Happy Halloween!

Tonight I went to the book store at the mall. After that I went over to the food court. My treat to myself was Rocky Rococco's pizza and a cinnabun. My cashier at Cinnabun was wearing a bee costume. I think I saw a spider too but spiders don't have wings so I'm really not sure what I saw.

Yes or No

This is all over the blogs aready but I just couldn't pass up posting about this myself anyway.

I didn't watch the entire debate but just by chance I happened to tune it in just at this was happening. I thought that was awesome that Tim Russert threw her a tough question. As you can see here she simply would not answer it directly, instead choosing to throw in a slam on the current administration and dance around the issue on both sides. The last 45 seconds are golden. I was yelling at my TV, "It's a yes or no question!"

I can't help but smile inside when I see stuff like this. Hillary's out of her element if she's not taking softball questions from those that don't or won't ever challenge her answers. Put her on her heals and you end up with results like these. If a candidate can't answer tough questions and take a clear position how are we to support that candidate? Tim Russert tried to pin her down to a position. She clearly resisted being pinned down.

I've often thought that too much is made of candidates who change their positions. The so called flip-flop. Certainly I agree that a person can change their opinions and positions over time. I know I have held to positions in the past which I no longer agree with. What I can't understand is taking opposing positions within weeks or months of each other or expressing different opinions depending upon who the audience is or what the polls are saying. That either means your pandering or it means you don't have a core value system with which you base your beliefs upon. In either instance it's not a characteristic of a leader. While some issues can be nuanced, this issue of giving licenses to illegal aliens is anything but. The answer to the question as it was presented was "yes or no", not "yes and no".

Hotair calls this Exhibit A in the case against Hillary for President.

Can I Afford It?

A while back I was surfing channels and I got sucked into watching part of a Suze Orman show. Ordinarily I cruise right on by when I see her annoying presence on television but I stopped anyway. In the same way I can't stand Keith Olberman on MSNBC I still can't help but stop at it now and then. Maybe to remind myself how repugnant he is I don't know. Anyhow as annoying as Suze Orman can be (and mind you it's not anywhere near being in the same league or flavor as Olberman) I got sucked into it watching this segment called "Can I Afford it?". It was actually rather interesting because people call in with all these ideas in mind for things that they want to buy. Then they say what their income is, what their savings are, and how much debt they have if any. Suze then reviews the situation and gives them her approval or a denial. Most of the time she denies people and most of the time it's pretty obvious why. I felt better about my financial position in life after I watched this. A lot of people out there have a lot of debt and not enough savings. This one guy wanted to buy a horse for 6 grand I think and she denied him. If I remember all this right I think he was 58, he had 7K/mos income and debt-wise I think a mortgage. Then he says that he has $2000 in stocks and didn't mention any retirement savings. What the heck? Your 58 dude! Your in serious trouble if you want to retire anytime soon and now you want to buy a horse that cost more money than you have saved?

In don't need Suze Orman to tell me if I can afford stuff or not. I could buy everything on my wish list tomorrow if I wanted to but it wouldn't be a very responsible thing to do. I labeled it "materialistic" for a reason. I'm going to buy the stuff I can afford and save for the rest or maybe just forget about buying those items altogether in the short term. It's called priorities and thankfully I have mine straight.

Materialistic wish list

#1 Cell phone - I sometimes think I'm the last person in America that doesn't own a cell phone. My plan right now is to get rid of my land line and use only a cell phone with hopefully an inexpensive service plan.

#2 Bike - I don't really NEED a new bike but I can easily see that the bike I have isn't particularly suited to the longer distance rides I've been doing. This one and #1 will be knocked off the wish list first as they are both long overdue purchases.

