Spring Approaches

I have been working sporadically in the garden, mostly raking the leaves that are still left from the Fall. Spring is just a few days away and I am trying to get rid of the old before the new arrives. On the left you can see the new that is starting to pop up. Cindy planted hundreds or thousands of red tulips in this part of the walkway. Okay, not a thousand, but lots. They are just starting to poke their noses through the soil. The ratty looking plants around the edges will have white flowers. It will be beautiful. When they are here in full, it will really be Spring. For now, we have the pretty purple crocus growing up in the lawn. What a pleasant surprise. It is their pretty faces that prompted me to go out to clean the garden. Little bulbs are starting to poke up everywhere. I have to be careful as I rake not to step on something trying very hard to make its presence known.
This is not a dry season. I decided to read Love in a Dry Season because I liked the way Shelby Foote wrote about the Civil War. He's a champion story teller, his characters are well formed. This is true in this book as well as in the other books. Actually, this reminded me a lot of Elmer Gantry. fI just checked, it isn't read by the same person, so it must be the writing. And the main male characters are equally into themselves. Once again, Foote has written about interesting characters and places. My goodness, I think I really like novels. I had no idea.
My blast from the past is of Cynthia and Teena. I love going through my pictures to see the people who have made me smile. I've been promised pictures of Teena's little boy and have never seen one. Oh well. I tried to call Cynthia a few days ago and got voice mail. I'll try again and will actually leave a message.

Door Holders

The people at Booz Allen are champion door holders. You go through a lot of doors to get to your desk. This is in part due to the fickle weather outside and no revolving doors in the lobby. And you need to use your pass to get into most hallway doors. These folks here are very good at remembering to hold the door open for those behind them. Just good manners and they have very good manners here.

That's why I wasn't totally surprised when a gentleman held the Men's Restroom door open for me the other day. That door is right next to the backdoor I go through to get to my desk. We both looked a little surprised when he realized what he had done.

What can I say? A true gentleman. Him, not me.

Guernsey, Literature, and The War

The snow has finally melted. It was wonderful to be in the middle of it. The snow was light and fluffy. Or it looked like mounds of whipped cream. Or it was black and grainy and shoved over to the side of the road. It took 4 days for my car to completely melt; or the snow on it took that long. Luckily, my car is still intact.  

My job is such a bust. I still don't have company email.  On Thursday I left at 12:30. Yesterday I left at 9:30. Now my password isn't working. Me neither. Tres desolate.

Life is still not as bad as it was on Guernsey during WWII. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is an enjoyable book none-the-less. It is written as a series of letters. Thankfully, this was a letter writing time in the world. It takes place in England just after the war and many of the letters are about what life was like on Guernsey during the occupation. Although the characters are colorful, the book doesn't totally sugar-coat the occupation. It seems to be fairly even handed. It ends a bit rom-com. But the rest of the book is so good, you might be able to overlook that.

One of my favorite things about the Guernsey book is the writer's love of books. It doesn't just show through the literary societies stories, but also through the heroines stories about books. I especially liked the story of her failed engagement.

Ever Gullible

Bernie Madoff made me do it. The man ran a Ponzi Scheme; he took money from those who wanted a good return on their investment and paid off with money from new "clients." He promised a 12% per annum return. That's actually about what I was making in my 401K before the bottom dropped out of the market. Of course, the guys who were managing my 401K accounts were actually investing the money. That wasn't true of Bernie. He ran a true Ponzi Scheme.

Of course, I had to learn more about this. What better choice than to read Ponzi's Scheme by Mitchell Zuckoff. Ponzi was an Italian immigrant at the turn of the last century with a checkered past who settled in Boston and found a clever way to build the fortune he so deeply desired. He promised a 50% increase in the value of investments in 45 days. He said that he was buying and selling postal certificates. I still don't quite understand what those are, but I don't think it matters. He wasn't buying and selling them anyway. He relied on the long line of gullible people streaming from his office doors. His company's name was The Security Exchange Company. The reader of this book goofed once and called it The Security Exchange Commission. I was waiting for that.

Ponzi would bring in over a million a day at the best of times. That's why he had money to pay off the people who didn't roll over their profits. A million dollars! The newspaper cost two cents at that time. People had to scrimp and save for a long time to get $50. And yet, they gave that money to Ponzi.

The book is also about how a newspaper, The Boston Post, nailed him. Police and other legal types failed. In fact, a lot of them were investors. The owner of the Post didn't believe this scheme was real and worried about the pressmen who were investing. We may not have newspapers around soon, but we will always have charlatans.