Monthly Archives: January 2019

General

Cottages Galore

Back in 1986 or ‘87, Elaine asked me to get her a Fairytale Castle; she even pointed me at David Winter, an English sculptor who made cast sculptures of many English countryside buildings and a few fantasy castles as well. I began my quest going to some of the local stores which carried these sort of knick-knacks. While they had many different David Winter Cottages, I couldn’t find the Castle. But, I liked what I saw and picked up a few of the cottages whilst looking for the Castle. I even went to England in 1987 and searched the High Streets for the Fairytale Castle, but to no avail. And I continued to pick up a few pieces that intrigued me, such as the Green Dragon Pub and the Hogs Head Beer House.

The following year I finally found the Fairytale Castle and it joined the small collection I had started. Then I joined the David Winter Guild and started getting pieces regularly, and the collection grew. This continued for another 20 years until David retired in 2010.

In the Hay Creek house we had display cabinets to showcase many cottages and, if I remembered, we would rotate the stored cottages with the displayed cottages. We could display a fair number of cottages, maybe 20-30 at a time. Many of the cottages were small 2x3x4 sculptures, but some of them were massive. If you have a castle with a dragon sleeping around it, it is a big piece.

Then we decided to downsize. I inventoried the cottages as we were packing up and found that I have 184 David Winter Cottages (and Castles). Aaaargh. I can’t keep them all. We don’t have the display cabinets anymore. We have a mantle over the fireplace that can hold a few. Even if I were to religiously rotate them every month or so, we don’t have the space to store all the cottages not on display. (We are not going to fall into the suburban trap of renting a storage space. If it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t belong.)

My plan is to keep a few of the castles and the Christmas Cottages (and maybe a pub or two) and get rid of the rest. I’m not sure if it worth the hassle of putting them up on ebay. I don’t think the cottages command much of a market today. Maybe I should try a consignment shop?

This week I will organize the collection and figure out where to next.

Geek Stuff, General

Try Something New

I used to be able to write a post on my web page – https://www.stardel.com/eg – and it would automatically cross-post to my Facebook page. Then Facebook took that functionality away. Now, I can only cross-post to a Facebook page I manage, and, evidently, I don’t manage my own home page. So, I set up a FB page I called – Jack Heneghan’s Page – (in a burst of creativity,) and now I can cross-post to that.

However, I don’t have a lot of people looking at my NEW page since no one knows about it. So, I will try to share the post on the NEW page to the OLD page and see what happens.

One of the reasons for doing this is that I stopped using exemplia gratia for posting bits and primarily looked at FB to catch up with other people. I didn’t really use FB to post items for myself, just to comment on other’s posts. I would like to get back to posting my own thoughts and to keeping them in a central place where they don’t get lost in a torrent of other posts.

It’s an experiment, we’ll see how it works.

General, Preparing for the worst

A concern

Here is an article that lays out one of my main concerns of the past decade. Back when the markets tanked, the Fed began buying up those bad collateral debt obligations in stages and ended up with 4 TRILLION Dollars of bad junk on its books. As the article points out, other Central Banks were doing the same and globally they hold almost 15 TRILLION Dollars worth of bad debt.

This propped up the stock markets artificially for the big boom period that certainly helped me towards retirement, but what happens when that hyper pumping-up stops? We are probably about to find in the next year or two. I can only hope my portfolio (and my retirement) survives what is coming, because I have no idea how to protect it.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/stock-market-investors-its-time-to-hear-the-ugly-truth-2019-01-05