The older cour cat Katy gets, the more she seems to crave our warmth during the chilly winter months. It matters not whether it is convenient for us, she is particular about her cuddle time and will take any comfortable spot she can find — or create. Photo by Glenn.
January 30, 2021: It’s a new year, our nation has a new leader and a new attitude, and now we’re gonna lick this little virus known as COVID-19. That was so 2020, wasn’t it? So what are we all still doing hunkered down in our homes, told not to go anywhere or do anything because it might spread the pandemic and contribute to filling our hospital emergency rooms that are already stretched to capacity? May old acquaintances be forgot, please!
The new year looks a lot like the old one, as the masked ABC crew broadcasts from Times Square in New York City just before the stroke of midnight. Photo by Glenn.
Our New Year's Eve dining fare includes tiramisu, courtesy of Costco. Photo by Glenn.
The New Year's Day food fest continues with fondue. It's a little lumpy still while we wait for the sterno to do its job and get the cheese to its runny consistency. Photo by Glenn.
Roni is in cleaning and decluttering mode on the first Sunday of the new year. She's got the cabinet cleaned out to reorganize the dish racks. Phoenix has taken advantage of the moment to explore. Photo by Glenn.
Whaddya mean I'm not supposed to be in here? Photo by Roni.
The NFL season is near its end. Time for some playoff action presented as only Nickelodeon could do it to keep the kids entertained — with green slime in the end zone whenever one of the teams scores. New Orleans beat Chicago, but who really cared about the game at this point? Photo by Glenn.
Does it look like we're going to eat our way through January? Skipolini's Pizza has opened in Oakley, which is one of the mostg anticipated events in... well, weeks. We love their pizza, so we had to get one on opening weekend. Photo by Roni.
Skipolini's doesn't only do pizza. These fried raviolis were really good too. Photo by Roni.
Ben is in danger of becoming an Apple fanboy (but don't tell him that!) Here he is unboxing his latest tech toy, a new iPad Air that he semi-impulsively bought from Best Buy so he can use it to enhance his artistic endeavors. Photo by Glenn.
The financial markets have been going nuts this month, with speculative and downtrodden stocks getting bid up to unimaginable levels. This is just a small list of the companies we follow, four of which we actually own. Can you guess the one we don't? (Hint: It's the one trading at three figures that everybody else in the world bought this past week — GameStop.) Photo by Glenn.
We got the cats a new scratching post, but what's got Phyre excited is the little bag of catnip that came with it. We sprinkled some on the base of the post and this was the result. Photo by Roni.
The winds have been vicious this month, and our poor back fences have been punished. We nearly lost several panels on Jan. 27 after a night of battering gusts. We've got more braces in place now than fence boards. Spring will be a big season for repairs. Photo by Glenn.
We close the month with an awe-inspiring photo taken along the Big Break Regional Trail near our home. A barn owl is perched atop a tree, backlit by a full moon surrounded by a halo. The owl just sat there and let us take photos, not seeming the least bit concerned by our presence. Photo by Glenn.
Well, some old acquaintances. We hope you’ll stick around for ours, at least, as we plunge ahead in search of some new adventures or challenges. Something. Anything! Just let’s not have a repeat of the worst of what we’ve seen in the past dozen months, because as much as we all wish for a do-over of 2020, nobody wants to go back there, honestly.
Needless to say, we and millions of others (billions, if you count the rest of the world) were quite excited to watch the ball drop on New Year’s Eve, signaling the turn of the calendar page from dark times to bright. And so we tuned in a full three hours early to see TV coverage of the festivities in New York City, or at least what passed for festivities in this age of masks and social distancing. It was not that we couldn’t wait for our own time zone to enter the new year, but rather out of necessity to allow Ben to celebrate with us before he trundled off to bed in preparation for an early workday the next morning.
We must have tuned to the wrong station, because there was so little fanfare at the stroke of midnight EST you’d think we were watching a golf tournament instead of a raucous, rockin’ sendoff of the old year. “That was it?” we all said in unison. “How disappointing. That was just so… so…”
“Pathetic” is the word we were looking for, and we all hoped afterward that it was not a harbinger of things to come in the succeeding 365 days. Even our champagne bottle seemed to be a fail, as it was a screw-top rather than a cork and didn’t make that satisfying pop as Glenn opened it at the top of the hour. But did it really matter, seeing as how we were three hours ahead of schedule anyway? It was sort of like when parents have young children who need to get off to sleep, so they pretend that it’s midnight with a recording of the celebration before they ship ‘em off to bed. Except that we weren’t fooling anyone in our home and it just felt silly.
Ben appreciated that we moved things up to allow him to join in the moment, even if he was too tired for champagne afterward and Glenn had to rush out the door so he could get in his bi-nightly neighborhood walk before our local illegal fireworks displays and sideshow activity got going. We live in such a lawless little town despite it being one of the safest places in America to live, or some such nonsense.
