#158 - The Flying Dutchman Returns

Greetings to all. It has been about a month since my last blog post and I am now back in the Philippines. Almost 27 months gone.

I was very fortunate that I had staff and friends who looked after the house. It was in excellent shape. Of course, a few things needed to be fixed, but nothing major in the slightest. It has been a little bit surreal walking back in the house and everything is essentially exactly as it was when I walked out the door January 6, 2020.

The yard might have been a little overgrown :-)

So, I have been puttering. Getting the garden cleaned, roof painted, various fixes, and a huge amount of decluttering. Not only I, but also Mark’s stuff. Almost a year now since he passed. Hard to believe. And I still think about him every day.

For all of my lip service about being happy staying in hotels, and moving from country to country, I have to say it was good to be back in my own place. Especially, having my office back and adequate desk space, the second monitor, my very nice HP printer 😊 , etc. I think I enjoyed traveling far more when I had a base to return to.

But at the same time, there is no doubt that I have been subject to a constant low-level of anxiety being back in proximity to the businesses that I am invested in. I so very much just want to cash out and to be able to go on my merry, bumbling way. As I have told my partners … I’m tired.

Then again, as I tell myself often, this is the worst problem I have (i.e., that I am invested in successful businesses) and then I have absolutely nothing to complain about. 😊

My de-cluttering is constant and ongoing. Mark was a box hoarder, and in addition I was finding receipts in his files for things that he had bought as far back as the early 2000’s most of which have faded so much they can’t even be read anymore. Shredder. As of this morning I’ve cleaned out 75% of the clutter. Some will take more work though. See photo of the results of my notebook addiction. If I start using them right now, and writing every day, I still think they would last me 10 years or more. There are about 65 notebooks in that pile and I have more coming that I bought while in the states. 😊

My biggest issue at the moment is how to get rid of a collection of some 800 CDs. What an investment that was over the years from 85 to the early 2000’s. But, I don’t listen to them. I have copies of them on my hard drive, and I still don’t listen to them. My listening habits these days involve Spotify and Amazon music. I’m having somebody check with local universities to see if they have a music department that might want them.

I find myself in the predicament of too many places to go and not enough time. I think I wrote about this in another blog, that my plan to spend the year in three countries may have run aground on the rocks of reality. I cannot reasonably see how I can make it back to even Varna before the middle of June. And then a couple of months there before I go to Columbia, and then I’ll have to go immediately back to the Philippines. Well, like I said, if that is my worst problem … No doubt I will be getting lots of frequent flyer miles on Qatar.

I will be contacting that guy about the job to tell him I can’t take it. I will do as a friend suggested and say if he wants me on his board I’d be happy to do that. I just have too much work to do here in Asia. The idea of sitting on a few company boards does interest me. If I could find a few companies that wanted to pay me a small fee for being on a board and availing of my experience that could be something very different for me. Interesting, some income, not a lot of time or responsibility, and using my experience.

Ukrainian story … I was trying to send money from a bank in the Philippines to Ukraine. 3 banks [BDO, Metrobank and China Bank – this list includes the 2 largest banks in the country] declined the transaction because they have Ukraine listed as a “Russia member country”. I have no words. How braindead ignorant can these bankers be?

I find myself thinking constantly about the adage that the older you get the less you find important. Or words to that effect. And it is true. There is very little that concerns me now. And I am exhausted by the state of the world and my inability to do anything about the plethora of issues. I can’t even talk to most people about it. I don’t even want to pretend to be agreeable. The way I feel today is that I’m too old to appear to be anything I am not. It isn’t worth the trouble. I’ve been that way for years actually but I’ve put on a front so I don’t appear to be too rude but these days … eeehhhhh.

A quote from a book by Ilona Andrews, bloody books but an excellent writer (It is actually a husband and wife writing team). “People, especially unhappy people, want a cause. They want something to belong to, to be a part of something great and bigger, and to be led. It’s easy to be a cog in a machine: you don’t have to think, you have no responsibility. You’re just following orders. Doing as you’re told.” That applies to so much in our world today.

And to end on a humorous note … A quote from another of my favorite authors, Niall Teasdale. “A naked woman is a thing of beauty, and a naked man is an accident waiting to happen: something is bound to get twisted, crushed, mangled, or attacked by a cat.”