The Oppenheimer Report - 5/21/12

Today I begin this report with a mini rant about contractors. There is a reason why shows like Holmes on Homes are so popular. Over the past five years we’ve had the occasion to use a lot of different contractors in the building of our house, and one thing I can say from my experience is that there are more bad ones than good ones. It seems especially true up here in the Great White North; there are some real flakes up here passing themselves off as pros. In my opinion plumbers top the list on the flake scale. We had a guy do some major plumbing work on the old cottage, and when we needed him back to fix a deficiency, we found out he’d skipped town owing half the community money. The guy who installed most of the plumbing in the new home, hired by our general contractor, was completely and utterly unreliable. He’d start a job and walk away for weeks, holding up all the other trades reliant on the completion of his work. Single handedly he sabotaged our building project and cost us a lot of time and money. I’m told he had an alcohol problem. A few months after he had disappeared for good, we found out just how much he’d done wrong or failed to do altogether. For example, he reversed the hot and cold on a one of the showers and simply forgot to install most of the cutoff valves in the basement. What I am learning, slowly, and especially since we moved to the Great White North, is that when we do find a good tradesman, we are quick to pay our bill, and we treat them like foreign dignitaries. Luckily, we’ve had a great carpenter from the beginning, and he has introduced us to some other good subs. I’ve heard from more than one resident up here that the good contractors do not need to advertise, because they are busy enough by word of mouth. Indeed we could keep several trades busy for a year or two with all the mistakes made by the others.

Last Thursday I picked up my boat from the marina, complete with its new Evinrude ETEC 200 HP outboard motor, new steering cables, and a new depth finder. It was a frosty 50 degrees F when I picked it up, but I bundled up and took it for a long ride over to the big lake. This is my first marine upgrade in 23 years and there have been significant improvements in outboard technology in that time. These days a lot of people buy four stroke engines (gas only) because they tend to run cleaner, but the new 2 strokes are much improved in this regard, and much lighter than comparable four strokes. We’ll see how the new power plant fares after a few seasons, but so far I’m impressed. Fuel injection ensures it starts right up and it is quiet as a sewing machine at low idle. The most significant improvement is that it is much faster off the line. This week I’ll check it out with the GPS to see what its top end is. I suspect it’s a little slower than the old 225HP, but then again, I’m a little slower than I was 23 years ago. My motto used to be “when in doubt, overpower,” but I’m no longer as intoxicated by speed and power as I used to be. These days I’m more interested in reliability and longevity.

Disco diva Donna Summer died last week at 63 after a battle with cancer. She was the Lady Gaga of her day, and though I despised disco at the time, I liked some of her music. She worked hard for the money. Facebook went public last week raising $16 Billion in it’s IPO, the largest ever initial public offering by a US technology company. Should I buy in at $38 per share? I think I’ll leave that to my financial advisor to sort out. I thought “Flutie Flakes” were a good investment, and now have a closet full of stale cereal. Founder Mark Zuckerberg married Priscilla Chan, his companion of the last nine years. What, no pre-nup?

This past week was a momentous one for Shauna‘s family. Her father’s brother had a lot of problems and died of misadventure many years ago. Because of his problems, he never got to know his three children from two failed marriages. For various reasons the ex-wives cut all ties with the Taylor family, and those kids were never given the opportunity to know Shauna’s dad, or their paternal grandparents. I think that’s very sad. It’s a long and complicated story, but the ending is that last Saturday two of those three children met in Toronto at the home of Shauna’s parents, and there was a very happy reunion. A brother and a sister from two marriages had never met, and in fact did not know until recently that they were related. We brought family photographs and old home movies, and although they never got to know their father, they now have an opportunity to know his brother, and some of the mysteries of their past can now be revealed. Vicariously, I eat this stuff up. Shauna has been in contact with the third sibling and will likely meet him in the near future. Life is full of surprises!

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2012 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED