Fear and greed

As the stock market roars up magnificently I again feel the forces of fear and greed. I think, “Why didn’t I invest everything I had when the market was down?” I think, “I can’t invest anything now, what if the market tumbles again!” Today I even considered, “Maybe I should short the market and make a fortune!” This investing is hard business.

In other news, I’m happy to report I finally finished up all our personal and corporate tax returns, what a great feeling that is. I celebrated the other night by drinking a nice cold Carlsburg while sitting in the hot tub with the kids and Ana. We celebrate all victories, accomplishments, occasions and special events, no matter how small - this is one of the most important traits of the Olson clan!

Prairie love

Ahhh, the prairies! Every time I go home I realize I've forgotten how huge the sky is. We visited our cabin out at Fishing Lake after a two year absence. We lucked out with beautiful, hot weather and the company of many friends and family members. On top of all the beer drinking and tractor racing we even found time to catch a few fish. We are so excited about the full week we plan to spend there in August, that should really give us time to kick back and enjoy. Just a short one this time...

Trip to Rochester

Last Friday evening, after pouring a concrete pad for the shed we are going to build in the backyard, Ana and I discussed the plan for the weekend. We soon realized there wasn't a plan. To us, it's a tragedy to be sitting there on Friday night with no plan or commitments for the weekend. Once we realized our terrible planning error, we got to work!

Ana chose Rochester, New York as our weekend destination. We blasted off early Saturday morning, making a brief stop in Brantford to pick up Ana's folks and a dose of T-ho coffee. Three hours later we found ourselves in the town of Pittsford, where we enjoyed a nice stroll along the Erie Canal and a delicious lunch. Oh yes, and Ana bought this incredibly ugly wire wagon wheel trolley for a dollar at a knick-knack sale. I nearly threw it in the canal when I saw her walking up with it but since I'm such a nice guy, and didn't want to get kicked, I just hurled verbal abuse.

After that we drove up to Rochester and discovered the Strong Museum of Play located downtown. In we went, parents, kids and grandparents, to see what treasures we could discover inside. I loved it! I loved it more than anybody else, perhaps even all of them put together. This was chiefly because of the giant video game arcade that housed at least a hundred vintage arcade games, games like Donkey Kong, Crystal Castle, Track & Field, Q-bert, Gunfighter and a whole bunch of others that propelled me back in time and turned me into a 10 year old boy with a sticky quarter in my hand, walking into the arcade at the plaza in Fairhaven, Saskatoon. Besides the arcade, they had toys and games of all descriptions. There was a magic, crystal ball, kid-sized wizard robes, magic wands, king and queen costumes, building blocks, crayons, miniature grocery stores, interactive games, funny mirrors, thousands of books, plastic hamburgers, sandboxes of silicone and an extraordinary butterfly garden.

After this we drove to the hotel and John and I took the kids for a swim while the ladies went shopping. For dinner, we found an Uno steak house and tackled some meaty sirloins, after which we retired to the hotel and I managed to stay awake for about 20 minutes of Escape From Alcatraz.

The next day we had a quick tour of downtown Rochester, including a stop at a large waterfall encased by crumbling factories - a very strange sight indeed. We then drove north to the southern shore of Lake Ontario and continued west towards the Canadian border. We were surprised at the lack of development - most of the lake front cottages were actually just cottages...instead of unneeded mansions. We cut across the border and continued to the town of St. Davids where we stopped for lunch at Mike and Ana's bakery/cafe called Olson Foods & Bakery - Ravine. They were actually off for the day, which doesn't happen often, so we settled ourselves at one of the tables and had a yummy lunch of bbq ribs. It's a lovely place, very vintage, evidenced by the odd collection of beaten up chairs, no doubt scavenged by Michael at garage sales and auctions across southern Ontario. Stella helped the depreciation process along for one of the chairs by breaking off a lower crosspieces while attempting to climb the chair to accost her mother. Just before leaving, Ana walked over to check out the items for sale and was delighted to see the lofty prices of the Le Crueset pots, as she had recently picked up a set of three at a garage sale in Paris for $30!

