It's a new year and time to clean out the clutter in the Gehlke household. We decided to start by moving our living room bookcase into the master bedroom to give us more space in both places. Roni sorts through the books she is adding to the shelf while Jim Cramer entertains us on YouTube. Photo by Glenn.

Welcome to the Roaring Twenty-Twenties

January 30, 2020: It seems to happen every year. Between Christmas and New Year’s Day, we wake up one morning and realize how cluttered the house feels. Maybe it’s a bit worse this year because the holidays snuck up on us more than usual following our cruise, or we never really did get things cleaned up from our never-ending kitchen overhaul. Whatever the case, Roni lately has been feeling the need to declutter, and so we find ourselves making plans for what is likely to be the Year of the Big Cleanup.


It's January, but bear with us as we recap Christmas because we didn't get to last month. Here's Ben, baking cookies to take with us for our Christmas Day visit to his grandma's house in Hayward. Photo by Glenn.


Roni and Ben enjoyed decorating this gingerbread house together. Glenn enjoyed eating the gingerbread after it was finished. Photo by Glenn.


It wouldn't be Christmas without the baking of the Christmas bread. Based on the chef's own 1-10 scale, this year's production received an 8 for preparation, a 9 for presentation, and a 10 for flavor. Photo by Roni.


Not to be outdone in the holiday baking department, Roni turned in a breakfast winner with her asparagus quiche. As usual, we had way too much food Christmas morning. Photo by Glenn.


After breakfast we like to take a quick family portrait in front of the tree and gifts. This year we managed to get all three of the cats in the photo, even if they were a bit squirmy. Photo by Glenn.


Ben poses with a few of his gifts during our unwrapping ceremony. The scarf is new this year, while the hat he purchased himself during November. It lights up. Photo by Glenn.


Great minds think alike, which is how Ben and Glenn both managed to give Roni copies of the latest Nora Roberts book. At least we still have the receipt to send one back to Amazon. Photo by Glenn.


Just in case there was any doubt, Glenn is a hero. See, it says so on this mug — a gift from Ben. Photo by Roni.


Katy isn't particularly impressed by the Catzilla calendar Roni received as a present. Perhaps the humor hits too close to home for felines. Photo by Glenn.


We've made it to Hayward, where Grandma Gehlke is waiting with a lovely holiday feast. We brought along a Christmas-themed Nothing Bundt Cake to share with the family. Photo by Glenn.


Glenn and Ben dig into the dinner offerings, which were set out on the new island in Grandma Gehlke's remodeled kitchen. Photo by Roni.


If there was any doubt brothers Glenn and Sean are related, look no further than their identical Panama Canal shirts, both purchased during their recent cruise to Central America. No, they did not intentionally coordinate their wardrobes for the gathering. Photo by Roni.


This appears to be the Christmas of duplicates, doubles and twins. Here cousins Ben and Allen show off their respective copies of "Luigi's Mansion 3" during our family gathering in Hayward. Photo by Roni.


We always knew Glenn had a good head on his shoulders. This particular one, which is ceramic, arrived courtesy of Glenn's sister Jenny. It is a replica of one that we originally found in the library at the Elbasani House in Sea Ranch. Photo by Roni.


Jenny provided several great gifts. She thought that Roni might be missing her appendix following surgery to remove it in July, so somehow Jenny found this appendix keyring as a way for Roni to keep the memory of that wonderful day with her wherever she may go! Photo by Glenn.


The world needs grandmas, and thanks to Ben, his now has a plaque to prove it. Photo by Glenn.


It's time for one last goofy family portrait before we say goodnight and head for home. We're missing Grandpa Gehlke, who was in Hemet this year between scheduled visits to the Bay Area. Photo by Roni.


Roni got a new Nikon D5600 camera body for Christmas, so naturally we had to test it out with a trip to Cosumnes River Preserve to hunt for unusual birds. We found more people than wildlife, unfortunately, but at least she had a chance to play with the new gear. Photo by Glenn.


Every good photographer needs an equipment manager, or perhaps it is a caddy. Whatever you want to call it, Glenn well serves the role of beast of burden during our visit to Cosumnes River Preserve. Photo by Roni.


It's time to drop the ball and close the book on the 2010s. We celebrate the start of a brand new decade with
our traditional champagne, sour cream herring and watching the countdown from Times Square. (Photo by Glenn)


New Year's Day marks the end of the holiday season for us. Time to pack away the Christmas decorations and declutter the living room. But first, we take in the spectacle of the Tournament of Roses Parade from Pasadena. Photo by Glenn.


