T.G.I.F. Friday: Volume 37

Welcome to “Thank God I’m FI” Friday, Volume #37!

Here are some things I really like and that you might too. 

Finance Articles

Burnout, Variety, and Crop Rotation (The Escape Artist) – “The problem is not hard work. The problem is the monotony, lack of true meaning and the power dynamics of The Office-Industrial Complex”

What Do You Have in Common with a Squirrel? (Super Saving Tips) – “Have you ever watched your neighborhood squirrels searching for food and storing it in the summertime?”

Video

There’s only one obvious choice for video of the week.  This is honestly the most amazing thing I think I’ve ever watched, and in the last 4 days I think I’ve watched it over 100 times.  It gives me goose bumps every time.  This isn’t CGI or computer animation, this is real….

Who’s Inspired Me

Again, an obvious choice – the fine folks at NASA and JPL. 

We just landed an autonomous helicopter on Mars.  Yeah, that’s a sentence I never thought I’d type.  The Mars Perseverance Mission made a glorious and successful touchdown on the red planet on Thursday Feb. 18th as you saw in the video above.  (If you didn’t watch the video you really need to do that.)  Along with the Perseverance Rover, there’s an autonomous helicopter named Ingenuity.  So far Ingenuity has communicated and is operating as expected.  Once Ingenuity’s batteries charge and NASA validates that its systems are surviving the brutal cold temperatures, they will attempt the first flight of an aircraft on another world.

All of this blows my mind.  This was the first full color image from Perseverance, and NASA has already put tons of images up on it’s site.  That’s friggin’ Mars.  I know, we’ve deployed quite a lot of rovers there and we’ve got thousands of images.  But it still gives me chills every time.

What I’m Grateful For

The amazing podcasters out there putting out the latest information and having detailed conversations about food and diet.  I listen to far too many to list, but I’ve learned more in the pat 2 years than in my entire life previously.  I’ve put much of it into practice and have experimented with lots of things, most of which have benefited me greatly.  There may be future posts on this topic 🙂

Lyrically Speaking

Eddie and Polly start to fight
Like everyone else
When their money gets tight
New Orleans ain’t no place to be broke
But they’re too young to understand
There ain’t no good place to be broke

From “Eddie and Polly“, The Delines 

The Delines are a pretty obscure band that formed in 2012 from members of the Minus 5, the Decemberists, and Richmond Fontaine.  If you don’t know any of those bands, then welcome to my world (I told you I was a music junkie…).  They’re big enough that they’ve toured Europe and Asia, and they have a Wikipedia page so there’s that. 

The Delines songs are mostly in the same style that Willy Vlautin made Richmond Fontaine famous for, called “dirty realism“.  Richmond Fontaine put out 11 albums of glorious stories detailing hurt, crime, drugs, breakups, and the cold realities of life.  Imagine Tom Waits applying his broken pencil to the matters of rural folks instead of the urban downtrodden, and you have a good starting point for Richmond Fontaine and the Delines. 

Vlautin of the Delines is such a talented writer he’s written six novels, and his first was declared one of the top 25 books of the year by the Washington Post in 2006.  

After highlighting Guadalcanal Diary and James McMurtry in previous TGIF Fridays I received emails thanking me for introducing folks to lesser-known bands and artists.  I love that, and now you’ve fed the beast 🙂  I have a massive music collection and lots of obscure stuff, so if you want to learn about new bands please come back.  I’ll still highlight famous artists here sometimes, but I guarantee you’ll also see artists you’ve never heard of. 

And oh yeah, this is still a personal finance blog, so as the Delines said there ain’t no good place to be broke!

Miscellaneous

We Quit Our Jobs to Build a Cabin—Everything Went Wrong  – “We knew we were fortunate to have good jobs—and this was well before our country was facing a pandemic and massive unemployment—but we were facing the existential crisis that comes from spending your days doing something you don’t enjoy and wondering if this is how the next five, ten, 20 years will play out.”

Bad Diets Are Responsible For More Deaths Than Smoking, Global Study Finds

Are We Trading Our Happiness for Modern Comforts? – “As society gets richer, people chase the wrong things.”