The Real Charlie

Live Free Or Die

Had an interesting trip up to Rochester, New Hampshire on Friday night. We were heading up to see a show at artstream, where Abby's work was exhibited last year. Shortly after leaving here we hit massive traffic jams, very stressful for me at the end of a not-so-hot work week. We then had 30 minutes of smooth sailing, followed by forty minutes of white knuckle driving in a massive electrical storm, with some of the heaviest rain I've ever seen. Ever. Got to the gallery, had a glass of wine, and met the artists Lisa Congdon and Lisa Solomon - this picture is of your humble servant shaking hands with Lisa Solomon, and Lisa Congdon is standing in the background:

The patterned dress that you can glimpse under my arm is Abby, who I must say looked adorable on Friday night, as she so often does.

Always suckers for a new piece of artwork, we bought "Realgar" by Lisa Solomon:

Realgar is a mineral, a natural ore form of cyanide. I remember it will from my geology days. This piece has Arabic text, skulls and is mixed media. And orange. How can it not be awesome? I predict a fight to keep it out of Roxanne's room, as it has so many of her favorite things. Between the color and the "skullies," we might not win this one.

After seeing the show we drove to Portsmouth and had good food and awesome beer at Portsmouth Brewery, followed by a long drive home in yet another electrical storm. The rest of the weekend was fun but comparatively uneventful.

Learning to Fly

A postscript to my sea gull eviction post from last month. Today the building manager sent out a notice that gulls had nested on the roof of our building, and were teaching their babies how to fly, and we should be aware of any clumsy new fliers banging around outside our windows. My assistant saw them taking wing this afternoon. I'm sorry that I didn't get to see the little birds next door grow up. I wonder what happened to them.

On a not unrelated note, I watched Roxanne having a swimming lesson yesterday. The teacher looked like his patience was being tested; she seemed to be veering between tolerating the lesson and wanting out immediately. I so feel for her. I hated swimming lessons as a kid, found the required coordination hard to manage (kick and pull and breath and not swallow water?) and many of my teachers less than sympathetic. I hated, and still hate, getting my face in the water. I can tread water for a long time and out dog paddle most canines, but I am just a lousy swimmer. With luck Roxanne will take after her mother or my sister, both virtually amphibious. I just hope she can learn to enjoy it a least a little bit.

Staying the Course

Unless you live in a dark and damp hole in the woods, you are aware that the securities markets have been a bad place the past few weeks. Like many, if not most, investors, I am not doing well year to date. My biggest problem is my exposure to some auction rate securities, which I can't sell for love or money. Otherwise I'd be happier, actually, because I'd be looking to use some of that capital to buy some of the bargains and near bargains out there on the market, especially among some of the big European companies in the financial, consumer staples and industrial areas, and among some of the US mega caps in industry, technology and, yes, a few financial stocks. But until I can get at my (famous last words) "cash equivalents," I am on the sidelines.

Except that I sold my last holdings in Bank of America last week, after several decades of owning Connecticut National Bank, Shawmut, Fleet and then Bank of America. I've been whittling the holding down for about eight years, and said goodbye to the last little bit after a terrible year or two. Incidentally, I was also a lifelong (literally, as my parents opened a Hartford National Bank account for me as an infant) retail customer of BoA and its antecedents, and "fired" them two years ago. Not a quality outfit in many, many ways. Good riddance.

I did finally invest my IRA rollover. I ended up with more money than I expected, so I went from X all in Blackrock Global  Allocation to 6.5 as follows:

2.5X in Blackrock Global Allocation
2.5X in iShares Lehman TIPS
1.5X in cash

I am still looking to get that cash down as I am getting a 0.10% yield annually on it. I am looking at some other "asset allocation" managers, particularly the Bob Arnott advised funds at PIMCO, All Asset and All Asset All Authority. They are both funds of PIMCO funds, and the later can hold short-biased sub-funds. Not a bad idea, in this market. As always, I'll keep you posted and, also as always, my financial advice and ideas are worth what you just paid for them.

