I got up early this morning a decided to use my new egg poacher. It is an incredibly beautiful sauce pan with 4 little Teflon baskets that hold the eggs will they gingerly poach in subtly rolling boiling hot water. Then you time the poach for the doneness you would like. Three minutes will get you an egg that is set but still snotty and will have a runny yolk. 5 minutes and the eggs will be firm, but the yolk will still have a bit of fluidity to it. 7 minutes and you got a hockey puck.

Eggs are relatively healthy for you but got a bad wrap in the late eighties and nineties when everyone was going fat crazy. At 90 calories, it is a decent balance of protein and cholesterol. Poaching is one of the healthiest ways to enjoy the yolk and albumin.

So I was excited to use the new device. I fired up the 18,500 BTUs on our stove and before I could get the bread out of the bag, my water was starting to boil. I was truly excited. I quickly drop my eggs into the little baskets and put them in the boiling water and covered the pan.

About 12 seconds later I heard this PUFF and watched the water spurling (Made that up but it is a cool word.) out fo the pan extinguishing the 18,500 BTU flame and emitting gas into the house. As I approached the stove to shut off the gas, I had a sauce pan with egg ribbon soup and four scary looking yolks staring back at me.

I managed to salvage two the eggs and Man Child was impressed that dad had made poached eggs. I had the other two mangled albuminless lonely yolks. While he finished getting ready for school, I spent 25 minutes cleaning the stove and the new poacher for the 5 minute eggs we enjoyed. Thank you William Sanoma.

Once in the office, no wait, I have to tell you about the dog situation. We are having the west coast Boone Cronin reception this weekend so we wanted to have our back yard fixed up. That meant new sod and a few new plants. That means the dogs are sequestered to going out front to the corner. It adds a few more minutes to every activity we do around the house. But I Digress.

Once at the office, we had a meeting with my fellow leaders of the company, The CFO and the President. It was a good meeting and I can't tell you what we discussed because this is very top secret stuff. Actually it would probably bore you to death more than some of the stock stuff we spew about in this note.

After that, it was lunch with a couple of fellow co-workers at Hanna's. It had been a few days so it was good to come home again. I enjoyed their wedge salad with a pomegranate vinaigrette dressing. Then it was off to see the doc for my regular visit for him to tell me I am over weight and need to lose weight. (Couldn't he text me?) Then I met with our team who helps PADI manage out 401 K program as they are having an event Thursday at, you're never gonna believe it, The Beverly Wilshire Hotel AGAIN.

Anyway I met with the wonderful people (Doug and Linda-Doug is a reader and it sounded like Linda gets hand me downs from Doug about the Salve Lucrum Blog) at The Precept Group so they could coach me as they have invited me to be on a panel this week to talk about PADI and our relationship with the Precept Group. I promise I won't let you guys down. I will tell the audience you have suggested we move our entire 401 K into Greek Bonds, yeah that's the ticket.

After that I had just enough time to get my hair and bead cut as some foo foo place by the airport. $25.00 bucks for a number two on the top and a number one on the beard. She did do my eyebrows. Then it was a 10 year anniversary open house celebration for our friend Brian LeBrecht and his Law Firm, LeBrecht and Associates. They held the event in wine store that had this cool wine rack that you put prepaid cards in and press a button and you get the wines on tap. I found out you must be fast though at I put the card in and when I went to get the wine nothing happened. Someone else had pressed their tapper button so I had paid for the their wine. See Dave, I can't go anywhere without buying a round.

We finished the day by Devin using our new Panini maker with much better success than the new egg poacher.

So wit all this running around, what happened in the market today.

Did they fool us again?

The market was kind of directionless as it tried to read between the lines of the earnings reports of Bank of America and Goldman, while trying to take on the disappointment of IBM's revenue numbers. The dollar dropped a bit making some gains for the energy sector and then OMG France and Germany have a plan to extend the bailout to 2 trillion dollars. Let's all go out and buy equities now the world is a safe place again. And we did. Well some of us did. A lot of sector went up but volume was light.

Now come on people, this is the 12th time France and Germany have said we have a plan, but we still keep taking the bait. At least no one ran on the front lawn of the White House and said, "We like the details of the new plan." Come it must be fun to go have a Schwarzbier with Merkel and hear her say, "Ich muss wissen, wie oft kann ich Ruck mit dem Aktienmarkt in den Unted Staaten.", Which loosely translated means,

"I have to know how many times I can jerk with the stock market in the United States."

While the report or rumor out of Europe was getting all the credit for bumping the market, tonight I read about the housing market index report which jumped to its highest level in 18 months. The number was 18 as well and everyone was expecting a 14. This is good news. I am surprised it did not get more airtime. I had to go and look for it. If we could string a few months of that kind of improvement with a few good months of employment, well it would be magical. Hey I can dream.

CAUTION, a few of you read my forensics and might have thought those are current feeling and ideas. Please read closely, those are notes we made about the past decisions. If you are in doubt, drop me a line. My point was to show you the power of the doing the analysis.

Now some new homework as of a few minutes ago. This was one of the ideas out of this weeks Barron's. We are still looking for a decent banking stock.

BNS, the Bank of Nova Scotia, together with its subsidiaries, offers various personal, commercial, corporate, and investment banking services in Canada and internationally. This could also be called the big bad ass bank of Canada. It holds 90% of the county's banking assets. It is operating in a country that has strong barriers to entrance from outside finance entities. It has decent exposure to Latin America, Brazil, and Asia so that will help its growth story beyond its interest in North America. It has diversified business segments which have helped in these times of finance sector battering. Its ROE is one of the highest I have seen in the banking sector with a 10 year history of 19% (Confirmed on Morningstar and Schwab). While we see TPs (target prices in the 56-62 range, we feel the current value of 51 is fair.

We like the stock, and will be looking for the chart (BELOW) to form a nice base and the entry point we like would be $49.50-$49.75.

It throws a sustainable 4% dividend at the 51 dollar level. We see this moving to 60 by this time next year. DO YOUR HOME WORK.

Salve Lucrum