This week we had Jesse and Cori and the grand kids visit us. We always love it when they come. Grant and Grace know how to score points big time by asking if they can stay longer than one week as soon as they walk in the door.

We did lots of fun things. One purpose of the trip was to do as much skiing as possible. The Sierras have obliged by having one of the biggest snow falls on record, much of it coming in this week. Big snow falls are also accompanied by cold and very high winds which made conditions a little brutal , especially for the little kids.



This picture is taken at the top of Heavenly Valley's Dipper Chair. It is around 9500 feet elevation. Notice the information hut is burried in about 20 feet of snow.

Since it was too cold and windy on some days to take the little kids we filled the time in with some other activities. Like Bowling. It took a little work to convince Grant that he could not drop kick the bowling balls.
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We spent some time playing with Toby in the snow.

On Friday we got a break in the weather and Grace and Grant were able to get up on their skis thanks to the "Magic Carpet"



This next picture is Grant standing by him self crying, saying but I don't want to stop. The mountain was closing down for the day.

The Event

For the last three months we have been working on an event for our Waddell and Reed Clients in Northern Nevada. My inspiration for "The Event" is Warren Buffet's "Annual Meeting" for his company Berkshire Hathaway. He has many of the companies his company is invested in come to Omaha and they have a convention show like meeting. (Sees Candy, Net Jets, Gieco Insurance, and many others) The highlight of the meeting is Warren's report on the company.

So we asked to have Zack Shafran fly out for our meeting. Zach is the head of global research for the invesmtment division of the company and the manager of the $4 Billion in assets in our Science and Technology funds. We arranged for Tim Ripp of Associates of Clifton Pak to come from Albany New York. He is our expert on long term care and medicare. We also got Andy Rex our Nationwide Financial wholesaler to come over from the bay area. Bill King also came in from Kansas City.

The company was kind enough to fly Zach out on the company plane so as to minimize his time away from his investment management responsibilities. We had a lot of work to do to make sure that all of our materials and presentations would meet with legal, compliance and marketing department's approvals.

For the first 90 minutes we had food and drink at the Carson Valley Inn, had some mini workshops with our special guests and showed a video of some of our new materials from the Ivy Funds. You can see the videos at www.ivyfunds.com/theworldcovered. Then at 7:30 we had Zach come on. I introduced Bill King and he in turn said some nice things about me and introduced Zach.

We had about 190 people in attendance and the event seemed to be a success. It was a lot of work to put on by me , Bo and Janelle. I think I have a new friend and ally in Zach Shafran. He is a big Boy Scout supporter as well as a big time ski enthusiast. I'm sure it's not as big a deal as Warren Buffet's meeting but he has been doing his for a while and this was our first go at it.