Mr Al Young Dot Com

My post on the escalating price of airline travel got linked to a similar news story published on CNN online. You can see the article here. At the end of the article my article is featured in the section titled “From The Blogs”.

In the early days of air travel, airplane travel was a luxury reserved for the very rich.  Over the years airline travel was made available to the common people with air fares becoming more affordable.  Bargain airlines sprung up and it was cheaper to fly than drive.  Now with the gas prices skyrocketing airline travel may once again become a luxury item.

I was watching a news report on the struggles of the airline industry last week.  Fuel now accounts for more than half of an airline’s expense and they are losing money on each flight.  The loss ranges from a few hundred dollars per short flights to several thousand on longer cross country flights.  Obviously an airline cannot stay in business for long if is losing money on every flight.  They need to either increase revenue or reduce expenses or both.  Expenses are already being curbed.  On a recent flight I was not even given a bag of peanuts.  Everything cost money including a meal, pillow or blanket and checking in an extra bag.  Some airlines have eliminated the in flight movie system in order to save fuel.  Fares are also being raised in order for the airlines to squeeze out a profit on each flight.

We will be taking 2 long drives by car this summer instead of flying.  Even with the high price of gas it is still much cheaper than flying especially with a family.  Not only are fares rising, there will be less flights as airlines are going out of business and existing airlines reducing their schedule to stop the losses.  All these factors means you will soon be paying a lot for the privilege of being packed into a plane like sardines without any snacks.  That is if you are the few who can afford the luxury of air travel

Last month my son Marcus finished his first season of T-Ball and I finished my first year being an assistant coach. It was a good experience for both of us. For Marcus it was his first season of organized baseball and he did very well as one the top players on the team. The team consisted of 4-5 year olds but there is a big difference between barely 4 and in preschool and 5 and a half and in kindergarten. Its only 1 year but the difference in attention span, maturity, and skills is huge. Marcus went through his first year still enjoying baseball and is now ready for the next level. Some observations from my first season:

• Coaching: Coaching T-ball is not really about teaching the fundamentals of baseball although we tried. I think I spent most of my time trying to get the kids to pay attention and to look in the right direction while on defense. Many times they would be wrestling with one another or making “dirt angels” on the infield.
• Outfield: There is really no need for outfielders in T-ball. I think only a few balls went into the outfield all season. We just played a deep infield and still the ball sometimes went through because no one was paying attention
• Kids: At the T-ball level none of the kids really like baseball. They like being with their friends and maybe like wearing the uniforms but they don’t really understand or enjoy the game itself. Baseball is still too boring form them. Unlike soccer where there is constant motion baseball has a lot of down time just waiting for a ball to come to you or to bat. The kids get distracted easily and its a chore to get them to focus. Hopefully they will develop more of an interest in the game itself next year as they mature. The exception to this is Marcus who actually enjoys the game. Part of it is that he is a little older than the other kids and can pay attention longer. Also Marcus has been going to spring training and baseball games since he was 3. He even likes watching it on TV and listening on the radio. He also checks the score of the A’s game on the Internet first thing in the morning because the games end after his bed time. He may be the only kid on the team who actually enjoys the game.

I think it was a positive experience for everyone and I enjoyed working with the other coaches. Now its onto soccer. Here are some pictures of the season. For some kids raking the infield dirt was a highlight of the season.

It is the middle of the July and much of the country is experiencing a heat wave.  So naturally I would be spending a week vacationing in one of the hottest spots in the country….Palm Springs.  It reached a high of 114 degrees last week and on most days around 108-110 degrees.  I’m not a fan of the heat but when you are trying to find an available timeshare spot during the summer only the hottest places are readily available.  Mainly because no one wants to go there when it is so hot.  That can be a plus if you can handle the heat.

Last year we went to Scottsdale/Phoenix where it was equally hot so we are no stranger to extreme summer heat.  Palms Springs is very much like Scottsdale.  Like Scottsdale it is an upscale area with lots of nice homes and resorts.  Also there is a lot of shopping and golf courses.  And it is very HOT.  I think its dry heat but it does not matter, its still not comfortable.  Most days it reaches 100 degrees by 10 in the morning and it does not get below 100 degrees until about 9 in the evening.   There are only 2 places that you are really comfortable at, indoors under air conditioning and in the pool.  We spent a lot of time at the pool.

