The envelope system - Mvelopes.com

As I was reading through this Sunday's New and Observer, I stumbled upon a reference to Mvelopes in the Wall Street Journal Sunday section by Amy Hoak under an article entitled "Web Sites to Keep You on Budget." Interestingly enough, this is the method Heather and I were featured in the New and Observer for using. Amazingly enough, most of my colleagues and friends had no clue what the envelope system was and I heard more jokes than anything. In fact, my cube walls were covered in envelopes when I returned to work.

But, Amy in her article this morning didn't feel the need to expand on what the envelope system was...so I think it must be fairly cut and dry. She said, "[Mvelopes.com] is based on the envelope method of budgeting, which allocated funds by expense category."

Heather and I use Mvelopes and really enjoy it. We found it off of the Crown Ministries website. I think they have a one month trial, but its quite amazing. Even if, like Heather and I, you use a Credit Card for most of your purchases (hopefully with cash back or rewards)...you can easily allocate those expenses to the individual envelopes. I highly recommend checking it out.

I guess my candidate is...

Following other family bloggers lead, I tried this Candidate Calculator. Its a useful tool for people who don't have time to weed through each candidates position, which normally is made clear in a 14 page essay! At the bottom I left it Undecided so that it would not take my current preferences into account on anything but the issues. Here are my results:

Mike Huckabee - 74.00% match

Your Other Top Matches
California Representative Duncan Hunter (R) - 68.00%
Businessman John Cox (R) - 67.00%
Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo (R) - 66.00%

Middle of the Pack
Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (R) - 61.00%
Arizona Senator John McCain (R) - 60.00%
Kansas Senator Sam Brownback (R) - 56.00%
Delaware Senator Joseph Biden (D) - 55.00%
New York Senator Hillary Clinton (D) - 54.00%
Former North Carolina Senator John Edwards (D) - 54.00%
Illinois Senator Barack Obama (D) - 53.00%
Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd (D) - 52.00%
Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich (D) - 50.00%
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) - 49.00%

Bottom of the Barrel
Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (D) - 47.00%
Former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson (R) - 44.00%
New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson (D) - 41.00%
Texas Representative Ron Paul (R) - 33.00%


Party Results Republican - 53.24%
Democrat - 46.76%

I think the most amazing things to me were
1. 46.76% Democrat? Wow..I never have sided with a democrat in my 10 years of voting.
2. How low Giuliani, Thompson, and Paul were? 33% with Paul? thats crazy!

Working out? Whats your motivation?

In the packed gym (but numbers are already dwindling) this morning I overheard a conversation that really got me thinking...thinking enough to blog about it. The conversation went something like this:
Really Muscular Guy: "Good to see you at the gym this morning"
Groggy slightly overweight guy: "Yea"
Really Muscular Guy: "Whats your motivation?"
Groggy slightly overweight guy: "To lose weight"

So, this was at the start of my workout, about 5:45 AM. I had the rest of the workout, the time getting ready for work, and the commute into work to think about this question...about another 2 hours. You hear a lot that losing weight is the most popular New Year's resolution...to drop. So, why is that?

Judging from my personal experience over the past 5 years, I think the problem is one of motivation. If you goal is to lose weight, what happens when you have done that? Or what happens when you hit that first wall. Anyone could watch the Biggest Loser and tell you that everyone, even with personal trainers, will hit walls when trying to lose weight. If that is your only goal, I think you can plan on having that goal pop up on your radar every couple years for the rest of your life.

In my own personal life, I have jumped on and off the workout wagon about 6 times in the past 5 yrs. On my current track, I have been going at 5:30 AM every morning for the past 4 months. Its probably the second longest streak in my short life, the longest was solidly from April 2001 to about January 2002. I stopped after that 1.5 years because more of my time was being spent with my then bride-to-be and I wanted to keep her as number one in my life. Plus, with everything I had going on, it was the lowest priority and I guess I just no longer had the motivation.

I started up from time to time with the motivation of losing weight or getting in shape, with no real goals. Those typically failed from the start as I failed to establish a routine. When my daughter was born in October of 2006, I started to again thought about working out but couldn't fit it in the weekdays as I didn't want to lose what precious time I had with her. I mean, she is awake from 8 AM to 1 PM and 3 PM to 8 PM roughly...that means I only get about 5-8 PM with her if I am lucky and then the rest of the night with my wife!

