On December 31, 2024, I sat down to write my little diary entry as a full-time YouTuber, a crypto guy, an ICP investor, and a dad and husband. It had been, as usual, an awesome twenty-four hours. The picture I had in the background is a Harry Potter board game I just played. It's called Hogwarts Battle. I first played it with my friend when I visited him in South Carolina in July, and it turned out I'd already bought the game before to play with my wife, but we never got around to it. Now I am teaching the kids how to play it.
We just beat the fourth game. There are seven different games in the box: it starts with a basic version on game one and levels up to game seven. We beat game four, and it cranks up the difficulty significantly going into game five. We've won every time playing one, two, three, and four, so now I'm interested to see where we fail, because the first time I played this with my friend, he threw us right into game five and they whooped us. So I'm really grateful that the kids, at nine and six years old — even though the box says eleven plus — are old enough to play board games with, because board games are something I love, right alongside the card games and video games I cover in my Games playlist.
The trick as a parent is sometimes finding what I want to do that my kids will also want to do. A lot of the stuff they've wanted to do before is either not really fun for me, or it's video games. They enjoyed playing video games with me, but is me playing video games the best way to hang out with them? My dad almost never played video games with me growing up. He didn't play board games that often either, but I remember when he did play Monopoly, and I remember when he showed me how to play poker. Maybe that's why I got really into poker — because on some level it brought back memories of one of the only games my dad ever showed me how to play.
A talk with Laura about reaching higher
It had been a really nice twenty-four hours. The day before, I'd talked about realizing I could reach a higher potential in terms of the romance and the relationship, and I had a really good talk with Laura before bed about that. That talk went fantastic. Laura was really moved, even though she didn't say as much. In some ways she's a little debatey — she's a lawyer, so she's often debatey and sassy — but she was clearly moved by my desire to see if I could reach higher levels of romantic potential. I'm interested in thinking about this and talking about it each day, so that was a really nice conversation, and everything was good going to bed.
Counting the tennis balls I actually hit
I got up this morning, and the family went on a kayaking trip a couple hours north of where we live in St. Pete. Laura took her mom and the kids. I had tennis to play. I meet a guy at the racket club down the street from me — it's only about six or seven blocks from my house, which is awesome. I still drive so I can bring all my tennis stuff, but maybe I'll walk or bike someday. We've been meeting up every couple of weeks to hit in the morning.
What I did today is I counted how many balls I actually hit on the singles court. I hit over three hundred balls in an hour and a half. Instead of sweating the ones that go into the net or out, basically the same thing I've been doing with my basketball three-pointers, I don't worry about why it went out or what happened. Anytime it goes in, I take note of that and feel free to take shots. I play around, try to hit harder shots or weirder shots, and see if they go in. We played some ground games — first to eleven, where you have to hit two or three balls in back and forth first and then it's alive. He said maybe we can rotate in a little singles next time, which is great. This is the same idea I keep coming back to: I'd rather be counting the shots I make, not the ones I miss.
Then I'm out there thinking: I want to find more people to play tennis with. Should I get a coach? Should I play in the USTA? Should I pay people twenty bucks to play with me? Should I leave the racket club and do these other things? And I'm like, this is completely irrational right now. I'm literally playing tennis, and all I'm thinking about is how I can play more tennis. That's a good sign for sure, but I already have a men's clinic I go to once a week at the racket club. Even if you just looked at that as the membership, you could consider it a fifty-dollar-per-clinic membership, which is cheaper than straight-up tennis coaching, and I get the benefit of being able to play at the racket club. The whole family can come — Laura can go, the kids can go. It's definitely worth the membership. It's $240 a month, but if you've got it, you'd better flaunt it, right? I've got $240 a month I can spend on something that's that much fun.
I mean, I spent plenty playing Marvel Snap earlier this year on a stinking online card game. The screwed-up thing is that even talking about it right now, I'd love to just sign on and play some Marvel Snap, even though I know I'd feel like crap afterwards. I still get euphoric recall thinking about playing Marvel Snap and streaming games — that pull is exactly why I had to walk away from Marvel Snap after spending $2,000 on it. And then there's the tennis membership, and I'm thinking about how I can play more tennis. Aren't I playing enough tennis this second? I have the men's clinic, I have a guy I practice with every couple of weeks, and I have a guy who's better than me who plays with me every week. How much more tennis do you need? I'm also trying to get in basketball once or twice a week, yoga three or four times a week, and I walk the dog for thirty-plus minutes every night. Bro, you've got lots of stuff you're doing. I think I'm getting plenty of physical activity. The body's looking good, it's feeling good.
After the family went off this morning, around eight o'clock for the two-hour drive each way plus a few hours of kayaking, I figured I had the day to myself. And I'll let my ego have this: I won all three ground games against a guy who was born thirty years before me. Aren't you proud of me? This guy was competitive at tennis before I was even born, and I'm proud that he can still play and that he's helped me get better at my game.