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AFE, OUR TOWN may be, but it is not safe from the effects of calamitous wind storms like the kind we’ve seen the last few days of the month. You can generally count on at least one good Pacific gale in January, and we actually had two — the first arriving one weekend that howled all night and mostly contributed to a few leaves getting tossed up onto the porch. It was the one that followed a few days later, the night of Jan. 27, that had us more on edge.
With its fierce gusts that topped 40 mph and bone-chilling temperatures, it was a batten-down-the-hatches sort of event that dropped a lot of rain along the coast and snow up in the Sierra. It washed away a portion of Highway 1 near Big Sur, brought mud flows down the denuded slopes of last summer’s wildfire burn zones in Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties, and for us it meant the yearly ritual of crossing our fingers and praying the fence boards stayed in place.
Well, they did, mostly. That is, the boards were still firmly attached to the panels that collapsed in our backyard along the fence we share with the Loud House neighbors to the northwest. We emerged from our home on the chilly Thursday morning after the storm to assess the damage, and wound up making some hasty repairs with a metal stake and length of thick rope that we used to tie up the broken fence post so it wouldn’t blow over into their yard again.
And along the back fence, where problems had developed more recently, the posts were a lot more out of alignment than they had been a few days earlier when we put up a brace on the railroad side in preparation for the latest storm. Our goal hadn’t been for perfection, but rather to keep the fence panels from totally falling over that would have resulted in more damage. Now it looks like we will have our work cut out for us this spring when we try to make some permanent repairs.
But even more than busted fences, our biggest concern these days whenever the wind blows is with the huge pine tree growing in our front yard and leaning precariously on the rain gutter along the bedrooms. We’ve been eyeing it for removal at least the past couple of years, in the meantime watching its trunk list closer to the roof line. The gutter is the only thing right now protecting the house from the crushing force of that 25-year-old tree.
While the tree did not cause any damage in the latest storm, thankfully, it has got us thinking seriously about shopping around for a home equity loan to get it removed and to install a new roof, gutters and perhaps solar panels. But given our current state of semi-retirement and part-time incomes, we aren’t sure about taking on a lot of new debt right now. But if you’re thinking about loans, now might be the best time given interest rates are as cheap as they’ve ever been and might not get much lower if the economy starts to turn around.
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T'S BEEN A fairly snoozy start to the new year, perhaps because our nation is in a state of transition politically and with the state of the pandemic. We’ve been quietly working at home, anticipating the time when we’ll eventually be told it is our turn to receive the COVID vaccination. Ben, being an essential worker, is supposedly one of the first up for his shot. That is if supplies permit; there have been lots of shortages as well as glitches with deployment.
We have just passed the first anniversary of when the first Bay Area case of the virus was reported, at a hospital in Santa Clara County, and a year later we’ve seen more than 100,000 cases in that county alone. Our hospital ICU capacity has only just rebounded from a post-Christmas low of around 5 percent somewhere north of the 15 percent required before our county is allowed to escape the dreaded “purple tier” that is the most restrictive of such activities as indoor dining and public congregations. Just wear your mask, people!
Our investing activity has picked up right where it left off in December, once again with options trades helping to fuel the gains in our accounts. We tallied more than $4,000 in premiums, representing our best month since August as the markets have charged higher since the General Election wrapped up in November. Vanguard continues to extend us more margin credit, and so we have taken advantage of that as much as we dare, anticipating a major market correction in the near future. For the time being, it has been a trader’s market, with money to be made in the right places.
Without a doubt, the best place to have been recently was in GameStop (GME), which saw its share price skyrocket in a matter of days in a massive “short squeeze” that pitted a scrappy bunch of Reddit daytraders against the big Wall Street hedge funds. Millions of dollars were made and lost in minutes. And while we count ourselves among the 99 percent of investors who wish we’d owned a few shares before all this insanity started, we haven’t been directly involved with the mania.
We say “directly” because we do own other stocks that have been affected by the frenzied buying that has driven GME higher. Our AMC theater chain shares have more than tripled this past week, which seemed improbable a few weeks ago when the company was on the brink of bankruptcy. We’ve also seen run-ups on Virgin Galactic (SPCE) and Palantir (PLTR), both of which we own exclusively to trade options around. It remains to be seen the end result of the current madness, but we fear the worst for the overall market — at least in the near term.
Our lone share purchases for January were 60 shares of Umpqua Bank (UMPQ) and 100 shares of Palantir. We are starting to focus on dividend stocks again, so AT&T (T) is also getting a look from us in our taxable account. As always, there are far more things we want to buy than available funds to do so.
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OU MIGHT HAVE noticed that this is a briefer newsletter than usual. Blame it on the fact that we haven’t been getting out much recently, given the weather and the pandemic. But there are buds on the almond trees and early signs that spring is on the way, so perhaps it won’t be long until we have more news (and photos) to share. In the meantime…
Have a good February and see you next time.
