Surprise!
Even though last week Hello was talking about past bad weather, who would believe that the very day The Monticello News was printed last week we would suddenly have a surprise sleet storm.
The skies around here were full of clouds and temperatures were in the low to middle 50’s at 2:30 p.m. Nothing indicated that in a 10-minute period heavy sleet would fall, some pieces of sleet we saw were a quarter inch size. You just never know.
Making Dough
2020 was the year of making dough. Thousands started making sour dough bread in their kitchens when the bread shelves at the grocery stores were cleared out during fear-fueled runs on essentials. This will make your interest rise. Here is one example of shoulda, coulda, woulda. Hindsight is 20/20.
Is investing in the stock market Goofy? Nearly 50 years ago, a guy named Walt Disney decided he needed to raise some money to expand his company, so he sold some stock. It was 1957, cost per share was $13.88.
If you had invested $1,000 then, you would have received 72 shares. After reinvesting your dividends all those years, on December 30, 2020, your 72 shares would be 27,648 shares and valued at $4.78 million.
Walt Disney’s vision of “The Most Happiness Place on Earth” may have started for him when he was a child. His mother’s family lived about 50 miles North of present-day, Walt Disney World. Walt Disney visited relatives in the area and began to buy acres of land through a third party buyer to try and prevent speculation and driving the price per acre up. “If you can dream it, you can do it.”
Goodbye 2020, Hello 2021
Well, it has been a year now since we first heard of the pandemic, only we thought it was just the flu. The last worldwide pandemic, 1917-1920, was actually called the Spanish flu, and was neither from Spain nor the flu. Some say that pandemic lasted anywhere from a year to three years.
Without any medicines, relying on wearing masks, washing hands, quarantine and using bleach to clean, that pandemic killed an estimated 675,000 Americans, afterwards the average life span was reduced by 12 years, education and business took up to five years to recover. Today, with all the advances in medicine, over 400,000 Americans have now died from Covid-19. Several companies have developed a vaccine, which although not approved by the FDA, is being used in this emergency.
There was never a vaccine developed for the 1917-1920 pandemic, but a miracle vaccine was developed in the process. A Dr. Salk trying to find a Spanish flu vaccine found a vaccine to prevent polio that infected millions around the world at that time. By 1979, the United States was polio-free.
Thank goodness humans always have optimism even in the darkest of days. If the predictions are correct, more babies will be born in 2021 than the previous four years, so….