·:[ David and Claire’s Blog ]:·
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I’m sure many of you have been following the recent uproar about AIG’s bonuses, and the new tax legislation the government wants to put in place. This would tax the bonuses paid to employees that work for banks that received TARP money 90% if that family made more than $250k for the year. Fortunately for me I don’t qualify, but it’s also fortunate that Claire quit her job last year- otherwise we would have. I agree whole-heartedly with the spirit and intent of this law to put a stop to rewarding the people who put us in this economic quagmire with millions of dollars. However I truly believe that the legislation as it is now is oppressive and a punitive tax being placed on many people who don’t deserve it. Trust me when I say that even if I knew what people at Citi and other TARP companies were doing, I have absolutely no way that I could change it. Despite being an employee of Citi I still find out my news about the company the same way as everyone else- in the news. I’m just a technology guy trying to make a good living. Sure, I chose finance because they pay well, but I certainly don’t condone what some people in the organization have done, and I wouldn’t do that myself. I’m much too risk adverse for that! This new tax law affects thousands of Wall Street workers, most of which are similiar to me, with no power to influence the top executives that caused all this. If the law passes as is here’s some effects I predict:
- Many people will be inclined to quit their jobs, or not look for another one this year (like Claire) so they end up just below the $250k limit.
- Some of the only people with disposable income right now will be saving it instead of spending it, and thus not boosting the economy, to pay their big tax bill next year.
- There will be a massive talent exodus out of the financial firms (this may not necessarily be a bad thing)

One other thing. I’m glad that the AIG guys got their bonuses this year. If they hadn’t received them because the government stopped it then they would have set a horrible precedent: the government can breach any contracts they feel like. If the government can do it why can’t I? I hate those two year cell phone contracts. If the government can breach contracts then why can’t I? (But don’t forget about UAW)

Someone has given Brynn and Evan the wrong information about daylight savings time. From what I understand, when you “spring ahead” kids will tend to stay up later and wake up much earlier, but we have had the opposite effect. On Saturday night (prior to DST) both kids were up until 9pm. This is very late for Evan, regular time for Brynn. On Sunday, they woke up around 9.30am (now on DST) which is much later than their usual wakeup time of 7.30 or 8am. They had a fairly standard day, but as we reached the evening hours both were showing signs of being quite wiped out and we had them both in bed by 7pm on the first night of DST! Given that this was technically 6pm, it was over an hour earlier than Evan’s usual bedtime and THREE hours earlier than Brynn’s bedtime. Freakish. But AWESOME.

It seemed like an anomaly but no, our good luck streak continues. Foolish David made sure to change every single clock in the house but he forgot one – his own alarm clock. While my clock was right, his was an hour off so I woke up at 8.30am to David standing in the room saying, ruefully, “I messed up with my own alarm!” The kids were still not up (yay!) but woke up when they heard David slamming gates on his way downstairs. Fast forward through another boring rainy day at home and Evan is desperate for bed by 7pm and then Brynn (possible alien-substituted Brynn) demands, DEMANDS, to go to bed at 7.20pm. Again, for those (and by ‘those’ I mean me) who struggle with figuring out what exactly happens every time DST goes in or out, this means that our previously 9pm bed time delaying child, is adamant that she must be in bed before 7.30pm – aka 6.30pm pre-DST. Bizarro world. But, again, AWESOME!

Tomorrow, the stars realign. Claire suffers severe karmic retribution for her gleeful post.

Brynn oftens acts like a mini-Mom for Evan, keeping an eye on him or telling him off if he does the wrong thing, so for a while there Evan was just calling her Mommy, like he calls me (and, until recently, David), but lately he’s been using the word “Naany” a lot and we finally figured out that he is referring to Brynn. I suppose it’s a little like “Brynny” which we often call her, but it mostly sounds a lot like “Mommy”. I heard them upstairs today and Brynn was screaming at him “I’m not your Mommy!! I’m BRYNN! NOT MOMMY! BRYNN!!!”

Evan has been in mega-mischievious mode lately. He goes out of his way to cause trouble or break things. He is already turning into a very rough and tumble kind of boy. Brynn went to a friend’s birthday party yesterday and we took Evan along. The boys were all 4-5 and were, of course, only interested in running around and crashing into one another. As expected, Evan was right there in the thick of it! The other parents looked a bit worried about ‘the baby’ but they don’t understand that the most fun thing that can happen to Evan is that someone charges him and slams him to the floor. He is still as sweet as pie though. His latest thing is to ask for a banana and then break it in half and offer one piece to Brynn, completely unprompted.

Brynn is also a major pain lately because she is a terrible three year old demon-child; super bossy, demanding, impatient and moody. She can now unlock and open the back door so there is the constant danger that she can just walk out the door and leave if she gets mad enough. Today she threw a major tantrum and tried to escape out into the rain, in her pyjamas and bare feet. I immediately grabbed the tool box and added a latch to the very top of the door (so it is even out of her reach when she inevitably tries to use a chair to reach it). This is of course going to lead to situations whereby David tries to open the door when he gets home and finds that he’s locked out and I’m upstairs giving the kids a bath and don’t hear him banging on the door for 20 minutes. Thanks evil-Brynn!

I never actually got around to writing that post about our vacation in Australia. Brief version: fun, warm, wine, family, sick toddler, Christmas, New Years, plane rides from HELL!!!

It was my birthday this weekend and we decided to go to Philadelphia, although not actually for that reason. I had forgotten about the birthday when I started planning this trip (last week!).

We drove down on Saturday morning and went straight to the Cheesesteak District for some authentic Philly food. The choices are Pat’s or Geno’s. We’ve been a few times before and have sampled both of their wares but we tend to like Pat’s as it is less greasy. The weather was really, really cold and the line was long and very badly organized so we were actually standing in the middle of the street for a while. We sat outside shivering to death and eating our tasty, tasty cheesesteaks. Brynn was unimpressed. Evan liked the fries.