#3 ipod - I'll probably get just this basic ipod shuffle. I use headphones at the gym all the time and my current one is sooooooo 20th century. I mean I actually have to put the mp3 files onto a CD and carry the bulky thing around with me. With one of these I could just load it up and all I have to do is clip the thing onto my clothes or slip it in my pocket.
#4 Mattress - When I went to Disney this last January I slept on the most comfortable mattress I have ever slept on in my entire life. The tag said Sealy Posturpedic Encore 720 Plush. I've done some research and that specific model name is only distributed to hotels but equivalent models are sold all over the place. I'd like to get a new bed frame and a queen size mattress. I really don't need the queen size but one never knows what the future holds. #5 LCD television - along with a new entertainment center to put it in. My folks just got a new 32" Samsung and it looks great. Darn if I don't want one of those High Def TVs too. This one is a bit further out of reach when I consider what I allow myself to spend with respect to my disposable income. #6 Laptop - I really could use one when I travel. I like to write down my thoughts in a notebook whenever I travel and keep track of everything I did and where I went and all of that. I think a laptop would be more convenient and on top of that I could access the Internet and keep up with email and the news and my portfolio and so on. Plus I could also unload all of my photos onto it and look at them in full size at the end of the day rather than on that tiny screen on my camera. I take a lot of pictures when I travel. The only thing is I only travel about once a year so for 50 weeks out of the year it would probably sit around and collect dust. #7 CD player for my car - I only drive my car 5 months out of the year and during that time I have it out of storage I drive it maybe 25% of the time I go anywhere. My Trans Am is a luxury of sorts already but I only have a cassette deck in it. I put it in there when the factory stereo quit. It was at a time before CDs were something you could burn at home. I used to dub mix tapes for myself from my CDs so it was logical at the time to get a just a cassette deck. Now things are different and I'm stuck listening to tapes whenever I drive my car. I always seem to have the same couple of tapes and I'm getting real sick of them.

Easy Money

Nothing like makin money without lifting a finger. A bit of research is necessary but a stock like FCX which has clearly been a winner for me wasn't that hard to find. Sunpower I can't claim as my own find, but it has been totally rockin just the same.

My cost basis in Freeport McMoran Copper and Gold is $71.82. The resistance point on this stock is around $120 now. This one's going even higher short and long term. I have no doubt about it.

My cost basis in SPWR is $38.18 and it has recently been on a breakout up over $100. It could easily pull back a bit and even when it does, the stock has still more than doubled for me since I bought last November anyway. Sweet!

So what's the plan? As long as I continue to have stocks like this...and believe me they aren't all this great...to counterbalance some of the not so hot ones I'll retire from work as early as possible. I'll do some traveling and I'll drink wine and eat steaks and shrimp, chocolate cake and ice cream until my arteries can't take it anymore and I die of heart failure.

Or maybe not exactly that but I'm sure I'll come up with something good to do. Right now I'm spending more time learing the ropes of investing than I am planning out an endgame. The name of the game now is invest, reinvest the gains, then reinvest those gains and so on.

Huh?

Buckethead

No comments just great music.

Mary Katherine Ham

Where has this woman been all my life? She has an open invitation to dinner anytime. Smart, attractive, and conservative. I don't really know what collards are or why I should eat them on New Years but she looks great in this video making them and going on about politics the whole time. Now that's my kind of woman for sure.


I think I first saw her on Glenn Beck's show but now I see her more on the O'reilly Factor. There a segment on there maybe once a week called "Policing the Net". I don't know if it's on the same day every week or what but I should try to figure that out.

Totally free Saturday

I have a totally free Saturday with absolutely no plans. I didn't go to the gym today but I did have some great sandwiches for lunch. Among other things I'm gonna catch up on some posts since I've been posting here relatively infrequently lately. Most of the things I've been thinking about lately are just trivial. Most of the other things I've been thinking about for posts are just the same political things already posted about all over the internet anyway. I think a lot more about politics than is reflected in my postings here. I highly recommend the checking out the "other blogs" listed on the right of my page. For now it's a short list but I should expand it to include other blogs I visit. There are a lot of good ones out there. Whether I need it or not my almost daily visits to them remind me how messed up liberals are. Jessica McBride's blog has a more local flavor but I like to keep track of both local and national politics.

On television I generally watch bits here and there of The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity and Colmes, and Glenn Beck. Mainly because the channel MSNBC is on is between Fox and Headline Prime where Beck is I sometimes run into Keith Olberman or Chris Matthews. That Olberman guy is completely unhinged. I just can't put to words how over the top that show is. It's an hour of completely unfettered and unchallenged far far left liberal views. And how may times is he going to give Bill O'Reilly his "worst person in the world" title? I think O'Reilly can be a bit of a windbag sometimes too but on balance he's a fair guy. I somewhat prefer watching Glenn Beck though. He's more entertaining. It's rather alarming sometimes to watch and learn what's going on in the world and what it is that the enemies of the US are up to and what they are saying openly. Things that aren't on your local or network news channels. A lot of it is what liberals would rather minimize, deny, cover up, or just label those that don't as fear mongers.

Here's Glenn Beck video from a while back (10 minutes).


