Comings and Goings

Well, damned if I'm not flat as a pancake. Over the last few days I've finished a short news story, my column and wrote the cover story for my local alternative about my friend Bo Keely, former national champ at paddleball, writer of the bible of racquetball and several other books, retired veterinarian, long distance hiker and bycyclist, and inveterate hobo who loves riding the rails. What a wonderful guy and how nice to just get to write a fun story for once. But it was a 6,000 word fun story and that has left me empty empty empty. My editor and I put it to bed Tuesday evening and I still haven't got the energy to do anything, much less come up with cool stories for you guys. I will, but I'll have to recharge a little.
Which doesn't mean it hasn't been wild around here. Chepa's boyfriend left Monday night and so while I didn't get to see Sierra and Alexa for the weekend--along with Madeleina who was spirited away as well--I did get to see them the last couple of days. Which makes my heart whole. Alexa is a mad woman. In just two days she's broken nearly every necklace I have from the Amazon. Just insists on wearing them and then pulls them and pulls them until they break and the beads--mostly seeds--go flying. Madeleina gets upset that I'm letting her do it, but I remind M that in her day she destroyed an earlier generation of Amazon necklaces the same way.
"Sure, dad. If I did what Alexa is doing I would have been grounded for a month."
That from a girl who has never been spanked and was grounded from watching music videos on her computer for all of three days in her life.
I also bought my second stock in my life this week. My first crashed badly several years ago. A friend who was a big shot in a company insisted I invest some money in his company. At the time I had it so I put $6 grand or so into it. Cratered miserably.
This time I'm taking my chances on Ford. Yup. I was reading more on the bailout and made a mental note that Ford hasn't asked for a penny. In a related story I saw that Ford was unloading some business or other that was losing money. Then I read about Ford having come to terms to restructure union contracts. Then I looked into the driveway and saw my two Ford Ranger Pickups, Italo's for-sale Ford car and his 2000 Ford Lincoln. So on a whim I looked up the stock price: about $2 a share. And I called Italo and out of the blue asked: Italo, what if I were to buy a thousand shares of Ford stock?
We talked pros and cons (HA! I mainly said I know nothing about this but the worst we can do is lose $2 grand. But I don't think Ford is going out of business so we might make $8 grand if it goes up to $10 bucks a share) and he said, Go ahead. And give me some of it when we win.
So I did, getting it at $2.19. And now, for the last two and a half days I've been checking the price way too often. And been telling Italo: Italo, look at this! We're up $440 in two days...no, make that $420....no $390....WHOA! We're up to $460!
This morning it hit $2.78, which put us up near $600 briefly. Not bad for a week when I am too pooped to pop. When I look again it'll be down to half of that. It's a good thing I don't do this stuff: I'd just be staring at the damned prices all day, having little heart attacks.
Marco just walked in, wearing a towel and tried to wrestle me. HA! Normally I'm forced to wrestle: Today I just pulled his towel off. Which made Madeleina shriek with delight. "Oh, my god! Look at Marco's butt! That's the skinniest butt I ever saw!"
Which made Marco run for the shower as he tried to cover up.
And that's all we got going on around these parts.
Hope you're all having a great day, no matter what you're doing.