Why are we all smiling? Because it's 2023! Finally. We're litterally seconds into the new year and so far it's been smooth sailing. Just 364 days, 23 hours and change to go. Photo by Roni.
January 30, 2023: It has been a mostly calm and soggy start to the new year. Coming off one of the driest years in the history of our state, California has been caught in the middle of atmospheric river storms that began in late December and have in just a few weeks refilled our empty reservoirs to within a few percent of normal levels. The Sierra Nevada has seen record snowfall that bodes well for at least this spring, and there is hope that summer won’t see a return to the severe drought conditions we had in 2022 that resulted in water rationing and some communities running out of water entirely.
It's New Year's Eve, and Roni is making us some treats to while away the final minutes of 2022. She's drizzling white and dark chocolate on popcorn for the perfect mix of salt and sweet. Photo by Glenn.
Oh yes, forgot to mention the pretzels. Yummmmm. Photo by Roni.
Time to drink that spiked eggnog we bought for Christmas but never opened. A little goes a long way with this stuff. Photo by Glenn.
The champagne isn't exactly on ice, but it is on the dining room table. Photo by Glenn.
The countdown to the ball drop is underway. Glenn waits for the exact second to pop the cork on 2023. Ben's just waiting to go to bed. Photo by Roni.
Happy New Year to New York... three hours late. Photo by Glenn.
The old year is over? We'll drink to that, but this might not be enough booze. Photo by Glenn.
It's our New Year's Eve tradition to eat sour cream herring just after midnight. It's supposed to be good luck if it's the first thing you eat. If nothing else, it gives you fish breath before bedtime. Photo by Glenn.
Ben's the first to dig into the herring. Did we say that he was anxious for bedtime? Midnight is a verrrrry late bedtime for Ben these days. Photo by Glenn.
Mmmmm, yep, just like we expected it to taste. Photo by Roni.
We think she likes it. Photo by Glenn.
One more pose for the camera. Look, we're smiling! Let's check back in 12 months and hope we're still smiling. We were smiling at the start of 2022, too. Photo by Glenn.
For the "spare" Christmas bread we decided to break tradition and used colored icing. We were out of green, so we had to make our own from blue and yellow. It sort of all ran together after it was poured. Photo by Glenn.
We had lots of wet weather in January. A flock of turkeys takes advantage of a dry spell between storms to go for a stroll on Big Break Road here in Oakley. Photo by Glenn.
The slough at the edge of Big Break Regional Shoreline is fuller than usual, thanks to days of rain. We weren't yet at king tides, so this level probably rose in the days after the photo was taken. Photo by Glenn.
The Cline grape vineyard across from our subdivision became a lake after a series of atmospheric river rainstorms. Photo by Glenn.
There are coyotes everywhere in Oakley. We've seen them both in our neighborhood and wandering along the Big Break Regional Shoreline, where the park district put up signs warning visitors to their presence. We've crossed paths with them before. Mostly they try to avoid people. Photo by Roni.
The kayak launch at Big Break isn't looking its best. The park district will have to dredge the area this spring before anyone can get out to the water. Photo by Roni.
It's a foggy morning and the water in Big Break is flat and calm. January sees a lot of foggy mornings and evenings here. Photo by Roni.
Alas, a poor western fence lizard appears to have become trapped in the door of our truck during the rain. What a terrible fate... Photo by Glenn.
...False alarm! We opened the door to remove the body and the little guy popped to life, apparently no worse for wear. We have no idea how it got caught in the truck door or how long it had been hanging there by one foot. We let it go in our front yard planter area. Photo by Roni.
We could take this photo at least once a year. Our panel fance has wobbled out of alignment again after yet another fierce wind. Ho hum. Photo by Glenn.
Just a little patch job. Maybe the neighbors won't notice. Photo by Glenn.
If this photo looks familiar, it's because it appeared in last month's newsletter. We're running it again here to demonstrate the powers of Artificial Intelligence — not Glenn's, but rather the software that can turn this... Photo by Glenn.
...Into this. We used the photo above to "influence" the output of the Dream by Wombo software. It's kinda cool, in a creepy, leery sort of way. Image by Dream.
Here's a pic of Ben taken on Christmas Day... Photo by Glenn.