Still you do eventually get used to the heat or at least adapt better.  When the temperature dropped by 10 degrees due to some thunderstorms it almost felt pleasant…. almost.  Despite the extreme heat we did get in a lot of activities and had a good time.  If you can handle the heat going to a hot weather destination during the dead of summer has its advantages.  First the rates at hotels and restaurants are much lower than during the winter when everyone is going.  If you want to experience a nice 4 or 5 star resort but did not want to pay the high prices go in the summer.  You can get room rates at 1/2 off or more from the high season rate.   The same goes with restaurants. So if you want to pamper yourself at a nice resort at a  bargain price summer is the time to go.

If you want to hang around a nice pool, get a spa treatment and eat well all at a reasonable rate, this is the vacation for you.  However if you want a more active vacation, than it may not work for you.  The good news is that many attractions like golf are deeply discounted during the summer season.  The bad news is that you can only do anything active comfortably very early or very late in the day.  I would have loved to golf on one the many golf courses in Palm Springs but I don’t think I could have lasted 2-3 hours in this heat.

Last week Stan organized a evening at the movies for many of us with young children. Several families got together to see Kung Fu Panda for only $4. We all enjoyed the movie and had a good time. Today I was surprised to learn that one of my Facebook friends was watching Kung Fu Panda online. I was also surprised to get some possibly useful information from Facebook.

So I checked it out at www.restofthemovie.com. Sure enough I was able to see the movie online. There were also many other first run movies you could see. After taking a look around here are some thoughts on the site:

• Because of the size of movies, most are broken into parts. Kung Fu Panda is split into 4 parts. Once you finish one section, just click on the next section. Nothing to download and its a small inconvenience.
• The movie quality and sound is certainly not high definition but its okay. Certainly watchable. It goes without saying that you need a high speed internet connection but the feed of each movie varies. Some are better than others, its a matter of trial and error. Two movies that seem good are Kung Fu Panda and Don’t Mess With The Zohan.
• Some movies are are only available for a short period of time and its gone. Some have foreign subtitles
• if you want to download the entire movie you are directed to a movie download site where you pay a monthly fee and have to download software to view the movies.

It is always nice to get a check in the mail. Instead of the normal bills and junk mail you get money. Its not often that this happen. Most of the time money is deposited into your account electronically and you don’t get to actually receive the check. It is more convenient but you don’t get the same thrill as opening an envelope with money inside. Lately I have been getting money in the mail……email that is.

A couple of times a day I get an email that I have an e-book sale. That means money in my inbox. Its not really because they send me a check twice a month. So in this case I get to experience money in the mail twice. Once when I am notified by email of a book sale and when the actual check arrives.

A couple of times a week I also get an email from PayPal that there has been a deposit into my account. This is from the earnings from my freelance writing jobs with Ehow. They process the PayPal deposits 2-3 times a week. Money is deposited into my PayPal account and I eventually transfer it to my checking account without ever seeing a physical check or cash. Still it is still exciting to see money in my email inbox. Sometimes I wake up with several emails of book sales. Money in my sleep….sort of. At least the emails represents real money unlike the many emails in my spam folder offering to wire me millions of dollars from Africa. That’s why I check my email so often….I’m looking for money.

I have been on Facebook for awhile but not as an active participant.  Only recently have I logged onto Facebook more often since Stan got me more involved with Facebook.  After spending some time on Facebook, I think its a fun and sometimes useful networking tool.  Its different from My Space which is for kids and Linkedin which is for business networking.  My Space is popular with the under 18 crowd and pedophiles.  Linkedin is like a rolodex online.  It is great for making business contacts and networking but not as much fun as Facebok.  So Facebook is the appropriate social networking tool for my age group.  After spending some time on Facebook I found some cool things it can do and things I still don’t understand.

What Is Cool About Facebook:

• Connecting with old friends: I have reconnected with old friends from college and high school which I likely would not have been able to do without Facebook.  That is the best thing about Facebook.
• Photos:  I enjoy seeing photos of friends and their families particularly those I have lost contact with

What I Still Don’t Get About Facebook:

• Virtual Gifts: Every few days someone gives me a gift on Facebook.  Not a real gift but a virtual gift.  Something like so and so sent you a flower and its a picture of a flower.  Okay.  I got “poked” by someone once. Another time someone threw a virtual snowball at me. What???
• Status:  There are people who are always on Facebook and updating us with their status.  That means telling everyone what they are now doing.  Like I just took a nap or I’m watching TV.  Maybe other people care what you are doing, but I don’t really need to know.
• Friend Request:  The whole idea with Facebook is to connect or to reconnect with your friends and that is fine.  I get friend requests and I am glad to accept, but sometimes I get requests from people I barely know.  I may have met them once or twice through a mutual friend and now they are asking me to be their Facebook friend.  I always accept to be polite but I would not really consider them friends.  It is kind of like high school when you try to get everyone in school to sign your yearbook despite the fact you only have about 10 close friends and the rest are just acquaintances.   All these friend request seem just like filling up your yearbook.  I would rather have a smaller group of friends than hundreds of Facebook friends that I barely know.

