Home Sweet Home

I'm writing this on a ipad so this'll probably take a while, and contain more typos, than normal.

I'm home. Home is where the wife is, so they say - she's here so it must be!

What have I done since getting home? Well, I did indeed put the snow tires on the car. I'm currently going through CDs and DVDs and putting them into big wallet holders, and throwing out the plastic cases. Not sure if I can do anything useful with the cases.

Usually I buy music digitally, but some albums are half the price when bought second hand, even including postage.

After living out of a suitcase for a month, coming home to all this stuff is odd. I want to throw more out. Much more. I'm not doing too badly - one surplus desktop PC and one laptop have been donated to Kara's work.

But I still have 4 tubs of what one would politely call e-waste. A Dreamcast, one UK and one North American Playstation 2, PSP, old motherboard. An iBook G4 I bought for no good reason at all a couple of months ago.

I have started three Canadian "DRIPs" or dividend reinvestment plans - that is, buying a share certificate and having the dividends reinvested directly in that stock. You can do this via a broker using a method called a synthetic drip, but these three are the 'real thing' - shares held directly in my name. Some give a discount on the reinvestment price, too.

Why would I want this? Well, a synthetic drip only buys whole shares. If you get $10 of dividends but the stock costs $10.01 per share, you don't get any new shares. With a 'real' drip, you get fractional shares.

Like most countries, domestic shares have their dividends taxed favourably in Canada - as the company has already paid tax on the dividend. Note this is not Couch Potato - I am stock picking here, rather than buying the whole market. So this is a sideline, a small investment for fun.

What else. I should be buying chicken wire and stakes, firstly to make a leaf composting enclosure, and to make a groundhog exclusion zone for next year. But today I'm mostly taking a break.

And looking at cars on the internet. Always looking at cars on the internet...