Are you ready for some football?

Ok, so far I am 0 - 1 on my football picks. I took the Saints over the Colts on the Thursday opening night game. This pick is reflective of a problem I have with my pool selections - letting my like or dislike for a team interfere with picking the most likely to win.

I am a in winner's pool and a loser's pool. For these, you have to pick a team each week that will win, or lose. Any week you are wrong, you are knocked out. And you can only pick each team once. There is a 10 or 20 dollar buy in at the beginning of the season, but with a lot of participants, the pay out can be pretty substantial. My winner for this week is New England; my loser is Tampa Bay.

This weekend is also the local chili cook-off. 10 to 15 local bars, restaurants, businesses, or just groups of friends, enter their special recipe into the competition. There is a live band and raffle drawings and it is generally a good time. The fact that each group tries to buy your vote by offering up an alcoholic beverage of some sort doesn't hurt the festive atmosphere.

I don't have a lot of money in the stock market, but I did actually stumble onto one good move. The first stock I ever bought was a few shares of Walmart - purchased at probably its highest price in the last 50 years. About 2 years ago, I decided to bail out on Walmart and invest the money in Wild Oats instead. Some of the reason was financial - the growth potential was better, and some of the reason was political - that I'd rather have my money in a company promoting organic foods, than in, well, Walmart.

Anywhoo, the deal for Whole Foods to purchase Wild Oats recently went through, and all the shares were purchased at $18.50/share - a nice profit from the $8.00/share I paid! The money remains in my IRA, and I need to find another stock to invest in now . . . too bad Target is priced too high as well . . .