But, this fall I found new motivation. I realized that the lifestyle I wanted for my new growing family was a lifestyle of fun activity. I didn't want to risk getting into a position where I was too out of shape to go hiking, rock climbing, kayaking, or biking with my family. I want my family to be a family of adventure and a family of activity, not one that watches a TV show together but one that explores God's great creation with one another. I want to be as healthy as possible so in the years I have with them, we can do these things with one another. There is my motivation, its all I need. I don't care what weight I am, I just want to be in shape to experience life with my family to the extreme. I don't want to be the man on the couch, I want to be this man:


Over this Christmas vacation I had, we were blessed to have my mother here for a bit. Together, we looked through thousands of pictures my father had scanned from slide format. With long time friends of my parents over one day after Christmas, we showed them some of the old pictures. They commented about how our family was the family always at parks, camping and hiking. I have many fond memories of camping with my family. Here are some from when I was 5 months old and my sister 4 yrs old...



I am motivated to have the same for my family. I want to be in the physical condition such that my children can experience that. There is my motivation for the new year.

Big shoes to fill

Anna is growing up quicker than I ever imagined could happen. Let's try to name some milestones...

• The other night, she got her blankey and told Mommy that she was ready for bed
• She climbs with ease up and down the stairs
• She has a new room that looks older and more mature

• She eats most everything we eat and eats out of things like raisin boxes with ease
• She is starting to understand a lot more, we taught her things with ease like what a belly button is

Thankfully, tonight she did something that made me remember just how young she is...

Sony DCR-HC28 review

I am a novice video guy, this is my first video camera. But, having a 1 yr old daughter and another on the way had me wanting a video camera. With some Best Buy gift cards given to us for Christmas, we decided it was a good time to take the plunge.

The Good

• Very inexpensive. It was $225 on sale at Best Buy.
• MiniDV is uncompressed and therefore pretty easy to edit.
• Firewire to our Macbook is very fast and easy to use with iMovie.
• Very Small and lightweight.
• Image stabilization seems to work pretty well
• Everything bad I read was about the sound, but I find it to be very clear.
  

• It does a good job of managing different mini-clips in the playback system. Not sure what this is called, but it automatically resets the counter to 0:00 after each time we pull off the movie clips. this could be standard, but is really a nice feature.
• Battery life seems to be great for what we use it for, a bunch of small 5 minute clips.
  

The Bad

• No 16:9 mode...which all my TVs are widescreens.
  
• On our MacBook and large LCD TV, these videos really start look amateur in full screen. Look fine on a youtube like interface.
  
• Why is it the 4 pin firewire instead of 6 pin?
• Firewire cable is expensive, ~ $30
  
• Touchscreen controls are not that easy to use for me. My wife seems to hit the buttons with more easy.
• Its very difficult to keep the camera steady at 20X zoom. Not sure I would ever use it or anything higher unless I bought a tripod.
  
• The default zoom level seems to be too close. you can't take videos unless you can step back a good bit.
• Using the tapes as storage is a bit kludgey in terms of rewind, play, etc.
  

The best thing about our camcorder is iMovie. So, its not so much the camcorder as the software which didn't come with the Sony but with our Macbook.

Overall, I might buy an HD version using flash memory if I were to do it again. That is, for small 5 minute clips to capture moments.

Have a Merry Unsantatized Christmas

Our singles / college pastor, Bryan Finley, did our Christmas service today at our church. Eventually, you should be able to hear it here. It was a great sermon and talked about how many of our rituals and traditions have us sanitizing Christmas to become something other than what it is about. When he said sanitizing, I at first thought he said "Santa-tizing" thanks to that wonderful southern accent I am still getting used to. Santa-tizing is also a very applicable word, since its making Christmas about Santa and gifts instead of about the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Santa-tizing is exactly what happened in Vegie Tales movie entitled "The Toy that Saved Christmas." But, its far worse than just making Christmas about gifts or even giving, but making Christmas about families and as Bryan quoted one radio host, "Christmas is what makes our nation great." Christmas is not any of that, but about what makes our God great. He came into this world humbly and humbly offered Himself to all of us. And we celebrate Christmas as the day He came to earth for us.

So, I say have a Merry unsanitized and unsantatized Christmas!

