I spent the last week traveling - for business – to the UK, and just flew home yesterday, Friday the 10^th.   While in the waiting area of the gate at Heathrow Airport, I got to watch the New York Stock Market open.  In the twenty minutes or so before I boarded the plane, and lost contact with the land-based world, I got to watch the wounded DOW bleed out another 7%.    That’s right, SEVEN PERCENT in TWENTY MINUTES. 

As I boarded the plane, I realized that by the time I landed in LA 11+ hours later, the stock market will have had a full day, in fact the final day of the week, in which to do whatever it is that it would do.  Would I land to find that American Airlines was out of business?  Would we find an eerie and deserted LAX, with no-one to unload our bags, no-one to extend the gangway to our plane and let us disembark? 

Would there be air-traffic controllers to even guide us safely to the runway?

I giggled at the thought of it, and settled in for not knowing anything until we landed, and settled into my book (Sons of Heaven by Kage Baker in which the immortal cyborgs also face the end of the world as they know it.)  

Of course, we landed and everything was perfectly normal.  The world had not ended, I was able to reacquire my baggage and my wife met me out at the curb.  Nothing was any different.

My lovely and talented wife ends some of her funniest and most alarming stories with “and then I wasn’t killed.”  These are stories from her misspent youth, often about horrible decisions that she made did not actually end in her death. 

I feel that really does describe what we’ve been collectively doing with our finances, and will also describe the end result.  “And then we all lived.”