Back To School Night

Last night I was at my youngest son's school to meet his teachers. It was a bit useless since he is in a multiage program and has the same teachers he had last year. It was more I think to let the teachers know his parents are both still involved and care. I did get to eat a bunch of cookies and brownies so it wasn't a total waste of time.

The ex told me her mother has to go in for surgery. Apparently she has some type of growth near her pelvis. The word cancer has not been used but I know the ex' maternal grandmother did pass away from cancer. I am a kind of not sure how to handle this situation. Surprisingly when I came out and got divorced it was not taken well by the ex' family- go figure. I do still care about her because she was a large part of my life for a long time but there is a lot of acrimony between us. I also am concerned about how my sons might react to a situation where their grandmother has cancer and if it does not end well, how negatively it will impact them.

So on Mini Adventures my eldarin wizard is up to level 4. I seem to have had crappy luck lately on the d20 rolls. I also invited my brother and a good friend who I use to play old school AD&D with back in junior high and high school to join. I noticed Mr. Barrett is kicking some serious ass on the game though- I may have to stop sending him healing or buffs until I catch up, lol. Mr. Clifford is close to falling into that category as well.

I am stunned with what the Treasury and Fed did last night- They banned short selling of financials! Intellectually I have a real problem with what they did. They did a half-assed job and did not take into consideration the law of unintended consequences. The options market is effectively dead now, as is the convert market, the ETF market and you can forget about order facilitation. Talk about engendering moral hazard...

My guess is today there will be record volume all to the up side but come Monday the equity markets will completely freeze. We are now entering an ice age. IT would have been better if they had declared a bank holiday. Which leads me into the real reason they did all this. Several other money market funds yesterday also broke the buck. That led to a huge outflow of actual cash from banks. The Fed and Treasury sees this stuff real time and they saw a massive run on banks starting to happen and it scared the shit out of them. They did not have many options. I get why they did it but all it does is delay the final cleansing of the chicanery that has been going on in the markets for the past 15 years.

Now that I am all happy and joyful, I am off to the beach this weekend. My youngest has a fall baseball game at 6 and I have the boys this weekend. So I will try to catch some of his game and then take them to the beach. We will be on the last boat over. The husband actually has his book club at the beach this weekend and we have one of the book club members staying with us in the third room. TK and MK will be out there as well so we'll get some cards in. It is my last weekend out there this season.