A couple of months ago, my wife and I stayed over our friends’ house in their redone guest room when I received a phone call a little after 10a. It was another friend who had 1p reservations for 3 at The French Laundry, a 3 Michelin Star restaurant (as of 2010, the only one in [...]
Over the last 16 years, since I was of legal age for paid employment, I have been inundated with advice about how to take advantage of tax laws while planning for retirement. Never mind that traditional retirement was 40+ years away. Most people have seen the graphs illustrating the power of compounding e.g. if one [...]
Jump to PhotosIf you haven’t already, you might want to read part 1 Now came the hard part, should we make an offer and if so, for how much? We had not previously reached this point in the process and having < 12hrs to make a decision on a house we had seen for the [...]
I graduated college in 2000 and after spending the summer in student co-operative housing, girlfriend and I moved into a < 500sqft studio apartment in Berkeley on the corner of Ellsworth and Dwight. Location and price drove our decision as she still had a year of college left and I had a job in San [...]
Jump to MediaI have been a Yankee fan for almost 25 years; the Yankees failed to make the playoffs during the first 9. In 1995, I got my first taste of the postseason, which ended with a crushing extra-inning game 5 loss to the Seattle Mariners in the American League Division Series. Luckily, the next [...]
Last year I read an article about the White Elephant Sale and went on the last day. They neglected to mention most items are 50% off on the final day…so the single item we purchased, a copper trivet with Ganesha on it only set us back $0.25. We felt we had to buy something… This [...]
Our loft is now ChristmasTree--. It was a nearly 14′ tall Red Fir (commonly known as Silver Tip) and came from the East Bay Nursery. We purchased the tree on 2008-11-30 and used a 20% off coupon from the East Bay EcoMetro book. This was the first year we used LED lights. The ornaments were [...]
