SWB: Alan B. Rowley II - Success Coach - ECoaching - Email Coaching

What's Up With Success Warrior?

He's still working, exercising, kenpo-ing, exercising, coaching, exercising, eating right, exercising, and trying to get enough sleep.

What this is going to mean for now is a scaling back on blogging.  Scaling back meaning dropping the SWB blog for a while and aiming for a post a day for Chronicles.

Chronicles will still, uh, chronicle my fitness journey and the other days will likely be a mish-mash of topics.  What ever strikes my fancy for the day and probably covering several things per post like the Snippet Saturday posts.

Today, Tia and I are going to the city to see if we can help pull this country out of the recession by buying birthday presents for Trey. 

No, we didn't get our "rebate" from King George yet.  We won't be using that to help with the recession.  That's going toward paying off my car.  Other than the mortgage, we should be debt free in June.  July at the latest.

Speaking of the mortgage, I called my credit union to see what kind of rate I could get on a refi*.  Not a whole lot better than what I have now.  What the hell?  Uncle Ben is selling fiat money at bargain basement prices.  You'd think my credit union could pass some of that savings on to me.

Tomorrow, I'll update my P90X Journal and maybe on Friday I'll have an interesting story from today's little outing.  It seems like something funny or interesting happens when we go into town.  I think the reason for that is the fact that I don't get out much so anything beyond my front lawn is interesting or humorous.

Have a great day!

Commentary for October 17, 2007

Today's post is on the Chronicles blog and is the next installment of the August 6th story:  Ask a Cop: August 6th, 1993 - Part 7.

I have written about the first 3 minutes of this story a couple of times but have never written about the rest of the night, the rest of the weekend, and the years following.  I have verbally told the story a couple of times all the way through but have never gone into this much detail.

It has been interesting to look back trying to dig up the details from my mind.  I'm not great with memory so this takes some extra digging and I still feel like I'm missing things.  Some things have always been missing though and my concept of time during that period is really messed up.

New Blogging Plan

I've been away from blogging for a while trying to decide what I want to be if I grow up.  I didn't come up with any definite answers so it will be best for me to stall off the growing up process for as long as possible.

There are some things that I do want to do while I grow up though.  Two of those things are reading and writing.  I need to finish my book and try getting through some of the books sitting on my "to read" list.  I have been a non-reader for far too long.

I also need to get back to my exercise program.  My 90 day experiment was cut short by the stick strike to my trachea but that's healed up and it's time to get back to exercising. 

All of this leading to my point.  I'm only going to write one blog post per day.  I'll alternate between the two blogs and probably post some small commentary on the opposite blog for the day.  Nothing that will take much time but probably a note of what was posted on the other blog for the day.  The themes will stay the same with Success Warrior being about money and Chronicles being about just about everything else with regular posts on cop stories, fitness, family, and humor.

You Have Reached The Blog Of Success Warrior

I am sorry that I am unable to come to my blog at this time.  If you would like to email me or leave a post in this blog, it will do absolutely no good but you are certainly welcome to try.  Knock yourself out.

I never realized just how many little things I do each day to stay up to date with so many things.  Being gone for two days has opened my eyes to it.  I am way behind and today I was too busy to get to much. 

We had a wonderful weekend though and did some shopping and had a couple of great meals and we did it all with cash.  Of course.

Tomorrow, let's talk more about oil just because I want to.

The Sword Points Will Be Added And . . .

You would think that there is a winner of the shirt but not all is as it would seem.  I will tally up the points and let you know what will be happening next with the Sword Point contest. 

It's going to have to wait for a day because right now, I am going to go to bed and hope that I have enough energy to go to work later.

For more details about how I feel and what caused it, read today's Chronicles post.

People ask me if it's neat that I get to go to so many concerts for free.  I tell them that it's cooler than that because they pay me to go to the concerts.

Who knows?  Someday, I may be up on the stage.

Not singing though.  Yikes!

Telling jokes maybe.

Or more likely trying to convince people to get out of debt.

And telling jokes.

Beware The Groove - A New Month

I have been completely out of phase for the last couple of weeks.  My groove has been thrown off.  Now it's the beginning of the month and time to start updating all my end of month stuff for the last month. 

I don't know if it's just summertime that is causing it or something else.  My weekends have been taken up and it looks like we'll be out of town again this weekend.  It's hard to get on top of things.  It seems like each day slips away and a little bit more adds on to the next to-do list.

Anyway, I'll be trying to get all the numbers updated tomorrow so I can post on my progress or lack there of. 

I still need to complete the extra pages that I'm creating for this blog too.  While I'm here and not doing much, let me ask you this.  Do you have any favorite posts from either this blog or the Chronicles blog that I should definitely include in the posts list I'm creating?  I'm not going to list every post on that page.  Just your favorites and my favorites.  What should be there?