...And this is Dream's interpretation of the Ben photo. We asked the AI to use Ashton Kutcher as a base model for the output. At least we think it was Ashton. It was some hollywood actor, at any rate. Image by Dream.
You can get some very interesting creations from the AI with the right keywords. We asked Dream to use this image of Sean taken during our Christmas gathering and give us a picture of a Scotish man with red hair and a curly red beard wearing a blue plaid shirt... Photo by Glenn.
...The AI software came up with this. Sean might want to consider a new look after seeing this. Image by Dream.
This is not an AI image, it is Ben trying on a blazer at Kohl's as he searches for an outfit to wear to the wedding of two friends in the snowy Sierra. After considering the possibilities, he wound up going with something less dressy and much cheaper. Photo by Glenn.
This would be great business attire around the office, if Glenn had an office to go to. Lecture circuit or book tour, maybe? Photo by Glenn.
This is part of an experiment with trying to cast concrete alphabet characters from silicone molds. The liquid concrete mixture has just been poured, now we have to wait a few days to let it harden. Photo by Glenn.
The results of the first casting are kind of a mixed bag. We took the characters out of the mold at three days, which was too early. A few of the more delicate pieces broke. The numbers are darker because they were just demolded whereas the letters came out a day earlier and have had more time to air dry. Photo by Glenn.
Round two of the alphabet experiment. This time we are spreading out a half-inch thick slab and will be cutting the letters out with cookie cutters. Photo by Glenn.
One week after they were cut from the concrete slab, these characters are dry and ready for use. Photo by Glenn.
Glenn is hard at work on... work. If it isn't obvious, it was a cold day and we had the heater running and still needed to bundle in sweaters and jackets. Phyre almost never hops up on Glenn's lap, which is how cold the cat thought it was. Photo by Roni.
Phyre usually prefers cuddling with Roni. So what if she's losing the blood flow to her feet? Photo by Glenn.
Phyre and his brother Phoenix cuddle up on the TV stand in the living room. Phe is still hanging on. We'd like to think he's getting better, but this is a long, slow process. Photo by Roni.
Ben and his Uncle Sean enjoy their drinks at Skipolini's Pizza in Oakley. Sean dropped by on Friday, Jan. 27, following a day of work up near Sacramento, so we treated him to dinner. Photo by Glenn.
We got to check out a new American food restaurant near us called Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, or WTF. Glenn went for the bleu cheese burger with sweet potato fries. Photo by Roni.
Roni liked her jalapeño burger and garlic fries. The restaurant, located in Driftwood Marina, served generous portions and we had a tough time finishing it all. Photo by Glenn.
They won’t be worried about running out of water in the Central Valley for the foreseeable future, where epic rainfall led to overtopped levees along the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, stranding motorists on tiny islands of asphalt that once were backroads and portions of Highway 99, requiring air rescues in some cases.
We often start the new year with a visit to Cosumnes River Preserve near Galt or some other nature venue to escape the house following the crazy holiday season, but any plans of doing so this year were waylaid by the weather. Storms dumped so much water on the Cosumnes River that it inundated the nature preserve and the road leading to it. In years past we had seen the parking lot at the visitor center converted into a lake by flood waters, but this time the area was part of a vast ocean no one but the birds was able to traverse.
So sorry, we won’t have any wildlife images to share this month. But fortunately the situation was less dire closer to home, even though the East Bay Regional Park District did close the trail through Big Break Regional Shoreline out of an abundance of caution when storms combined with king tides to raise water levels. We’ve never been flooded out in the nearly 32 years we’ve lived in Oakley, but by the way people were hoarding sandbags in our town we worried that this could be the first time. Thankfully the storms have passed and all is well.
Well, almost all. We did get a bit of wind damage that wrecked our side fence for about the 10th time in the past decade, and all the rain managed to expose the various leaks in our roof, doors and windows we didn’t previously know about. You trust that when contractors install something for you that they’ll do the job professionally and free of defects, but that wasn’t the case on our living room window or patio door, where the caulking failed in driving rain and left us with puddles on the window sill and in the slider track for the door. We are, to say the least, very disappointed.
