prisoners are treated. Without wanting to get into this story too much here, I briefly considered handing my greencard to them and picking up the baby and just having her be German only. I managed to keep my cool for the most part, but it is amazing to see how you are not so much a citizen but more of a subject in these good ol’ US of A.

I guess if you followed my blog for a while I am not so fond of any government controlling me so….. it’s not wonder the prison routine of “pick up your ballsack and now spread your ass cheeeks” kind of treatment didn’t make me feel all warm and cozy inside today.

Long story short – I managed not to say something offensive and get myself arrested – although I did have the audacity to turn my mobile phone back on 10 seconds before I reached “German Soil”. Well….fuck ‘em all… passport is obtained and I won’t have to deal with these people for a few more years. Now just a formality visit to our local city hall tomorrow morning and we will have a legal dual citizen baby on our hands.

I think she just blew up her pampers….. so I will cut this short. Time for another solo flight.

The Mrs. loves Ebay and bargain hunting. I am a big friend of Ebay as well and so it is now wonder that we search our way through millions of baby related offerings during the course of stocking Mack’s room. Two auctions in particular had us a bit confused. We had ordered a Philips Avent 520 Baby Intercom used from some dude in Munich and a Medela Harmony Breast Pump from a seller in Austria.

A few days later we received a package – mailed from Austria. We expected it to be the breast pump (the package coming from Austria and all) and where surprised when the package contained the Philips Avent 530 Baby Intercom. A little bit of head scratching ensued wondering if it was the guy who sold us the Avent 520 from Munich who sent it from Austria for some reason, or if the breast pump people had also sold a Avent 530 and mixed up packages.

Today we received another package in the mail. Also from Austria. The Medela Harmony Breast Pump perfectly wrapped up inside. I guess now I know who to contact about the Baby Intercom and why it is the Avent 530 instead of the 520 – which we are not complaining about since it’s the better model – and why the damn thing doesn’t work right.

Here is a little something for all you Ebay fans: