Mondays

Mondays can appear good or bad depending on how a person feels about what he's got to do. I have never dreaded Mondays the way some people do but if I had known I would spend well over an hour trying to straighten out my cell phone bill with the Rogers company by live chat ... well, maybe you know already how customer service goes these days. It's enough to make a pope resign.

I took the two photos below while returning to our gated community after purchasing milk from a convenience store across the street. The little booth with the over-sized roof is constantly manned and the smiling guard opens the gate for tenants to go out and he lets them in again if the rent is paid.

 

Our apartment door is adjacent to an opening onto the roof,

and here is what it looks like from there ...

The domes are stairwell roofs. One could sit on that roof and read for a while except that this is Mexico of cloudless skies and a sun that means business. So we sit below on the lawn and read in the shade of the palms.

Which reminds me ...
Let me tell you about a book I'm reading about currency wars. I read how the author, a highly experienced fellow from Wall Street, was invited by the US military to recruit colleagues to participate in simulated international financial war games. One of the first moves was by a team playing Russia. They sought to undermine the dominance of the US dollar in international trade by requiring payments in gold or gold-backed currency from its oil customers. The US dollar is not backed by gold as you likely know. Are you still with me? The Russia team launched a gold-buying spree.

The supervisors of the war games thought that was dumb and it would never happen in real life for reasons I won't get into. The author believed it was the most logical way a modern currency war would be waged.

He then mentioned that in the 'War Room' no cell phones were allowed. War game participants were effectively cut off from the rest of the world during the day. So at day's end he checked world headlines on Drudge Report. Not knowing of Drudge Report, I paused, googled it on my iPhone, and guess what I saw? See photo below for one headline story ...

Sure looks like my book is timely. Maybe Putin read it. I recall the Bible says at the end people will throw their silver into the streets and their gold will become an abhorrent thing. I guess before that happens people have to accumulate a bunch of it first. For a while a person could have had the impression the only ones passionate for gold were Olympic athletes and even that gold isn't genuine. But I digress.