And sorry for the hiatus, as Typepad fixed some annoying bugs and I finished a massive SLEP (Service Life Extension Program) on my iMac G4. More memory, new OS, new backup drive -  its practically modern! And I even own an iPod now! 21st century, here I come!

Sea Gull Eviction

My assistant and I were chatting yesterday morning, and he interrupted my (doubtlessly fascinating) discourse to point out that some men in hardhats and gloves were on the roof across from my office. A pair of sea gulls have been nesting there, and attacking the men who have been working to replace the substrate to the rubber roof (it must be something nasty, given the moonsuits they wear.) There has been a lot of fowl vs. human combat outside my window, and now the time had apparently come for humanity to exercise our evolutionary edge.

One guy videotaped while the other guy grabbed the nest. He put it in a bag, with the parent gulls swooping in on him all the while. Then he went back into the corner with a cage, and emerged with four tiny fuzzy gray gulls peeping in the cage. The parents were diving around and screeching. Quickly, the two men, with the cage and the bag, dove into the hatch and down into the building. I was sort of sad - herring gulls are no endangered species, and actually sort of a pest, but I felt for the gulls as a fellow parent.

For the rest of the day the parent gulls swooped around, calling and squealing  for their missing babies. They banged up against my window, several stories above, and swooped again and again over their abandoned nest site. Today they were nowhere to be seen or heard.  I have no idea what became of the chicks.

Success!

The mystery of my 403(b) rollover has been solved. My former employer's HR department sent the paperwork directly to the investment manager, who then sent the check directly to my financial adviser, where it showed up, without notice, today.

So now I am back to my asset allocation decision again. Right now my IRA is 10% in cash and 90% in the Blackrock Global Allocation Fund (MDLOX, for you ticker checkers). The IRA has X dollars in it (X being a relatively small fraction of my total portfolio), and the new additions will bring it to 6X. My plan, for tonight at least, is to allocate the IRA as follows:

2.5X in Blackrock Global Allocation
3X in the iShares TIPS ETF, for some tax sheltered exposure to a real return asset class
0.5X  in cash

How might I change it? I am concerned that the TIPS are really overvalued right now, as are most real return assets. So I might go 5.5X into the Blackrock Global Allocation, or add some Diamond Hill Long-Short into the mix. But I have learned that the Diamond Hill is actually fairly tax efficient, so I might wait and save that for the taxable account instead. Another option would be a global (ex-US) bond fund, or a fixed income asset allocation fund that can do for FI what Global Allocation does for everything that's not tied down. I'm going to mull it over for the weekend, and I'll let you know what I decide.

End of May?

It is hard to believe that May is almost over. The month didn't even fly by, it just vanished, in a flash. So, a few late spring updates and thoughts:

1) No, I still haven't gotten my 403(b) money emancipated yet. Yes, it has been two months. And yes, the nasty letter is coming. Should I start it out "Dear Thief" or "Dear Loser?"

2) Today I was walking home from the train, about 3/4 of the way home, and I heard some familiar squeaking from up ahead of me. My girls, all three of them were coming down the street. I waved, and the two little ones broke into a run (more of a gallop, actually) and caught up with me, and gave me a hug. My boss, whose daughters are 11 and 14, keeps telling me to enjoy this stuff, as the little girls get big fast.  With a welcome home like that after along (but fun, and productive) day, how can I not enjoy it?

3) This morning, my train got in fifteen minutes late. Yesterday, my line was disrupted by a lightning strike. This afternoon, two trains on another line collided. One of my favorite conductors retired and another switched lines. Why do I have the funny feeling that my mass transit honeymoon is over?

Let My 403b Go!

