As many folks know, Claude and I have a goldmine that we haven’t worked in many years. Why not? Simple reason: doesn’t pay. Why not? Simple answer: to make a gold mine pay, you need OSHA clearance, among other things. You need a license to exploit mineral rights, even on your own property. The biggest problem is, you don’t want to advertise where your mine is located — that’s inviting disaster in a hurry. The other increasingly obvious reason is that we’re just too dang elderly for all that climbing and hiking and bending and waterlogged drenchings and cold misty mornings. On the other hand, a few expeditions in there every so often wouldn’t be too bad. Here’s the deal: we can’t take in a workshop — it’d reveal the location of the mine, the very last thing you’d want to do. One more major piece of information weighing in rather heavily…gold is at the bottom of a price-test, and that means people are not interested in buying it right now. The public only buys a thing when it’s at the top of its price range, so when gold goes up and up and up, they’ll eventually buy — right at the tippy-top of the market. Then, quite predictably, when gold goes back down, as it always does when traders take a profit on the way up, they sell. Pardon my chuckles. So the gold mine has sat for several decades with nobody seemingly interested. But all of a sudden, we’ve had three inquiries about the mine, all from the same general direction…

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