Llegué aqui en Ecuador martes, 19 de abril, de la mañana. El miercoles de la mañana, encontré Luis y nos comenzamos a planear para apoyar las victimas del terremoto. Con Luis, su primo, Henry, esposa de Henry, y un otro amigo de Luis, nosotros cinco trajimos mucha comida, y artículos de aseo (el camión estaba lleno) a Perdenales. Luis y su familia tenían mucho voluntad a ayudar los otros Ecuatorianos. Condujimos en la madrugada desde 2AM el jueves, y llegamos en Perdenales a las 8AM. Nos entregado!
Yo, Henry, y LuisHenry tiene el camión. Él entregó.Trajimos las cosas en bolsas pequeñas.
This is the first quarter that I can say things are going as we expect at 695 Riverview Drive. All 9 units are occupied. All 9 tenants are current on their rent. The manager, Panzera Realty, produces a reliable, accurate report each month. The bottom line shows it as well. With reliable tenants and much of the deferred maintenance from the previous owner completed, we are saving for future improvements, or possibly cash for another purchase.
The following pictures are from the stairway maintenance project I completed in December.
The old steps were uneven. The wood was beginning to rot and the nails were coming out.Removed the old steps and patched the side of the building with stucco mortar.Reassembled with new wood.Finished the railing.
Simple Kneads Gluten-Free Bread
Simple Kneads is really taking off. They are gradually adding retail and food service distribution and as of 31 March, they are selling bread directly from the website. The bread is selling fast and the vendors and customers are happy.
I am still “all-cash,” and have been since December 2013. Per my previous post, I continue to watch 4 specific indicators. The first 2 indicators, Total Market Cap / GNP “Buffett Indicator,” and economist John Hussman, are hard-negative and I am therefore not looking into the market. I’ll wait for a better opportunity.
Click here for a recent commentary by John Hussman. He is very technical, and currently pessimistic, but he is consistent in his analysis and he makes sense. From week to week, he uses the same indicators week to week rather than chasing news headlines, and he uses only indicators that have a strong correlation to future results in the S&P 500 specifically. He has incorrectly predicted market crashes in the past, but he discusses these failures in his commentary. He doesn’t claim that there will be a crash. His claim is that because of overvaluation, the potential long-term upside is too weak to justify the exaggerated short-term risk of such extreme valuations.
Vino de Coco
I plan to visit the company in the Philippines in December–all business of course!
Part one of my Brazil trip is coming to an end. I have been here since 2 February. I will go to Belo Horizonte this weekend to experience Brazil outside of Rio de Janeiro. I’ve heard great things about the city and nearby Ouro Preto.
I came here to learn Portuguese. My Portuguese has progressed, and I can communicate, but I need more practice to improve. I can read Portuguese fairly effectively, which I learned by reading the newspaper and magazines using a dictionary. I can write and speak with many errors. Still the most difficult thing is to converse at full speed. I need practice. I watch movies and the news and this helps, but consistently having full Portuguese conversations has proven difficult because all my friends speak English and they want to practice! What I have become very good at is speaking English as various levels of speed and vocabulary! I have to say, I certainly appreciate the patience of my only-Portuguese friends!
The father of my host family has probably taught me more Portuguese than any other single person.
I came to Brazil to teach English. I finished the TEFL course the 13th of March with Graeme Harris, an Englishman who lives here with his Brazilian wife. He took the course after his oil job disappeared with the low oil price. He is starting a language school of sorts and I’m helping him with that as well. He is building clients by talking to companies and by word-of-mouth. English is in high-demand and his work is increasing quickly.
For my own part, I have given some formal classes, and I have one regular student. I also have a list of people who are interested in classes and I have various lessons prepared now that I can give with very little preparation. One main difficulty was to find a suitable classroom in which to teach. Coffee shops are only viable for one-on-one classes. With the help of my host family, I now have a few classroom options for hosting classes. I plan to conduct a weekly class for the 3 months when I return. I have prepared a lesson book that is particularly relevant to the difficulties that native Portuguese speakers experience with English. The lesson book is designed to help the user self-study effectively. While I have had some difficulty with learning Portuguese by self-study–and formal Portuguese classes would certainly help me–I have been successful by doing language exchanges and I still believe that language can be largely self-studied. This is especially true for English, with the large amount of material available to include movies and music. I now post short English lessons to my site that students can study with the notebook.
The last section of the notebook is a tool that is exactly the same as the tool that I made for myself to learn Portuguese verb tenses by example. It is simply a list of the verb tenses with blank space to write examples as you hear them, or as you attempt to produce them yourself. Watch a movie, write down your favorite lines under the appropriate verb tense. Listen to music on YouTube with lyrics, same drill. It is the most natural, simplest, cheapest, most interesting way to gain practical usage of language and systematically correct mistakes, hands-down! It facilitates listing questions to ask friends later (during language exchanges for example) and meaningfully improve from fun foreign language activities, like watching movies and listening to music. It sounds childish, but that’s exactly why children are widely considered to be better at learning language. Learning language is child’s play!
After being here in Rio for a few weeks, and attending some shows, I became inspired to take some piano lessons. I have tinkered on the piano since I was 20 years old and haven’t taken a formal lesson since I was 10, so this is a long time coming! The road to taking piano lessons was interesting. It involved finding an instructor by asking around at shows, making my first all-Portuguese phone call, buying a keyboard on Brazilian craigslist, and convincing the teacher that I could understand Portuguese piano lessons (não problema). It has been worth the effort. Self-study can only take you so far!
Music is everywhere here in Rio–and good music!
That’s it: learning language, teaching language, and learning music. That’s what I do here now and I am prepared to do more of the same when I return for the months of June, July, and August.
Like the huge flags in Mexico, Brazil has a flare for the awesome with big cool statues in the various squares around the city.
If you weren’t actively planning your Rio 2016 Olympics trip in the spring of 2015, you must buy your tickets second-hand. I just spent several hours researching the process and here is what I found:
Options:
https://www.cosport.com/ is the official vendor for the US. They have been the vendor for the Olympics since Sydney 2000. The tickets are mostly sold out, but they do have some available. There was a lottery that started in spring of 2015 and ended in the summer of 2015.
E-Bay. Folks in the states are receiving their tickets this summer (2016) from the lottery and some are selling them on E-Bay. I do not believe that the tickets are attached to an individual and require ID. I am looking for more verification on this.
This doesn’t help much, but at least you can direct your search.
www.tickets4summergames.com/ appears to be a scam. I’m not chancing it. There are other scams out there. There is a reddit post about it here, as well as this BBC article.
