Spring is near, and Glenn has made his annual pilgrimage to visit the almond trees that grow along the northwestern edge of Oakley. The trees may come and go as land use changes and evolves, but the February blossom display remain a colorful constant. Photo by Glenn.
February 27, 2020: This being the shortest month of the year, it is perhaps appropriate that this might also be one of our shorter newsletters. Time gets away from us, life gets busy, and frankly this has been one of the slowest months for family doings in recent memory. Not to mention the fact that we’ve been derelict in our photography duties. So if you were hoping for one of those giant Gehlke galleries to keep you visually focused when our poetic prose doesn’t do the trick, we apologize in advance for letting you down. On with the show…
Ben is rocking his new sweater along with a new hairstyle that includes a blue streak on one side. Time to pose for a selfie. Photo by Glenn.
From the "better late than never" department — also known as the international mail service — Ben finally received the postcard we sent to him from Colombia. A peek at the postmark confirms that it was dispatched on Nov. 29. It reached our mailbox on Feb. 8. Photo by Glenn.
Glenn received some mail himself this month, although in much more timely fashion. These silver rounds caught his eye online, so he bought a few just to enjoy their design. Clockwise from upper left are the Britannia from Great Britain, the Britannia Allegories round from the Germania Mint, an American Eagle, and a Libertad from Mexico. Photo by Glenn.
Valentine's Day means getting sweets for your sweetheart, or in our case ice cream for dinner. Roni's lovely card to Glenn serves as a perfect backdrop to a double scoop treat from Guanatos in Oakley. Photo by Glenn.
The almond trees are in bloom on the Cline vineyard near our home. Time for our annual blossom walk. A wind farm across the San Joaquin River towers above it all. Photo by Glenn.
No matter how many times we take this picture, it never gets old. It's a perfect day, and the white almond blossoms contrast beautifully against a crystal blue sky. Photo by Glenn.
Different blossoms, darker blue sky, yet still just as beautiful. Photo by Glenn.
And here's Glenn, another year older yet still enjoying his time among the blossoming trees. Photo by Glenn.
That's one small step for man, one giant leap to find the owner of this wayward shoe along the rail yard on the former DuPont property. Photo by Glenn.
The eucalyptus grove is making way for a new logistics center that Oakley broke ground on a few weeks ago. Not much has happened yet at the site, but in a year or so from now this rural patch of land will be covered by warehouses. Photo by Glenn.
Here are the blossoms on our own ornamental plum tree — the same one that has been growing in our front yard since before we moved here nearly three decades ago. Photo by Glenn.
The best plants are the ones that take care of themselves, like this vine that started as a small potted plant we bought at Home Depot a few years ago. Hard to believe that we nearly lost it the first month we owned it. It is a sun-loving gem that dies off in the winter and comes back bigger and more beautiful each spring. Photo by Glenn.
Phyre has found his new favorite spot to watch the birds that hang out in the mock orange tree outside our kitchen window. We'd prefer he not be on the counter, but he is persistent. Photo by Glenn.
It's bath time. Hold still while I wash behind your ears, brother. Photo by Roni.
February has always been a transitional month, from a nature standpoint. We’re still officially in winter, but by now it is starting to feel like spring and the plants can’t be stopped from their emergence from dormancy. That also goes for the almond trees that put on their snow white display of perfumed blossoms late in the month. Glenn continued his annual tradition of walking about the former DuPont property near our home to check out the trees and enjoy the solitude of the road less traveled along the mostly unused rail yard. Although this year, it was a little more traveled than on previous visits.
For the first time since the old DuPont chemical manufacturing plant closed in 1998, there’s new construction taking place at the sprawling property. The city of Oakley recently broke ground on a logistics center that will rise on the remediated soils that were once too contaminated to use for anything but growing weeds. Backhoes have been at work recently ripping up old shrubs and trees, and unfortunately taking away much of what gave the fallow property its rural character.
That work is occurring on the western side of the property, adjacent to Bridgehead Road. Fortunately it does not immediately impact the grape vineyards to the east, which once served as a buffer zone between DuPont and nearby neighborhoods, and which today adds visual interest to our community. The railroad property remains isolated from town, which also has turned it into a safe haven for illegal dumpers and homeless encampments.
