Entries Tagged 'Roundups' ↓

Well, after blogging for almost a year I have collected over a thousand comments on my articles. Some of them are really quite interesting. Previously I highlighted some, and here are some more of my favorites.

In my article about California, a woman named Nancy Lynn left a poem and I really loved it:

From Nancy Lynn

I have lived here since 1996, and realized the other day that I still don’t feel at home here. Here is my poem about California:

California

It never rains here
This long-legged mistress is a mystery,
She is fake and beautiful
With no soul
But never changes.

The year is like a stack of blue cubes,
Square as windows of an Internet Company
Reflecting the sky
Of daily brightness
And vapid valleys streaming in cars
Climbing one hill and another
Which exit only for take-out coffee

The ocean is untouchable
Cold, colorless darkness
A metaphor for “the beach”
Where you may look, but don’t touch
It’s all a part of the perfection,
And you can insert your image everywhere.

The natives, having pushed out
Indians, Mexicans
But sit in trees and fight for the condor,
Must always defend how beautiful
And bounteous their land is,
Vain and proud of their humility,
Political correctness and perfection.
I listen, but only hear
The sky, void of thunder.

Thank you Nancy Lynn!

Speaking of poems, my dad is a budding poet. He left this comment a while ago that made me laugh a bit:

great job, Xin!

Send you a Chinese poem I just wrote for your future education of your kids in Chinese.

沿路春光

行进在加州12号公路上

苏醒的

呼啦啦一片

何止

是那五彩的春天？

路边绽开的黄花

向我坐车的大灯眨眼

沿路清澈的湖边

过冬的加拿大天鹅

盘点着回迁

雨后微涨的湖面

泛起美丽的漪涟

迎来成群的白鹭，水鸟，

鸣呤，盘旋—

广阔无垠的原野

带着雨季的寄托和眷恋

把生命的绿

在大地洒遍，向远山伸延

浅黄色的澳洲长毛羊

黑白相间的奶牛，

牛马群一点点，一片片

象繁星将这绿的苍穹装点

大洋春天的季风

顺着三角洲的水道线

牵动那百座百呎高的风车

飞旋—

高大的三角铁架

化作那永动的能源

电灯亮了，电车通了

风车啊，

天空感谢你

留给她一片蔚蓝的天

车还在向前

春光让我陶醉

突然

路旁车速灯提起意见

“超速，超速！”

刹车，减速，

我醒了，

醒来的还有那

永远赞不完的春天！

This my translation of it:

The Light of Spring Along the Road

Driving along California Highway 12
I am awakened
by a windy plain
it is the multicolored spring
The yellow flowers blooming next to the road
are blinking at my car’s headlights
The clear lake along the road
is surrounded by many Canadian geese.
The surface of the lake ripples after a soft rain
and welcomes flocks of chirping and hovering egrets and water fowl
The vast and endless wilderness
Carries the loving care of the rain season
and spread the green of life across the plains and towards the mountains
The light yellow long haired Australian sheep,
And the black and white cows
dot and flock the plains like
stars upon a green sky.
The winds of the ocean
flows from the peninsula’s shorelines
and make the windmills fly.
Its tall steel frame converts the renewable energy
The lights are lit, and the electric cars are moving.
Windmill, the sky thanks you for leaving her a blue body.
My car is still moving, and I am still mesmerized by the spring.
Suddenly the car next to me flashes its lights.
I am speeding.
I brake and slow down.
I am awake, and I still have the spring that I can never stop praising.

Anyway, hope you have enjoyed these diversions from personal finance and two views of California. My dad works for a foundation that helps people save energy all over the world so that poem has a bit of a hippie environmentalist ring to it, which is kind of cool.

If you want to read more about personal finance. Here are some recent carnivals I participated in:

Carnival of Personal Finance #155 hosted by Pinyo.
How to Make Money Doing What You Love Carnival
Carnival of Money Stories #61 at Piggy Bank Blues

That’s the ones I remember, but if I didn’t link you feel free to tell me! Have a great day everyone.

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Welcome to the March 17, 2008 edition of credit report stories. This is a fairly new blog carnival that doesn’t have many submissions. The following are the submissions I found useful.

