Beach Complements on the Patio

What this family needed was a little summertime project.

When my step-mother was here, we put some new plants in my barren porch post. However, once they were green and pretty, I just realized how decrepit my old wooden table appeared. Yesterday, I stopped at Home Depot and bought primer and two colors for the table: Glidden's poolside blue and ripe apricot. The finish is exterior high gloss, though I'm sure enamel would have been better to handle outdoor use. My kids helped me prime everything, though as I painted colors, there were several places that lacked the primer coat. Of course I had to pick a slightly complicated arrangement of colors, and most likely there are places that have a stray brush stroke of the wrong color. With the apricot and blue, it's a bit like being at a little seaside café.

As I finished painting, a neighbor came to my porch fence and asked about the table. She wanted some ideas for an old dinette set she has. Her conversation ended with compliments on the table. Then as I took photographs, my table and chairs had another little visitor. I think there were a few more compliments from that guest.

Painting with my children was fun, though I don't think I'll quit my day job to startup a new family business. Proviso! If you have upstairs neighbors, watch for dripping bags of trash placed over head. They can ruin a paint job and a hairdo! Anyway, this service set for four will make a pretty little spot to sit on sunny days...after the paint cures a bit. There's also hope that the Fingerhut craftsmanship from more than a decade ago will hold out a little longer.

2nd sleep musings on high school econ

At around 3 AM, I awoke with this idea bubbling in my brain. After an hour of tossing and turning, mulling and musing, I decided to get up, don my monogrammed bathrobe and power up my computer to let it out of my weary noggin.

Turn the -opoly games that are so prevalent into a market segment analysis and study project for a high school economics class. Have students form small groups to research the last 10 years of a particular market segment of their choosing, e.g., wireless communication, housing & mortgage financing, home & business personal computing, musing & recording industries, etc. As students conduct their research, they should evaluate trends, market influences, market explosions and bubble bursts, both stabilizing and destabilizing factors, IPO's, private industries, corporate giants and influential but small-share players. Once students have established a body of research, they begin creating their games. Using soft drinks as a model, they might start off with recognized corporations like Coke & Pepsi then structure the board to include recent trends like energy drinks, health drinks, flavored & enhanced waters, bottled coffees & teas, retail outlets like Starbucks, partnerships with fastfood & restaurant corporations. The list in my head goes on and on. Other market factors that seem on the surface to be unrelated will have effects on consumer spending: war, recession, market drops, trade with China, consumer confidence ratings, Super Bowl commercials, unsuccessful product deliveries (New Coke, yikes!). I've had similar scenarios partially developed in my head for wireless communication: AT&T Wireless is spun off Cingular. BellSouth Mobility buys Cingular but keeps the Cingular name, AT&T buys BellSouth and thus reacquires Cingular and puts everything under the AT&T umbrella. Once you consider branding, FCC rules, bandwidth auctions, proprietary phones and networks, phone number portability, and more, the possibilities for Community Chest and Chance cards start to get a little crazy. That's one strand anyway of a vast web weaving in my little cobb-webby mind at now 4:50 AM. There's still computer & operating system wars: Windows, Mac and the -Nix niche, not to neglect PDA's and other mobile computing options as well as Web-based computing (Google, Yahoo!). Allowing students to dig into market history and to explore current trends along with upcoming market events (iPod vs. Zune, SP1 for Vista and Leopard for OS X) and third party heavy hitters like Logitech, Symantec, Adobe, Intel, AMD. Any one segment is like a great tree with thousands of miles of tendrils, roots, shoots and branches all interwoven to create quite a complex system. I think students would quickly begin to understand better the interdependence of free-market economy. Then as they condense what they learn to the confines of a Monopoly styled board game, they can start to see just how all these factors affect consumers through choice in the market place, the meaning of "multi-billion dollar industry" and the reality of the butterfly effect on global economics.

And now that the alarm clock is about to begin is matinal buzzing, I will dam this stream of consciousness and leave it for some one else to ponder. Maybe I can take a nap today during my planning period.