The roof is another matter. We’ve been planning to get the roof replaced for a couple of years now, and it looks like 2023 will be the year it finally happens. We noticed some fairly large damp spots in the drywall above the garage and could actually hear the water dripping in at least three spots during one of the fiercest storms. The gutters in the front yard had rusted out at least six years ago, and although we patched them up with Flex Seal and duct tape, they are far beyond those repairs now. We think April or thereabouts will finally be the time we bring someone in to do the job for us, so time to start saving our pennies and researching prices.
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B
EN WENT TO a wedding this month. No, it wasn’t his, but rather the nuptials of a pair of former coworkers from the grocery store where he works. As Ben himself noted, it was his first wedding since that of his Aunt Jenny and Uncle Tom in 1995, where he was their ring bearer. Needless to say, he was a bit nervous about attending the event and hadn’t a clue of what to wear.
The wedding was being held on a Friday afternoon in Forestville, which is in the Sierra foothills a few miles outside of Auburn. Ben would have loved to be able to make the drive himself, but because of the curvy mountain roads and the prospect of rain or maybe snow, coupled with Ben’s lack of experience driving in such conditions and the distance from home involved, he worked it out with a friend to get a ride there. He wound up sharing the cost for gas.
So with transportation settled, we focused on getting Ben into something more formal than a T-shirt and jeans. Because the wedding would be outdoors. Roni thought he might do well to get a warm sweater and some nice slacks. Not super dressy, but probably plenty for someone not in the wedding party. Glenn went with Ben to Kohl’s a couple of days before the event so they could pick out some things to wear.
Explaining the differences between formal, semi-formal, casual and business casual to someone who has never had to consider such things isn’t easy. For Glenn, who himself has never been a fashion plate, it seemed especially hard. We’d had some informal discussions about dressing for success at work, and while Ben wasn’t especially interested in a suit and tie nor has much practical use for one in his current role, he did sort of see the value in having a nice blazer and pants to wear for nicer occasions like the wedding or some future date night.
At some point we wound up in the men’s section at Kohl’s where Ben tried on a blue blazer that looked pretty snappy on him. While he didn’t exactly fall in love with it, he was poised to buy it until Mom reminded him that the sweater might be the thing he was really after because it would be warmer and certainly more functional in everyday use after the wedding.
So the blazer went back on the rack. And while finding slacks, dress shoes and a nice white shirt to wear proved relatively easy, coming up with a knit sweater was extremely difficult. What we learned is that once Christmas is over, no retailer wants to be stuck with a bunch of sweaters, even the nicer ones, and finding them even on the clearance rack was impossible.
We left Kohl’s empty handed and went to Target before finally winding up at JCPenney, where again the sweater desert loomed. Roni texted us with a catalog image of a sweater JCP allegedly carried but which we saw nowhere on the store’s racks, even after asking a clerk to help us track it down.
At this point we’d been out shopping for four hours and Ben, not wanting to have to go back out the following day, was getting desperate for a workable solution to his outfit needs. He found a thin sweater that indeed looked nice, even if it wasn’t the knit pullover he’d been seeking.
Well, it all worked out in the end. Ben got off to his wedding early Friday afternoon. His friend wasn’t terribly experienced driving in inclement weather either, so his parents decided to rent a car and drive everyone up to Forestville. They arrived a few minutes before the start of the ceremony, spent a bit of time at the social hour afterward, then drove home that evening. Ben got back around 9 p.m., tired but with tales to tell about the experience.
He had taken the time to make the couple’s wedding gift: a painting of the bluff by the ocean where they had proposed to each other. Ben doesn’t paint often, but it was a from-the-heart effort that was fully appreciated by the recipients, who immediately recognized the location.
We hope the wedding experience opens up Ben to the possibilities of other social events in the future. Sometimes it’s tough for young adults of his generation to break out of their comfort zone.
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J
ANUARY AND THE winter weeks that follow are always a good time for craft projects, and we’ve both been working on ours. Fresh off of his concrete creations for Christmas presents, Glenn has been tinkering with some new ideas involving letters and numbers — specifically, casting them to create messages in stone.
Concrete in some ways is like working with modeling clay or Play-Doh while it is still wet. You can cut it, carve it and shape it into two- or three-dimensional objects that can either stand on their own or be incorporated into larger projects, such as benches, tables and birdbaths. Mixed at a ratio of two parts sand to one part cement, it creates a very smooth yet strong bond for a number of craft projects.
