After a quick visit to the Slave Lucrum Portfolios, we went for our swim, a couple of quick chores and before heading into the office a nice breakfast with the lovely wife and our good friends from AZ, who fed us this morning.  Then we got to the quiet office and I mean quiet.  With super assistant Ellen gone and my fellow key execs gone and their assistant gone, it was ghostly quiet.  

Got my to dos squared away by lunch and ran home to check on the dogs and see man child for a few minutes before getting back before the close of the market.  Cleaned up some e-mails, helped someone get the word out they are looking for work, which allowed me to connect with a few folk I don't normally get a chance to say Hey! to.

Heard from my buddy from under and reader Terry C.  Hello mate!  Good to have back in the reader group.  We had an interesting talk about some commodity and economic trends in his sector of the world.  Got caught up on some reading, HBR (Harvard Business Review) articles, Executive Counsel, and some posting on the AMA website.  Looked at May financials and basically had a fruitful but uneventful afternoon at the office.

When we got home we found the lovely Mrs. C putting away various kitchen items from a kitchen we one know long buried in our memories and 3 foot of mud.  It was amazing to see thing that were packed away and the Brilliant people from Servpro put mud filled baking dishes and broiler pans into brand new boxes.  It makes you wonder what they were thinking? 

Anyhow after drying a few things Devin prepared a hamsteak with mashed potatoes and we also enjoyed some of her fresh Bruschetta. 

That always triggers a conversation about how do you pronounce bruschetta.  Is it Bruce Shetta or Bruce Sketta?  Well this is one of those mysteries of life.  The base of the word is from the Italian bruscare meaning over the coal.  Buscare is pronounce bruce car ee.  Yet you can go into the most Italian places in the world and hear bruschetta pronounced either way.  We leave it to you.  Tonight's bruschetta was pronounced giv a me so more ay. 

Then we enjoyed an old (1997) movie called The Jackal.  It had Bruce Willis, Sidney Poitie, and Richard Gere.  Near the end of the movie TV buffs there is a guy on the roof of the building with Richard Gere.  He is only in the scene for about 15 seconds and has a one or two word line.  Look real close.  You will see new Chin Ho Kelly from the new Hawaii Five 0 TV series.  The actors name is Daniel Dae Kim.  It was like his 5^th or 6^th thing he had ever done.

We did not really watch the market too closely today until this evening.  We did our best to glean what we could from Bernanke's FOMC comments.  Seen here trying to channel ubiquitous verbiage from Grrenspan:

 In essence, they will pour more money on the problem if they have to.  They did not define what would trigger that action (although it can be assumed deflationary trends) or what those actions might be.  (Look for comments in Jackson Hole In August that sound a lot like QE III.)

So the day finished down, got that wrong, oil inventories were lower than expected, got that wrong, nailed the contents and sentiment of the FOMC meeting.  Herman Miller (Office Furniture) beat estimates, got that wrong, Fedex beat as we suggested, BBBY Bed, Bath etc did beat as we suggested, in other words we must have had some snotolla on the crystal ball Sunday Night.

In other market news today, we got a couple of interesting alerts from our buddy Jim Cramer.  He is closing out his positions in BA Boeing.  He had a 26% gain at one time and it has dwindled to about 12%.  We were in and out of BA several times in 2010 and netted about 9% with dividends.  In our guess about WAG Walgreens, we noted that the CEO announced a dropping of a huge contract with ESRX Express Scripts.  Jim Cramer made a linkage I did not see and is pimping a position in the stock.  (Join Streetsmart.com for all the great details.)  He was also pimping DU Dupont and JCI Johnson Controls.  WE DO NOT OWN WAG, DU, JCI, ESRX.  JCI has been on our watch list since January 2011.

So after the Bernanke shuffle and the Greek vote of confidence, how do we play this market?  We are still in a correction and jobs and housing are a mess.  It would be silly think we are at a bottom, but we could be close.  (The big part of the could be is the debt crisis here in the US.)This would be a great time to brush off those watch lists and start looking for value and growth stocks.  Remember those are two different categories and they chase two different strategies.