My Hands Hurt.

The playset, the hard part.

So, after a pancake breakfast, Omaha and I spent the day building the playset. We did the difficult the part today, assembling the A-frames and the platform from which the monkey bars and the slide will sit. It took a lot of effort to get it all lined up. I discovered that all the time and effort into making sure the frames lined up was blown: they didn't line up, and I measured them over and over. In one case, I was off by a whole inch! I had to re-drill the holes, meaning that now I have to fill the unused holes with wood putty to protect the beam from the rain. The spade was no good for one because the redrill was too close to the original; I had to dig it out with a wooden mallet and a thin chisel to get the countersink hole into place. Frack. I have to put in some cross-braces that I'm going to have to give some serious thought, because I can't afford that slight offness with the metal braces on each side. But, to our pleasure the hard part is done, and the thing is mostly stable right now.

The bad news.

Mostly. Omaha and I have long known that the property is sloped. The retaining wall is but one small detail to this problem. Omaha and I are going to have to figure out the territory around the playset well enough to dig and mound and otherwise provide a level playset for the children.

But the real heavy lifting is mostly done, although I'm damn well going to pay for it. My back is killing me, my hands are tired of hammering and drilling and handling the wood, which still needs to be sanded and painted. Another week or so and it'll be all done. And then I get to do the deck! That just needs a cleaning and paint, but oy, the life of a homeowner is just never finished.

Along with my hands, I think I've hurt my back. Not too badly, but certainly it was not prepared for lifting even half the playset. All of the wood I bought masses about 230 kilos (504 pounds) so the unit assembled does not weigh that much. About a quarter of the wood isn't in it, but still, that's a lot.

It's been really hot and I'm exhausted. Iced tea and ibuprofen are called for!

I am an idiot.

So, being forty, I'm reading through investment and retirement planning packages. I'm learning an awful lot about hedge funds, REIT (real estate investment trusts), exchange traded funds, and so on. Lots of interesting and surprisingly geeky data throughout. Oh, I know I'm bad at this, but I want to at least have a grasp on what my family's new financial adviser has to say when he says it.

My new FA is big on hedge funds. (In fact, the day I met him was the day the Bear Stearns hedge fund, heavily leveraged in sub-prime mortgages, was seriously hitting the fan, and he said he admired my willingness to ask him about that.) He talked about having a diversified collection of hedge funds as one asset allocation class, and I was sitting there trying to figure out what the heck that meant.

I figured it out today. You can have hedge funds in different investment classes: commodities, energy, technology, transportation, etc. The average annual performance over the past decade for all hedge funds is 10.48% return with 7.22% deviation, meaning for any given fund (again, this is all averages, just as an example), there's a 68% chance that your return will be somewhere between 17.7% and 3.26% (10.48%±7.22%) and a 95% chance that the return will be 24.91% to -3.96% (10.48%±(7.22%×2)). That's right, there's a slight risk you could lose some of your investment in a given fund

The idea is to selectively choose a lot of different hedge fund investments, so that the average performance across the portfolio approaches or even exceeds the average of all of them. I mean, this may seem blazingly obvious, but it never quite clicked for me. I suppose the same is true for any investment tool, but I had to be reading about something as esoteric as a hedge fund to figure it out.

Y'know, ever since someone showed me the way standard deviations are used to describe risk in investment tools, I've been much more comfortable with understanding the risks that I might someday take.

If I ever have any money.

Groan. Oh, we'll be hearing about this for a while.

For groans: Police says the girl was lured into a long-term sexual relationship with the couple through the Wicca religion and ceremonial witchcraft and drugs.

And for fun: Y'know the old expression that some politicians will only lose their election if they are ever caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy? County Auditor Roger Fisher is testing the second part of that proposition.