We Shall See (2010 predictions)

With all the financial blogs out there, it's nice to get an idea of which ones actually know what they are talking about. Well here's a summary of some blog's predictions for 2010...let's see how they do.

Fun in the Fall

How Fast things turn around in the NFL

A toast to my Chargers. They were DOA only a few weeks ago....

The Chargers (7-3) have won five straight and the Broncos (6-4) have dropped four in a row, turning the division race upside-down. Just five weeks ago, the Chargers trailed the Broncos by 3½ games.

The balance of power in the AFC West couldn’t have shifted in a more dramatic fashion.

Rivers was a crisp 17 for 22 and he led San Diego to scores on seven of 10 drives. Nate Kaeding kicked four field goals and the Chargers also recovered an onside kick, recorded three sacks and forced three turnovers.

The Broncos? They were flagged nine times to San Diego’s one. And Marcus Thomas blocked an extra point in the final minute.

Otherwise, all San Diego.

They may not be a dominant team. But winning is fun and they have given me a ton of great games over the last 6 years. I saw a great stat the other day that the Chargers are 40-5 in games played after November 1 since 2004...amazing!!

Best. Playoff Series. Ever

Game 7 tonight. This is like a great heavyweight fight or the super bowl, where you're just hoping it will live up to the hype.

Once again, I turn to the sports guy to nail it....
We are watching a first-round series in which five of the first six games have come down to the final play. Four of those games went into overtime. One went into double OT. One went into triple OT. It's the wildest first-round series ever played. Whatever happens in Game 7, we will remember it as one of the most incredible matchup in NBA playoff history.

Derrick Rose took the superstar training wheels off. Rajon Rondo turned into Isiah Thomas, The Sequel: Just as talented, just as hated, just as nasty. Ben Gordon and Kendrick Perkins turned into Andrew Toney and Robert Parish. The great Ray Allen became a minus-130 favorite in the "Reggie Miller versus Ray Allen" argument and might have to change his name to "The Great Ray Allen." Paul Pierce added to his legacy and sullied it a little at the same time. Brad Miller made the Faces Hall of Fame and the Dorkiest White Guy Celebrations Hall of Fame. John Salmons and Glen Davis put themselves on the map as bona-fide NBA players. Kirk Hinrich redeemed his career. Stephon Marbury destroyed what was left of his career. Doc Rivers and Vinny Del Negro inspired their players and undermined them at the same time.

There are many great things about sports, but here's one of the best: You never know when two teams will click. I used a boxing analogy in my column after Game 2, and it still stands. Styles make fights and styles make playoff series. Has to be a constant tug between young and old, unstoppable and stoppable, physical and finesse, experience and inexperience, fast and slow, big and small, stupid and smart. You need guys continually rising to the occasion and pushing themselves to a level they didn't know they had. You need two teams (or fighters) hugging each other afterward and thinking to themselves, "Thank you. You brought out the best of me. Thank you."

We love sports for the simple reason that we never know when this will happen. It rarely does. We watch a lot of crummy games. We watch sporting events that had potential to be great and weren't. We watch sporting events that almost made it, but one dumb thing happened to screw it up: A foul at the wrong time, a penalty, a two-base error, whatever. We keep watching. We keep hoping. And when everything clicks, it's blissful.

Let the Gardening Begin

DONE!
5 new fruit trees, 2 4x8 raised garden beds. A LOT less grass, and a lot less water needed.

Birth of a Garden(er?)

Working hard to transform a patch of grass to a garden. Plumb & Pear trees are in. Next will be install the raised beds.

A Change Brewing for Sports?

From a great "Sports Guy" column today....