On the Sunday of his walk, Glenn encountered at least three homeless people living along the DuPont property line. One man had been “taking a nap” in the weeds near the fence, while two others sat together behind one of the remaining small almond trees along the railroad right of way, a collection of pup tents nearby. Suspicious of outsiders, they asked Glenn if he was looking for someone in particular, to which he replied “nope” and continued on his walk.
The homeless and garbage situation aside, the property doesn’t hold the charm it once did. Most of the trees outside the vineyard are gone now, and construction means that soon there will be more warehouses and fences cluttering the view of the Delta and vineyards. Will this be the last of the blossom walks? We’ll have to wait until next year to find out.
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W
E HAVEN'T CONTRACTED the novel coronavirus yet, so far as we know, but our investments sure caught a pretty major case of the virus-fed fear that swept through the markets in late February. And if the spread of the mysterious COVID-19 isn’t enough to make one feel ill, then the sight of $60,000 evaporating from your accounts in a matter of a few days will certainly leave you feeling queasy. Yeah, that happened.
This is really the first major test of our dividend investing strategy that we have faced since we embarked on this adventure about 14 months ago. One week is far too soon to know how everything plays out, and whether this is just a “correction” like some of the financial pundits are saying, or the start of the long predicted bear market and a global recession. But what we are already seeing is a separation of the wheat from the chaff in our portfolio. We aim for a core collection of stocks that have a strong track record and are likely to perform well in the long run — companies like Lockheed, Apple, Visa and Microsoft. But we supplement those with several lesser quality, high-yield investments that provide good cash flow while offering little to no growth. In the worst cases, those investments underperform in good times, and as the proverbial sh*t hit the fan this week, those were the things that sold off hardest.
Not that everything didn’t suffer in some way. It will likely be months before things recover, given the ongoing concerns about global pandemics and the uncertainty of a presidential election cycle, so in the meantime we try not to focus on the big red wave sweeping through our brokerage accounts and instead focus on the major positive aspect of being a dividend investor in a down market: the chance to buy more investments at cheaper prices, for those who have a stockpile of cash at the ready.
That has been our biggest problem lately, in that we hadn’t managed to stockpile very much cash before the sudden downturn. What we do have we’ve gradually been deploying on the stocks we like. We bought more shares of Ryder (R), Carnival Cruise Lines (CCL), Exxon-Mobil (XOM), British Petroleum (BP), Ford (F), Apple Hospitality REIT (APLE), Brookfield Center Coast MLP Energy Fund (CEN) and ALPS Alerian MLP Fund (AMLP). We haven’t begun to calculate the effect these purchases will have on our future income stream, although for now any increase pales in comparison to the capital we have lost. We’re still up from where we started, but this is sort of like getting scalped by the barber when all you needed was a little off the front and sides.
Glenn has been using his options account to place trades on Virgin Galactic (SPCE), which saw a phenomenal run higher between late December and the middle of this month. He made roughly $3,000 selling option premiums during a couple of days, but after one of his puts on SPCE closed in the money he was forced to buy 100 shares of the stock at $35, so now he is selling covered calls against the position with the hope of having those shares called away for a small profit. If not, he’ll probably hold onto them for the long term as Sir Richard Branson’s company figures out how to make money on space tourism.
We’re all hoping March will come in like a lamb and go out like a lion, as far as the stock markets are concerned.
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F
EBRUARY LOOKED MORE like the lion preceding the lamb, when it came to weather. We started out with a fairly major wind storm early in the month that had us fearing for the integrity of our back fence. Wind gusts topping 45 mph battered our property, leading us to wonder if the repairs we had made after a similar storm last fall would hold. The post Glenn had set with nothing more than sand and gravel worked its way to an angle, but the panels it supports held together. Will they survive another similar blast? Probably not, which is why we’ll need to get out and make a better repair this spring.
