Our beautiful cat Dax is no longer with us and we are missing him very much.
He was only with us three short years but was able to bring much joy into our lives, he was well loved by all who met him and he was definitely a ‘people cat’. You leave us many good memories Daxy and I believe you will have now found peace and lots of tasty tuna.
Love from AP, VK & Oli
Courtesy of my cousin, Rod Grant.
Australia is a big country, road train at Helen Springs Station.
One of my favorite bulletin boards has this thread about just what is rich for you?
Link to somersoft forums thread ‘What is your definition of rich?”
First there is a definition that needs to be made between dollar rich and satisfaction from inside which also might be classified as a form of riches. A common definition for rich that I’m aware of is simply the desire to have enough money that you don’t have to work for it. Often described as financial freedom it can be expressed as this:
Financial Freedom = Ongoing passive income (Income you don’t need to exert yourself for such as share dividends, rents, managed business income etc) >= Cost of living
A common rule of thumb for sustainable retirements and living off investment income is to draw down no more than 4% of your total asset pool in a year, this is quite conservative but a good place to start. So with a yearly lifestyle draw of $50,000 you will need $1,250,000 (50,000/.04) net in income producing assets to qualify as financially free. This means you can relocate to your couch and watch TV for the rest of your life without every having to worry about going bankrupt or creditors knocking on your door. Adjust these figures up and down depending on individual requirements.
Personally I think it’s important not to confuse financial freedom with other concepts like ‘rich’ and ‘happy’. If you dig down into common motivations I think a lot of people would choose waking up happy on Monday mornings and not disliking having to go to work over a less certain prospect of having heaps of dollars that might involve working at something you hate for many years, this is all about knowing what motivates you in life.
Philosophy and literature has a lot to say on the subject of being rich.
Nature didn’t tell me: “Don’t be poor”. Nor indeed: “Be rich”; but she does beg me: “Be independent”
– Chamfort, Maxims (1795)
“If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches, but take away his desires”
– Epicurus
The link between dollar rich and happy can be tenuous. A reading of the biography of billionaires Kerry Packer, James Packer and Felix Dennis will provide plenty of evidence that anybody dollar rich can be very unsatisfied.
All perhaps a little interesting and food for philosophical thought; but back to the original question and talking only in dollar terms, how much is rich for you? Well… This is the scale that Felix Dennis supplied to classify exactly how rich a person is.
Total assets (Pound sterling)
* £1m-£2m: The comfortable poor
* £2m-£5m: The comfortably off
* £5m-£15m: The comfortably wealthy
* £15m-£40m: The lesser rich
* £40m-£75m: The comfortably rich
* £75m-£100m: The rich
* £100m-£200m: The seriously rich
* £200m-£400m: The truly rich
* £400m-£999m: The filthy rich
* More than £999m: The super rich
Of course if you are a billionaire your definition of rich is going to be a bit …. inflated 
From the excellent A Week At The Airport: A Heathrow Diary
The quality of this interaction was the responsibility of Diane Neville, who had worked for British Airways since leaving school 15 years before and now oversaw a staff of some 200. It was never far from Diane’s thoughts how vulnerable her airline was to its employees’ bad moods. On reaching home, a passenger would remember nothing of the plane that had not crashed or the suitcase that had arrived within minutes of the carousel’s starting if, upon politely asking for a window seat, she had been brusquely admonished to be happy with whatever she was assigned. In the earliest days of industry, it had been an easy enough matter to motivate a workforce, requiring only a single and basic tool: the whip. Workers could be struck hard and with impunity to encourage them to quarry stones or pull on their oars with greater enthusiasm. Once it became evident that someone who was expected to wheel elderly passengers around a terminal, for example, or to serve meals at high altitudes could not profitably be sullen or furious, the mental wellbeing of employees began to be a supreme object of commercial concern.
But even true friendliness was not always enough. I observed a passenger running with shoulder bags towards a check-in desk for a Tokyo flight, only to be courteously informed that he had arrived too late to board and would have to consider alternatives. Yet his 747 had not already departed — it would sit at the terminal for a further 20 minutes, its fuselage visible through the windows. The problem was a purely administrative one: the airline had stipulated that no passenger, even one awaited by a bride and 200 guests, could be issued with a boarding card less than 40 minutes before departure.
The presence of the aircraft combined with its unreachability, the absence of another seat on a flight for 48 hours, the cancellation of a day of meetings in Tokyo, all these pushed the man to bang his fists on the counter and let out a scream that could be heard as far away as the WH Smith outlet at the western end of the terminal. I was reminded of the Roman philosopher Seneca’s treatise On Anger, and in particular of its thesis that the root cause of anger is hope. We are angry because we are overly optimistic, insufficiently prepared for the frustrations endemic to existence. A man who screams every time he loses his keys or is turned away at an airport is evincing a touching but recklessly naive belief in a world in which keys never go astray and travel plans are invariably assured
Watched ‘Avatar’ in 3D yesterday. Quite a jump forward in viewing technology from the last time I watched 3D at the cinemas, which was Jaws 3D way back in the 1980’s if I remember correctly. The story was a blend of other movies and cliches, including elements of Lord of The rings, Braveheart, Starhip Troopers, Dances with Wolves and Aliens (Sigourney Weaver and those robotic Exoskeletons again) Basically the movie was in two parts with the first part being the most enjoyable, the final fight sequence was too Hollywood. Still.. some ground breaking work in cinema history I feel, perhaps not quite at the level of ‘Star Wars’ but still one to remember 20 years from now. 