Tuesday, November 25, 1997
Back in the
U.S.A.
or
Scud Missiles, International Terrorists, and Beef Cubes
by George Runkle
(TMF Runkle)
Saturday I returned to the USA from four fun-packed months in the United Arab Emirates. As I mentioned in an earlier Fribble, I volunteered temporarily to leave my cozy spot in the Air National Guard and join my active Air Force colleagues in the Mid-East. I attempted to keep up with Fooldom through the World Wide Web while I was there, but in time my participation dropped to zero. Partly it was due to the slowness of my Web access, but mostly it was just plain lack of interest. When you are on the other side of the world, it's hard to care about your portfolio's performance.
My main interests and concerns after a few weeks became, in this order:
1. What was for dinner (usually it wasn't very good)
2. Who I could catch a ride with to downtown Abu Dhabi (especially important if dinner was really bad since they do have a Burger King in town)
3. The heat (up around 126 degrees F for a while there)
4. International terrorism (while not a real problem in the Emirates, not something to ignore)
5. The possibility of war with Iraq (it's the chemicals that make Saddam dangerous)
By the last week, Saddam The Dictator got to be a pain, and there were very tragic events in Pakistan and Egypt when terrorists struck. Items four and five competed for first and second place, with one and two moving down the list. One night in that last week, beef cubes (ugh) were served for dinner, and there was a knock-down-drag-out bout for the first-place worry.
While I was over there, I learned a little bit of Arabic. I became a much more sensitive man by separating my laundry and adding bleach to the whites. I even folded my clean clothes after I took them out of the dryer. I embarrassed myself when I had dinner with Arab friends by trying to eat like they did, with my right hand. Try eating rice that way. I did, and wore most of it. My friends were very polite, and didn't laugh that hard.
I'm digressing again. How did my portfolio do? Well, I hoped that with four months of neglect my stock prices would shoot sky high. One of my companies did, it went up just like a Scud missile. Problem was, it came down like a Scud too, and plowed back into the ground a bit before coming to rest. The other stocks did OK. No big surprises, but I didn't lose my shirt in the big "correction" that occurred while I was gone. My wife says it is because I wasn't around to panic and sell everything when the market dropped. She's so cynical.
Now that I'm home, where am I? I'm not really sure. After being away from home for four months, I feel a little disoriented. To make the checking account easier for my wife to handle while I was away, we dropped the automatic investments in the DRiPs. Now, I have to decide which ones to start up again. Do I continue investing in Coke? How much should I send each one? Making the decisions harder is the fact that I had to replace both cars before I left. Thus, my finances are completely different from this past summer.
In the upcoming weeks and months this all will give me plenty to write about. I'll cover the ins and outs of family financing in the Family Fool, and I'll be working with TMF Jeff in the DRiP Portfolio over the next few weeks. While I've been out of things here in Fooldom for a while, I'll be making up for it in the next few weeks. It's good to be back, and I hope I won't suffer the effects of post-traumatic stress syndrome. I dread the thought that the rest of my life could be plagued by recurring nightmares of beef cubes on rice.
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