Thank You Very Much, Mr. Roboto (a guide to math trades)

...for doing the jobs nobody wants to--like putting together a long chain of trades to make everybody happy.

Seriously, have you tried doing that by yourself? It's a pain. You have to send a string of e-mails to people you may not know, get individual confirmations, and organize all of the information  for the other traders. And if one trader backs out? The whole trade dies then and there.

Thank goodness there's an easier way--the math trade.

News Bits: 7/15/2013

Exactly one year ago I started writing a weekly news post for iSlaytheDragon. When Futurewolfie initially suggested that I write a news column for our blog, my thought was, Isn't this what W. Eric Martin is for? And I continue to ask myself that same question now, albeit much less frequently, thanks to all of you. It's been exciting to see our weekly news post grow from a tumbleweed witnessed by a few faithful readers into one of our most-read and discussed posts of the week.

So, to all of you who have been with me since the beginning (and those who are just joining us), thank you. Your energy and enthusiasm has kept me going despite the frequent questions of identity and utility.

But enough of this. The NEWS:

Board Gaming on a Shoestring

We run a pretty tight ship in my household, with a budget being the mainstay of our operations. Everything we buy gets recorded on our budget ledger, and we carefully monitor our purchases to make sure that at the end of the month, we know where our money has gone. We do this to ensure that our money goes where we want it to go and that we spend less—preferably much less—than we make.

This may seem like a recipe for eliminating all hobbies of any kind, but early on, we recognized that hobbies are a necessary part of life. My favorite part of our budget is the personal spending cash column because it allows each of us to have a small amount of money to do whatever we want with. If I want to spend all my money on Bazooka bubble gum, so be it. If my wife wants to buy more yarn for her knitting projects, that's okay too. (For the record, I don't buy Bazooka gum: I usually buy board games.)