Glenn purchased silicone baking molds off of Amazon that are normally used to make candy but are also good for casting plaster, wax and resin. The sand/cement mix is just fine enough to work too, although as Glenn discovered there are some caveats.
The alphabet mold consisted of all 26 characters in a single tray, each approximately 2 inches tall by 0.5 inches thick. The numbers, despite being produced by the same manufacturer, were a bit taller and deeper, so Glenn cast them slightly thinner to compensate. The goal was to produce characters that are all the same depth, as these will later be attached at the back to a concrete slab while it is still wet. Well, that was the theory.
Using a watery slurry of concrete, Glenn filled his molds on a Sunday evening and set them aside to cure. In warm weather months, a thin object such as the letters would take about two days to cure enough so they can be removed from the mold. Given that January is not warm and we were doing the work indoors, Glenn waited an extra day for the concrete to harden. It turns out that a week might have been better.
Despite having sprayed the silicone with mold release agent ahead of time, the green concrete was still very brittle at three days and the thinner characters with delicate curves — “5”, “U”, “R”, “3”, “G”, etc. — mostly broke before they were free of the mold. Waiting a few more days produced better results, but it was enough to convince Glenn that if he wanted to spell anything meaningful that it would be a slow process to cast each character in silicone if he had to wait a week between castings and had just one mold to work with. There needed to be a better way.
So it was back to Amazon, where this time he found a set of letters and numbers made from tin that could be used as cookie cutters. This would produce characters about 2.5 inches tall and half an inch deep. These were thinner than the silicone mold process, but significantly faster as multiple cutouts of the same character could be produced in minutes rather than weeks.
This time the concrete had to be mixed a bit thicker so that it could be spread like cookie dough and still hold its shape when cut. Using the 2:1 sand to cement ratio, Glenn spread out the mixture on a sheet of plastic on a table set up on the front porch and cut out a couple dozen characters with plans to use them later. As this is written six days later, the letters have cured well and could be handled without breakage after just a couple of days despite nighttime temperatures that got into the upper-30s.
You’ll have to wait until later to see what comes of this experiment, but for now Glenn is encouraged by the initial results.
Not to be outdone, Roni has returned to her resin crafts and is starting to experiment with UV-cured resin. This is much different than the traditional method of mixing two-part epoxy and waiting for it to cure over a period of a few days. With UV, the resin can be worked with as necessary until the crafter is happy with the display, then the piece is placed under a UV lamp for a few seconds and instantly hardens. It is sort of like when you get a composite filling at the dentist’s office. They pack a Bondo-like material into the cavity, shape it with their metal tools, and then cure it instantly with a UV light, hard as the original tooth enamel. It’s all very amazing to think about where technology has taken us.
On Jan. 28 we spent some time at Hobby Lobby in Antioch where Roni picked out a whole bunch of silicone molds to make jewelry and hair barrettes, so that will be her first foray into the UV world. We’ll see what creations she comes up with!
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A
RTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, OR AI, is supposed to be all the rage this year, and if you haven’t heard about it already then you undoubtedly soon will. There are some practical applications of the technology already, but so far it is mostly confined to the world of experimental robotics and frivolous things such as gaming and video creation.
Software such as ChatGPT can construct an entire resume or doctoral dissertation with a few simple prompts, or create a product marketing website out of thin air in a matter of seconds without the user needing to know a line of code.
As for us, we’ve been playing with AI’s artistic side via programs such as Dall-E and something called Dream by Wombo. Most of them offer a free version so you can experiment with their capabilities to decide if you want to pay for the full versions, but it’s pretty amazing what you can accomplish with the basics alone.
We created an account on Dream and had it create some “art” based on photos we provided it. You start with a text prompt such as: “A surreal image of a cat wearing a blue hat and sitting on a bench” and the program spits out a random image that is supposed to reflect the input you gave it. If you provide it with a photo, it uses the image to inform the algorithm on how to display the new art it created. We’ve included a couple of examples with this month’s photos.
Glenn saw the potential to use AI images as illustrations for some editorial work in his web producer role at Local News Matters, and his first use of such an image was to create a caricature of California Gov. Gavin Newsom. It looked decent as an illustration, but you’d never want to pass it off as a realistic photo.
