A Day in My Life

Yes friends, you got it right. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, there is a new online animated series “in which Warren Buffett teaches children about investing. The web series will debut on AOL in the fall.” You can guarantee that this will be interesting. Anything that has the name Warren Buffett attached to it is bound for success. Take a look at this sample video below to get an idea of what this new series will be like.

I came across this great representations of our tax dollars at work. It shows very clearly where your dollars are being spent and how those numbers compare to the previous year. I could spent a long time reading through all this info. Be sure to take a couple minutes to take a glance.

For more personal finance images visit Mint.com’s Financial Blog

The play is now over and I can start moving back to a level of somewhat normal – summer normalcy that is. That, however, isn’t really saying all that much as summer tends to be crazy all the time. Not only are there a ton of things to turn down doing each summer because I’m doing a million other things, but I’ve also ended up on the run so much that I’ve been missing out on the great weather we have had. That doesn’t include the past couple weeks of 60° and rainy weather. Here’s hoping that starts to turn around soon.

The musical I was in the last two weekends ended up really coming together and going quite well. I felt that as the shows went on each weekend, they got better and better. The quality dropped off on the second Thursday performance since we had a break of four days from the show. However, the very next day, we brought it right back and had a solid performance. If you weren’t able to make it, you missed a great show. If you did make it, wasn’t that Biff Baker something?!? Pieface wasn’t too bad either I must say.

The news in our lives is the following: we have decided that at the end of August, we are going to be getting a dog! Not just any dog mind you, but a basset hound puppy! We chose a basset hound particularly because they are pretty lazy, independent, and low maintenance dogs. After a lot of searching and a bit of luck, we were finally able to find a breeder that hadn’t already sold all of their puppies down in Southwest Minnesota. We are both pretty excited. You could probably guess that Bethany is a little more excited than I am if you have been noticing her Facebook updates recently. The ones we found were born on 7/5 so are only a few weeks old right now. They keep them with their mother until they are about eight weeks old which puts us at the end of August. Originally, we were shooting to get a girl, but after we found that two of them were already spoken for and we weren’t all the keen on the third female, we decided to switch our aim at one of the males. Bethany went down to scope them out on Monday and decided on this little guy.

Leading up to the decision on which one to get, we had listed out several name options for the little guy. Ironically enough, we had better consensus on boy names than girl names. This made the switch over to getting a boy a little bit easier. Being the music nerds that we are, the name for this little guy we decided on is Copland. You know, after the tremendous twentieth century American composer? Think Appalachian Spring and Fanfare for the Common Man. We plan to bring this little guy home at the end of August, right around Labor day.

This current week is shaping up to be quite the long week. A couple months ago, I was asked by the Doc to play in the musical at Bethel this summer. Since I am a sucker for playing in musicals, I said yes without really thinking too much about it. Most importantly, I didn’t think about how much of my summer this would take up. When the schedule of rehearsals came out a few weeks ago, I knew there was going to be one week that was jam packed with rehearsals and shows. That crazy week happens to be this week.

We had a couple rehearsals prior to this week so that we would learn the music before we met up with the singers. Some of those rehearsals did go longer than I had anticipated. Fortunately for me, last week I didn’t have to be to work until 8:15 so I was still able to get a fair amount of sleep. Then this week started. Just for the record, I have to let you know that we have rehearsals or shows every day this week. Also, unlike last week when I could sleep in a little bit, this week I have to be at work by 7:30. Those 45 minutes of sleep are sure nice to have each day. When we were first told the rehearsal schedule, the end time each night was suppose to be at 9:30. This would have been a fine time to end for me, even on these early mornings. Being that this is a musical, I had expected the rehearsals the week of the show to go a bit longer. However, I didn’t expect them to go quite so long as it did on Monday night. That night, we didn’t finish up with the rehearsal until 10:20. That is a significant difference from what I had originally expected. Since it takes me 20 minutes to get home from Bethel, I didn’t arrive home until close to 11:00. Now that is late! Needless to say, I was struggling to stay awake yesterday, especially in the afternoon. Fortunately, last nights rehearsal was significantly shorter. I think we finished up at around 9:50 last night. This allowed me to get a little more sleep last night so I’m not doing so bad today. Tonight is our final dress rehearsal before the show opens tomorrow. I’m hoping tonight will be more like last night and less like Monday. I would encourage you all to come see the show. It is pretty fun and the music is good. When Dr. T asked me to play, I asked him to compare it to another musical we played a few years ago. He said it was kind of like that, except with better music. I tend to agree. You can find out more information on the show by going here.

On a side note, I finally got around to putting up a Blogroll on my blog. Let me know if you are missing from the list and I’ll be sure to add you. Also, I put up a link to Bethany’s and my Book List at the top and bottom of my blog. From there you can view the list, see where we’re at, and check out the ratings I have given to the books we have completed so far.

Hope to see you all at the show!

