For all the times she may have lamented that no one ever sends her flowers, Roni was up to her eyeballs in petals and blossoms on her 60th birthday. A colorful way to start her seventh decade, even if her allergies protested a bit. Photo by Glenn.
March 30, 2022: Technology marches on — whether or not we choose to march with it — and considering that this is the month of March, what better time to yield to the forces of progress?
The view from the second floor of the Richard E. Arnason Justice Center in Pittsburg isn't too bad on a spring-like afternoon in early March. Glenn is here on jury duty for a two-week misdemeanor criminal trial. Photo by Glenn.
Contra Costa County has just lifted its indoor mask mandate with the start of March, but the courthouse hasn't quite gotten around to removing the signage that says otherwise. Photo by Glenn.
Here's one of Roni's most recent resin creations — an ocean beach scene with waves crashing ashore among the rocks. One of our local landscape supply centers was nice enough to let her take home for free the flagstone chips she used in the project. Photo by Roni.
A delivery of flowers has arrived in honor of Roni's 60th birthday. These are from Glenn's folks in Hayward, although Glenn didn't realize at first because he didn't immediately read the tag. You see, Glenn had ordered his own flowers, so when these arrived while Roni was at work, he thought the florist had goofed on his order! ("This looks nothing like the picture online...") Katy is inspecting the attangement in anticipation of a tasty snack. Photo by Glenn.
We went out to lunch for Roni at a Mexican restaurant in downtown Antioch called Guadalajara Taqueria.We had the place mostly to ourselves on a Wednesday afternoon. Photo by Glenn.
Food's here. Looks pretty tasty. Roni's got the quesadilla while Glenn has ordered the cheese enchilada plate. Photo by Glenn.
Roni's enjoying her birthday so far. Photo by Glenn.
Ah, another bouquet has arrived. Um, that doesn't look like the one Glenn ordered either, probably because it was actually a gift from her sister Jacki. This one also included a sampler of chocolates. Yummy. Photo by Glenn.
Wait, what's this? Finally! Glenn was getting a bit concerned about the flowers because he'd placed the order late the night before. But Good Scents Flowers in Oakley came through. Photo by Ring.
Actually, this arrangement served double duty as a birthday/anniversary bouquet. Roni reads the included message from her hubby. Photo by Glenn.
Normally Roni would have ordered an ice cream cake for her birthday, but she wanted to be different this year, given the milestone event, so we ordered a bunch of cupcakes, cookies and bars from RiverTown Sweets in downtown Antioch. Photo by Glenn.
It may not be a typical birthday cake, but if it fits on a cake pedestal and you can put candles on it, it still counts. Photo by Glenn.
One of the gifts Roni received was this zen fountain to use on the desk in her home office. The fountain has LED lights that change color while it's on. Photo by Glenn.
Or maybe it's just a fancy cat fountain. Phoenix doesn't even care about the LED lights. Photo by Glenn.
Our yard hasn't been looking its best lately, given that neither of us spends much time in it. But spring makes even the weeds look beautiful for a short time. Roni uses a lazy Sunday to water the flowers, which have survived despite the lack of attention from us. Photo by Glenn.
The wisteria vine on the BAP pergola got a few blooms this month, but it is clearly not loving the lack of rainfall from Mother Nature this winter. Photo by Glenn.
It was 34 years ago, on March 26, 1988, that we became husband and wife at a Presbyterian church in Hayward. Where has the time gone? Photo collage by Roni.
We went to Papa Chen's Chinese restaurant in Brentwood for our anniversary lunch. Glenn ordered the Yu Shiang chicken with garlic noodles. Photo by Roni.
We'd been checking out YouTube TV on a free trial when we got a hankering for ice cream. We got our treats from Polar Bear Ice Cream in town and brought the home to resume our TV watching. Phe appears to be more interested in the bear on the side of the cup. Photo by Glenn.
We bought the cats a new scratching post. For whatever reason, Phe likes to attack it from the top rather than the side. Or maybe he's perfecting his pole dancing technique. Photo by Roni.
A couple of furry sunworshippers enjoy the afternoon rays by the bedroom window. They have to conserve their energy so they can chase each other around the house come nightfall. Photo by Glenn.
Our cable bill has been a sore spot with us for years. No matter what measures we take in an attempt to rein in the ever spiraling costs in January, we inevitably find ourselves right back where we started and usually worse than that by December. We’ve gradually whittled our service down from a super deluxe package with multiple sports packages and movieplexes to just our local broadcast stations and a handful of standard bundled cable offerings, yet still we found ourselves paying more than $215 monthly to Xfinity once we threw in our mid-tier internet service.