If Enough People Tell You Enough Times . . .

Like I said yesterday, I've been blogging for quite some time.  In April of 2006, my wife and I decided to pay off all of our debts.  I created a blog so that I could journal our account.  My thinking at the time was that by having our attempt open to the public, we would try harder.  I don't know if it really helped motivate us because we were already pretty motivated. 

I explained what our plan was and gave tips out based on what was happening in our life.  I also started passing on information about finances in general, not just ours. 

After blogging for a couple of months about my plan and how it was working for us, people started asking me to write a book.  That was flattering.  I had no intention of writing a book.  My plan was simple and I felt that anyone wanting to follow it could just read my blog.  I told readers that I would consider it.

A visit from PTE Rick changed my thinking.

Success Warrior Coaching - Origin of the Name

It was pointed out in the last post that an advertising executive thinks the name Success Warrior Coaching is going to fail me.  This earned her a negative five Sword points (name change - explained later) but to be fair, she is not alone in her belief.  Let me tell you how it came about and why it's not going to change anytime soon.

I've been blogging for 4 years now.  I can't believe it's been that long.  That's a lot of words written.  I somehow heard the term "Blog", went looking for it, started and was instantly hooked.  I love writing and this format worked so nicely for me.  I signed up for a blogging service called Blogit (it was called the Blogging Network back when I signed up), which is kind of a gated blogging community.  Bloggers pay to be part of the community and part of those payments get kicked back to the bloggers based on popularity of their blogs.

I created the blogging name PatrolSergeant and my first blog was called "How To Win."

On my seat again

Let me start this by saying thank you to everyone that emailed me with their concern.  I do appreciate it.  When doing these posts each day, it's easy to underestimate how much people appreciate them.

Let me also tell you that my wife works at an elementary school or as I refer to it, "The Germ Factory." 

I was recently reading an article of the most unhealthy places to work.  Schools have more germs in them than hospitals.  I could have told you that without the article but it was nice to have my suspicion confirmed.  Hospitals probably actually have more germs but the staff probably try harder to suppress those germs than 7 year olds.

So it comes as no suprise that when a bad virus "is going around" as it is right now, that it landed in my home. 

I am well on the mend today.  I was actually feeling much better yesterday but my son was having his worst day of being infected by this bug so my attention was turned toward him.  Having recently gone through the same illness, I had great empathy for how miserable he was. 

My wife, in the meantime, was spending a great deal of time reading Revelations.  She thought that me going for a week without being on the computer must surely be one of the signs for the End of Days.  It has turned out that it's more like the story of Lazarus. 

I don't smell too good but I'm alive.

Tomorrow will start off the new year for this blog

I was going to go into more detail about Prosper.com but I have a series of posts that I want to write about in the new year so instead of starting with Prosper and interupting it again, I'm going to wait until later next week to start.

Starting tomorrow, I will be back to nearly daily posts.

What I Intend With This Blog for 2007

Several things.

First, I'm going to continue to chronicle my efforts to get out of debt.  My wife and I have built up enough momentum that this probably isn't necessary but I think it is helpful for accountability.  It's very motivating when you are chronocling your efforts for the world to see.  I think that it's also helpful to others to see what we are doing and how we are doing it because becoming debt free is possible.  I'm not some rich guy telling other people how to do it.  Someday, I will be =) but for now, I'm just trying to make it work for myself.

I find that I think things through better as I write them so I will be using this blog to continue to refine my thoughts and ideas on personal finance. 

At some point, I'm going to take the key points from this blog and write it all down in one coherent document.

Even when I have done that, I am going to continue to write this blog and provide tips and trivia that I come across, answer questions from the comments, and hopefully provide a bit of daily inspiration for readers who are also trying to take control of their money away from the banks.

I believe that if we can get enough people to live debt free, we can make a positive change that will be felt by everyone.  It will become a buyer's market where people with no debt are being catered to by the banks that are competing for business rather than dictating terms to financial beggars.  I also believe that when people have more money for themselves, they will do good things with that money such as providing funding for medical research and charity.

Is all of this too much to ask for one little blog?

The Next Financial Post

I'm out of town and don't have much time on a computer and don't really want to spend much time on the computer anyway.  =)

The next Personal Finance post will be on Thursday or Friday and be back on track.  Let's make 2007 the best year possible.

Welcome to the Success Warrior Blog

Hello,

This blog is for all those people that have asked me to do a blog away from Blogit.  This blog will contain a wide range of topics on what ever strikes me on that day.  Topics will include thoughts on my son, success, personal finance, funny things that go on around me, the Rams, and probably more on my son. 

Thank you for stopping in..

-Alan
aka SuccessWarrior