It was a case of self injury, though the injured person can not really be faulted. There were too many things present; it was an accident waiting to happen. And it did. In fact, it happened several times in one month, resulting in as many injury claims. 

The business is a seasonal one, house boat rentals. The boats are old, as are the docking facilities. The latest dock was built at the end of the 1940’s. Little has been done to bring the boats and the docking facilities up to code. The county does not have the money, and it is an unincorporated area.

So the boat rental company and all its facilities fell between the cracks of jurisdictions, until the recent self injury of several people and especially the vocal protests of one injured person.

The person who was most vocal about the injury was disabled, and when an injury resulted from what should have been an accessibility improvement under the Americans with Disability Act, it caught the attention of county officials.

Even though county officials knew about the recent spate of injuries, there was still little they could do, except go out and cite the boat operator. A further complication is that the boat rental operation is extremely popular, and is actually a kind of historical site and destination within the country. The officials, however, were alarmed when they got through with their inspection.  There were many problems. To correct all of the problems that should be corrected immediately would have involved shutting the operation down. This would mean a big loss for the boat operator (the company also operated the only ferry across the river and only access for miles) but also a big loss in tax revenue for the county.

It was decided to close the boat rental operation for a week to 10 days to correct the most grievous and dangerous problems. This was a hardship, as it was in the midst of the busy summer season, and some boat rentals were actually out on the river and would return to a closed facility.

While the boat rental operation was closed the owners, who were one of the oldest and most politically connected families in the county, decided to bring in outside contractors to work as quickly as possible to bring the land facilities up to code. The boats would be another story. The boat rental company has applied for a waiver to bring the boats to code, as the improvements in some cases would be impossible and would cost more to perform than the boats were worth. They applied for an historical waiver.  It was granted for the newer three of the boats, but denied for the older two, which were built in the late 1930’s.

When the boat company was allowed to reopen, after inspection, the boats and their status was still in legal limbo.  The ferry operation, which was deemed essential to the county and state’s operation, stayed in operation the entire time everything else was closed down.

Online stock trading has made my life so much easier, especially in dealing with the crises that has been going on for the last couple of weeks. I’m not a day trader or anything like that, but it did give me reassurance to be able to access my holdings and see what they were doing.

I am not a day trader, as I said, because I think that there are a very few who can make money consistently being one. That was never my goal.

However, my goal in online stock trading is to be more active and to take advantage of buying and selling opportunities.

These last two weeks have been a nightmare and an education.  I had been more of a “buy and hold” type of guy, but saw my attitude change when the market was tanking. It occurred to me, that in many of my holdings, I had not paid attention to that old stock trading adage: You will never go broke taking profits.

I hadn’t taken enough in the way of profits, and was determined to change that. Because many of the stocks I had had for many years had climbed tremendously I was in good shape to sell even into the downturn and still have a lot of profit room.

I did so on several of my old long term holdings. I wasn’t sorry to sell, either, even if a rally comes on Monday.

If a rally comes, I’ll take the cash and put it into some stocks I have in mind. I spent the entire weekend researching various sectors and will buy into some companies, including bank and financial companies that have a good P/E ratio, are good buys and that have a good chance for a strong recovery.

Another thing I promise I will do is to hedge my bets more. I want to protect my long term stock positions, and I think I have to pay more attention to keeping them in good positions by looking more closely at the put and call situations.

This market has not scared me off; rather, it’s made me from a pretty conservative investor to one who is more involved. It just makes sense.

A few of my friends last week threw in the towel.  They sold most of their holdings and flipped their 401(k) holdings into money markets funds. I guess I might do the same thing if I had seen a thirty or forty percent decline.

I guess we all learn from our mistakes. I only hope that when the governments of the world get through with “fixing” the markets there will be something left to trade.

Joe and I had a great time at the Boston Red Sox game until I looked up in the stands and saw that lady again.  And she was sitting with Mrs. Murphy’s accountant!  I was shocked.  I quickly pointed her out to Joe who was busy watching the game but before he could look around, they vanished.  This was the lady that I thought for certain dropped dead at the Wicked play.   This woman looked just like her and I thought I had seen the guy before, too.  I decided to do a little sleuth work and go over to his house the next day so that I could snoop around for myself.  I would pretend that I was thanking him for the tickets. The next morning, I got dressed and got into my car.  Before I could get out of the driveway, my neighbor Mike came hobbling along and asked me to get him some Jack Daniels.  After all, the last bottle was broken over that guy’s head. I headed down to Don’s liquor store and was shocked to see it in shambles.  Everything was tossed off of the shelves.  Don just sat at his stool, crying.  “What happened?”  I asked.  It was an apparent robber, but it didn’t seem that anything was taken.  “I guess I shoot my mouth off too much,” said Don. “About what?”  Don then confessed that he had gone to Mrs. Murphys’s unannounced to bring over her scotch when who did he see there but the lawyer from the Texas Holdem Gang and a shady looking character.  There was an elderly lady in the room, too.  Don said that he left and didn’t’ think they saw him, but after he got in this morning, he realized that they had seen him. This is a warning to me,” he said. “For what?” “To keep my mouth shut.”

I got two interesting messages today. They were both from a guy named Johnny, the first saying he was calling from Dallas Bankruptcy and the second just saying that his name was Johnny and he needed to talk to me about a loan. They both said that actually and both had the same area code in their phone numbers. I assumed they were the same people because on the first message the guy said I should call him back by eight o’clock that night and then I got another call that afternoon. So I call back the last number that was on my voice mail and talked to a Johnny. After talking to him for a minute, I was really confused because he was calling on a loan that I was already handling with someone completely different from a different company. He told me that that sometimes that happens, two companies trying to collect on the same bill, but I did not understand why. I would think that the collections people would know that that would confuse people. Then he told me that he was not the Johnny from the first message. He was actually just as surprised as I was, but I could not call the first Johnny back because I did not save the number. I figure he will call back though if he wants whatever I owe him soon enough.