Time with the kids

This past week I have spent a fair amount of time with young people. Brent Eddy is one of the Government teachers at Douglas High School. He asked me to come and talk with five of his government classes about personal finance. I spent most of the day on Thursday and Friday morning with his classes. It was fun to be with the kids. They were all Seniors and will be graduating soon. They seemed interested for the most part. Some of them seemed to be very interested. Some didn't seem like they would be interested in anything.

Saturday I had about six young men and their dads at the hanger of Hutt aviation to work on the Aviation merit badge. This was an assignment after the merit badge clinic a couple of weeks ago. I let everybody climb around in the Musketeer and showed them how a pre-flight inspection goes. Then we drove around the airport and learned about how things work at a municipal airport.

All told I probably spoke with 90 to 100 young people this week.

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.

Scout Sunday at the Nevada State Capital

Nevada State Capital

Scout Choir: Joel Gilbert, Marlan Jonsgsma, Lee Jonsgsma, Matt Stockton, Adam Gilbert, Andy Vardus-Doane.


Statue of Sarah Winnemucca in State Capital Building

Today was Scout Sunday and Marla and I attended the inter-faith service for the Pinenut District of the Nevada Area Council. I thought it would be good to have someone from the Board of Directors in attendance plus they asked me to play the piano for the Boy's Choir.

There were about 70 in attendance. I'm told that was a lot more than last year. I'm disappointed that none of our Ward's boys or leaders were there. The Capital is a fabulous old building with some great history about it. The service was good. We had talks from the Catholics, Methodists, and Mormons, patriotic hymns and the boys chorus was great.

I have a new job on the BSA board. I'm the Vice President of Administration. That puts me on the executive committee, so there will be a few more meetings to go to. I still don't understand the board stuff. It is mostly oversight. I'm used to putting on the programs not monitoring them. Our current task on the board is to choose a new Scout Executive for the Council. That is pretty important and the Scouts have a very well laid out process for doing it. We met on Friday and laid out what our strengths and weaknesses are as a Council and outlined what we think we need in a Scout Executive. Then the word goes out that Nevada is looking. Applications come into the National Office and they select 6 - 8 applications that we as a board review and select 3-4 to interview. Then we fly them out with their spouses

Post Thanksgiving Flight

So in between snow storms we had a nice day to take the Musketeer up. It had been a couple of months since I last flew, (it's not like riding a bike) so Don and I went up and practiced some landings and steep turns, then I took Thea and Will up for an areal tour of Lake Tahoe.

Lake Tahoe over the wing of the Musketeer

Cascade Lake, Emerald Bay and Tahoe shoreline

Upper and Lower Echo Lakes, starting to ice over

Eye Candy, Lake Tahoe in winter splendor.

First Snows, Thanksgiving 2010

Winter came early this year to the Carson Valley. Near record cold temperatures (-1 degree F) on Wednesday and two days where it never got above freezing during the day.

We had Thea home for Thanksgiving. She brought a friend boy home (Will). Jared and Erin stayed in LA, Sara is studying for Law School in Provo and Jesse and family had their turn with Cori's family. Since Marla is still recovering from knee surgery, I cooked the Turkey, (Dutch Oven) Stuffing, gravy and pumpkin pie. (Home grown and home processed garden pumpkin with ginger snap crust.) Grandma Bettie did the veggies and Thea did the rolls. We had a nice dinner. All the kids called in so the day was complete.

Proposed WFIC land purchas in Genoa

The Whitaker Family Investment Co. LLC made an offer today on 3.5 acres in Genoa in the Eagle Ridge Developement. The prices are down 65% from where they were about 3 years ago. I offered $150,000 for the lot. Seems like a great buy. I plan to keep in the the investment Company as a long term hold. It is on a paved road off of Jacks Valley Road just North of Genoa. It already has water, electricity, natural gas and sewer run to the lot. There is a seasonal stream running across the south end of the property.




This is the view of the lot from the road. It has about 10 mature pine trees. ( Probably 75 to 100 years old) There are another 10 trees that are young maybe 5 -6 years old.






This is the view from about the middle of the lot looking south. A nice small grove on pines on level ground in a grassy area.

This is the view from the back corner of the lot looking East.

Any Whitaker kids that are interested in weighing in on the purchase can post a comment. I'll keep the post up for a week or so and then delete it.

DAD