We then took the long, winding road home, avoiding the highways and instead getting a lovely tour of the orchards and fruit lands. As luck would have it, we found a flea market along the way, just outside of Jordan, and the "adults" did some shopping while us kids stayed in the car. We arrived home by about 6pm, tired, happy, and very satisfied with our decision to turn an otherwise dull weekend into an adventure!

What to do with our website?

Our treasured, packed, interesting, rugged and extremely worn website has been on our minds lately. We've been running http://www.lifeisgrand.org/ for almost 10 years now which, in internet terms, is mind boggling. I've been reading up on Web 2.0 technologies and am amazed at how much the technology has moved on. For instance, we've been writing a journal on our site since Oct 5, 1999. When we started, there was really no such thing as a social networking site, so we used our website as a tool to keep in touch with our friends and family as we travelled around the world. Of course, it was "one-way" communication, which is really what Web 1.0 was all about back then. We posted pictures, stories and journals which were available for anybody in the world to read, and it worked great! Over the years, we've built up a substantial readership, in fact, we still attract over 10,000 unique visitors per month, mainly looking for travel related information. Now, the internet world is much different. The name of the game is "interactivity" - the days of a static website are pretty much over. Which puts us in a bit of a spot. During the past year we've been kicking ideas around about what we can do to derive some income off the website, as the original purpose of the site has been pretty much replaced by Facebook (what we're up to), online photo sharing (where we've been), instant messaging (communication), wikipedia (information on countries) and Linkedin (networking for business/projects). We have really struggled with what to do with it. The first problem is that neither of us have kept up our web development skills, so any attempt to freshen up the site would probably just end up in a mess. We are also extremely cheap, so the idea of paying somebody to redo the site for us is not appealing, unless there would be a good return on investment. Which takes us to the second problem: what exactly is the purpose of our site? The most successful websites out there have a clearly defined function or purpose. They offer specialized information, specialized products, or a unique way of getting required information. The same is true of the popular blogs - they are narrow in focus and keep a readership by focusing on a particular subject of interest. Our website and blog is all over the place!! I like to write about things that interest me, such as investing, travel, finance and politics. But I doubt that there are many people out there who are interested in the same wide span of topics that I am so my blog is really just a replacement for a personal diary. Let's take the travel aspect of our site, which draws the most visitors. There are thousands or maybe even millions of travel websites out there, many very focused on one particular country or even regions or towns within a country. If you want to get detailed information on a specific place, our site is definitely not the place to come, as many of the countries we've written about, we only visited one or twice years ago so the information is not up to date. What we do offer is a very personal opinion on places, which is sometimes difficult to find on the web as it can be hard to tell if there is an "advertising" aspect to a website's opinion. It's a trust issue. Ana and I have brainstormed various ideas, looking for an angle, trying to figure out what we have to offer that isn't available elsewhere and what we've come down to is this: we have struck an amazing balance between employment, business, travel, raising kids and having fun. We don't know anybody else who has been able to balance all these things as well as we do. That's our angle. Now, we just need to figure out how (or indeed "if") that translates into a successful website.

Analyze a boat purchase

A great deal on a sailboat has come to our attention so we're now in the process of deciding whether to pursue this purchase. Whenever we face a life decision like this, our first step is to decide "why". Last night we came up with this list of reasons why we'd like a boat:

1. We love spending time on boats

2. We want the kids to grow up around boats and water

3. We want to develop our own sailing skills to enable us to do a year long sailing sabbatical

The next step is to figure out the real costs of owning a boat. We contacted the marina where we would keep the boat and got the prices for monthly berthing, haul in/out, winterizing, etc, then spoke with our friends to get an approximate cost of insurance. If we spread that out over the entire year it worked out to be about $230/month. If we then add in maintenance costs, which are high on older boats, we get another $166/month(based on a $25,000 boat, mid 1980's, 8% maintenance/year).

That makes a total of almost $400/month per year to own a sailboat. Hmmmm.

If we decide that we can afford that cost, we then need to decide what activities our new sailing hobby will displace. As you can imagine, our life, like most peoples', is extremely busy, so when we pick up some new activity, then something has to give. It seems the area most likely to give would be the impromptu weekend trips courtesy of our favourite airline, WestJet. We're okay with this, especially considering we'll be spending the time sailing, fishing and swimming.