One of Roni's Christmas gifts was this farmer's market sign, which we finally got around to hanging up over the kitchen sink a few days after the start of the new year. It really helps complete the scene. Photo by Glenn.


Another of Roni's gifts was this set of four illustrations of herbs. She bought frames for them, and we hung them in a square along the wall of the entryway into the kitchen. Photo by Glenn.


It's hard to be cold during the winter when you have a pair of foot warmers — and we aren't referring to the ones on Glenn's toes. Phoenix and Phyre are looking for some body heat of their own as they curl up for a nap with Glenn. Photo by Roni.

Mind you, we know things are serious when even Glenn feels the urge to rent a Dumpster and start chucking stuff into it. Not that we’ve done this yet, thanks to winter rains and chill, although the prospects for a busy spring and summer loom large. In fact, this was the main reason why we bought the pickup truck more than a year ago, anticipating the day when we would finally break down for a few quick trips to the county dump.

Yes, the garage is high on our list of “trouble spots.” As we were attempting to put away Christmas decorations and find new places to put empty boxes acquired during gift-giving sessions, we came to realize that there really isn’t anywhere left to pile stuff. It’s just that simple. Short of renting a storage unit, we’ve come to the point where we must decide what is truly important enough to keep and what of those other indispensable items we can dispense of. Where to begin?

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, so someone famously said. Our first step was into the bedroom, where we decided it was time to do something about the old TV stand that has been collecting dust and other things since the last time it held a bulky tube TV nearly a decade ago. It’s a huge, sturdy piece of furniture with a pair of cabinets that were a great place to store old DVDs and video cassettes, which by that alone tells you how long it’s been since we used it. The middle shelves held our DVD recorder (another relic) along with boxes for outdated digital cameras and a couple of MP3 disk players. May old acquaintance be forgot!

We tossed many of the old video cassettes and some old DVDs Glenn had recorded of NASCAR races yet never again watched. We set aside some of the electronics for e-waste. And then we moved that beast of a TV stand into the living room, where it found a new home beneath the window sill near the fireplace. You see, as much as we wanted the TV stand out of our bedroom, we had nowhere to put it in the garage even if we had wanted to, so indoors is where it remains.

There was a method to this seeming madness, however, as now we had freed up space in the bedroom to receive the bookcase that had been in the living room. This nine-cubby unit is slightly longer yet narrower than the TV stand. Roni has loved it as a place to store her favorite romance novels, but unfortunately it didn’t fit comfortably next to our sofa set, which for the past year has been protruding slightly into the short hallway leading to our bedroom. We’ve learned to avoid bumping into it when we walk between the bedroom and living room, but it wasn’t convenient. So we relocated the bookcase into the bedroom where the TV stand had been.

This would have been a simple swap, except that the bookcase is also several inches taller than the TV stand and for this reason didn’t fit under the flat screen TV that we have mounted to the wall. So that meant not just having to remount the screen at a new height, but having to actually take the bracket off the wall, drill new holes, and reattach it to the studs. Once that chore was accomplished, we were able to place the screen back on the wall with justthismuch clearance above the bookcase and below the curio shelf above it.

Despite the effort involved in this furniture move, we are both happy with the result. It has inspired us to do more, and so the next step will be to move the sofa away from the living room wall and place a small table behind it that can serve as a stand for lamps and a recharging station for our USB devices. We realized that as much as we enjoy our sofa set, there is nowhere to leave drinks or plates of food we might not want spilled. Adding the table that we plan to construct ourselves will make the arrangement more functional. Now if we can pick a time to get out to Home Depot and purchase the wood and other materials we need to make the project happen!

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W

E HAVEN'T PROVIDED an update on our investments in a couple of months, being that we were busy with holidays and travel, so now at the start of a new year seems like a good opportunity to take stock of our financial situation, pun intended.

The past year saw the stock market climb to record highs, rising more than 22 percent in the process. Buoyed by the Fed’s efforts to lower interest rates and pump liquidity into the economy, it was pretty tough not to be a winner even with the most conservative of portfolios, and so the stocks we bought in earnest back in January and February of 2019 were mostly higher by the end of December — some substantially. Our goal was to generate roughly $22,500 in dividend income by the end of the year, and we easily surpassed that despite suffering three dividend cuts along the way.

