Tommy Board...first Surfboard

Craig, I can appreciate your desire to see your kid surfing. When my grom was little, he started on a sponge and really enjoyed it. I did push him on a board a few times to get him used to it, but let him go at his own pace. When he was ready, I got him an old beater board. That was the best thing I could have done. When the kids are young like that, they beat the hell out of the boards, use them for Hot Wheel ramps and all sorts of other uses. They tend to drop the boards, crack fins off, make puncture dings....stuff that you can't imagine. If you get him a new shaped board, your anxiety level will be at an all time high, thus reducing the pleasure level for both. It's a fact of life that kids are really tough on boards....keep plenty of duct tape around. I have seen lots of dads try to push their kids into surfing and the results were not what they expected. If your microgrom sees you in the water all the time and it's an accepted part of your total lifestyle then the surfing will come naturally for him.

As for the soft board, at my break, the groms beat up the other groms with soft boards....just food for thought.

Aloha,

You are absolutely right. But don't construe my idea about giving my little guy a first board with the idea that I am (forceably) getting him into surfing. I want surfing to be an 'option' for him, but if he doesn't share my stoke and enthusiasm for surfing, that's OK, too.

If I give him a 'little board', maybe it will be something he will treasure someday, maybe he will break it! We'll see! For Christmas I gave him an HO train that ran around the tree. He broke the engine already...he was(is) too young. But when we put this away, maybe someday he'll appreciate to see his first train set.

Likewise with his first surfboard! craig

I wanted one of those.

Surff, Besides learning a to be a surfer, Tommy is learning the fine arts of capitalism and trading. I am sure Tommy will be happy to let his broken train set go for at least 150% of what Toys'R Us charged his daddy. The proceeds will go to the 'Educate Tommy at Stanford/Harvard/Yale' fund. <G> craig

Out of curiosity, what kind of trading are you referring to. The reason I ask, is because I've done a bit of trading(grains)over the years, still do. In fact, I still have my seat on the Minneapolis grain exchange that I bought in 1985 when they were real cheap. I lease it out and keep waiting for it to go up some more before I sell it. When I bought the seat, I was gung ho to move to Minneapolis, but luckily my wife talked me out of the insanity of moving from Florida to Minnesota. She even told me that I couldn't score waves up there, and that I would become a couch potato. Not moving there was probably the best trade of my life. Good luck with teaching the grommet the fine art of trading...my grommet was trading pokemon cards till the school banned them.

Aloha,

Jeff, Like a lot of Chicago (and New York) kids, I started off on the exchange floor at 17 y.o. earning $90/wk. I've been involved in the markets for quite a long time. I've been a local trader at on the floors of the the Chicago Merc and CBOT, traded institutionally, done research, and have been involved with government bond trading. My interest has been on the financials sides and I primarily worked with merchant banking units and funds.

Knowing the asset management business, and particularly the options business, I consult to firms about technical architectures relating to the banking and finance businesses. (i.e., cross selling to technical and business users of such Risk services)

Right now I am doing some network design work (UML) and my client is the Options Clearing Corp in Chicago. The OCC itself is completely rewriting and web-enabling its systems in one of the industry's largest projects. I recently left the Banking and Finance e-business unit of IBM in New York, as the commute to and from Chicago was too stressful for my family and I. IBM runs 13 online securities and derivatives exchanges worldwide. Even if the exchange (certainly floor) business goes away, the concept of 'underwriting' or clearing a transaction will be here for a very, very long time. Watch for the eventual merger of all types of transaction exchanges. Deregulation is both inevitable and necessary for the industry to survive in the USA.