We may or may not get a State of the Union address, but I feel like I need to get a state of Lazy Man and Money out there. I’m not going to stop blogging. However, as I’m sure you noticed, I’ve been blogging quite a bit less than what I used to.

Last week, I wasn’t able to get out a single article. I got disappointed too, because I had a whole list of titles and outlines of things that I wanted to say.

There’s been lot of news circling around us like a tornado lately. My wife was one of the lucky few of her peers who were not furloughed by the government shut down. We have a large number of Coast Guard service members in our area. They were furloughed. In fact, I’m currently dog sitting a dog whose parents are both retired Coast guard who didn’t get their paycheck. (They assured me that they planned well for this. It was a bit of an awkward conversation, because I was very interested, but it wasn’t any of my business).

Many local business have chipped in help those who were affected. Even though we weren’t affected, I felt Survivor Guilt. It was made worse by the fact that the government was not shut down for any useful reason.

Early last week, our local community was dealt another blow. The company that supplies natural gas to the island turned it off for mostly everyone. They said their supplier didn’t have the gas, but everyone suspects that it’s a bigger problem than that. With something like 6,000 having no heat on the coldest day of the year, it made national news. However, once again, we were lucky. We had normal gas service.

Thousands of families went to local hotels, schools, any kind of facility that could keep them warm. The city looked like ET (or what I remember it being) with officers, trucks, makeshift tents everywhere.

The biggest change we had, personally, was the kids’ school being shut down for a couple of days. This was after the long MLK weekend, so they had a 5 days off in a row. My wife still had to work, so did my best home schooling for a couple of days. However, by the time they were able to re-open the school, I was spent. We had not only the coldest day, but it changed to an amount of rain and wind that only happens a couple times a year. It wasn’t good weather for doing anything outside.

Towards the end of last week things were starting to get better. Unfortunately, by that time I had fallen behind on a few other side gigs. The stress of not getting a blog post out was getting to me as well.

My wife decided it would be a good idea to reach out to some of the families at our kids’ school who were displaced and offer them a home-cooked meal and the kids a place to blow off some steam. I started to get stressed out by this. With a 5 and 6 year old and a dog sitting business, I’ve never been able to keep the house in good entertaining condition while my works some 60 hours a week (including her grad-school). It was a good gesture though, so we did our best. (Actually is was mostly my wife doing her best on this one.) It all worked out well.

I’m not sure if this is going to come off as “negative post” because I feel like I’ve done a lot of complaining. However, we were very lucky a couple of times. If you need to take away a financial message here, one could be from that Coast Guard couple who planned well and went away on (what turned out to be) a very well-timed vacation. Another message could be that a lot of people businesses really came together in a time of need.

Personally, I’m hoping to have a couple of normal weeks. That will certainly help me back to those articles that I’ve outlined.