There is an amazing new boat heading out to sea. This isn’t your average boat. You aren’t going to find any plain old Mercury Outboard Parts or Evinrude Parts on this thing. What you will find is a whole lot of plastic. The boat, named Plastiki, is made entirely out of recycled plastic. This eco-friendly boat is going to travel around the world by water to raise awareness about the green issues that we are facing in the world today.

The boat belongs to David Mayer de Rothschild. He is a British environmentalist who has done a lot of work to raise awareness about green issues throughout the world. In 2005 he founded an organization called Adventure Ecology. He has become well-known for the various interesting adventures that he takes with this organization. For example, he spent time with a filmmaking crew in a rain forest in Ecuador to raise awareness about green issues affecting the rain forests there.

This plastic boat is his latest adventure in awareness-raising. He plans to sail it out to a place known as Plastic Island. This is a floating pile of trash that exists in the South Pacific. It’s there because of the waste that we make in this country and he wants people to know about it. Making the boat out of recycled plastic was the icing on the cake of this plan.

So, when my aunt passed away (God rest her soul), I found myself with a small inheritance.  Okay, it was a lot larger than I was expecting, but since I was her only nephew and she had no children, I guess I should have expected it.

Now, I didn’t want the money to waste away in the bank (or in a GIC like my father suggested), so I turned my sights to finding some investment properties in my hometown of Tampa.

Thankfully, there are a number of places that I looked that had plenty of Tampa property for sale, and I proceeded to write down the ones with potential.  I set them aside so that I could crunch numbers to find the true gems.

My favorite part of the whole experience was that I could do the prospecting from the comfort of home before taking up any of my realtor’s time – truth be told, I think he likes it too.

The solution is something called a telecoil. This is a little wire that picks up signals. What happens is that the wire tunes in to the signals that you’re trying to hear and cuts out all of that ambient noise in the background. The result is that you can hear as well in public as in small group settings when you’re wearing your hearing aid.

So how do you get one of these telecoils? Well you may be surprised to know that your hearing aid could already have this built right into it. Look at your hearing aid and see if it offers a setting labeled “T”. If it does then you just need to turn this setting on and you should immediately be able to hear better in large crowds. If not then you can have the telecoil added on to your device.

That opportunity came to me this past spring when I was asked to coach the ten year old boys soccer team.  I couldn’t say no as this was the opportunity that I had been waiting for for most of my life.

But I knew it wasn’t going to be easy as I had no experience managing teams.  I had to depend on the experience and leadership of the team captain to help me out.  Thankfully, Joel was a good leader and I knew that I could count on him to help out.

After getting my head around the whole coaching aspect, it was really easy to coach the boys.  I guess it helped that I was very passionate about soccer and I loved the sport – so that is what I was trying to teach them as well.  Sure, winning is great, but not if you have to give up having fun.

We did very well too – we made it to the state semi-finals.  We all had a blast and I am looking forward to coaching soccer again next spring.

A friend recently gave me a good explanation of this that resonated well with me. He knew that I had recently done a business debt reduction to release my small business of the burden of some of its debt. He pointed out that I would never have done this on my own and that I thought nothing of hiring a debt consulting firm to help me. He compared this to my health and asked why I would do it on my own when there are experts to help us.

I know that this is a very simple idea but it really made sense to me. I tend to think of doctors as a necessary evil but maybe I should think of them as professionals who can help in their areas of expertise. I’m not saying that I should take their advice without question. I wouldn’t take the advice of my debt consultant without question either. But I would solicit that advice and consider it before moving forward and that’s what I’m starting to realize should be done with doctors as well.