Ted's Blog

While on vacation I was able to play Risk 2210 A.D. with my brother and nephews. Andrew brought the game board, which originally came out in 2001, but it was new to me. This variation of Risk adds underwater territories and continents (2 or 3 territories per continent) and the moon with 3 additional continents, plus there are small changes to the land territories including most of the names of territories. Using energy tokens that you earn by controlling territories at the beginning of your turn, you can buy specialized commanders which are required if you want to take over water or moon territories. The commander also lets you use an 8-sided die for attacking and they always defend with an 8-sided die. An opponent with a 6-sided die can never roll a 7 or 8, so this is a pretty good advantage. There are also cards that you purchase with energy credits that allow you to do special things like reinforce a territory when it is attacked, give you points at the end of the game, and other things, some of which can completely change the game, like stop an opponent from attacking you (or stop an opponent from using cards against you, both big changes on the last turn).
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After a week of family vacation in St. Augustine, Michael is now officially on his fifth grade trip. As part of that Mom bought tickets for him to go to Busch Gardens and said if I tagged along, she would get me a ticket too (I never got a fifth grade trip, but I got to go to Busch Gardens in Williamsburg with Andrew, too). We got a 2-day ticket for not much more than a single day ticket and it includes lunch both days. We went to the first day today by ourselves, but Mom and Don will join us tomorrow.

Busch Gardens has some of the best roller coasters in Florida, but I wasn’t sure how Michael would do on them. He said he would try out Cheetah Hunt first, their newest roller coaster. Since we got there right at the opening, there was only about a 5-minute wait. As he saw how high the track goes and how fast the cars flew by, he started getting a little nervous. We sat about halfway back so we couldn’t get the front row view of the drops and loops. Once we were in our seats and buckled in I asked him if he wanted to get off and he said yes. I tried to get the attention of an attendant, but they have a procedure they follow. Michael raised his hand to get off. Too late. He was very nervous, but during the ride he seemed pretty calm. After it was over, he said he wanted to go home immediately and never wanted to come back to Busch Gardens. I said we could take the cable car ride over the animal habitat to at least see some more of the park and again there was hardly any waiting. He resisted at first, but liked that ride. That took us to part of the park with a log flume ride, so we rode that. It was such a big hit we got back in line and rode it again. At some point we came across an area where one of the biggest roller coasters, Sheikra, causes a huge splash that soaks people standing nearby, so Michael stood there and got soaked a few times. He tried to get me to come over, but there was no way I was going to be soaking wet for the rest of the day.

While we were walking, we came across a bird enclosure where you could feed birds nectar, so we stopped in there, bought a tiny cup of nectar and the guides showed Michael how to stand so that the birds would feel comfortable landing on him and walking down his arm to the nectar he was holding. He had three birds on him at once. In the picture he is still soaking wet from Sheikra’s splashes.
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Last year I put my Roth 2014 contribution in to Vanguard’s Total International Stock Index, which wound up losing money. International stocks haven’t recovered as quickly as the US market, so last year I figured they were due, but instead the US continued to outperform the rest of the world. As I watched all of this unfold, I started to realize I was probably too heavily weighted in international stocks anyway. Still, in a market lull during October, I took a little money I had in a short-term bond fund (cash, essentially) and put it in Vanguard’s European Index. This went up about 10% almost immediately, but by December was back down to near where I bought it. I wound up selling it as well as my domestic small cap value fund to buy Vanguard’s Total Stock Market Index fund, which invests in the whole US stock market (instead of just the S&P 500 large caps). Some of that is too late because small caps dragged in 2014 as well, but now I have only two Vanguard investments: total US market and total foreign markets. So that’s everything! I still have more than I should in the international fund, so I am putting some of my 2015 contribution into the domestic fund.
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I sort of got overly involved in buying precious metals this year (gold, silver parts 1, 2, and 3). I don’t think there is anything wrong with having some precious metals in a portfolio, up to a few percent of total investments, but I probably haven’t been doing it that well. It’s hard to know whether prices will go up or down, but realistically prices would have to go up quite a bit before I could realize any gains by selling physical silver and gold somewhere. Maybe a 40% increase in price to realize a 20% gain. I also put some money in exchange traded funds that you buy like stocks that are much more efficient, allowing a 20% gain with maybe a 24% increase in price. But the price has continued to slide and is down to around $16 per ounce whereas it was $19 when I first started buying and as high as $21 at one point.

Continue reading “Silver, Part 4”

I’ve been wanting to upgrade my 6 year old Dell Vostro 1400 for a little while now, though it wasn’t urgent since the Vostro works pretty well, especially after reinstalling everything back in February. I bought a ultra portable Transformer T100 which can also be used as a tablet if you remove the keyboard, but it was too small for me. I thought maybe I could get a powerful laptop that I could use to replace my ancient desktop computer and also take it with me when I needed to, but I find myself using the laptop a lot while watching TV, so I’m not sure I would use the laptop as a desktop very often. Plus I wanted to support two monitors, but I’m not sure how that would work. Maybe I could just get one very large monitor to take the place of two separate monitors.
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