So long Keith

Tough day yesterday.
I drove my daughter, Elisa, over to Seattle to see Keith. Keith is her significant other. A nice gut, a talented carpenter, hard worker. A guy that was footloose and an adventurer, he had spent the last nine summers mining gold in Alaska. He didn't get rich, but always made wages, with a little left over. Kinda like a couple of month vacation for free.
Last year I grubsteaked them for a grand, with the agreement that they would pay me back with an ounce of gold. Overall, they broke even, with a little eft over.
Keith had no problem finding work, as he has an excellent reputation as a talented carpenter and a hard worker. Everything was going according to plan.
Then he started having abdominal and back pain, and one day his eyeballs turned yellow.
The diagnosis was devastating. He had pancreatic cancer that was inoperable. The cancer was pinching odd the bile duct on his liver, so they installed a stent to allow the bile to drain, but there was nothing to deal with the underlying cause.
So since November we have had to watch him decline.
He steadily lost weight, and went from around 190 down and down and down.
When I saw him to say goodbye yesterday, his chart said that he weighed 123 pounds.
He looked like he had just been freed from a concentration camp.
He faded in and out. Sometimes he was there, sometimes not.
I got to say goodbye and get some sense of closure.
It is very difficult to believe in a God who tortures people to death slowly. No man could have devised a nastier way to kill someone.
So I told him I would see him on the other side, and shed a few trees.

Winning With Weed

Lately I have been seeing a lot of posts on facebook about Weedstock, which is my term for the feeding frenzy developing around the possible financial gains to be made around the legalization of Marijuana.
Reminds me of the idiocy surrounding the .com frenzy. People who have no idea what they are doing are presented with an "opportunity" that sounds good and should in theory should make a bunch of money without doing anything.
Is there an opportunity to make a ton of money in the marketing and sale of legalized weed?
Hell yes!
Are you going to make it investing in every two bit grow operation?
Hell no!
Out of the thousands of small businesses will still be standing when the smoke clears, which ones Will still be standing is something no one can predict. It would take a lot of research to sift through all the hype to figure out who actually has a product or service that actually have value.
My money is on Big Pharma. They will find some way to control supply and distribution. Or some legal doorstop to keep it all in house.
Take your hard earned your money and buy some boring solid investment that has a guaranteed return over time.
Remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.