The gusts also managed to blow several boards out of one of the fence panels separating our property from the neighbors. Making repairs could be as simple as tacking the boards back into place or buying a whole new panel from the home improvement store. The bigger challenge is how to fix it while the neighbor’s huge loudmouth dog is barking its head off at us while we work. Not a fun prospect.
With the weather improving — our groundhog promised us it would be an early spring! — we did manage to get some cleanup done on the back patios, sweeping up more than a year of accumulated wisteria pods, leaves, vines, sand and construction debris. We’ve badly neglected our yard, and each year it becomes more depressing to look at. This year will probably include some sort of major cleanup along with the garage.
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B
EN HAS BEEN having a solid run at work recently, being promoted to “frozen lead” at the grocery store. Basically that means he is in charge of stocking the frozen food section, where he had been doing some occasional fill-in duties along with his various morning shifts working in the deli department and serving as courtesy clerk. This comes as he prepares to celebrate five years of working at the store in March.
It wasn’t all good news for Ben, however, as he had a small incident with his car. While backing out of the driveway one morning, he forgot about the garbage cans down at the curb and accidentally clipped one with the passenger side view mirror. The impact cracked the plastic housing and detached the mirror from its base. He bummed a ride to work that day, fearing it would be illegal for him to drive with a busted mirror. We tried to explain to him that it wasn’t so long ago when side view mirrors were considered optional equipment on most American passenger cars. An inconvenience, maybe, but surely not illegal to drive.
Nevertheless, we patched the damaged mirror back together with popsicle sticks and packing tape while Ben ordered a replacement off of Amazon. It was about a 20-minute repair job once we figured out how to crack open the inside door panel to detach the power cable from the old mirror and unbolt the broken part from the door frame. Although Ben’s car is silver, the new mirror came in basic black. He’s decided not to paint it, so we are dubbing his vehicle the “Raiders car” in honor of the team’s colors — silver and black.
Speaking of football teams, we were all disappointed to watch the San Francisco 49ers fall to the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LIV, held Feb. 2 in Miami. Having just spent a few days in the Sunshine State following our cruise in December, we enjoyed the Latin flare of the halftime performance by Shakira and Jennifer Lopez. Too bad the local team didn’t generate as much excitement in the final quarter of their 31-20 defeat. Maybe we’ll get ‘em next year.
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W
E DON'T OFTEN give animals enough credit for their ability to be as willful as humans when they choose to be. From a very early age, Phoenix and Phyre have challenged us with their desire to use the partition wall between our kitchen and living room as a playground. Or maybe it’s as a battlefield, we can never be sure. This has become more problematic as they have gotten larger and heavier. We now fear for the safety of items they may drop from the counters or the top of the refrigerator.
We know the cats know when they are being bad, because they usually signal us with a meow or a look just before they go bounding up the cabinets fast enough that we can’t stop them, then they sit and stare from us from above — a “ha-ha, you can’t catch me” look. Once Phoenix started using the front of the refrigerator as a slide to come back down, putting scratches on its surface, we knew we needed a stronger deterrent.
Our solution was to purchase a couple rolls of contact shelf paper, the kind with a sticky back that adheres to wood or metal — or cat fur. Hehe. We unfurled the rolls, face down, on the top of the partition wall, and taped the edges to keep the paper in place. Then we sat back to see what would happen.
It didn’t take long before Phoenix made his move, leaping to the top of the cabinets when he was sure we were looking. But boy was he in for a rude shock. He didn’t like the feel of the contact paper on his paws, and so he hunted around for the one place we’d left uncovered, huddling there as if on an island amid a sticky ocean. He tested the top a time or two once we finally covered up everything that remained exposed, and so far he appears to have gotten the message that he isn’t wanted up there.
As for Phyre, he has taken to sitting on the kitchen counter between the stove and the sink, where he likes to watch the birds that flit about the mock orange shrubs just outside the window. Knowing where those paws have been, we’d prefer him to do his bird watching somewhere else, but at least it’s not up above the cabinets or the refrigerator anymore. Now if we could figure out a sneaky way to take the shelf paper and ugly blue masking tape down from there without the cats realizing it’s gone!