Like unfaithful lovers, this toxic relationship had us casting our wandering eyes upon more attractive suitors, but we were never daring enough to have an affair until we met YouTube TV.
It began as an innocent flirtation. YouTube TV came on to us with a too-good-to-pass-up offer of a 14-day free trial. It offered 89 channels with an easily customizable menu and an app where we could quickly modify the settings. It had our local broadcast channels. It had a DVR with unlimited storage for shows we would want to record. It didn’t require a contract. All it asked was for a streaming device and a credit card number (just in case we wanted to make a lasting commitment.) We fell in love.
We took YouTube TV up on the free trial on March 13, just to see how we liked it, and at no time during the two weeks did we touch our cable controller. We’d known there would be a couple of stations we would no longer be able to see if we dumped cable, such as ION and NBC Sports Network, both of which we watched regularly. But YouTube TV offered some suitable replacements in addition to some old favorites we’d abandoned from cable years ago to save money — Discovery with all its affiliated offerings (History Channel, Smithsonian, Animal Planet, etc.), NFL Network, Hallmark Movies & Mysteries, Sundance Channel and more. And while YouTube TV still has its share of Spanish language stations we don’t need, it isn’t cluttered up with all the Korean, Hindi, Chinese and similar international stations. If we still had little kids, there would also be a lot to love in its lineup of Disney, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and PBS Kids. If we were super into sports, in addition to the NFL Network there are also included stations for the NBA, Major League Baseball, multiple ESPN offerings, and college networks.
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UR TRIAL PERIOD convinced us, as did the monthly $10 discount for our first three months on YouTube TV. So for our wedding anniversary on March 26, we gave ourselves a mutual present and dropped in at the Xfinity store over in Streets of Brentwood. We were officially breaking up — with cable.
They didn’t even raise an eyebrow when Roni informed the woman at the check-in counter we were canceling our cable service. And after 31 years, at that. Maybe it was because we were also there to exchange our broadband modem, so they knew they weren’t totally losing us, or perhaps this is the enlightened new approach by management to not give the hard sell lest they piss off the customer and lose them entirely — as used to happen, from what we had heard about dealing with their customer service. (Cancel? What is this cancel you speak of?)
While we later spoke with an associate on the phone helping us with the modem exchange, we were told at least a dozen times what “awesome” customers we are, having been with them since 1991. They even let us know about some great free deals we could get because we are so amazing. Yeah. A bit of desperation, perhaps?
In any event, we are now officially cord-cutters with nothing but our streaming channels and a box full of memories in the form of paid, pricy cable bills from decades gone by.
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F COURSE THIS switch to the brave new world of streaming television meant some other changes as well. Namely, we needed internet-enabled televisions to receive the content. We’d had Apple TV hooked up to the living room set for a couple of years, and an aging Apple device in the bedroom that had mostly outlived its useful life.
So for Roni’s birthday, in addition to other gifts, Glenn got her an Amazon Fire TV Stick with the idea that it could be used on the bedroom TV. Roni had other plans for it, however, and so we wound up connecting it instead to the living room set in place of the Apple TV box, which in turn got relocated to the bedroom to replace its predecessor. Roni probably wouldn’t have cared except that the small remote Apple provides is slippery and “touchy” when it comes to the controls; often we wound up accidentally pausing playback when it would slip from our hand or the cats would sit on it. The Fire TV Stick, in addition to being significantly cheaper than the Apple TV device, has a remote with a control button that gives a solid “click” when you depress it, so it is much more difficult to accidentally slip around while browsing the menus.
We’ve been enjoying the new setup a lot, so far. The Fire Stick comes with apps galore — so many, in fact, that we have yet to sift through all the free programming they offer us. There’s Tubi, PlutoTV, IMDb, Crackle… just for starters. We found streaming feeds for all the major network news programming, as well as live feeds for regional TV news stations in major cities from Atlanta to Detroit to Seattle to New York. Roni has been checking out the free offerings on Amazon Prime, which we already had access to but rarely watched because we didn’t have a convenient way to view them on the big screen. Glenn discovered this channel called getTV that plays reruns of a lot of the ‘70s sitcoms he grew up with, including “All in the Family,” “Sanford and Son,” and “Good Times.”
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OOD TIMES WOULD not be an accurate description for what’s been happening in the economy of late. Rampant inflation and fears surrounding it have contributed to epic food, gas and energy prices while our investments continue to be in turmoil. Although our taxable account took another hit this month, it appears that the market selloff may have hit bottom on March 14 — unfortunately the same day Glenn optioned 300 shares of Apple (AAPL) stock at its low.
