#419 Power Lunch

Late entry - I'm still considering this Monday.

Piper, my financial advisor, had called last week, saying he had some numbers he wanted to go over with me, and suggested we do it over lunch or dinner.  So we had lunch today. 

The original plan was to walk from his office to the Inn just down the street, but instead we drove to a restaurant just across from the Rhinebeck Fairgrounds.  It used to be the Rolling Rock (where we had dinner after the wedding, Daughter.  Remember?)  It's under new management now, has a new name with "O"s and the word "Grill" in it (or something like that).  It's really nice inside, terrific food.  I had Pad Thai noodles with oriental vegetables and shrimp in a spicy coconut sesame sauce.  Yummy.

Well, Piper actually had very few "numbers".  He and the Angel had run my projected tax returns for 2005, 2006, and 2007, to figure out what my likely capital gains exposure would be under various scenarios, selling off stock over three years.  Man, this rebalancing is going to cost me!   But it has to be done, and they are working hard to minimize the pain.  Angel is a tax genius.  But going over those numbers took all of ten minutes.

The next two hours and 50 minutes was ... lunch.

We talked about divorces and real estate reassessments and relationships and communication and compromise and school taxes and depressions and recessions and loneliness and interest rates and relearning how to flirt in your 60s after 30+ years of marriage and the weather and teapots and kings.

I was shocked to find that we had been sitting at the table almost three hours.  I hope he tipped the waitstaff well.

It's really too bad that I have no interest in him as other than an advisor and possible platonic friend.  He'd make a good friend.  He's sweet and earnest, even cherubic, but there's no chemistry.  Not on my part, anyway. 

When I got home, I had to look up some details for the Angel, then I went shopping, dropped off the camera from Rakkasah at CVS (this time I got the prints and CD back in an hour), and then I spent the next four hours putting several hundred photographs into Kodak EasyShare albums.  I'm a little angry with Kodak because the program grabbed every photo it could find on my system, and put them into random "albums", but won't tell me where, and won't allow me to delete the bad shots.  It seems like all I can do is move them (or copies of them?  Gee, I hope not!) into new better-named albums.  Razzelfrats.

Roman was supposed to call me tonight.  He didn't.  I left him a message at 10:30, saying that if he got my message before 11:30, to please call.  He didn't.  I'm a little worried.  If he's ok, and his parents are ok, I may have to kill him.

~~Silk