We just returned from the very sunny city of St. Louis, Missouri. If you have never been there before, I would recommend that you make it a point to visit the city at some point. While it is smaller than the Twin Cities, for what it lacks in size, it makes up in culture. We made this the second trip to the city in less than a year in order to visit Bethany’s sister Erika and her husband Eric and their new little baby, Liv. If you remember, I posted when Liv was born about seven weeks ago. As you could very well imagine, we were making this trip with the primary goal of meeting and spending some time with our newest little niece.

I took last Thursday and Friday off of work so that we could make the most of our trip. We left shortly after Bethany got home from work on Thursday morning and headed out on our nine hour trip. As she had worked all night, Bethany did a lot of sleeping on the trip. Unfortunately for the both of us, I wasn’t paying very much attention to where we were going and I ended up missing an exit. Next thing you know, we’re taking a big detour through Des Moines. Whoops. It didn’t really take that much longer, and we got to see some nice sights in Iowa. We got down to St. Louis around 6:00 that night and proceeded to check into our hotel.

We quickly settled in and headed the 2.3 miles over to Erika and Eric’s house. That night, we just laid low around their house. Eric grilled some bison burgers and Erika whipped up a salad. I hadn’t had bison burgers before and I have to say I rather enjoyed them. After talking for a while and holding the baby, we took off for the night.

On Friday, we stopped by Einstein Bros on the way to their house for some bagels. Eric had to work that day so Bethany and I hung out with Erika and Liv that morning. We took turns passing Liv around between the three of us. She really is a very good baby. She is very content, doesn’t do a lot of crying, and does a lot of sleeping. That afternoon, we did a bit of baby sitting so that Erika could get out of the house and hit up the gym for a bit. When Eric got home from work, we got Liv all situated in her car seat and headed out to the St. Louis Art Museum. I was surprised with the amount and quality of art that is there. I must say I wasn’t expecting to see a wall size Monet there. On the way home from the museum, we stopped off for some dinner at a local resturuant/pub for dinner. Our timing was great since we got a table right away and made it there for the beginning of the Twins game. The food, drink, and game were all very good, I must say. After dinner, we went back to their place to hang out for a while before Bethany and I went back to the hotel.

The next day, we got ready for the day by putting on our Twins shirts. That’s right, the big event of the day for us was going to the Twins game against the Cardinals in Busch Stadium. We knew it was going to get pretty hot that day, so we lathered on the sunscreen since we are both still pretty white. After some breakfast at Eric and Erika’s, the baby sitter came and we took off for the game. I must say, we were not ready for the kind of heat that we would meet that day. Throughout the day, we saw the stadium thermometer top out at 99° as we sat in the direct sun. Eric checked out the heat index and saw that it was 105° shortly into the game so it’s anyone’s guess what it topped out at that day. Throughout the game, we went back for food/water every three innings just to get out of the heat. Also, a pleasant surprise was that my good friend Tim Koch was also in town and at the game. He stopped by for a little while during the game to catch up. What a small world! Unfortunately for us, the Twins weren’t able to pull out a win that day. We blame our loss on Mauer not playing that day, not on Pujols hitting two home runs.

After the game, we went back to their house to relieve the sitter and to cool off and just relax for a while. Eric and I made a quick trip to the storage locker to swap out a chair that afternoon and to pick up a salad for that night. For dinner, Bethany made baked lemon pasta from The Pioneer Woman, some garlic bread, and the salad. It was great. I thought it was even better than the first time she made it. That’s really saying a lot since it was fantastic the first time! After dinner, the ladies went and picked up some cupcakes at the Cupcakery. Those things are amazing! I had the Italian Cream cupcake that had coconut and cream cheese frosting. Boy was that thing great! That brought us to the end of the day and we headed to bed.

Sunday morning brought checkout at our wonderful hotel. After a quick checkout, we stopped for breakfast at a nice breakfast/lunch restaurant before we headed out of town. I had my usual French toast – you really can’t go wrong with French toast. After breakfast, we took a couple pictures with Liv and said goodbye to Eric and Erika. On our long drive, we tried to listen to the Twins game on any AM station that we could pick up. Thankfully, the Twins were able to win the series and improve their inter-league record. We made it home around 8:00 that night, unpacked, went for a quick walk, and went to bed. What a great weekend!

Be sure to check out the rest of the pictures from our trip here.

As you have probably figured out by now, I have my blog hosted on my own domain, BGerdin.com. I’ve had this domain since, oh, the summer after my Sophomore year at Bethel. I distinctly remember sitting down in the blistering summer heat at what is the ITS Helpdesk with nothing to do, causing trouble with Mr. Bleess. I remember that he had recently acquired his domain of bleaus.net (be sure to check it out, it’s pretty sweet!) and I was really interested in having one of my own. It didn’t take long before I had decided on and purchased my very own domain. At the time, it made way more sense for Austin to have a domain because he was, at that time, a computer science major. Me, being the finance major that I was, really had nothing to do with and shouldn’t have even been thinking of having my own website. But alas, here I was with my very own domain.

