September 17, 2003
8 Years of Bilik Family
Claire's Birthday - This afternoon marks eight years since we went from being a "couple" - as we had been for six years - to being a family. Today Claire is eight years old. "Bundes", the BIG sister, the oldest of five! She couldn't have asked for nicer weather today. It was a beautiful September afternoon. Unfortunately it probably won't be that way by Friday when we have her birthday party with a handful of her friends. By then we should be feeling the after effects of Hurricane Isabel. This evening we did have a little cake after dinner and we let Claire open one present. The rest will wait until the Friday party and sleepover.
Work trip - I found out today that for the first time in a few years, I may need to make a business trip that would last several days. The last major trip was to Cambridge, UK to learn about Bluetooth. (pictures from that trip - April 2001) Boy! Did that technology go nowhere in a hurry! I may spend 3-6 days in Santa Cruz, CA in the second half of October to learn about our existing RTCS products and maybe a little about our MQX products. Unlike some of the other things in the past that I've been ramped up on in anticipation of a near term new product, these are actually existing products that need more personnel to support. Currently I'm learning about ARC's software development tools in anticipation of the very near term release of the successor to ARC's Tangent-A5 processor.
Book cases secure - Last night I bolted the book cases to the wall just in case the boys decide to try to climb on them. Michelle hasn't done much with the shelves yet but I presume soon they will be teeming with books, knick knacks, plants, etc. I've been joking about dedicating a shelf to my geeky O'Reilly books, commonly known as the "Nutshell books". They are the computer equivalent of legal or medical references that line a lawyer's or doctor's shelves. Some example titles I own: this, this, this, and this. Geeky titles all! (with more that I want to get soon) It should contrast well with our large collection of Catholic books and the numerous kids' books. It'll be quite the eclectic collection of books.
Women in the workplace - The Boston Globe has an article covering some research results that I had suspected for the past several years. My hunch was that the huge number of wives who entered the workplace was a major factor in driving up the cost of many things, especially homes. Home prices (and other expenses) rise to meet the demand and income available to families. The irony is that so many women entered the work force to help increase the family's buying power. But if everyone does this, the amount the suppliers can charge can go up. The author of this article writes:
In a cruel irony, the two-income couple's quest for security may be inherently self-defeating. Women entered the work force in search of more spending power and better lives for their families (among many other reasons). But the two-earner family has caused a bidding war for housing in the suburbs, as all those families chased the same houses in the same school districts. And yet there's no going back: Getting by on a single income is pretty much impossible in many neighborhoods. (That may be why three in four married couples rely on two salaries these days.)
It's an interesting article but one of it's conclusions - don't have kids - seems absurd. Yes, kids are an expense but not having kids would have a tremendous long term negative effect. We are already struggling to meet Social Security because the birth rate is too low to support this 20th century Ponzi scheme. But in Europe they already have issues because there aren't enough workers to replace the retirees. In countries like Italy the replacement rate is under 1.2! Don't have kids... bah! Perhaps if we had more, our SSI deductions would be lower!
Hey Scott- I sent Claire a b-day card last Thusday. Did it come in yet? I know mail takes a while to get out there.
Posted by: Suzy at September 18, 2003 02:07 PMOh yeah, and where did you get that really neat piture of her up there?
Posted by: Suzy at September 18, 2003 02:08 PMHi Suzy,
Yes, your birthday card for Claire arrived early this week -- Monday or Tuesday. On behalf of Claire, thanks!
Re: the picture of Claire
I wanted to make a picture of Claire but I wanted to do something a bit like the portraits that they do in the Wall Street Journal. I took this picture from my archives:
http://bilikfamily.com/Pictures/2003/Sep/7/2.html
and did a oval vignette on her face. I retouched the background a bit so it wouldn't be too distracting and then applied some filters to make it look kind of like a charcoal or pencil drawing. It was actually kind of fun.
This is what I mean by a Wall Street Journal style portrait. See columnist Peggy Noonan at:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/images/headcuts_article/hc_noonan.gif
While my results weren't identical, I thought that they turned out pretty cool.
Posted by: Scott at September 18, 2003 02:28 PMWow! Impressive! I want one of me for my birthday.
Posted by: Suzy at September 18, 2003 02:35 PMThe problem is that I don't have many pictures of you in a digital format. I think I made the weblog author thumbnail photo of you from this shot:
http://bilikfamily.com/Pictures/2003/Jul/31/2.html
And I could make a similar charcoal/pencil sketch using that. It just wouldn't be a high resolution source. For this picture of Claire I had many pixels to spare.
I'm thinking that for my next round of digital prints (i.e. printed on real photo paper) I may experiment with some artistic effects. I also really need to make some wallet sized photos. The ones I have in my wallet are when the boys were half a year old. It all depends on available time and motivation. (like everything else in our lives)
Posted by: Scott at September 18, 2003 03:03 PMAn anonymous reader writes:
I don’t know if I would believe the article about home pricing due to 2 income families. For one thing, I know of very few families who have seen bidding wars occur in their home sale. Pretty rare.
To which I responded:
There were huge, major bidding wars on our house in Nashua. Our asking price was _significantly_ above what the nearest homes sold for just a few months prior so it's hard to argue that we were underpriced. And all offers (about 4 or 5 in 24 hours) were above our asking price. Another month later our neighbor sold for _another_ $15K more. This happened consistently for about 2 years with other houses on our Nashua block. When we _originally_ wanted to buy this house, it was already off the market a day after it went up. When it went up a second time, the only reason we got it was that we also offered a bit more and we did it the same day. In the months prior, there were several homes we made offers on that weren't accepted, even at asking price.
Now with interest rates creeping up and more families living on one income (due to layoffs) the market has softened somewhat. But to have your home double in value in seven years is pretty common among folks I've spoken with around Nashua the past decade. What makes them worth that? Families are trying to move up here. (It's not retirees -- they hate property tax. They prefer income tax) How can starting families afford homes that are $250-400K if it were a single income making typically $40-60K/year? They can't. But they're pooling their resources as combined income.
I'm NOT saying that women shouldn't be in the workplace. I was merely asserting that often families pool the incomes of both a working husband and wife to stretch the value of home that they buy. In areas of higher demand (due to their family friendly locations), you see a lot of these families using their "bidding power" to try and trump the other offers. I assert this pushes prices up -- along with numerous other economic factors like interest rates, the economy, tax policies, schools, etc.
Your family and our family are not the common case. Your husband and I are both highly educated engineers who make good income so that we can afford decent homes on one income. It also helped that for about three years prior to moving out to NH, Michelle and I saved about 2/3's of our (then) combined take home pay to be able to put a lot down on our original Nashua house. We didn't want to need her to work when we decided to have children. But in this yuppie neighborhood I live in now, there are a handful of households where the kids see neither parent from about 7AM to 7PM because both needed to work to be able to afford to live here. They couldn't make their mortgage on one income. It's sad. Those kids live in nice houses in a nice area but don't see much of the parents who shape their lives.
Posted by: Scott at September 20, 2003 06:15 AM