Timeshares

Heather, Anna, and I just got back from visiting with my father and step-mom at Myrtle Beach, staying at the South Beach Resort at Myrtle Beach. My father used RCI to trade in some of his timeshare to go to another. Here Heather, Anna, and I are at the South Beach Resort:

This past trip, combined with memories from my last Myrtle Beach trip, had me thinking about timeshares. Two years ago Heather and I went to Myrtle Beach with our close friends Aaron and Suzanne in December. We had decided to go to the Dixie Stampede for their Christmas show. (Very good show incidentally. Everywhere in Myrtle Beach seems geared to sell you a timeshare, from Malls to restaurants, and unfortunately Dixie Stampede was not different. We were offered a free drink and appetizer during the preshow for filling out an information card. It wasn't surprising to us that Heather and I, being young DINKs (dual income no kids), hit their target market for anything they wanted to sell us. Well, they offered us a couple hundred dollars and breakfast if we spent a couple of hours the next day at the Sheraton Broadway Plantation timeshares. We didn't have any plans, so we said sure its worth a couple hundred dollars to us to check it out. So, we took the tour and enjoyed the place. Since I was familiar with Hilton Grand Vacation Club, I knew much of what this was all about. We enjoyed it and seriously liked the place. A 2 bedroom unit at the time would cost $18,000 and also need $750 maintenance per year. To Heather and I, that is not something we can make a quick decision on, and things then started to get bad.

The sales guy who was previously very nice to us, turned very rude when we said we were not interested in making a decision that day. Apparently, he thought we really were wasting his time. He badgered us a bit and we told him we definitely were not going to buy. Another person came over who we complained to (complaints on deaf ears) and we walked away with our couple hundred dollars, but very angry.

Since then, we have had other offers for free weekends or other things if we sit through timeshare pitches. I think that the experience was so bad, unless we were really interested we would never do it.

Incidentally, I loved the Starwood Vacation Ownership, even though I don't think I could ever buy into it because of that sales guy. I think Heather and I will just scrimp and save and hope we someday can buy a lakehouse. We may be turned off from timeshares forever...but we can still enjoy our parents like we did this weekend :-)



We liked the South Beach Resort, things seemed in good repair although the amenities were the bare minimum. They had cheap linens and an unimpressive workout facility and lazy "river" as well as some poor customer service. Maybe I will blog another day about the problems with many of these places as I have been to enough. Starwood solves many of these problems, too bad that bad taste will never get out of my mouth!

Brrrrr... It worked

To follow up from my last story, about the tramatic night Anna and I had with her big ouchy. She woke up the next morning with no mark and no bruise. I guess the ice worked! Or maybe I overreacted. Let's just say the ice worked!

Here is Anna from yesterday night with her pink Harris Teeter baloon and playing with her favorite toy, Cassie...



It was so warm yesterday (in the 80s) that she was bare-legged. It had been so long that she didn't have on tights or pants on, her legs were extremely ticklish. That made for a fun night because every time I grabbed her she would giggle.

The Big Ouchy

Tonight something happened that never happened on my guard alone, Anna fell and had a big ouchy. It started with her really enjoying her big pink chair. Mommy had sat on it with her before she left, and she continued to play with the chair.

Eventually, she start moving the chair. She moved it in the middle of the floor, pure hardwoods and no rug. Well she stood and leaned on the back as she had done many times, but this time it didn't hold her. She did a face-plant on the hardwoods having tipped the big pink chair over.

Typically when something tragic like this had happened when it was Heather and I, I'd call in the calvary. Heather and I would double team her with love and all would be well. Well, Daddy didn't do too bad himself. I wisked Anna away and changed her perspectives, went to a different room altogether to get her thinking about something else. We went upstairs and read a book. All was well, the tears had stopped and Daddy's little girl just got more cuddly.

However, the trama was not over. I noticed Anna got a big red spot. And not wanting Anna to end up with a big black and blue mark from one of her few times with Daddy alone, I decided to ice it. Well, this was worse than getting hurt to begin with. After 10 minutes of holding ice on my little girl's head and her crying the whole time, I let her go and prayed that she didn't get a big bruise. All that crying wore her out, and she was acting pretty sleepy early...leaving me to write this blog entry ;-)

Dad alone? Play with the baby!

As I wrote last week, Anna and I have been having Tuesday night date nights. Two of the nights I went out shopping with Anna and noticed that as I walked around with Anna people tended to come up close to Anna more so than normal. Is a Dad all alone a reason to approach the baby? When Heather and I are out, Anna gets comments but not approached and touched. When its just me, people have a tendency to get close to Anna and do things like grab her feet. This seems really odd to me, and I don't think this happens to Heather when she is alone.

