RAFFLE CLOSED – 670ドル raised for Pets in Need, feel free to still donate (direct donation link), winners are being notified.

I’m running this independently. Many of you who have been following me on Facebook know that I hit the 1000th mask last week. I have not been selling masks, but making them mostly for non-profits (~700 masks to the San Mateo County Health Outreach Foundation, Pets In Need, Abode Homeless Services and more), friends, family, and clients.

Here’s your opportunity to have one.

Make at least a 10ドル donation to Pets In Need: (direct donation link) to help support a SF Bay Area no-kill animal shelter. Forward your donation receipt to my email (erik DOT oliver AT gmail DOT com) and for every 10ドル donated by you I will write your name down once. On Saturday Aug 15 at 9am Pacific, I will randomly choose 5 winners from the listed names to receive masks 996-1000 shown below.

(Note I am running this independently of Pets In Need; masks will be shipped via US Postal Service Priority Mail at my expense to anywhere in the world the USPS supports. Void where prohibited by law.)

Once again Andrea @ Thingamajigsaw has outdone herself. This is a great example of working themes from the artist (Picasso) into the puzzle cutting as well as cleverly using dropouts to make an already challenging puzzle harder to put together. Great work.

Andrea at Thingamajigsaw did an amazing job taking this art print and elevating it to a sublime jigsaw puzzle. Only 269 pieces, but with a tricky square style cutting technique I’ve not previously seen, assembly of the center was quite challenging.

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The cutting style is more apparent from the back:

Kudos to Platinum Puzzle’s Dee Rogers for outstanding cutting of this ~700 piece traditional puzzle using Steve Skelton’s whimsical “Farm Table”.

The irregular edge together with interesting interacting and enlarged silhouettes made for a challenging puzzle to assemble.

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Made a post at Medium about my personal financial and investing philosophy.

Some new traditional puzzles from Thingamajigsaw. Very well cut as well!

Cups and Chirp weighing in just under 150 pieces is a real challenge given the irregular shape and open dropouts. Lots of well designed silhouettes that interact in cool ways, e.g. momma bird feeding her chicks. Flower in a vase. And hummingbird at flower.

This is a Stave Limited Edition wooden jigsaw puzzle by artist Andrea Farnham. The puzzle only advertises four main tricks on the tableau but getting the rings together is an undocumented fifth trick. This is a gorgeous hand painted puzzle (no longer painted by Andrea but by other Stave Artists) and the tricks are clever and well thought out. The three-dimensionality of the puzzle is top notch and the extra little notes like the ribbons for the trapeze artists add to the puzzle. Purposefully a small image so as not to provide too many spoilers.

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Well, a year late but I should also give Andrea Farnham of Thingamajigsaw a positive review of an amazing jigsaw puzzle that any Sherlock Holmes fan simply must own. Using Larry Elliott’s artwork (http://www.thingamajigsaw.com/traditional.html#elliott) she has created an incredible puzzle that requires knowledge of Sherlock Holmes stories to complete.

Here’s a picture of the completed puzzle with the silhouette figural pieces removed:IMG_2960

Those figural pieces you will notice are arranged in a spiral… So you need to link each figural with a story (the complete works of Sherlock Holmes are provided). For example, if you said the Rosary figural was associated with the “The Sign of Four” you would write that figural down next to the story name. The Rosary is positioned as “O” starting from “A” at the outside of the spiral. Knowing that the Rosary is O will let you decode a secret message which is indexed by letter, e.g. “O6” so the 6th letter in “The Sign of Four” is “G” write that down, and continue.

Lots of fun, I brought my copy of this puzzle to a board game gathering and it took a group several hours to assemble and then another several hours to decipher the code. Very clever multi-layer design and guaranteed to entertain.

Definitely a keeper.

Thingamajigsaw’s Andrea Farnham has done it again with an outstanding complex jigsaw and word puzzle based on Artist Larry Elliott’s work “Tower of Babel” (http://www.thingamajigsaw.com/traditional.html#elliott)

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When you buy the puzzle you actually get two wooden jigsaw puzzles, a five-language dictionary, and a guide to solving the word puzzle once you’ve assembled the jigsaw.

Basically, once you solve the jigsaw, the figural pieces in the main puzzle have letters and numbers next to them, e.g. the octopus figural has a M6 next to it which on the small puzzle is in Spain. Time to use the dictionary to find the Spanish word for Octopus (pulpo).

When you have all of the translated words, you will be guided through a process to remove the letters from the border of the main puzzle and reveal a secret word (good for a 1-time 10% discount at Thingamajigsaw).

Fantastic work by Andrea and a very clever compliment to the Sherlock Holmes-themed puzzle she released last year also using Larry Elliot’s art. This is a must buy.

A fun “treat” puzzle from Stave.

Dinner at Baume on Dec 14, 2013. The firm holiday party/dinner.

Pictures of our cruise to Mexico.

Photos from our NYC-Bahamas cruise on the NCL Jewel. Highly recommend taking the Tru Bahamian Food Tour in Nassau.

Additional photos from Tanzania trip (including Amsterdam layover)

Pictures from our safari in Tanzania: Lake Manyara, Serengeti and Ngorogoro crater.

Kilimanjaro pictures

Legos can be fun as an adult too, did the “Tower Bridge” set

Back from a great trip to Alaska.

We went with my whole family to Disneyland (and California Adventure), it was my ~2 year old niece’s first visit. Lots of fun.

So, this past week I finally took the plunge and rejiggered most of my investments for retirement based on an accumulation of readings over the past few years. The last kick in the pants was doing more Bogleheads reading.

Other influences:

• “Dare to be Dull” (aka “How a Second Grader Beats Wall Street”)
• The Simple Dollar blog
• Get Rich Slowly blog

Biggest changes:

1. Bond (mutual funds) out of taxable accounts into tax deferred accounts (I had started buying bond funds slowly over the last 18 months but they were all in taxable accounts.)
2. Bond (mutual fund) allocation (drastically) increased
3. Expense ratios (ER) brought down with last high ER fee sold (all funds now are sub-0.30%, most are closer to 0.10%, weighted average is 0.19%)

Anyhow, my biggest wish was that I had acted sooner. It has been nearly two-or-three years since I got the (good) advice to add some bonds (mutual funds) to my portfolio, but I sat on the sidelines for too long and when I did do it, I allowed classic behavioral economics errors to sideline me from putting the bond funds in the right place.