Our best play by far was also one of our worst. Apple (AAPL) tumbled more than 20 percent after we bought it in November 2018, but it came back with a vengeance in the latter months of 2019, and is now closing in on a 50 percent gain in our taxable brokerage account, which means we probably will never sell it unless we want to eat the capital gains tax on it.

On the other side of the aisle is Blue Apron (APRN), which has dropped nearly 80 percent from where we bought it. We are grateful to have kept this a small position, especially after the shares reverse-split and the price hit an all-time low as we write this.

We haven’t bought much recently because of the markets sitting at record highs without a major pullback to make prices more attractive, although that changed somewhat with the coronavirus outbreak in China that has sent jitters through the world financial markets. We took advantage of a brief selloff in travel and leisure stocks to double to 400 shares our position in mall developer PREIT (PEI) and add 80 shares of hotelier Apple Hospitality REIT (APLE). 

We have also been trying to add to some of our dividend payers whose price is close to or below where we originally bought in. One of those is Monmouth Real Estate (MNR), a New Jersey-based industrial property developer that is heavily tied to the fortunes of FedEx, its largest tenant. Given that the package shipping company has stumbled in the past year because of trade tensions with China and a move by Amazon to implement its own distribution system, Monmouth stock has also lagged recently. We added 30 shares of the stock this month, encouraged by Vanguard’s move to finally join the competition and do away with its commissions. And of course there is our faithful energy go-to, AMLP, which we added 100 shares to as natural gas prices remain in the dumps amid oversupply and a warm winter. If you are looking for a good place to invest and have lots of patience, energy stocks are near historic lows and poised for a rebound.

One other buy we made in January is more speculative yet one we are very excited about. We purchased 35 shares of Virgin Galactic (SPCE), which is billionaire Sir Richard Branson’s venture into the fledgling field of commercial space travel. The company had its IPO in October and its stock had lagged until mid-December, when it suddenly started shooting for the stratosphere much like Branson’s plans to take paying customers into space beginning sometime late this year. This is not something we are likely to do ourselves anytime soon, given the $250,000 ticket price, but we’d certainly be excited if one day the stock value ever reaches such lofty realms. Our current portfolio holdings can be found here.

Glenn has been getting more involved in options trading, writing covered calls against several stocks he owns in an effort to wring some extra dollars out of them. It’s a strategy that isn’t for everyone, as admittedly the risks can outweigh the rewards if not done correctly. He’s had plenty of failures along with successes in the first six months he’s been trading options, and now he is trying to “graduate” to level 2 approval at Vanguard, which would also allow him to sell cash-secured puts — a strategy whereby you receive a premium in exchange for committing to buy 100 shares of a stock if it falls below the option strike price. If the option expires above the strike price, you get to keep the premium without having to buy the shares. Pretty simple, except it ties up money in your account to cover your potential share purchase while you wait.

We don’t know what the economy holds in store for the rest of the year, given global tensions and the U.S. election cycle, but we plan to continue making strategic buys as situations develop.

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W

E ALL HAD a great Christmas, despite the fact that it seemed to zip right by this year, thanks to our cruise and time in Florida. Ben got several games and collectibles he wanted, Glenn received a comfy new chair for his computer desk, and Roni scored a new Nikon D5600 camera body to further her photography endeavors. We drove out to our parents’ house in Hayward and spent the afternoon opening gifts and sharing dinner with Glenn’s brother and sister, Jenny’s family, and Mom/Grandma. We missed Grandpa/Dad this time around, as he didn’t make the trip up from Hemet due to the fact he had been in the area in November and planned to return in January to help Mom during her scheduled eye surgery.

We gave Roni’s new camera a test run on Dec. 29 when we drove to the Cosumnes River Preserve south of Elk Grove. The water levels are high there this time of year, and so a lot of ducks, geese and migratory birds can be found in the fields. There is a boardwalk that lets visitors walk out into the marsh for a better view. Unfortunately, weekends are always busy for visitors during the winter, and when you add activities like Ducks In Scopes to the mix, it creates crowds and a lot of commotion that keeps the wildlife from wanting to get close enough to take decent pictures. We will probably try again some weekday when the weather is nicer.

That’s going to wrap it up for this month — a little shorter than usual to make up for last month’s mini book. Meanwhile, we’ll be rooting for the San Francisco 49ers as they make their return to the Super Bowl this weekend against the Kansas City Chiefs. Go Niners!

 

Glenn, Roni and Ben