Daddy’s Little Girl

Two hundred years ago women didn’t even ride horses. Now, when I take my daughter to her riding lessons it’s noticeable how there are no boys there. It’s certainly a girl’s hobby these days and probably the most expensive hobby an eight year-old could have.

My daughter has been taking lessons for years and recently my wife and I bought her a horse. Now we are paying for boarding and training of said animal. The total cost is around $1000 per month. Mind you, that doesn’t include the cost of my daughter’s riding lessons. That’s just for feeding and training the horse.

None of this I mind because she is daddy’s little girl as the title suggests. Suddenly though, the plot has thickened.

Two weeks ago she comes home from school and tells me she wants to be in the horse business. She didn’t say she wanted to be a veterinarian. She said she wanted to be in the horse business. The best part was that she didn’t mean when she grew up. She was ready now. I asked my third-grader if she knew how much it would cost to start something like that and she said she already has $220 from Christmas money and piggy banks.

On that note, I decided to take her to the local Barnes and Noble to look for a book that could help. We found a book called Starting and Running a Horse Business. I told her that if she read the whole book and could prove that she understood it when I got back from travelling that I’d put up the money and we’d start a horse business.

Well, she read that book three hours a day over the last two weeks. When I talk to her she talks about effective ways to advertise and accounting techniques.

I guess my plate just got a little fuller. If I had it my way I’d start some sort of online horse exchange to live up to my part of the deal but I have a feeling she wants to actually see and ride the horses. At least land is cheap these days.

Realized Gains

Zip-Lining through the canopied rain forest in the Jamaican mountains, I can’t help but to think about Frank Schilling’s post on SevenMile.com. Like most of the big domainers, he doesn’t sell domains and he attempts on his blog to explain why that is so.

Perhaps because I was flying through the trees at night I could focus on the question at hand. When is the right time to sell a name?

I think back to my days at an Internet start-up in the mid-nineties. The venture capitalists would rant about how they would only invest in a company with one of three exit strategies. They would need to “go public” so their shares would be liquid, sell the company or the founders would need to buyout the investors.
What was their reason for this way of thinking? They wanted to realize their gains. They were keenly aware of the worthlessness of paper wealth. Gains aren’t realized until the cash is in the bank. Having something worth money is not the same as having money.

I think that many domainers out there have only paper wealth. I’m not speaking of Frank who has both. A good deal of domainers are sitting on names that are worth a pretty penny but generate little income and they refuse to sell the name. I just don’t see the sense in that.

I suppose part of it is personality related. For me, I can sell a name at or slightly below today’s value and feel comfortable that I can do more with that money than what I sold it for. If I was someone that didn’t have faith in my ability to buy something new for far less than today’s value I would struggle with it a bit more.
For now, I’ll take the cash and this little girl on an adventure.

There is something great about having kids with different spring breaks

There is something great about having kids with different spring breaks. While I’m Island hoping with my youngest, I’m just 11 days away from spending a week in Jamaica with my oldest. My friends and family can enjoy pictures of that trip too while I annoy domainers with completely non-relevent ramblings.

So far we’ve hit the U.S. Virgin Islands, St Martin/Maartin, Antigua and St Lucia. The boat was supposed to stop in Barbados today but due to large swells it couldn’t safely dock. Instead we are out to sea and tomorrow we’ll drive around the Caribbean’s Pompey, Montserrat, to look at the volcanic ruins. All this before returning to the home port of San Juan, Puerto Rico. It’s there that I am looking forward to the most, simply because I own sanjuan.com.

P.S. Never tell a personal trainer you’ve just met that you climbed Mt Kilimanjaro. I’ve worked out each day on this ship and the guy has nearly killed me each time. Damnit though, I’m going to get in shape.