Travel with me to the North Carolina suburbs

This is not your typical "Travel With Me" post. This is a hard hitting reality check post about Steemians who have non-Steem full time jobs. RL has gotten so busy for me lately that I have only posted twice in the past 2 weeks! My goal was one post a day, so I'm failing miserably. I originally wanted to post about Finance related things...but screw it...I'll post about my life in the burbs and reintroduce myself.

If other Steemians can post about their trip to hotel pools, or time share spam, or videos of them chilling in their garage, why not me? I could potentially be interesting to some readers...I might have curb appeal.

Before you read anymore, I want to set some expectations.

There won't be pictures of me in a bikini at a pool. Btw, I'm a dude so probably a good thing for you!
I'm not going to post pictures of what I ate for dinner. My perception is that most Steemians are dudes, so you probably don't care?
I'll keep it real
If you are dying to see bikini pics, just google it...or go to youporn.

So, what have I been up to in RL?

Mrs FinancialCritic is preggers and nesting

Wifey is due in a few months with our first kid (baby girl). She just began the "nesting" phase. I assume the term "nesting" is derived from birds who build a nest before laying their eggs. For those of you who don't have kids, it means my wife wants to drain our bank account to buy every baby item in sight...paint for the baby room, furniture, baby clothes, baby salt and pepper shakers, baby napkins, baby related shirts for our dogs, etc. There is way too much baby stuff out there.

We are selling my bachelor pad

I bought our current house when Mrs FinancialCritic was a girlfriend, so I wasn't really thinking about kids at the time or staying long term. My primary concerns when buying the house were to see how big a party I could throw, making sure the kitchen island was a good height for a beer pong table, getting a good price, and wooing Mrs FinancialCritic.

Great Success! We have a big 20 year old house perfect for parties and Mrs FinancialCritic married me. But, now the house is 4 years older and needs a lot of updates. The heating/cooling units had to be replaced, the roof was replaced, the siding probably needs to be replaced soon...it's a complete buzz kill and leaves no time for flip cup. We have done a ton of updates, but I just don't have time to do more updates with the baby coming, working, side hustles, and Steemit! This means we need to finish any projects we started, hide the portable outdoor beer pong table, and allow our realtor to convert our comfy home into a hotel lobby.

We are buying a new house

We are buying a newer house (less than 5 years old) so I don't have to worry about fixing anything for a few years. We also want a better school district and a bunch of other "wants" because we have gotten very spoiled the past few years. I have a dream where I'm writing a blog while sitting with little baby FinancialCritic in our screened-in deck while the puppies play in the yard....and my boat is parked in the 3 car garage. Naturally, there won't be beer pong in the house with a kid...so the boat will have the portable outdoor beer pong table on it.

Buying a new house is really fun and we are fortunate enough to be able to afford most of our wants. But, when your wife is pregnant and nesting, the pressure is on to find a new house really fast!

I work...and it doesn't involve blogging

I work in the tech industry in operations/logistics. WTF does that even mean? In big companies, there are lots of moving pieces with multiple organizations and projects. I help organize, measure, figure out which organizations should get more money, which ones should get less money, and help guide them to follow the company vision.

Sounds boring to most people, but it's a really fun job because I love business, technology, and analysis. I also get to travel to new places to visit different teams within our company. Sounds great, but it does means I sacrifice sleep on these trips a lot.

I love side hustles!

I have always worked on some kind of side hustle on the side since college. From developing apps, to selling t-shirts, to buying a rental home, flipping a fixer upper house, to investing in small businesses. My current side hustle is blogging on Steemit, passive investing in crypto/stocks, and learning technical analysis. You can find me on @TheChartGuys chatroom trying to absorb as much info as I can.

Time flies when you have no time!

Between buying a house, selling our current house, working full time, trading crypto/stocks, and trying really hard to not get a dad bod, there has been a shortage of time to blog. A lot of my previous posts involved researching for hours for each blog. For example, my posts on Steemit Stats and number of active users each took 5 hours to find and analyze the data.

I'm going to have to change how often I write research blogs to maybe once or twice a week because there is just not enough time.