So I left my previous job at the end of February. In April, like a good boy, I asked for the papers to get my 403b account rolled over into the IRA that I manage for myself. I picked out the investments (some TIPS, some Blackrock Global Allocation), signed and filled out and saw the notary. Then I mailed it all to my former employer for verification of my having left their employ.

And I have heard nothing. For a month. I know they got the papers, because I sent them return receipt. They are either lost, or sitting on someone's desk, or someone is being an ass about it. I just want my money. So I called today, and did not hear back. I'll give them tomorrow and Wednesday, and then the next letter goes to the CEO.

Let this be a lesson to you all: it is all well and good to save for retirement, and to intend to keep one's assets properly stewarded after one leaves. But it is another thing altogether to claw one's money loose from the grips of incompetent bureaucracy!

Another Thing That Never Happened When I Drove To Work

I've been taking the train most days for almost two full months. Early on, I noticed that Eddie, the morning conductor on the front of my train, seemed to know everyone, bantered with the regulars, and was generally a funny, pleasant guy. I also heard rather quickly that he was about to retire, taking a buyout from the commuter rail operator.

When I got on the train today, I was slipped a little piece of paper and a woman whispered to me the cryptic words "it happens right after Wellesley Farms." The paper had the lyrics to "For he's a jolly good fellow," and instructions to sing once we heard the whistle. Once we pulled out from Wellesley Farms, a shrill whistle was heard, and both decks of my packed double decker car burst into song. Eddie was duly impressed, and touched. At South Station everyone stopped to shake his hand, and wish him well in his retirement.

When you ride to work alone in a car, that never happens. The commuter rail can be unreliable at times, too hot often and too crowded always. But it is always just a little bit of community, at least for forty minutes each way weekdays.

Strep and Mexican Cheese

Last Friday I started to feel really run down at work. I thought that I was having a Lyme disease relapse - I get this from time to time - but I powered on through the day and got home. We celebrated Stella's birthday (yay two years!) and after that I collapsed. I didn't even eat dinner. I woke up on Saturday with a 102 temperature and a sore throat. My sister spent most of her childhood with strep or recovering from it (and eventually got her tonsils out, which ended the problem forever), so I knew the signs. I went to urgent care (my doctor doesn't swab on Shabbos), got the throat culture and the penicillin, and went home. I am 80% better today, but bizarrely, my culture came back negative! The doctor said to keep taking the penicillin, the test was probably incorrect. Maybe I have stealth strep? As usual, I blame my two little petri dishes for bringing me this little gift from one of their play dates.

In other news, MMWR warns us, again, of the dangers of unpasteurized cheese. This time, drug-resistant salmonella from Mexican-style cheese. Not cheddar. But eating cheese from your local corner market is still safer than eating a dead beached whale. In the same issue: fishing fatalities. To the fisherman, not the fish. That wouldn't be news.

Thus Spake Stella, and Open Studios Results

So we drove into Brookline today for Brookline Artists' Open Studios, during which I got four great collages by the very cool and very hospitable (as in he let my children eat most of his corn chips and mess up his son's magnetic art board) Fred Free. Specifically I got this piece, this smaller piece, and two others. I have a cool new office with huge, bare walls in need of some interesting things. Combined with some work that I have at home, and an old picture of my father in the loading dock of the warehouse my grandfather built, I can get a nice little office gallery going. Oh, and Abby Whileshenaps, the award-winning artist who happens to be the love of my life, whose studio is located two feet away from my side of the bed and who is the mother of my children, is supposed to make me a bird. Someday. Ahem.

Anyway, on the way there Roxanne dozed off after Daddy sang some Passover songs, and Stella (who will answer inquiries as to her age with a hearty "Two In April!" and queries as to her mission with an emphatic "destruction!") held forth with the following story:

"Once, there was a dragon, who ate one hundred waffles. The people all went down the hill to see daddy get off the train. Um, the end."

Abby and I listened respectfully, and did not laugh out loud. We are still trying to understand the subtext obviously embedded somewhere in all of this.