More to come, stay tuned.

Florida real estate

There was a business aspect to our weekend trip to Florida, namely, to check out the state of Florida real estate and the prospects of getting in to an investment property. The verdict on real estate prospects? Poor. I've read that the Fort Myers area of Florida is one of the worst hit real estate markets in the US. Knowing this, one would expect to see some signs of slowdown in economic activity, but this was not to be found. Everywhere we looked was a parade of new cars, motorcycles, and people spending money. The shopping malls were packed to the point of hardly being able to find a parking spot. Restaurants were full, people looked happy, and there were few building vacancies to be seen. There were more "For Sale" signs up than in recent years, but nothing like what we were expecting. While it's true that you can buy a house for under a hundred grand, this will still only buy you a beaten up house in an undesirable suburb, miles away from the ocean. The premium properties are still commanding premium prices, though not as high as a couple years ago. Properties that were selling for 750k are now a steal at 600k. To me, the prices still seem well out of range for the average person and far, far below what I would consider to be a great deal. It makes you wonder, how bad is this recession really? This past weekend every single WestJet flight to southern destinations, and most in Canada too, was 95% full. This is not a sign of penny pinching consumers and the populace facing economic oblivion. Maybe people are just enjoying their unemployment and spending their severance pay on enjoying life for a while. Is it possible the real pain is yet to come?

Weekend in Fort Myers

Ana's been on a mission to plan us a long weekend getaway and it's been quite an adventure. The first choice was Nassau, Bahamas - we were hoping to go back to the same cool all-inclusive we visited last year but the price was much higher this year so we decided against that. The next idea was Barbados but the flights were too full and the accommodation prices were ridiculous. Next up was Newfoundland...which seemed like a great idea until we looked up the expected weather for this time of year and it was wretched. Plus the flights got filled up anyway, obviously a bunch of masochistic tourists or homesick Newfies headed to St. John's. So then we set our sights on Las Vegas. Brilliant idea - the flights were available and the accommodation was reasonable. Plus Ana, nor her parents had been there before, and I hadn't been there for about ten years so it seemed like a great plan. We booked the hotel and watched the flights.....slowly fill up until this past Wednesday when it was quite obvious they were going to sell out. At that point, desperation was setting in. Not on my part so much, but more Ana. Once she sets her sights on a vacation weekend, it's like a crocodile snapping it's jaws down on a wildebeest's leg. In other words, the crocodile will not go hungry. By this point, we were down to looking at what flights were available....going anywhere. The rapidly filling flights made us wonder, "Recession.....what recession??". It's not that often that every single flight leaving Toronto on a Thursday or Friday to anywhere remotely interesting is almost completely filled. Ana looked at Victoria (too full), Phoenix (nope), Fort Lauderdale (full), Orlando (okay coming back but full going down), and those are just the ones she told me about. By this time, I had practically resigned myself to spending a quiet weekend at home. Besides the desperate flight situation, the weather forecast for Brantford was looking remarkably lovely with highs of 25 and 26 over the weekend. Finally, from the depths of our home office, came a sort of cautious victory tone from my sweet wife. "Fort Myers! Fort Myers is clear! And we can come back through either Tampa or Orlando, we're good to go!" With that, accommodations and flights were booked and Ana was happy once again. The only minor hiccup was that our sweet little girl Stella broke out in a most unusual rash, something looking very much like chicken pox. There was just enough time to get her to the walk-in clinic before we left, where the doctor admitted he really had no idea what it was, but it was not likely chicken pox since that affliction is very rare these days. Since Stella was feeling fine and in a great mood, though slightly itchy, we decided to push ahead with the trip.

So here I sit, Friday night, with a chilled Presidente beer in hand, committing my thoughts to cyberland, with the kids in bed together watching a Diego video while Ana and her folks are out shopping. When it comes to the decision between going shopping and doing anything else, I almost always choose the latter, unless there's a nice cafe or cold beers or cigars or preferably all three included in the shopping picture. Here's to another Olson-style power weekend!