Isaac Sinnett

Volatility, cold and snow

The stock market took another big dump today and along with it, or led by it, apple (aapl) dove.  It wasn’t just a small sell of, it was a jump right off the cliff.  Shares where down over 10% (down over $16).  Shareholders were selling the stock like they’d die if they held on to it.  So strange after they posted their earnings, and they were up over 58% over the year earlier.  However, the outlook for the current year is not so beautiful and that caused investors to get cold feet.  The point of all of this…I lost money today. But that is the beauty of the stock market and capitalism in general.  It can make you money, but at the same time it can lose it all for you too.

It has been freezing cold as of late.  This past weekend, it was 30 degrees below zero with the wind chill factor.  Ridiculous is what I say!  The past few days it has been snowing and living in a large city, that creates problems.  First, people freak out and it makes driving very difficult and long.  My normal drive to work has essentially doubled, thanks to the weather.

Sometimes you just find ……..

I went to log-on to my health insurance website the other day to check it out and the first thing that I come across is that January is national obesity awareness month. I’m going to leave this one alone and just let everyone think whatever it is that they need to think about that information.

But, where everyone should find themselves is on the couch this late Sunday afternoon to watch the Packer game. We are in the NFC Championship game and if we win we go to the Superbowl! Who would of ever thought any of this when the season started.

However, for the present, I find myself sitting in the apartment with Paul watching the Godfather. Such a great movie. I believe we may have started something, perhaps a Godfather trilogy.

Ode to Carpet

So today started off with waking up from a night of tossing and turning thanks to the fact that my nose was all stuffed up and I couldn’t breath.  That lead to a day of sneezing, blowing my nose and overall feeling like a pile of garbage while at work.  I made it through though like a champ, if I must say so myself and I must.  To continue the weirdness of today it was 63 degrees.  63! people.  Must I remind you that it is early January and I live in Chicago.  I was outside in a regular ole button up shirt and I was comfortable.  I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.  And to top off the unseasonably warm weather, I drove home in a thunderstorm.  Again, it’s January in Chicago!

On to more exciting things.  Paul and I decided to take the garbage out tonight and who would’ve thunk we had 4 bags of garbage sitting around.  Ok, sorry, got a little distracted on my way to the exciting things.  I was just going in chronological order.  First, the garbage was taken out and then Paul and I trucked on down to my favorite store, Jewel.  I’ve decided that I shop at Jewel more than any other store and that is grade A useless information as  I wind my way to the point of all of this.  On Sunday I had seen a nice little small rug that would fit perfectly in front of our door so that we could wipe off our shoes when we come in.  The problem was that in all of my excitement Sunday, I actually forgot to purchase the rug.  So we went back tonight to purchase it and it was a good thing I forgot on Sunday, because there were many more options in the color department tonight.  And so, the dark red one was purchased and taken home.  The purchase of the new rug allowed me to put the rug I had previously purchased at Ikea in the kitchen so it was like there were two new rugs.  One word, Thrilling!

I don’t know if everyone remembers a few blogs back when I was mentioning that you have to pay for bags that you use at Ikea.  Well, I have learned that you have to purchase bags at other stores too.  I guess stores that feel that they are giving you such low prices feel like they will go bankrupt if they don’t charge you for the bags.  All this brings me to the fact that I finally did purchase a bag a Jewel tonight.  They have reusable shopping bags that you can purchase for $1.  These however are real reusable bags and are not made out of plastic.  I figured with all the stink that I up about the bags and how they should at least have non-plastic bags that you can buy that I should purchase this reusable bag since it met my requirements.

Flying Bulls and Benny

Who wouldn’t want to brave the cold, eat a slice of so-so pizza, grab a cab and wait a bit more? Anyone that wants to see Benny the Flying Bull. You are sitting there enjoying a great game. Nearly deadlocked at the end of three quarters and down from the top of the arena comes Benny. Benny who? Well, had you paid enough attention, it’s Benny the flying bull.

Intriguing Lists

For those of you who do not check out the lists on forbes.com then you are truly missing out. They post some intriguing things. Today, I checked out forbes, as I often do, and came across a link for college basketballs most valuable teams. Now this is something that we often equate with professional sports. How valuable is your team?, but never with college sports. At least I hadn’t. But it makes complete sense. College sports teams are nothing but cash cows for their universities. Not all that surprising is the fact that North Carolina tops the list. Not only do they have a long tradition of college hoops, but no offense, the only other thing there is Duke, so you can’t blame them. One thing that surprised me was my former school, The University of Arizona. Our basketball team ranks fourth in the country. With courtside seats costing a minimum of a $40k donation per season, we had better make some kind of list. I looked around and saw that there was a list for most valuable college football teams as well. The values that they put to these teams dwarf those of basketball.

All of this leads me to the question. Huh?