Thanks c2, for today is my read-only-n-do-nothing Sunday. I shall take the kids to the neighborhood club by 11:00 to engage w/ other kids and family friends for group lunch. Tonight is family dinner night and after dinner I shall watch an episode of favorite program then fall asleep quickly.
Erita, at 7.6, is progressing well and scoring high w/o much effort; she finds school "too easy" even as her school is one of the more difficult ones populated by kids of insanely competitive families from hong kong, mainland china, Korea, Japan and a smattering of euro kids. Teaching is dual language (as opposed to bilingual) for every subject, with each room of kids led by two teachers native to mainland china and an English-speaking-as-only-official-language nation. Years 1-3 is taught 70/30 mandarin/English, and by year 7 the ratio is flipped. Erita devotes her extra-curricular sessions to ballet (4 sessions per week), skating (1), swimming (1), and Chinese calligraphy and brush painting (1) - her calligraphy / painting teacher's former student is an living artist in china whose work sell for 7-8 digit numbers (6-7 digit usd). Erita is stronger in English than Chinese but scores 6 out of 5 in both. She is 5 out of 5 weak in rock climbing; am unsure what went amiss. She says she is nervous about height.
The only manner we "pull" Erita is keep telling her to stop reading too much and get to ... dinner, sleep, whatever, and we have to supervise her reading as she tends to simply grab the next book on the shelf of her mom and aunt.
Jack, at 21 months, is also coming along. Yesterday his mama's exercise coach came to the house and while approaching was spotted by jack before she rang the compound gate bell. Jack alerted mama to the approach, unable to verbalize, just by deep breathing exercise that he learned to do by watching. Jack is hilarious. Jack is strong in communication and eating and pooing. Jack discovered the word "please", as in "apple please apple" more assuredly nets him some goodies even when out of plan.
Neither kids watches tv, and only watches DVD about once every two weeks when they remember to ask on lazy Sunday afternoons.
Reading the privateer just in, and the cover email mentioned, I quote
Attached is the privateer for the past fortnight (actually I am a week late getting this out) as well as the gold newsletter for the last three weeks.
Some points I took away from these newsletters:
- On April 26, S&P cut the rating on the Spanish sovereign debt two notches. Spain is going the way of Greece.
- Only Ron Paul and Mitt Romney are left in the republican race for president. Mainstream media does not give Paul a chance, running headlines like "Ron Paul Supporters Need to Sober Up"and "Supporting Ron Paul is Naive: Small Governments are for Small Countries". Non-mainstream news give Paul a chance because of the complicated delegate process, which varies by state. There is a huge amount of misinformation out there on this subject of delegates. To learn (and possibly get confused) more on this, click here.
- One fourth (or about 10 million) recipients of our food stamps were accepted into the program since the recession officially ended in June 2009. Taxpayers pay out US$ 205 M per day for that welfare program currently to 20 percent of all US households. Less than half of this money is actually used to buy food. Along with other entitlements, the average food stamp recipient gets about 70 percent of their income from the govt.
- Our leaders attempted to drop the prices in precious metals and oil on May 4th by again changing the rules for commodities trading. It was complicated. The new rules were only for "speculators" who saw their initial margin requirements leap by 35 percent. "Hedgers" had no change in their margin requirements. Oil, silver and gold dropped accordingly. Oil fell 7.2 percent to below $100.
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