Thankfully the universal health care package he's talking about in the last 5 minutes of the video was dropped from the WI state budget thanks to Republicans. Unfortunately I live in a blue state where this type of nonsense is proposed and would become reality if it weren't for Republicans. Gov. Doyle and state Democrats should suck rotten eggs for proposing a pork laden state budget that increased fees and taxes by 1.7 billion dollars. The one that passed isn't great either but at least it only increases taxes by a few hundred million (I don't seem to be able to find the exact number at the moment). My personal assesment is that the Republicans gave in to too many of the new taxes/fees just to get a budget passed. They were getting pretty handily slammed in the press which as usual distorted the facts. The truth of the matter is that the previous budget could have remained in effect indefinitely until a new one was passed. Nothing would've shut down (govt agencies, state schools etc) as the Democrats and the press would have had you believe. I think I would have preferred to keep the previous budget to this one.



Now on to things a little more cheery...

Stupid Stats

I keep all my biking stats in an excel file on my computer. After each outing I take down all the numbers from the computer on my bike (distance, ave speed, time, max speed and cumulative miles) and enter them into a spreadsheet. At the end of the season I make up tables with relevant stats to see what I've done over the year. This year I pretty much blew away anything I've ever done before. I wasn't that far from tripling last years total mileage but I ran out of warm weather before I got that far. This chart shows my cumulative miles for each of the past 3 years.

There's a long flat, inactive period of about 2 weeks in August. I was out of town during the first week and when I got back it was raining for an entire week after that. I remember at the time I left for my trip thinking that I had already beaten my total 2005 mileage even though it was only the middle of August. After I got back and after the rain finally ended I made up for the downtime. According to my file I did about 275 miles in the 2 weeks that followed.

Additional stupid stats...

Out of 47 total outings my average ride was 26.32 miles. My shortest was 8.75 miles and my longest was 52.38 miles.

• 0-9 miles: 2
• 10-19 miles: 10
• 20-29 miles: 19
• 30-39 miles: 11
• 40-49 miles: 2
• 50+ miles: 3

My total riding time was 77 hours, 51 minutes, and 26 seconds. That's about 3.25 days. That only includes time I was actually in motion, not the time waiting at street lights or any rest stops.

Overall I think I did pretty good. I could've been in better shape to start the year. I was a bit on the heavy end of my range in the spring. I lost around 8-10 lbs over the summer but I could stand to loose another 5-10 before I'm in my ideal range. Maybe next year I'll finally get myself a new bike. My current bike is heavier and has much fatter tires than are necessary for the type of riding I'm doing. I can't remember how many times this year I thought about how much the charactaristics of my bike were holding me back.

Looking forward to next year it's hard to predict if I'll beat this or not. A lot will depend on what shape I'm in next spring, the weather, and if I get a new bike. It also turns out that 1200+ miles is a huge time commitment. I don't really have anything else planned. I enjoy the challenges and this keeps me in good shape. I don't have any regrets about having spent my time this way this year but on the other hand there are a few projects that I did not get at over the summer.

My Past DVD Rentals

Since I can never seem to remember the movies I rent I started keeping my Blockbuster receipts. This is a chronological list of all the movies I've rented since July of 2005 with IMDB links. There are a lot of good movies I haven't seen yet and looking back over this list, a lot of garbage that I have. My standards for judging a movie's worth aren't very high. If it holds my attention and is at least somewhat entertaining for the 90 minute or so duration that's enough for me. That said there are a few on this list that don't meet that standard. I watched them and by the time the end credits rolled or even before I wished that I hadn't. Those movies are marked with a *.

Pathfinder
Crank *
The Hills Have Eyes
Children of Men
Smokin' Aces *
Turistas
The Descent
The Protector
Saw 3
Slither
Star Wars Ep. III
Wedding Crashers
Lucky Number Slevin
Rest Stop
Hulk
The Sentinel
The Exorcism of Emily Rose
The Matador
Super Size Me
Underworld Evolution
Running Scared *
Underworld
Blade: Trinity
Hostel
National Treasure
The Bourne Supremacy

Seems like a short list...maybe I lost some of the receipts or something. Unfortunately every one of these was rented from Blockbuster. They have a monopoly on DVD rentals where I live. As far as I know there isn't another video store within 20 miles that isn't a Blockbuster. There was one independent store for a while but the guy closed up 3 or 4 years ago now. I boycotted Blockbuster as long as it was possible. I did that because every time I went in they claimed I owed late fees which I know were bogus. I guess now that late fees are non-existent I won't have that problem anymore. I've considered using Netflix but usually renting movies is a spontaneous event. I don't know if I want to have to plan this stuff ahead of time and get my DVD's in the mail and all that. Maybe I'll try it and see if I like it. I still feel the less business I give Blockbuster the better.