B. Duncan presents TV Station Puts Identity Theft Protection Companies to the Test posted at Identity Thoughts – Identity Theft Protection, Identity Theft Prevention. I thought this article was rather interesting. Apparently some identity theft alert services do work.

Raymond presents Best Business Credit Card For Your Small Business posted at Money Blue Book.

Jay Medina presents The easiest way to establish good credit posted at HelpfulAdvisor.com.

William Blake presents Are You Balancing Your Bank Statements Every Month? posted at Becoming Debt Free.

That concludes this extremely short edition of the article. Submit your blog article to the next edition of credit report stories using the carnival submission form if you have useful articles about credit cards, credit report, and identity theft!

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Wow, spring is almost upon us, and there are more San Mateo Home Sellers in Trouble, too. This is the most distressed properties I have ever seen in a 4 week period. 135 properties is almost 30% of all the listings in our small county.

Total Count of San Mateo Home Sellers in Trouble for 2/11/2008 to 3/09/2008: 135

Average Time from Last Sale Date: 1.65 Years

Average Annualized Loss: 19.1%

Average Absolute Percentage Loss: 15.76%

Average Size of Home: 1228

Average Price Per Square Foot: $467.47

Biggest Losers : 330 Wisteria Dr in East Palo Alto with an annualized loss of 99% and 2568 Illinois Ave in East Palo Alto with an absolute loss of 48.35%

I have decided that I may start a different blog and update it more frequently to record these properties. The blog would be a good service to my community and it would be easier to navigate than these spreadsheets. Each home will have its own post and I can categorize the homes much better via blog categories!

Anyway, today I read a really good article by a teenage girl about the foreclosure situation: Teen columnist: For adults, foreclosure is payback time. I am glad to see there is still hope for the younger generation!

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Well, The Baglady was in quite a few carnivals the past two weeks, and here they are in no particular order:

Festival of Frugality — Kyle mentioned me as an editor’s pick! Thanks Kyle!

Carnival of Personal Finance

Personal Finance Money Tips

Carnival of Money Stories

All Women Blogging Carnival

Happiness Carnival

How to Solve Money Worries

Carnival of Debt Reduction

Carnival of Family Life

Carnival of Cities

Carnival of Insanities

Common Sense Wealth Carnival

Here are a few of my favorite stories from the past couple weeks:

Ben Stein writes about his clueless friends who don’t know how to work. I thought it was an extremely funny article.

Blownmortgage shows us the “best borrower ever”, and why even conforming mortgages could fail. This is a must read, and it was very eye opening to me because I never thought that a “prime” borrower could also be living on the edge.

The Retirement Hobo writes about thanking his network, and I’m in the story!! yeah!!

Millionaire Mommy spills the secrets to her investment portfolio. I read the strategy thoroughly and it actually makes a lot of sense and is easy to implement. I took a free trial of the NoLoad FundX newsletter and it turns out I already own some of the funds in the list and they are definitely the better performing funds in my portfolio. I have held these funds for a while though, and I don’t trade very often.

Anyway, I’m coming upon my 100th post of this blog! I am planning a Chinese edition of the blog to improve my Chinese writing skills, and we’ll see how that goes!

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This week there were some great carnivals as usual. First there is the All Women Blogging Carnival at Red Sultana where my article about selling eggs was included. Being the nerd I am I really liked this article about bird migration.

Next there is The Carnival of Personal Finance #126. In this carnival I wrote about speed interviewing. A couple articles I would like to highlight is Scrabble and Personal Finance: 8 Lessons from Tiles at Blueprint for Financial Propsperity and Soup Parrish’s Ground Rules for his retirement at age 24. I really love Scrabble and I love how Jim put together his experiences in a game into lessons for personal finance. Soup Parrish is a friend of mine and he is trying an interesting experiment in retiring on $75,000 in San Francisco. I would like to see how he does.  I have told him that realistically he can’t retire on $75,000 here in the Bay Area, but he has a set of rules that lets him generate other income too.  Check out his blog at The Retirement Hobo.

Finally, there is the Carnival of Money Stories at Being Frugal. I like Lynnae’s blog a lot and this week my article about Asian parents  has been included.  I also really liked this story about gifts for children by Betsy Teutsch.  It’s pretty true that kids don’t like presents like stocks and bonds because they can’t really play with it.

That’s all for this week!

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