Life is What Happens

Life is what happens when you are not paying attention. There's no practice, it's just happening all the time. We're always on - always in it. So every day is a whole new ball game. Such is the theme of the Life Without Practice Blog.

Good day to you, new reader perusing this ordinary life from your monitor wherever you may be sitting and surfing today. Reading this blog will not get you deep insight into the latest news or buzz. No sports update, or commentary on tech gadgets. Nope, just an ongoing view of the little, minor projects in the life of one bit player on the stage of life. It's been spewing into this particular bucket for months, and will continue

A case in point, Project 2, P2 for brevity. Just one of the projects you'll see itemized in these annals. Onward goes P2. As summarized in a recent post, I'm moving forward on this project to move into a fulltime engagement with a purveyor of employment, rather than my rather spotty gig of consultatory interaction. Another call on that topic today. Me thinks my premise of a rising boom in the economy is being shown to be rather accurate. But candidate number 3 is still my desire. An interesting engagement in an exploratory and open-ended position for which I seem well suited.

This new opportunity has arisen, focussed mostly on one element of the engineering of new products for folk. A bit focussed for my liking, but I shall continue to explore it and see how the details manifest themselves. Nice to be still getting calls - even without circulating new cv's. They are very much like seeds planted. I once grew a banana tree - still have it growing actually. The seeds are much like resumes. Lumpy, unexpected things with indeterminate germination periods from a month to a year or more. One of my plantings sprouted in about a month, another sat forgotten in a pot while other things were later planted. A year or so later - pop, up comes another banana tree. Resumes are like that.

Another Project - Finances!
There's always another project to add it seems, on which I've been contributing on-again-off-again as the bandwidth allows. Call this Project 16 shall we?

Since my young years in highschool I followed the stock market, and thus a number of years later I have many hundreds of transactions behind me, folders full of statements and (luckily) a paper trail to allow me to recover everything that I did in building my 50 or 60 company portfolio.

Trouble is, knowing exactly how I've done. On an individual basis, sure each equity, I've bought and sold, I've scrutinized before buying, followed as an individual element of my portfolio, and occasionally delved back into, checking it's vital signs or making decisions about when to cahs out or cut my losses. But to see a good picture of the forest and the shape of the trees is more difficult. Come tax time, given a recent sale, calculating the exact cost and capital gain is a challenge sometimes, and often results in a late evening and lots of scribbled notes, and searching through statements.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I've got the statements neatly filed away chronologically, so I can find them. But the paths are often convoluted. You buy company a company like "poco petroleum" in the 80's. Later you might buy a bit more - now the cost per share is a bit more complicated, but manageable. Then it gets bought out by Burlington resources. Okay no biggy. Then they change the symbol of the stock. Then Conoco Philips buys them out, and gives COP shares for each BR share, as well as a chunk of cash (in US funds) for each share as well - and the COP shares are doled out in a 18:25 ratio. Well, what's the cost of each COP share when you sell it and get a capital gain?

You see my point. Simple math, but a long paper trail. A while back I set about recording all transactions for all equities I own or owned. A single big spreadsheet to search through when I need to check something. But it was a big job, prone to errors, but at least I had most of the data in there. A few statements were missing, but the data reconstructable.

I've just launched a new phase of the clarification - capturing a company-by-company summary of what happened (wha' 'appen' for the Mighty Wind afficianados out there). So I pour through the big spreadsheet, re-confirming everything that happened to each company. Things that are sold and gone, summarize how I did. Those that are still in my portfolio, summarize the current position and the exact cost base.

Whew - Makes me feel like an accountant. What a dreamy, exciting career that would be, if only I hadn't gotten distracted by physics. Sigh.

So thus goes my P16 enjoyment. Strangely it is a bit exciting. Like a good book, I want to see how it all works out. Am I ahead after all those years of investing? What if I had just stuck the money into a mattress? What if I had just put it all into a bank account earning 2% interest? Well, I'll be getting an answer to that, assuming my computer doesn't die or something. I'm concious of that possibility. I'm backing up the file that collects so much work - many days have been poured into there. I would NOT want to try and capture all this again. It's rather mindless and it would seem such an insurmountable challenge. I shall have to stick it onto a CD or something when finished. A tiny sub-meg file likely, but chock full of statistcal goodness.

Wrap
Okay that's about it. Your assignment - for these assignments are what draw so many of you to come to this fascinating look at mundaneity (mundination?, boritude?) - your assignment is to write down all your debts and all your financial assets on a sheet of paper and see where you come out. Do you have a number? Keep it to yourself, burn the paper and think about what it's all about.