Merry Christmas Lights!

We aren't the types to spend too much time on the Christmas lights, but I put up the decor of the year outside. This year we went with icicles in addition to our normal lights on the big evergreens, garland and bows on the posts, wreath on the door, and the candles in the window. Here is a picture of our house:

New rooms

Much of this weekend has been spent redoing two of our bedrooms for new usage. Prior to this weekend, we had a nursery, office, and guest bedroom beyond our master bedroom. With another sweet baby girl on the way, we decided to reorganize into a nursery, Anna's room, and a guest bedroom/office combo. So, my mother-in-law and I spent Friday afternoon and Saturday morning painting the two rooms and Saturday afternoon rearranging furniture. My mother-in-law is the real skill when it comes to painting, no tape needed...so I just do the rolling and she does all the edging. We painted Anna's room a green to match her new linens, Banana Fish Bubble Gum. Anna seemed to love her room!


The guest room/office was a dark green on the blueish side...it is now more of a warm milk chocolate or mocha.



Still have to hang art and curtains, but you get the picture :-)

Its a girl

My date nights have helped prepare me and get me excited for the arrival of another sweet little girl. Heather, Anna, and I went to the doctor's today for an ultrasound. We found out that everything seems normal and healthy, a huge blessing, and that they confirmed that Heather is almost 19 weeks pregnant,. The due date by the ultrasound was April 27. Anna was 5 days early, if the new baby girl is also 5 days early Mommy and the her may share a birthday!!

The tough part now is that we had a boy name picked out as a carryover from when Anna was around. We had much more trouble with girl's names the first time. Let's see if we can do better this time.

Date nights with Anna

Anna is now 13 months and Daddy and her have date nights when Mommy has plans. Last night was one of those nights, and we decided just to stay in and play. Anna was really busy last night, spending 5-10 minutes on each task before moving on to the next task. They were important things like playing with special toys, pushing around her shopping cart, or pulling all of the DVDs our of the cabinet and putting them back.

I can't forget Anna's favorite playtoy, Cassie. She loves everything about Cassie. Cassie makes her laugh without even doing anything. Cassie also takes a lot of abuse and doesn't even snap at Anna in return. Cassie goes crazy when we have guests over, but she really is an angel around Anna and we couldn't be happier with how she is with kids.

Our Year of Maintenance

2007 will thus be deemed in the Burckart household, the year of maintenance. Not anything to do with our daughter or the conception of our next child...but the year of maintenance. Coincidental that our house was built 10 years ago in 1997? I think not. Here is what we have had to do in the past year:
1) Change the torsion spring in the garage door.
2) Replace the boots around the plumbing vents on the roof
3) Replace the mailbox
4) Replace the upstairs AC unit and coil
5) Replace the water heater
6) Replace the cabinets, counters, appliances, floors AND subfloors because the dishwasher leaked and caused the subflooring to rot, mold, and buckle underneath the cabinets into the breakfast nook and throughout the kitchen.

And today, the furnace stopped working upstairs. Not to mention that a friend of ours has told us that our downstairs AC unit/gas pack unit is going and will need replaced next year. Incidentally, in July before #4 and #5 happened, I looked up this article from USA Today about when things will go bad and what preventive maintenance needs done. Here are some things that jump out at me:

• Water heater expectancy: 15-18 yrs
• AC units: 15 years
• furnaces: 20-25 years

You'll notice that we are 5-10 years ahead of schedule for things falling apart. That is why this year is the year of maintenance.

**updated because I forgot about the most expensive kitchen expense :-(

Cool website: Zillow.com

I was checking out this website, Zillow.com, and it is by far the coolest new power tool I have seen in a long time. It shows you all those things previously unavailable to the common purchaser without going through a real estate agent, estimate values of homes, "Make Me Move" prices, recent sales, and houses for sale on a Google Map like easy to use interface. I am amazed...great job Zillow!

For me, Blackberry 8830 wins out over iPhone

I recently made a tough (for me) decision as to buy the cool, slick, Apple iPhone on AT&T or the new but not as cool Blackberry 8830 on Sprint PCS. I have heard from many friends as well as people I trust online such as Jeff Pulver about how great the iPhone is...but I wasn't sure it made sense for me. In the end, I bought a BB 8830...here is why. First, I compared feature sets taking into account the networks:

feature	iPhone	BB 8830
Phone access	X
Email access		X
Maps / Yellow pages		X
News reading		X
Web Browsing	X
Worldwide usage		X
Message typability		X
Multimedia access	X
Price		X
Cool intangibles	X

In the end, I made the following decisions:

• I will mainly use mobile wireless access for email, maps/yellow pages, and news reading and do not need a general web browser. Email (push + speed), Google Maps (GPS + speed) and News (speed) are all better on Sprint PCS. Google maps with GPS is just a better experience. Likewise, reading news at EVDO speeds on Sprint just can't compare.
  