I thought this was pretty cool, however, I had no idea what I was going to do with it or even how to begin working on it. Thankfully, I was surrounded with all the computer people that I would need to start my site and get it up and running. Also thankfully, Bethel provided all of their students with a copy of Dreamweaver on their servers. This handy piece of software became the life vest for me out in the ocean known as the internet. I started out with a blog and it slowly grew to include regular html pages that I painstakingly learned how to code. This was quite a task for me being that I had never coded anything in my life. I asked both my coworkers and W3 Schools a lot of questions as I went along. Over time I moved my blog back and forth a couple of times from being hosted on Blogger’s servers to being hosted on my domain. Finally, I think finally that is, I moved my blog back to my server and started using WordPress to author my blog. I have never had any second thoughts since that move.

A couple years ago, equipped with my vast knowledge of website creation, I decided that I could help my dad create a website for Gerdin Auto. As you probably could guess, my knowledge is no where near vast when it comes to programing. You could probably figure that out pretty quickly by simply looking at GerdinAuto.com. Looking at that site now, it looks like a bad site from the late ’90′s. Bad, I know. But hey, I was having fun. I had made a website from scratch for my dad’s business. Pretty cool I thought. But, let’s be honest now, I’m not really sure that I want to be associated with the site any more. It is pretty lame. So, within the last six or so months, I decided it needed an extreme face lift. But how, and where would I even start on it? Those were two very good questions.

I just started to play around with what was currently there. I became frustrated with that pretty quickly because I knew that it was just awful. I hit a road block and didn’t really know where to go from there. So what I did was look around for websites that I liked and take some ideas from them for the new site. Since all of the sites that I looked at were in simple html, it was rather easy to look at their code with the simple “View Page Code” in Firefox and figure out what was going on. After searching for a while, I found a great site and started to completely redo the shops site using their code as a guide. Along the way, I have created a WordPress page that will be incorporated into the site and have also been doing some work in flash to add some special enhancements to the page. Everyone that I have shown it to so far has been blown away with how much better it looks from what is currently up there. Really, it’s not very hard to get that reaction coming from the current page.

So that’s really been taking up a lot of my time recently. I’ve been learning some flash, fumbling around with php, and doing a lot of trial and error with good ‘ol html and css. After I get some more of the content ironed out, I think it’s going to be ready for world to see. But as of now, it’s still in beta. I’m really starting to be excited with how it is turning out. I don’t want to link to it here on my site, so if you want to see the work in progress, let me know and I’ll send you the link to the testing pages. If you check it out, you’ll have to send me some feedback so I can make it even better than it currently is.

Keep fumbling around with your web skills, you never know what will come out on the other side!

For this first weekend in June, we stayed home. You got that right, for the first weekend in three, we didn’t go anywhere. It is so nice just to be able to stay home and not worry about traveling. The cool and rainy weather also allowed us to do some nice relaxing as well.

My Saturday morning start off at a much earlier time than I usually see on Saturday’s with an 8:00 Bible study with some guys from church. All I can say is that it was a good thing we meet Caribou at that time of the morning. This was our summer kick-off study so I can expect many more of these early Saturday mornings this summer.

Immediately after Bible study, Marc and I scooted over to my place and started to work on replacing his passenger outside car door handle. His door handle had broken off quite a while ago which made it very difficult for his wife to get into the car. Now that the drivers lock was also broken, replacing this handle was a necessity. He had ordered and received the part a couple weeks ago so we were able to dive right in to replacing it. We had the door panel off in a matter of minutes and started to survey the wreckage.

After we figured out what all needed to come apart in order to have it replaced, a couple trips for a small screw and a long magnet, some scrapes on my arms and hands, and some good ‘ol fashioned teamwork, we had that thing back together, good as new. Well, I suppose it wasn’t exactly good as new as the new handle is a different color than the rest of the car. But lets be honest, I would much rather have a working handle that clashes than one that matches and rips up my hand.

All-in-all, I think it looks pretty good. The whole process, including the couple of trips, only took us a little over two hours. Not too bad considering neither of us had ever replaced a door handle before.

That evening, Bethany and I had our good friends the Bleess’ over for dinner. Bethany had found a new Indian recipe that she experimented with for dinner that night. The process of making the dinner was more fun for her since she was able to use her new rice cooker. Since we both have a Scandinavian palate, she was worried that there would be a little too much spice for us. However, it came out great! The way she talked about the recipe, we were kind of worried to try it, but we were all very pleased with how it tasted! After dinner, we played some guys vs. girls Trivial Pursuit and had some ice cream with a little chocolate and caramel toppings. There’s nothing like a fun evening with good friends!

And thus ended Saturday. I’m not going to post about Sunday until a little later because I still need to take the pictures from the day off of my camera. Stay tuned for more.