Next we went to the Philadelphia Zoo which is actually a really nice zoo. It was not very busy (probably due to the cool weather) but it had many indoor exhibits so we were able to keep warm for a lot of the time. The best part was the gorilla exhibit which is super cool. They gorillas are indoors at this time of year and they have a multi level area in which to roam and swing around. There was a bigger male gorilla plus one that was, I assume, a smaller male. They were doing a lot of rough housing and they were hanging out in this one part at the bottom so I went down some steps and the massive gorilla was just sitting on the otherside of the glass staring at me. Then the little one came along and the big gorilla moved right up to the glass and reared up and I had turned my head for a second so I looked back and this freaking huge gorilla is right up in front of me. I was so surprised that I actually shrieked. They were doing a little play biting and then started wrestling which got a little intense and scared all of us a bit. Then the big gorilla did a massive jump onto a climbing structure and he went up to the top (two stories up I guess) by climbing and swinging on ropes and his arms were just so powerful that it took him only a few seconds. It was truly impressive.

They have a carousel at the zoo and both kids are huge fans so we had to go on that. Evan starts crying as soon as he gets on any ride because he can’t wait for it to start. He also has some kind of amazing powers when it comes to detecting that the ride is slowing down at the end. He again starts crying and I’m always trying to figure out what’s wrong before it dawns on me that it’s almost over. A few weeks back we went to a mall with a carousel and Evan screamed with joy when he saw it and made a mad dash for it. Unfortunately for us we didn’t realize he could actually fit through the bars in the barrier fence so he ran up and started squeezing his tiny body through before we realized what was happening. Luckily Dave grabbed him in time because if he had made it through he would have tried to board the in-motion carousel and that would not have ended well.

After a couple of hours at the zoo Brynn was ready to go but then we found a place where you can touch some animals (mainly goats) and Evan is goat mad so we had to stay there for a while. Evan bonded with a little white goat and he was actually very gentle with it. He liked nuzzling their faces together. Very cute. Probably not very hygenic. Evan chased many goats and then he discovered that if he held up his hand to their mouth then they would think he had food and lick his fingers, which he loved. So then he ran around shoving his hand into every goat’s mouth, just asking for trouble. At one point, a big goat butted another big goat which then bumped into a dad holding a baby and almost knocked them both over. It made me a little nervous to see Evan wandering around in a large trip of goats just grabbing and petting whatever he could get his hands on, but he emerged unscathed.

Finally we got sick of listening to Brynn complain about wanting to leave, plus Evan seemed to be getting chilled to the bone so we left and drove to the hotel. The hotel was the main reason Brynn wanted to get going. This was clearly the most exciting aspect of the trip for her. We stayed at the Doubletree which was really nice. Warm cookies upon check-in! Although the cookies had nuts so I had to veto them for the kids. The nice guy at the desk gave them teddy bears instead and later brought us up some different cookies to our room. Very nice staff!

We went to a nearby pizza place for dinner and then back to the room for some room service desserts. The kids were exhausted but took a long time to fall asleep. That worked out ok though because we got a bit of a sleep-in the next morning. We had the buffet breakfast in the hotel the next day and then we tried to find the “Please Touch Museum” which took forever. The museum had recently moved so our map showed the old location and that took us a while to figure out. I had the new address written down but it was on a recently renamed street which was not used on the map and I didn’t write down the old street name. Beyond frustrating! But we finally got there and it was a lot of fun. It’s specifically designed for kids 1-7 and everything can be touched or played with. The most popular exhibit seemed to be the Shoprite supermarket. Kids love to pretend to go grocery shopping apparently! There weren’t enough carts and Evan was trying to steal one from every kid he could. He’s a very pushy little boy and is not intimidated by anyone. He was also the master of pushing past kids waiting on line to go down a little slide. He would squirm past them and even though there were about 6 kids going on the slide over and over, Evan was probably taking every third turn. I finally had to get him out of there because other parents were not looking happy. It’s not my fault if a bunch of four year olds let a one year old push them around!!

After a few hours Evan was getting pretty tired so it was time to leave. Brynn had a bit of a meltdown when she found out we were going home. She wanted to go back to the hotel. The drive back was fine and then the snowstorm came through and now I’m avoiding digging us out. I don’t know how much snow we got because it was so windy. One section of driveway is clear but next to it is a two foot high snow drift. I think we probably only got about 4-5 inches but it’s really heavy and a huge pain to shovel.

Some thoughts on Philly:

The people are NICE! Like so, so much nicer than New Jersey or New York. It’s just across the NJ border so you’d think it wouldn’t be that much of a difference but, as Dave said, it’s probably more that our area of NJ is too close to NYC so we suffer for that. But seriously, everyone we dealt with, from parking attendants to wait staff, was just delightful.

We saw way too many examples of inappropriate dressing. We were freezing our butts off on a 42 degree day and we saw a guy in a tshirt waiting on line for a cheesesteak. We saw a guy in shorts at the zoo and then we saw two girls with skirts and bare legs walking around at night in the city. Brrrrr!!!!

The city of Brotherly Love. Everywhere we went, we saw lots of man couples but not of the gay variety. These were straight men on man dates. At dinner on Saturday, Dave pointed out a section filled with pairs of guys eating dinner together. At least six tables! But as I said, these were clearly not romantic dinners. Then at breakfast it was the same thing; half the buffet was filled with male couples. I don’t know what that was all about.

I’ll try to get some pictures up in the gallery soon (of the kids, not the man couples). I recently added the Australia photos so check them out!