As with any new technology there are plenty of legal and ethical questions surrounding its use. Because the AI “learns” from images that already exist in the real world, there are copyright concerns, even if the new work is remixed from several original sources. The artists who created those original works aren’t being compensated, and it devalues the work of human creators if a machine can make something that looks “as good” if not better than the original.
The other concern is the potential for passing off as real things that are clearly fake. As the technology improves, it will become harder to tell what is real and what is not. Who is to say that a great white shark wasn’t really photographed swimming over Yosemite Falls, or that the CEO of a multinational corporation wasn’t caught conspiring with an international terrorist at a Manhattan party?
For now, we’re just having fun with the AI tech and hope we’re not on the way to sentient machines a la the Terminator movies.
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W
HAT A DIFFERENCE a month makes in the investing world. At the end of December we were staring at 52-week lows for several of our stocks as the markets melted down for most of the month. Santa Claus rally? No such thing in 2022.
But with the flip of the calendar to January, it is as though all of the worries and cares of a shrinking economy and rising interest rates are suddenly immaterial. Our accounts have climbed by nearly 10 percent since the start of the year, and while one month does not a whole year make, it appears things are off to a better start and that investors are willing to take some risks once more.
As for us, we remain cash-poor in our taxable account. More so since Jan. 20, when we were forced to buy about $2,300 worth of shares off two unsuccessful put option trades. We acquired the final 200 shares of our Ideanomics (IDEX) trade that began more than a year ago, bringing our total holding to 3,000 shares in the taxable account — likely headed for a reverse split, unfortunately. We also picked up 70 shares of Invesco Mortgage Capital (IVR), which we had optioned in November 2021 prior to a reverse split of that stock, bringing our total holding there to 170 shares worth less than half of what we paid for them. Yeah, ouch. At least the latter pays a quarterly dividend.
We also added shares of Vroom (VRM), Archer Aviation (ACHR) and ChargePoint (CHPT) in Glenn’s IRA — all of which should be considered highly speculative and are being treated as such. They may never amount to anything, or they could explode higher one day. Something that comes with slightly less risk would appear to be the 200 shares of Spirit Airlines (SAVE) that we bought on expectations that the company will be acquired later this year by JetBlue. Under the terms of the unusual deal, JetBlue will pay at least $30 per share for Spirit, which currently trades for under $20. Spirit shareholders already received a cash payment of $2.50 per share for approving the merger (we missed out on that part) and will be paid 10 cents a share each month that the deal isn’t concluded, essentially like a dividend. If the deal falls through because it doesn’t receive federal regulatory approval, Spirit shareholders will receive a breakup fee and still keep their shares. Here’s hoping that the government moves the merer along in speedy fashion.
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A
S FAR AS we’re concerned, football season is officially over. The 49ers fell to the Eagles this past Sunday in the NFC Championship game, ending a 12-game win streak with a 31-7 dud that could probably be attributed to losing their third- and fourth-string quarterbacks to injuries in the same game. Sort of tough to beat the league’s top-seeded team with no one to throw a decent pass.
The defeat was surely felt more by Glenn’s brother Sean, who is a die-hard 49ers fan for the ages. But it might just be a bittersweet footnote to an otherwise successful year of gridiron action, as Sean defeated Glenn for the fourth consecutive year in their annual regular season football game prediction contest, known around here as Gehlke Bros. Football. Ben makes predictions too, and this year he finished second to his uncle, just two games off the pace.
We got to spend some time with Sean on Friday of last week when he stopped by our house on the way home from a business trip near Sacramento. He said it felt like forever since we’d all gotten together for our family Christmas dinner in Hayward just a month earlier. That’s understandable, since Sean spent two weeks touring South Vietnam with his girlfriend Chi in the interim, experiencing the start of the new year from their hotel in Saigon.
He brought us some gifts he’d picked up on the trip, including a lovely painting of a girl with a parasol and a collection totaling 880,000 worth of the country’s various banknotes, called the Vietnamese Dong, amounting to about $38 if converted to U.S. currency. Talk about inflation!
We all went out for pizza at Skipolini’s here in town, happy that there was a table available for us on a Friday night so we could relax and enjoy our talk in the restaurant rather than take our meal to-go back to the house.
That will do it for this month. Now it’s off to wait on the annual appearance of the groundhog to find out if we’ll have a chance to pull the weeds in our backyard in February or need to wait out another six weeks of cold and rainy winter.