Facebook is a fun entertaining social networking tool.  I can see how it can be useful and fun to some people. It seems the people who enjoy Facebook the most are the most social and outgoing.  I guess I ‘m just not that sociable in person or even online, so I don’t fully “get” Facebook.

June marks the end of another school year.  It is hard to believe a school year has gone by so fast already and we are already into summer.  Last week Marcus graduated from Kindergarten.  It seemed like yesterday that he started Kindergarten. I have had the unique perspective of seeing Kindergarten up close this year as I was in the classroom nearly every day of the school year.  Here are some observations and thoughts of the school year:

• Kindergarten is fast paced:  I’m too old to remember exactly what I learned in Kindergarten but I am fairly certain that we did not cover so much material in Kindergarten.  Even though they are only in school for 3 1/2 hours they cover a lot of ground in that time.
• Kindergarten is a lot of work:  I don’t take Marcus to swimming lesson very often so it seems to me like he learned to swim overnight.  One day he is clinging to a floatation device and the next he is diving in and swimming across the pool.  Not so with school work.  I see the hard work being done in the classroom, the home work and the evening reading drills.  So now that Marcus can read and write I can appreciate how far he has come.
• There is drama in Kindergarten:  Kindergarten is mostly a carefree time but there is also a lot of drama sometimes.  Each day we walk home I get to hear all the drama that happened during the day such as hurt feelings, and misunderstandings.  It is mostly forgotten by the next day but it always seem like a big deal at the time.
• Moms work hard:  Being with all the other Moms has given me a new appreciation of how hard Moms work.  The Moms of room 2 are a very involved and dedicated group.  They volunteer for every school function and are at school every day.  In addition many work part time or run a business in addition to taking care of many kids.  My own wife is an example of a hard working Mom.  She volunteers at the library each week and is chaperone for every field trip.  Outside of school she is the little league’s team Mom and will be teaching at two different DVBS in the next few weeks.  This is in addition to serving as babysitter to nearly every kid in the neighborhood on short notice.  At first I felt that I did not have a lot in common with the other Moms but by the end of the year they have come to accept me as one of them.  We had a fun time at an end of the school year party as we bonded over several bottles of wine.  Just today we spent an entire afternoon together just chatting away at McDonalds.

So Kindergarten ended much like it started, with some excitement, sadness, and a few tears.  Here are some pictures.

Last week we went back to the Lark Creek Steak House in San Francisco for Dine about Town. You may remember that I wrote about my dinner there back in January. Yes I know Dine about Town is an opportunity to try new restaurants and I have already tried the Lark Creek Steak House only 6 months ago. There are several reasons why I decided to go back to the same restaurant again.

1. Dine about Town is normally the full month of January giving us a chance to use the whole month to make plans and decide which restaurant to try. This year Dine about Town is broken up with two weeks in January and two weeks in June. That does not give you much time to plan and set up dinner plans.
2. I enjoyed our last meal meal at the Lark Creek Steak House and I did not see any other restaurants I was dying to try.

So instead of spreading out some dinners with various groups of friends over the full month, we quickly decided on a restaurant and made plans with 3 other couples. This was our largest Dine about Town outing yet. June is a very busy month for anyone with kids and we have a combined 10 kids among us. So it was a small miracle that we were able to find a date and babysitting for all our children on fairly short notice.

I don’t have any new pictures of our meal. You can see pictures here of the last time I was there. We had essentially the same meal and it was still outstanding although the prices on a few items went up. The other reason I don’t have any new photos is that one of my dinner companions cited a concern over her their privacy in appearing on my blog. OK, most people seem excited to be featured on my blog, but certainly I will honor your wish to remain anonymous. However you must remember that having a blog is like having a reality TV show. If you interact with me chances are you will be blog material sooner or later directly or indirectly. So if you have a real need for privacy I can either put a black bar over your face, use only your initials, have you sign a waiver or I guess you can just tell me you don’t want to be featured on my Blog. My anonymous dinner companion has already done that but if anyone else has a problem with privacy let me know.

Our dinner was a lot of fun. As parents it is always nice to have an evening out without kids and everyone always enjoys a good meal among good friends. Unlike my dinners with my old friends the Dine about dinners have a different dynamics. Usually we go out with “my” friends and “her” friends on separate occasions. In a marriage there are always friends of our spouse that we may not otherwise interact with. We may not care for the husband of our wife’s friend or just find that we have not much in common. Still we put up with these people for the sake of our spouse and it is usually not so bad. It is easier if you have kids. If you don’t want to interact with the other couple just go check on your kids until its time to go home.

