1st rule of gold

Some time ago I finished a book called Richest Man in Babylon. Basically this is a book about laws of money, how to wisely spend, save and invest your money. Although the book was written in 1920’s and it speaks about people and money in ancient Babylon all these ‘laws of gold’ still work on 21st century. Author gives us 7 basic laws of gold and I will try to write about all of them in good time. But first things first.

1st law: “Part of all you earn is yours to keep“. It is simple as that, but to many people this seems to be impossible goal to achieve. This rule says that part of your income is yours to keep, this means that whenever you get your paycheck, the very first thing to do is to take 10% or more from it and save it. “Yours to keep” doesn’t mean that you buy whatever you fancy or spend it on your hobbies. It means plain and simple that you keep it. And when you manage to do this you will see that your life isn’t any worse without that 10% of money. There are many-many places where you can be little more frugal and you won’t even notice it. Try it, it’s worth it. There seems to be strange and unexplainable law to money. Whenever you accumulate it little more, even more money is coming in and total saved money is growing even faster. From first hand experience I can tell that when you’ve a goal to save money and you’ve succeeded with that for a while you will start to think about lots of things – do I really need it or not. Mostly you discover that you don’t.

As of me, I’ve been keeping this law from the beginning of 2006 and all I can say – so far, so good. Me and my dear wife are blessed with very good (and relatively high-paying) jobs, so we both save from our salary about 25%. We approached this saving from a different angle. First we made our ‘normal life’ budget – added all our possible expenses together and all that was beyond that was meant for savings. One thing that really helps us to keep track of our expenses is Quicken. A software tool meant just for finances. We put there every penny we spend and categorize it. It gives really nice overview of our money flow. Sometimes this can be quite annoying to input every day our every expense there, but it really pays back. When month is over it’s so easy to see where we’ve spent more or less than out budget.

Second law that tells us how to become more wealthy, and this is from book inspired by God himself:

 9 Honor the LORD with your wealth,
with the firstfruits of all your crops;

 10 then your barns will be filled to overflowing,
and your vats will brim over with new wine. (Proverbs 3:9-10)

Like Jesus said: “It is more blessed to give than to receive“. Part of our salary is for tithing. And this is the part we’ve always done. Yea, it’s even more important than our personal saving. If I don’t have enough money to save, so be it, but I always want to find money to give. Trust me on this, I’ve seen this rule working out very well.

Joy of running

Couple of weeks ago I got myself a book called ChiRunning. It’s a book about running. It’s a book about smart and effective running and because I’m not very athletic and don’t have much muscular power, I’m happy to find ways how to run farther by using less energy. This book is all about it.

Word ‘Chi’ in title means ‘energy’, this meaning comes from eastern philosophy. While I don’t care much about all this philosophy behind eastern religions, I must say that there’s a lot to learn from this book. After I’ve read about 1/4th of the book and haven’t even done any exercises that come later, I already see progress in my running. When I got my knee injury from army few years ago, it has bugged me ever since. It was lottery during longer runs – will my knee hold on or will it start to protest and stop cooperating with me. But now, when using correct posture taught by ChiRunning I’ve no problem with that. When knee starts to hurt I know I’ve wrong posture and I adjust it – and voila, pain is gone.

Another good thing I’ve noticed. My “training zone” for usual runs is 70-80% of max heart rate (MHR), speed around 4.30 min/km, that was before book. Now, when posture is correct my speed “in the zone” is about 4.05 – 4.20 min/km, when posture is wrong, my heart rate goes above 80% of MHR and speed drops to about 4.30 min/km. This is truly awesome – using less energy to run faster and longer!

My 10k record time is about 41 minutes. Yesterday I ran 10.7 km, and inside this my 10km time was 43:00 and I wasn’t even trying that hard.

And it’s 66 days till marathon.

Being a Bug

Life so far has been just excellent. Spring was just wonderful and summer is even more. All nature is just living, green stuff all around and lots of food everywhere you look. Just a week ago I learned how to fly. At first it was quite hard – trying to coordinate both wings at the same time, man. Of course it wasn’t even half as bad compared to coordinating all my 6 legs when I learned walking. OK, so after few flight hours, many false take-offs, hard landings and 17 bumps against trees I finally managed it. Oh what a fun it is just hovering above the ground and getting ‘birds-eye’ view of life. Two days ago I and my 247 brothers did something crazy – we just went all together and stole some BBQ from monsters. Oh boy, did it taste good! So, now I’m just flying around and enjoying life. Bad thing is that very often during flying we have to run and hide from those mindlessly wandering monsters. It seems that they don’t even look when they trample around, just going… I wonder why they have ears, can’t they hear we’re here also.

Splash

…

Oh bugger…

…

As of today I have only 83 days till marathon. I. Must. Train. More. Why are there so much people, I have to run slalom every time I come through here. Hm, why is that I’m usually not content with my life? Winter is too cold, summer too hot, spring too slow, autumn too wet, salary too low, too little free time. It was nice to see sports instructor from my army time and he even said hello to me. The army time – every time I think of it, it makes me just happy it’s over… And those flying buggers. During last run I had 14 of them on my neck and I ate 3 of them. So far it’s been better, but I still got 20 minutes to go, everything can happen.

Oh. Man.

Seems that I just swallowed one of these bugs again.