The title of this entry is one of the ways I amuse myself after my homework is done and the dinner dishes are either washed or thrown away depending on how rustic a dinner it was and Husband is in the next room researching investment options online. He pretty much calls the shots in the family financial arena with my encouragement to study independently since I can only concentrate so long on Morningstar and Value Line, etc. I hope it doesn’t sound tacky of me to require we have oodles of money to retire on without researching options to get there but he seems to truly enjoy it. In my defense, I reconcile the checkbook and credit card statements since when I met Husband his checkbook had no figures in the last column to the right, the one marked BALANCE, and none of his credit card statements had little red check marks next to the amounts indicating they had been cross-referenced with actual receipts. This is my specialty (obsession) so we have gravitated to the areas of family financial service that speak to us and it seems to work.
We do make investment decisions as a team, though, and this is how that happens. Husband will come out of the room after doing extensive research and say to me, “I think it would be a good idea to buy more Pfizer at the next drop because…” and he proceeds to inform me of percentages, margins, price earning, yield and many other things that I know he is saying because I hear his voice and see his lips moving. But what is going on in my mind is, “Pfizer makes drugs. People take drugs. Nod head yes.” I don’t deny that it is definitely the Flintstone mentality toward future planning but I just don’t have the particular bone in my head that makes me want to investigate further. Misspell Pfizer, however, and I’ll catch you every time.
I inherited some shares in gold securities when my parents died and I couldn’t imagine ever, ever selling them because it was GOLD. I owned GOLD. This is not sewer caps we’re talking about, this is the stuff of jewelry and pharaohs, the stuff that dreams are made of. Real investors know this kind of thinking is absurd and that personal or mythical attachment to stocks screams “support group” since what you really own are shares in the company that mines the ore or refines it but the ending here is that when it spiked, I sold. It actually went up even higher after I sold and I never regretted selling when I did because it also could have plunged just as easily. Not being prone to seller’s remorse would seem to make me a good candidate for learning more about how to invest but for some reason it doesn’t. And if it didn’t happen with the gold it sure ain’t coming with municipal bonds.
I started out telling you about the title of this entry, Blogoir, and what my strategy is here. Raise your hand if you’ve ever Googled yourself. Raise your other hand if you’ve ever Googled someone you know to find out more about them or where they fit in the hierarchy of entities like them. Okay, now we’re on the same page. Over the months I have been blogging, I occasionally enter One Sane Voice into a search engine to see where my blog falls in the web information infrastructure. About a month ago, on a random query, I was the first entity listed on Google. It was a fleeting moment but it was a hoot to see that out of 1,284,663 possible listings mine was in the top spot. I may still come up first on an msn.com query but my Google star has since dimmed.
Individual entry titles have shown up in searches with more consistency. A link to “Dear Mr. Fairbank” showed up everywhere for a short while after that entry appeared and that’s what makes me think Blogoir has a shot. It would seem that it’s a short hop from writing a memoir to writing a blogoir but the term doesn’t appear to formally exist. I looked on netlingo and webopedia as well as the idiom dictionary and no definition comes up for blogoir. A memoir is defined as a personal account, autobiographical in nature, which can take the form of a journal, log, confessional or personal essay. And in the same way you would tack an ‘e’ onto memoir to add pretension without changing meaning, you could be every bit as faux French with blogoire. Search as I might, the word blogoir can only be found on a few myspace pages and other obscure references. Not to say I’m any less obscure. But one can hope.
So I’m going to wait a few days after I post this entry and then start clicking around to see if blogoir catches on or if it was already defined somewhere and I just missed it. But if you do start seeing the word appear in places it never did before, remember where you heard it first. And now you know what I do for fun online when you’re not around.