(written on the 13th from notes taken previously)
I was up a bit later today, which was probably good given the lack of sleep I’ve been getting.
I spent some time organizing my van, mucked and dragged, checked the house for water intrusion after the nutty storm last night (looked pretty good 🙏), and then got myself all set up to have a good scripture study and an effective day working on my book.
My goal was to have an outline for my book completely finished today, however awful that outline might be.
So naturally, with these great intentions leading the way, I accomplished exactly… nothing.
What I actually spent my day on was stock trading. If I was going to get back into stock trading, I was supposed to be doing it as a swing trader, doing a heck of a lot of research, buying stocks at the point where I felt like they were a goodbye, setting an automatic sell price for the future, and then walking away.
Well, I didn’t do that. I day traded. Again, and I spent all day doing it. All day to make something like $60. 😶
Better than losing, but… not very effective.
I actually had done a lot better, but I got caught in a sell off, forgetting that the stock market closes at 4:00 and not 4:30, so I wasn’t expecting the precipitous drop that happened in the last minutes before the bell. I was still up for the day even after getting caught in the sell off, but I’d lost most of what I’d made.
Foolishly, I kept on trading, all the way into the evening, and I managed to clawback a fair bit of what I had lost there at the end, but it took hours to get it back.
Old bad habits shining right through again. 😕
Another storm rolled in today, and the wind blew fiercely, shaking the trailer pretty wickedly. After the storm stopped, I went outside and found a 5 gallon bucket that had been full of oil knocked over with a split in the side, leaking all the oil out onto the ground.
😬
I also noticed some concerns with the way the rain was hitting the house and getting into the block.
I was feeling pretty low after pretty much wasting an entire day that could have been used to make progress on my book.
I don’t think I did any gospel study at all? No efforts on my book. Just stupid trading.
Why do I keep going back to it? Because in theory, I know what to do. So it seems so simple. It seems so ridiculous that I don’t have the emotional discipline.
Grateful I didn’t lose anything today.
But the oil getting knocked over was definitely not helpful. I took it reasonably in stride, but it was just… A weight? I wasn’t mad. I wasn’t discouraged, I don’t think. I think I just felt heavy and resigned to my fate?
I spent a good little while cleaning the oil spill, getting a shovel and graping the dirt down until I got past the oil-contaminated soil.
I took a break from that to inspect potential water intrusion concerns with the house with Heather, and then I went right back to scraping up all the oily dirt.
While doing that, Heather and I worked on refreshing our memories/memorization of Moroni chapter 7:45-48.
I wasn’t in a very good place, and when Heather asked if there was anything she could do, I just said that I needed light, so we started trying to work on that memorization.
Thx, Heather. 🙏
So I was low on sleep. I made poor decisions during the day. I was discouraged by things going sideways. I was dehydrated because I hadn’t really had much of anything to drink the entire day.
So I got a whole bunch to drink, and Heather and I listened to Elder Maxwell’s Wisdom and Order speech that he gave at BYU a few decades ago, or so, and I called it a night, heading out to my van.
But then I didn’t go to bed. 😕
I don’t even remember how I got back into it, but there I was in Google images with that stinkin’ thinkin’– seemingly unable to comprehend in the moment the reality of the consequences of my poor choices were I to continue.
And I did continue.
And there was no miracle for me today.
And I crashed… hard. 😞
And I’ll talk more about that in my next post…
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 