Is it just a Pullback?

Dow Down 416 points!

But we're still here! Andy's brother, Jimmy, called early this morning to make sure we hadn't jumped off our roof-top pool deck last night. Thanks for thinking of us Jimmy! We might've jumped if we were in a bunch of stocks, but thankfully we only had two...which we were able to take a small loss or reduced profit during this "pull-back" in the market. I should say that we probably would've gotten into a bunch of new trades on Monday, but we were in an all-day long options class...weren't we lucky? We were originally only going for the morning session, but then decided to stay for the afternoon session as well. We feel that, for the first time, the trading gods were watching over us.

So, today??? The market has been very schizophrenic...at 9:40 am it was up 70 pts, at 9:50 it was down 15, and so it has continued. We might follow Brian Shannon's advice and just take the day off. But, we need just a couple of hundred bucks to meet our February goal....so we may stick around to squeeze in a day trade if we can determine a pattern to today's price movements.

A Celebration of Life

Last night we attended Matt's Celebration of Life.

There are no weddings without tears, and no funerals without laughter.

This quote was posted on the table with several of Matt's memorable belongings and often worn items like his cowboy boots and funny hats, and was very apropos. Several people told stories about Matt that had us all laughing. Since I only knew Matt through Kayuba, I learned some more about him last night. For example, he played the didjeridoo (the Australian musical instrument); he enjoyed hunting for fossils; he was about to get his PhD; and he was just about to get his black-belt in karate. He lived life to the fullest, but when life ends at the age of 45 you have to wonder what else was on his life-list.

This also gets you wondering about your life-list of things to do, your accomplishments, how people will remember you, death, and what you plan on changing about your life now that you are reminded how short life can be. It is another sad reminder that everyday is precious and should not be wasted.

It was not my choice to leave you, it was my time.
~ Matt Barton

Movie Night

Last night was movie night, and the best kind - outdoors! One of the small city parks, Huizenga Plaza (aka Bubier Park) periodically presents Maroone Moonlight Movie Night. So we threw on our backpack-style beach chairs with a cooler and some pre-popped popcorn and hoofed it the two blocks to the park to sit in the grass, under the stars to watch "To Kill a Mockingbird". This year's theme was "the classics" so all the movies were classic black & white films.

I needed it. Earlier in the day we got stuck in high-season traffic creeping down A1A trying to take the scenic route from Boca to Ft Lauderdale. I started to get that crowd-claustrophia feeling with all the cars, new high-rise construction, and people. I needed that small-town feeling reminiscent of Ft Collins. Having the ability to walk to an outdoor-movie was the remedy.

Goodbye Matt

We just found out this week that one of our fellow Kayuba-ites passed away. We were very sorry to learn that Matt Barton died of a heart attack at the age of 45. It's always a shock, but even more so when someone is so young.

We could always depend on Matt to bring his delicious homemade brownies to all our dives or club picnics. He was not your traditional sort of person with his long hair pulled back in a pony tail. But he would crack us up with his different take on how to do things...like when he brought a hammock to sleep in during a kayak-camping trip down the Peace River several years ago. The rest of us were snug in our tents during that rainy night on the river bank. But when we awoke wondering how he fared, we were initially shocked to not find him in his hammock...and laughed when we found him asleep under his kayak.

Chris Guld has posted a web album with some pictures of Matt - you'll understand a little more after seeing these candid shots.

Rest in peace, Matt. And thanks for the brownies.

Feeds

Oh! I almost forgot to mention...for those of you who may be using Feeds and have bookmarked the old blogger address, take note that the new blogger has a new address at www.dianeandy.blogspot.com. Can you believe that diandy.blogspot was taken??

If you just click through from my website www.diandy.com - no worries, the link has been updated so you might not have even noticed that the blog is at a different location.

Enjoy your long weekend everyone!

Labels

I've gone back and attached "labels" to my old posts. So now you can review old posts based on the topic or by state - not just by the archived months. Since Blogger is owned by Google, they are trying to brainwash us into 'searching' for everything in life instead of organizing in folders, etc. It does make it easier, though!

Now, this was a little bit of a chore to do so if you see I've mislabeled anything, please post a comment and let me know so I can correct it. Thanks!

More Photo Tests

Please continue to bear with me here while I experiment a little with the new blogger. One of my worries with the new system is that everything (including my photos) are posted on blogspot's servers. With the old system my posts and photos were FTP'd onto my website at http://www.diandy.com and were all mine. If I ever want to leave blogspot, this just makes it a little harder to simply "switch" when my photos will now have a home address on their servers.

I'm not worried about losing my photos, or even those that have been resized for the blog, since I do my backups. This is just a convenience thing...IF I ever want to switch to another program...

Photo Test on the new system

Take a moment to smell the roses....while I on the other hand experiment with the new blogger to see what I like, don't like, etc. etc.

I am a little disappointed that my layout has been affected. Forgetting that I had widened my template years ago, I'm seeing that my text and pics no longer match up. I wish that the blogs weren't so narrow! I may have to tweak the HTML coding again to widen this again...

What I do like about the new system are the "labels". This allows me to enter keywords for each blog entry so if you just want to see our posts on "Nebraska", let's say, you could just click on that Label and it'll pull up just those posts. This will also be a work in progress, as I will have to go back through all of the posts from the last two years to add these labels.

NEW BLOGGER

I've just switched over to the new Blogger. I'm testing some of the new features. Please bear with me!

Racing Traders

We've mentioned a few times about the importance of exercise - especially now that we are sitting at our desks so much more than we ever have. And we've mentioned that we've done mini-triathlons - several over the past few years.

Well, we've been watching this trader's blog (Brian Shannon at Alpha Trends) and had ourselves a good laugh when he talked about his first mini-triathlon and his training regimen. Here's how he was able to mix his training and trading:

Now that's dedication!













He also had this cartoon posted on his site, which gave us a nice chuckle: