Courtesy of Noelle Hancock
(more from Noelle at the end)
The time to disappear for our summer travels has come. Happy Time! But it will get quiet here around the blog. So…
This important note about the comments:
From now until September I will be unable to answer your investing questions in the comments. So please don’t post them now. If you do, you might miss the answer by the time I get to it come September. In the meantime, you might consider continuing to read the posts and the comments already there. The chances are very good that your question has already been asked and answered. If not, post them come Fall and I’ll do my best to help.
Other comments are welcome as always!
Our Summer
It has been busy like hell these past few weeks.
June 30th we are moving and so have been going thru the packing and purging leading up to when the truck arrives to haul away our, hopefully fewer, things.
Regular readers will remember we sold our house a couple of years ago and moved into our current downtown loft apartment. It is in a 200 year old refurbished mill building. Brick walls, high ceilings, wood floors, exposed heating ducts. A very casual, industrial vibe we’ve enjoyed greatly. It even has a bonus room in a former staircase that fits my office needs perfectly.
But one of the reasons we love now being renters is, it is far easier to indulge our restless spirits. It’s time for a change and change is easy when all you have to do is let your lease run out, pack and hire movers. Plus the purging inherent in moving keeps the clutter from trapping you.
We are going to a building only a couple of blocks away, so we get to keep the same neighborhood. We’ll still be walking distance to the cafes, restaurants and theater we’ve come to enjoy but in a more upscale, elegant apartment. We’ll be on the 8th floor facing West with a river view. We are told the sunsets are spectacular.
This is actually the building we first had our eye on two years ago. At the time we needed more space but now the second bedroom, we kept mostly for our daughter’s visits, can become the office.
She, in turn, is headed for South East Asia for two years with the Peace Corps. She’ll be teaching English. Since the Peace Corps strongly discourages volunteers from leaving their host countries to travel home, we will be traveling there instead. New adventures!
To make matters more interesting, the apartment we want isn’t actually available until August 24th. Which, since we travel for the summers, works out rather well. Specifically, like this:
Jake indulging in one of his favorite hobbies
- June 29th I take Jake the Wonder Dog to stay with his pal Smitty in the New Hampshire countryside. Jake doesn’t like moving days or hotels.
- June 30th the movers load up our stuff and take it to storage.
- Meanwhile, our daughter gives away the last of her stuff and leaves her apartment in Massachusetts.
- We meet up here:
This is one of the grand old hotels scattered around New England that were built at the turn of the last century. They fell into disrepair but now most have been beautifully restored and refurbished. Not cheap, but we had been meaning to treat ourselves one day anyway. And we have almost two months of rent to play with!
- July 3rd we put our daughter on the plane to LA and exotic points beyond for the next phase of her life’s adventure.
- That same day we retrieve Jake and head west to Wisconsin and Shamba.
- We’ll spend the rest of July at Shamba on Lake Michigan as we did last summer.
- From August 1st to the 24th we’ll…
- …well we haven’t figured that part out just yet. 🙂
- August 24th we move into the new place, where we should be fully settled by October when…
- …I head back to Ecuador for the Chautauquas and the side trip to the Galapagos Islands.
While at Shamba I hope to finish the final rewrites and polishing on the book. The manuscript is currently out to readers and fact checkers, and with their input in hand I should finally have it done. Of course, there are many more steps between finished manuscript and published book. But it is getting there and should be out in the next few months. I’ll put up a post when it is.
So have a wonderful summer and to get started, here for your amusement and edification are some random cool things that have caught my eye of late:
Socially Responsible Investing This is a question that regularly comes up in the comments here and the link is my pal Darrow’s interesting take.
Dave Barry reviews Fifty Shades of Grey: Best book report ever!
Understanding the economy video, by Ray Dalio
Pushing the lions off their kill Awesome demonstration of what courage can do. It’s amazing the lions don’t think, “Oh look. More meat. And it’s coming right to us. Gotta love the service on this savanna!”
How many mutual funds routinely rout the market?
50 reasons we are living thru the greatest period in history
Where are our interstellar neighbors?
AI — If you’re going to be interested in this, you already know what “AI” is.
Finally…
“If you’re constantly thinking you need a vacation, maybe what you really need is a new life”
Why I gave up a $95,000 job to move to an island and scoop ice cream
Courtesy of Noelle Hancock
See you in the Fall!
