Monday, January 17, 2005

Three Events of the Past Week

The first I can't remember what it was at this very moment. I remember distinctly saying as the week went on that this event, whatever it was was something that I wanted to blog about. I've looked back in my calender and tried to figure it out, but nothing is jogging my memory. Thererfore, since I'm a calender/list freak and the fact that nothing is written down, this event must have been something that occurred in some spontaneous moment. What IS it? It's driving me crazy.

This past Saturday, I went and saw a financial planner. My long-time friend Kathy L. from my summer on the "Love Boat", pointed me in the direction of her former co-worker and friend Ray T., who is currently a high-level person within the Wealth-Tax Division of HSBC, which I subsequently found out stands for Hong-Kong Shanghai Bank Corporation. In our introductory emails, Ray figured out pretty quickly that I would probably need just a one time consultation to check on what I am doing is meeting my goals, both short-term and long-term. In our one and a half hour conversation on Saturday, he confirmed that how I have distributed my assets is correct. The two things that I should highly consider are A) Setting Up a Living Trust and B) Converting the TIC situation I am in into a Condo. I am glad and thankful that Ray was generous with his time to met me. It certainly is nice to know that I'm on the right path.

This morning, MLK Birthday observation day, my neighbor and friend Brian S. took my up on my offer to help him with some of his contracting work. Today's job was a "demolition" of the basement of a house he has been contracted to remodel. Demoltion in this case meant removing the everything that was currently in the downstairs basement of this house in St. Mary's Park because a new foundation needs to be poured. I like doing construction type work because it is the antithesis of the work I do. Working with one's hands versus one's mind is so different. So, the first thing I observed was the delivery of the dumpster? Has anyone actually seen how a dumpster is brought to a site? It's not exactly the most graceful looking method that Golden Gate Sanitation uses, but it does get the thing there. The first job of every demolition, I guess, is trash removal. There wasn't an exceedly amount of trash, but it needed to hauled out to the dumpster. Then the "demolition" began. Demolition is an act of removal therefore the process and it's results are not meant to be viewed as having inherent beauty. Get the stuff down and out as quickly as you can. I found that I viewed demoltion more as "disassemble" in that I would want to remove each board intact as one piece and then throwing it away. Follow this SAT analogy...DEMOLITION:DISASSEMBLE is the same as TEARING OFF THE CHRISMAS PRESENT WRAPPING PAPER:REMOVING THE CHRISTMAS WRAPPING PAPER CAREFULLY SO IT IS IN ONE PIECE. By the end of the three hours I was very nearly at demolition mode but I'm not sure I am fully cut out for ripping this apart.

I still can't remember what the third event of the past week was. I thought that by writing about the other two I would remember that third one. Didn't happen. Perhaps the third event didn't really happen.

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