Still it is nice to be able to find a group of friends that can be considered “our” friends and we can both enjoy the company. With this group of four couples I think we are as close to having  a group of “our” friends as possible. We share many things in common with these three other couples. We are all about the same age and are at the stage of life. With each of us having young kids we also share the same joys and struggles of raising kids. Our relationships with one another go back many years starting as single people to now a married couple with kids. I guess some of these people could still be considered more “her” friends and some more “my” friends but the line between “his” and “her” friendships are becoming less clear with each passing year. While I do not have the same relationship with my wife’s friends, we still have a relationship and history that goes way back. Some people I have know nearly as long but of course in a different way.

A fine meal with no kids is always a treat, but to be able share the experience with a group of close friends makes the dining experience that much more enjoyable. We feel blessed to have a group of special friends in our lives that we can both share and enjoy our lives with. I look forward to our next dining outing even if the food is not quite as good. Not often… but sometimes the dining is not just about the food.

What is the difference between a pro athlete and an amateur one?  Most people will say the pro athlete is more skilled and play at a higher level of competition.  Most of the times that is true but not always.  For instance there are many amateur golfers who are just as skilled as professional golfers.  Yet they are considered amateurs.  The main criteria in determining if an athlete is an amateur or pro is if they are being paid.  Once you sign a contract or accept prize money you lose your amateur status forever and you are considered a professional.

If we go by that definition I guess I would now be considered a professional writer since I have recently been getting paid for my writing.  Not much but I still got paid.  My ramblings on this blog are still amateurish to say the least but you can add freelance writer to my list of titles.  Here are some of my paid and published writing projects.

E-book: Not only am I a writer I am an author.  I have co-authored a real estate e-book titled “Tenant in Common Investing-The Uncommon Path to Massive Profits”.   Writing this book has been quite an educational and hopefully profitable experience.  It is a lot of work to write a book, but once you write the book it is quite rewarding.  There are many benefits of an e-book over a regular book.  First the costs to publish an e-book is very cheap compared to a regular book.  We got our initial printing costs of the e-book back on the first day of sale.  What other business can do that?  There is also no inventory to carry.  You don’t have to print a lot of books and have no one buy it.  Once someone buys a book they just download it.  You can also charge more for an e-book than a regular book.  If you go to Barnes and Noble you will see a 1,000 page hardback book being sold of under $30.  Yet e-books  of 50-75 pages can sell for as much as $60 and people buy it.  E-books can also be sold 24 hours a day.  I can wake up and see that I sold several books overnight to people from anywhere in the world.  We have some marketing campaigns coming up to promote the book and I have a few ideas for other books I am working on.

Ehow: I am also writing articles for a “How To”website.  You can check out the site here.  These are all instructional type articles on a variety of subjects.  This has been my bread and butter so far as a writer.  You won’t find my name on any articles on the site.  That is because I go through an agent who I get my assignments from and they sell it to Ehow.   I sell the rights to my articles as well so it appears on ehow as written by staff even though it was written by a contractor(me).  This month I have written over 60 articles for ehow.  Am I an expert on 60 subjects?  Hardly, I don’t think I am an expert on even two subjects, but 10 minutes of Google research and I am qualified to write an article instructing others.  For example I have written 5 articles  on variations of “How to Snowshoe” and I have snowshoed exactly once in my life.  For the amount of work Ehow pays decently.  They also pay quickly.  Once my article is approved they paypal me immediately.  I have been so busy with these articles that I have outsourced some of my assignments to a writer in India.  I just edit the articles and send it on.  This frees me up for other writing projects.

SEO Writing:  SEO stands for search engine optimization.  This type of article is writing for the Internet. It is just like regular article writing but for the Internet.  For example I might be asked by a client to write a 400-500 word article on “Getting a Mortgage” using the keyword “California Mortgages”.  That means I have to write the article on “Getting a Mortgage” but 3-5% of the words must contain the phrase “California Mortgages” That is because when someone types in the phrase “California Mortgages” in a search engine such as Google, the article and information on my client’s company will appear prominently.  This kind of writing is a little tricky until you get the hang of it but I prefer it.  So far I have only written a few articles for 1 client but I hope to do more of this type of articles as I think there is a good demand for it.

Miscellaneous: In addition to these other projects I have few other articles scattered among several web sites.  These are short articles that pay very little, but it gets some exposure and I can build my writing resume.  Here is an example of such an article.

Writing and blogging is fun and a good creative release for me, but anything  is even more fun if you get paid for it.