Hot honey hummus and an AA meeting
I came home and had some hot honey hummus — organic, and so good — and put that down with some carrots and a mini organic cucumber. I threw down some Triscuits with it, then stuffed down some of those sweet stripe candies, and went to my Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and met my sponsor there. Nobody called on me. It's nice when I don't need to share, and at the same time I'm like, screw y'all for not calling on me — I guess you don't want any of this wisdom. But honestly, don't enough people listen to me talk when you consider all my online videos? I often try to listen and take stuff in more when I'm out, because plenty of people are already listening to me talk. I get so many messages in open chat that I can barely keep up, just in the paid channel — I sometimes don't even get to the free channel, which is ironic because I'm obsessed with growing, but clearly I've got enough going on already. If you want that kind of direct access to me, that's exactly what the Jerry Banfield Family is for.
Kyle from Dfinity told me today that if I wanted a guest, I should let him know, which is great, because I have such an easy setup where somebody from Dfinity could just pop into a Zoom call with me, I'll record it, and I'll upload the video super easily. I want to get in contact with the people at Dfinity and more actively collaborate. I've got three people at Dfinity whose emails I have, and I've been meaning to email them for a couple of weeks. That's a priority — let me email them, connect, give them coupons, and schedule calls.
Why I told a guy his Solana coin was worthless
After my AA meeting, a guy who talks to me about crypto outside the meeting was telling me he wants to launch his coin. He asked if I could help. I asked, is it on Internet Computer? He said no, it's on Solana. I told him: all I can tell you is that launching coins on Solana is worthless. The coins are worthless. They have no legal control. It's nothing except speculation. There's no control over any assets by code. It's utterly useless, and I would not talk about, think about, take any money from, or do anything with a coin outside the Internet Computer at all.
And I'm not interested in being involved even in Internet Computer projects, besides maybe working with Dfinity directly or with OpenChat. I don't want to be the growth officer at OpenChat either. You all see what I do — I make videos, I do my own thing. I've got an office. I'm not trying to have some kind of a job. This is a job, but it's also not a job, because I'm the boss of this job, and I really like that. So I left him with this: if you want to launch a coin, launch it on Internet Computer. If it's on Solana, you're wasting your time. If you want the full version of why I keep landing there, it's all in my ICP Crypto playlist.
Eating a whole bag of popcorn in a parking lot
Then I went to Sunshine City popcorn to buy my wife some popcorn, because we're talking about romance, and if she actually tells me something she wants — like some key lime pie popcorn — then I'm definitely going to go get it. I get there and they're out of it. That's okay, just don't blow my buzz. I'm looking at the list for a minute and I ask for a sample of the lucky charm popcorn — my favorite cereal is Lucky Charms — and they're out of that too. The one thing I wanted, they don't have. So I told them, just give me whatever's cheap or free, whatever you want. If I can't have what I want, then I'll just stuff my face. I got two things of popcorn for twenty bucks — it's expensive popcorn, that was about half off — and I gave a five-dollar tip, because to me you can't not at least give a good tip. I don't know how everyone's tipping out here, but I feel cheap if I don't. Don't be cheap, especially when a lot of money people give you.
I went out to my car, and one of them was caramel popcorn, so I ate a few handfuls of that. The other was spicy cheddar, and even though I eat mostly whole-plant vegan, that spicy cheddar was like crack. I was in my car going, caramel, you need to get out of the way right now, because I'm eating this whole bag of spicy cheddar. And I did. Then it started to rain. I was going to go to Home Depot afterwards, but back in my car it's raining, I'm in my Toyota Corolla, the rain is dumping down, and I'm sitting here eating popcorn. Two people parked next to me, went in, bought their popcorn, and left, and I'm still in the parking lot like an addict. I ate an entire bag of popcorn before I got home, between the parking lot on Central Avenue and finishing the rest off in the Home Depot parking lot.
What's silly is that because I'm in shape and I'm eating during the day, I don't need to lose weight. And ironically, if my kids were overweight, I'd try to control what they ate, but because they're in shape, I don't worry about it. There's definitely a connection there. I really enjoyed just eating that popcorn. My general thought is that I eat mostly whole-plant vegan — I nourish my body with fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, and beans, minimally processed, take a B12 supplement, and that's it. Then I'll make exceptions, like today. There's not going to be any weight I put on, it's going to taste delicious, it gave my body energy, and I enjoyed it. There's a nice dopamine hit.
Eight hundred pounds of patio in a Toyota Corolla
Then I got home, after buying close to a thousand pounds of stuff at Home Depot. I bought ten fifty-pound sacks — my wife hates that word, "sacks," but she doesn't watch the vlog — and six sixty-pound sandbags, so call it 860 pounds to be exact. I also bought a heavy steel tamper, kind of like a butter churner but with a flat steel plate on the bottom so you can pound down your dirt and gravel. I'm trying to make a brick patio in the backyard, so I need a base layer according to YouTube and according to the Sakrete bag: a weed barrier, then gravel, then a little sand on top, flattened and banged down. Then I bought these plastic rubbery things to stack the bricks on top of, and I need to put an edge in.
