I Saw Navel Gazing

 

A year and a half ago I used the above photo “edited” of the statues of the Satyres en atlante which depicts Omphaloskepsis (navel gazing) during a message at Tapestry.  I used it to talk about some a tendency people sometimes have to contemplate what seems deep but actually doesn’t matter to real life, i.e. navel gazing. I had forgotten that the statues were located at the Lourve . So when we went to Paris I was thrilled to walked into the section of Roman antiquities and see it standing in the middle of one of the rooms.

I left my photo unedited because of two things:

  1. It is on my own self-hosted blog and not a 25′ screen at church, and
  2. The bulge that I covered up is actually just the knot of the wrap that is around their waste. I just thought it would be too distracting during our worship gathering to leave it uncovered and try to explain that it was merely where the wrap was tied. Also, covering the knot with the word “art” was pretty funny, so that was also a win.

SIDE NOTE – if you are considering a vacation anywhere you should talk to Pam. She is amazing at planning. You would not believe how little we paid for all four of us to go to France and basically be able to do anything we wanted to do because of her skills in vacation planning.

One Year Into Robinhood

I’ve posted before about Robinhood, a free investment platform that I started using a year ago, but I thought I would post about it again for two reasons:

  1. Apparently Joe H decided to join Robinhood and it looks like he used an old invite link  that I had posted, so I received a free stock. I received one share of Under Armor. This is by far my highest price free share yet (UAA closed Friday at $21.36, where as my previous highest value free share was about $4). Thanks Joe! I hope you got a nice share like my brother did – he received a free share of Apple.
  2. I’ve been investing speculatively through Robinhood for a year now so I could judge how I have done.

As you can see from the graphic attached to the post my return for the year was 13.75%, whereas the S&P 500 for the same dates brought a return of 10.783%. Thus I beat the S&P by 2.967%. Of course, that is counting my free shares for referring people to Robinhood, and the S&P doesn’t get those, so I probably lost to the S&P.

Maybe it is a good thing that I don’t handle anyone else’s retirement. 🙂 BTW if you want to try Robinhood and want a free stock use this link  http://share.robinhood.com/robertt429. I’ve had a blast doing a small amount of speculative investing through Robinhood.