Time really flies when you work. I have just crossed my 1 month work anniversary and earned my first paycheck. Yay! I still can’t believe that I had taken a 6-year break from full-time work before starting this new adventure this month.
This week things slowed down a bit as I caught up with a lot of reading and planning for next week. Back home, I was busy with many things to do at the start of the week on Sunday. I finally managed to book a date for the Macau restaurant for our December year-end vacation. The table booking dates are only opened 90 days prior and I was monitoring their calendar for months. Then I had to repaint the staircase with another coat of varnish in the afternoon as the first unprofessional one I did a few weeks ago resulted in uneven patches all over. Finally, I rushed down to the mall in the evening to terminate our cable service which we have not been using for months.
On Monday, I started to prepare the groundwork for the VCC (Variable Capital Company) discussion with our lawyers. We were told it would take about a month to set it up. Since we wanted to connect with a researcher based in S’pore to do some Biochar studies for us, I managed to successfully google 2 names from the local university and sent them a request to set up a call. We needed an independent check on the eventual results by our European contact on the same source materials.
I was pleasantly surprised that one of the researchers replied to me the next day to set up a Zoom call next Tuesday. I had also started to read up on the previous introduction marketing decks of our company. These will be the building blocks for our new fund management firm’s sales deck which our CIO will be creating. We also had a number of rounds of discussions internal to try to pin down the terms of the Shareholder’s Agreement between the parent and our fund over the course of the week.
The highlight of the week was the updated status of my iPhone 15 order bought online 2 weeks ago from the official Apple S’pore store. My credit card was finally debited on Wed and the status changed to “shipping”. It was delivered on Friday and I am now spending the whole of Sat transferring the data from the old phones to the new sets for both my wife and my sets. This will be my birthday gift to her this month. She will be upgrading from an iPhone 8 Plus(also bought by me for her birthday 7 years ago) to the 15, a big 7-step jump. Meanwhile, I will be jumping from an iPhone 12 ProMax to the 15 after a 3-year gap.
As a side note, 2 ex-colleagues had separately told me a long time ago that they liked Apple products so much that they decided to buy Apple stock. Eventually, all their new Apple toys were essentially free due to the capital appreciation and dividends of the stocks they owned. This was during the 2000-2010 period.
Finally, I decided to follow suit and started to accumulate the stock from 2012 in batches of 10 per order till I had a few hundred. I am happy to confirm that their thesis was correct. Since then, there were also stock splits and Apple is now the biggest company in the world in terms of market capitalization at almost US$ 2.7 Trillion.
Given that the handphone is the most used and important electronic device we hold in our hands daily, it is a given that all of us would invest in a new one every few years to keep up with the tech advances. One will be constantly buying a new set to upgrade every few years. Having a better camera with other new functions is now a necessity.
The rest of Thursday was to prepare for the important calls we were having next Tuesday and Wednesday. On Friday, I had a good and long lunch with my usual group of close friends to end the week on a positive note. The mid-autumn festival officially started and the office had a mini-mooncake feast to consume all the remaining ones we had.
I am looking forward to next week with excitement as we move on to the next phase of our firm’s development. There are many more new adventures ahead and I will try my very best efforts to strive forward. Work hard and play hard – that was our team’s motto while I was heading the team in the American bank.
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