Welcome to the NBA's world!!! Teams are locked into swollen contracts that suddenly make no sense, whether it's non-franchise players making franchise money (Vince, T-Mac, Shaq, Brand, Baron, Jermaine O'Neal, Dalembert, Okafor, etc.) or overpaid role players making six to 600 times what they should be making (Marko Jaric, Nazr Mohammed, Larry Hughes, Radmanovic, Mo Peterson, etc.). In the irony of ironies, the league finally learned something that fans knew all along -- nobody was buying a ticket to see the likes of Luol Deng, Gerald Wallace or Corey Maggette, much less Tim Thomas or Andres Nocioni. With the cap/tax thresholds slipping, teams can't dodge them by dumping overpaid mistakes like when Phoenix bribed Seattle to take Kurt Thomas' contract and two No. 1 picks last year. Someone In The Know told me that 20 of the 30 NBA teams will lose money this season … and we haven't even come close to hitting rock bottom yet. Just wait until next season.

FINALLY! some sanity might just fall on the sports world. When a very reasonable fan who makes a reasonable amount of money per year, has to pay $300 for decent seats to a regular season game for his tiny family of three, something is totally scewed and desperately needs to swing back to reality. I think it's high time we have a serious attitude adjustment for all atheletes. $60M contracts for slightly above average players is way beyond foolish. For years now I have refused to pay the ridiculous prices to see a game live. I'm hopeful in the next few years things will change dramitically and I'll be able to go see a game with my wife and son for $100 or so.

In Awe of the Universe

The Internet rocks for finding answers to what seem like basic questions but most people probably have no clue as to the answer (myself included).

Things I learned this morning....

The sun is about 90million miles from the earth

The nearest star to earth is 4.2 light years away from earth

Light travels 6 Trillion miles in 1 year.

If you got in your spaceship and went 100,000 miles-per-hour (no spaceship ever created does even close to this), it would take you 25,000 years before you reached the nearest star.

When you look up in the sky and see a star, you are not seeing the star as it is today. You are seeing what that star looked like years ago, sometimes hundreds of years ago.

The galaxy we live in (Milky Way) is bout 100,000 light years in diameter.

The nearest giant galaxy (Andromeda) is 2-3 million light years away.

Galaxies each have hundreds of billions of stars

There are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe

The "observable universe" basically is what we can see based on the amount of time it takes light to travel to the earth. If you go all the way back to the beginning of the universe, however far things were from earth at that time determines if we can now see them.

It is likely that the galaxies within our visible universe represent only a minuscule fraction of the galaxies in the universe.

The universe is approx 13.7 billion years old

The state of home ownership

The U.S. housing market lost $3.3 trillion in value last year and almost one in six owners with mortgages owed more than their homes were worth as the economy went into recession, Zillow.com said.

The median estimated home price declined 11.6 percent in 2008 to $192,119 and homeowners lost $1.4 trillion in value in the fourth quarter alone, the Seattle-based real estate data service said in a report today.

“It’s like a runaway train gaining momentum,” Stan Humphries, Zillow’s vice president of data and analytics, said in an interview. “It’s difficult to say when we’ll see a bottom to the housing market.”


--ouch! does that mean I should feel lucky that I'm not officially underwater with my mortgage at this point (very close though!)? Meanwhile I'm thinking of pulling the plug on my refinance so I don't have to cut a fat check to bring the loan to value ratio to 80% (didn't I put down 20% 5 years ago and pay-down the mortgage by another 40k since then?). I'll let this sucker adjust to the now 3.75% and sucker-punch the principal while it's at that level. Short-term thinking is an essential survival tool in these trying times.

The Happiest Place on Earth

Spent Jack's 5th Birthday at Disneyland. It had been about 10+ years since I had visited. Little has changed; it's still an amazing place! We truly had a blast. Riding Pirates first, literally walking all the way to the very front of the ride. There's almost no feeling as awesome as when you slip into that swamp and hear the banjo playing softly, knowing your little boy has never seen anything like this. as soon as we got off he wanted to ride again and we went off singing "yo ho yo ho a pirates life for me!"

Such a wonderful time.

In the Park

Went for a short walk to the park to fly Jack's newest Spiderman Kite. This one flew great! There are days where I wish Jack would not grow a day older....