Now, I realize I could pay somebody a few thousand dollars to put a brick patio in the backyard that probably looks nicer than what I'm going to do myself. But I have a neighbor in his eighties who is still doing all this stuff for his house — gardening in the summertime, doing his grass, sweating his butt off, getting sunburned. I noticed my dad went downhill when he stopped doing simple stuff like mowing his own lawn and started paying people to do things he ought to have been doing himself. He got lazy, sat on the couch more, and did less of those physical things. To me, if it's something physical I can do myself, I'd rather do it.
My house flooded with the hurricane. If somebody's going to put drywall in, I'll do it. I've never put drywall in, and it might sound bad to say, but how hard can it be? I'll cut the old drywall out, stick the new one in, caulk, glue, paint, measure it. I fixed my own fence — my wife's parents said it would have cost several thousand dollars to fix their fence, and my father-in-law and I bought five hundred dollars of material and did it ourselves. It was only about ten hours for the two of us, about twenty hours of labor, where you're looking at a hundred dollars an hour to pay someone.
Now, some of the logic would say, Jerry, you get $300 an hour for a call on ICP, so you should just pay somebody to do that stuff and do more calls. But no — I'm going to take the same number of calls I do. I'm not going to increase them. I do a max of two calls a day, or about ten a week. I feel good doing stuff like cutting my lawn, putting in a patio, and fixing my fence. I wanted to do the roof, but my wife drew the line there. The materials for a metal roof would only be about $6,000, but the labor to rip the old roof off and put the new metal on comes out to around $14,000. My wife said the fence is one thing — if it falls down, it's not a big deal — but if you foul up our roof, we have leaks and water coming in all over the house. Plus it would have been hundreds of hours of me on a roof, and you'd have to dump all the trash and pay for that. So some things make sense to have someone help with. I need to get a plumber to fix the garden hose thing out in the front yard, because if you foul that up, you have to turn the water off for the whole house. Anything I can do myself, though, I'd like to do myself.
Man, I can really talk — I spent eighteen minutes and hadn't even gotten through the day yet. But I enjoy doing these, so that's what counts. I bought close to a thousand pounds of stuff and my Toyota Corolla was definitely sagging in the back. I filled the back seats and the front seat, which is probably a better weight distribution than dumping it all in the trunk. I got home and unloaded it all while listening to Brandon Sanderson's Elantris. I'm deep into this now — we're two-thirds of the way through, listening at double speed, and I went through a couple of hours of that book today. He's got me hooked. We're going down the Brandon Sanderson vortex, and there goes fifty or a hundred hours of my life, because there's a lot of his stuff out there. I tried not to get in multiple times, but now we're past the event horizon.
The family came home early and I wasn't ready
Right after I'd unloaded everything and was planning stuff out, about to eat, my daughter walks in. All of a sudden — wait, the heck are you doing here? My wife didn't text me that they were going to make the two-hour drive back, and I felt stunned. I thought I had two more hours to film videos. I was disoriented for like thirty minutes after they got home. My wife was a little put off — she gets home and I'm like, hi, I thought you were going to text first, I was enjoying my time at home. I'm happy you're back, but I'm honestly not happy you're back at the same time. After about thirty minutes I settled down and realized I'm just going to have to wait, which is fine.
Before that, I hung out with the kids, washed a bunch of dishes, took the dogs for a walk, and then we played that Harry Potter board game. Now they're down the street doing fireworks with Laura's family, which is great, because I never got to do fireworks growing up. My dad was in Vietnam, and he didn't think fireworks were fun — they were also illegal a lot of the places we lived. We'd go watch fireworks, but he didn't let us do fireworks ourselves, so I still kind of feel like that. Laura and her family do whatever, and I hope the kids come back with all their fingers. I'm sure they will. You hear about those firework accidents, but that doesn't happen that often. One of the things you have to do is approach the world knowing that, sure, you hear about these outliers, and you don't want them to happen, but most of the time they don't, and often you won't even know which outlier is going to come for you. Maybe not — well, that sounds good to me.
Songs stuck in my head and the ambient music I'd rather make
So I hope I have time to make some music today and maybe film another crypto video. I sold another $300 call for tomorrow, and I made at least $3,000 on the day. There's this song that gets stuck in your head: "I hate how stupid I am, I hate how stupid I am." All songs get stuck in your head like that, and then I go around seeing what songs I can make to try to get stuck in somebody else's head — and I'm like, no, I'm just going to make ambient music that people don't even really listen to. That's nicer, isn't it? That's more considerate.
Thanks for listening — I appreciate you being one of the few to go all the way through this. I made somebody a Cameo today as well; someone sent me thirty dollars in open chat and I made them a little video for their friend. If you want to keep up with the day-to-day, I write a new one of these most days, and they tend to run together like this one and my day of family time, board games, and charging for crypto videos. If you enjoyed this diary, you can watch my newest ones in my Life playlist.