• I need a device I can drop a foreign GSM SIM into..something traditionally good with AT&T and bad for Sprint but not for these devices.
  
• I don't think we have advanced enough in battery technology for an iPhone to take place of two devices...and it doesn't have a hard drive or work with my docking station like my 80GB Video iPod.
  
• The tactile feedback on the BB was easier to type for me with big fingers than the iPhone. If I am going to use it for email, typability is pretty important.
  

Finally, I couldn't buy the iPhone on cool intangibles alone..and I am really happy with my BB 8830.

Now, I will be prepared to be slammed by my friends and unknown Apple followers on the internet for saying I liked something better than an Apple device. But, I thought I would, at very least, offer my evaluation so some person may gain.

Ohh, and the price thing is corporate discounts on service aren't applicable if you have an iPhone. I like my heavily discounted Sprint service.

Weekend with Anna

So, today is my last day alone with Anna while Heather is having fun with her cousins and aunts in New York City. Anna has been an angel, she slept til 7 on Friday and Saturday and 8:30 today. The activities have centered around constant motion. She has crawled everywhere, walked with her walker everywhere, and chased the puppy everywhere :-). Friday and Saturday she slept for 2 full hours each morning and afternoon. She is waking up now, which means she will have only an hour nap this morning.



Unfortunately, Anna's morning schedule this morning did not lend itself to me getting to church. By the time I changed, bottle fed, changed, and fed her solids...it was already too late for me to get to church for the 9:30 and she was sleepy around 10:15 which meant no making the 11 AM.

I did make it out of the house twice this weekend. The first time we went to Suzanne and Aaron's to celebrate Aaron's 28th birthday. It was fun, but a bit late for Anna. We started dinner around 7:20 PM and I didn't get home til 9 PM after semi-rudely running out. Thats about an hour after Anna's bedtime. We also went with Uncle John to the farmer's market and ate at the great seafood restaurant. We met Mike and Jenn there and had a good time. We also bought a couple boxes of tomatoes so Uncle John can make us sauce.

Anna was great. If only Cassie would learn from her. Cassie has been trying her best to demand my attention. She has gone potty on the floor 6 times, carpet everytime. Last night 3 times even after waking me up at 12:30 AM and 2 AM to take her downstairs to go potty. Next time, I may have to board her.

LG appliances

Heather and I recently redid our entire kitchen. We are not huge fans of the stainless steel appliances, so our choices in colors were limited from there. We felt we either had white, traditional black, or high gloss black. We decided to go with the high gloss black. After a lot of staring at the different brands, we took LG because their price, function, and style best suited our desires.

So, we have now had our LG appliances all fully installed for 4 months. A french door refrigerator with ice on the door (LFX25960), a range complete with convection and 4 burners and a warmer on the cooktop (LRE30451), a microwave which is substantially styled different ( LMVM2075), and a not fully integrated dishwasher (LDS5811).





This morning, the appliance repair man comes to our house for the second time in those four months. The first time, the dishwasher was leaking on some cycles it was running...it wasn't locking and sealing shut. The very good appliance guy quickly replaced the mother board like thing and its worked perfectly since. This was a big scare since one of the remodeling reasons was the dishwasher, which leaked and ruined our kitchen and dining room subflooring.

This time, the refrigerator periodically freezes up when using the dispenser. It works otherwise, but until it resets itself in 5 minutes or so, all you can get is water out of the dispenser. So, we are two out of our four brand new LG appliances have had some problems. However, our experience with the first repair was so good, I wouldn't not buy them again. We'll see if thats the case after this repair where we have something we can't repeat on demand.

Incidentally, we did buy all the appliances at Home Depot and have the extended warranties on everything but the microwave. Their extended warranty is a flat fee ($60 for 1 yr and $90 for 3 yr I believe), and after all the discounts we paid less than $300 for the microwave...it was odd to think about paying 20% of that for an extended warranty.

Back to blogging..

I know I have missed blogging for quite some time...but I am going to make another effort. No promises. :-)