What that means is that we’re under contract to sell those shares for $150 each if the stock price is higher than that by April 8, and as of this writing it is just below its all-time high after a relentless rebound. So while that part is good news for an account that has seen more than its share of declines since November, it also means we may soon have to sell more of an investment that has outperformed the general markets these past three years. Still, no one ever lost money selling for more than they bought it for, and that would be the case with Apple. The real question would become what happens next with the proceeds we would make from any sale. However, being too chicken to lose so many shares at once, Glenn repurchased two of the three option contracts within two weeks after he sold them, so currently he’s on the hook for 100 shares, which would leave us with another 300 if we are forced to sell.
The drop in the taxable account is a double-edged sword, because not only do we lose money when the market price declines, but we also lose equity that secures the value of open short positions also held in the account. Those shorts are represented by put options that were sold weeks and months ago and which have been rising in value while the market has sold off. Rising short interest plus falling equity equals a bad combination. We’ve been forced to raise more cash, so we recently sold our entire municipal bond portfolio (XMPT) which has also been tanking in the face of higher interest rates.
We don’t know where things are headed in the coming weeks, but if the markets have hit bottom then there is hope volatility might subside and eventually we can “safely” redeploy some cash in our trading account. It would be nice to be able to recover some of our losses, but as things stand it looks like we won’t have any income to declare on this account for next tax season.
The situation is vastly different in our unleveraged retirement accounts, where we recently bought 25 shares of Walt Disney Co. (DIS) in Roni’s IRA and one share of Alphabet (GOOG) in Glenn’s IRA to take advantage of its upcoming 20-for-1 stock split. We also picked up 100 shares of Vroom (VRM) with an October option to buy more if it stays below $5. Glenn’s account also will have some more money to deploy thanks to a corporate buyout of Monmouth Realty (MNR) at the end of February. A disappointment because it was a strong dividend payer, but good news in that there are many stocks on sale right now and having the cash is a good thing.
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OMEONE IN THE county superior court system appears to like us, as Glenn and now Ben have both been summoned to jury duty. Ben was able to opt out from a potential date in the jury box in Richmond, but Glenn was not so fortunate with his juror appearance in Pittsburg that began Feb. 23 and concluded March 10.
Glenn’s case involved a pair of criminal misdemeanor incidents that occurred in October 2018. A man in his 30s was observed by a passerby engaging in lewd behavior in his car while watching kids at recess outside an elementary school in Lafayette. The passerby reported the incident to police, and they caught the suspect nearby. The cops linked the case to a similar one in Walnut Creek that had occurred a few days earlier, in which a male driver pulled up to a 12-year-old girl waiting for a ride home from school and exposed himself to her. The girl picked the suspect out of a police photo lineup, who happened to be the same guy from the Lafayette incident.
It might sound like an open and shut case, but there were many inconsistencies in the witness testimony and the way the police investigations were conducted that left the jury unable to come to a unanimous decision. In the end, the judge declared a mistrial on all three counts the defendant faced, and so Glenn’s second-ever jury trial concluded with many unanswered questions. Had they just freed a guilty man? He’s got his own suspicions, but the only opinion that matters is that of the court, and we’re all innocent until proven guilty under the eyes of the law. But it’s hard not to feel bad for the Walnut Creek girl who got victimized twice — once by whoever it was that flashed her and again by the criminal justice system.
Now Roni is holding her breath that she isn’t the next one called to fulfill her civic duty. With gas creeping up on $6 a gallon right now, having to commute to court for several days would be a money-losing proposition even if it didn’t involve taking time away from a full-time job.
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ONI CELEBRATED A major milestone birthday this month when she hit the big 6-0. Normally a fan of ice cream cakes, she decided to be different this time and used the occasion to check out RiverTown Sweets in downtown Antioch. It’s hard to find a really good bakery in our area, but this place did a great job with a variety of confections ranging from cupcakes to cookies and bars. It was so tough choosing from all the offerings that we wound up buying a half dozen cupcakes, three cookies and at least four of the bars so that we could take them home and share with Ben.
Glenn did something out of character and ordered a flower arrangement to have delivered on her birthday. But apparently others in the family had the same idea, because we had a trio of florists visit our doorstep throughout the day. Glenn’s folks and Roni’s sister Jacki all contributed to the display that accumulated in our living room throughout the day. The flowers have continued to brighten our home for the week since they arrived.
We ordered takeout from Nick the Greek for dinner that night before diving into bakery goods and presents. In addition to the Fire Stick TV, Roni also received items to use in her resin crafting, spinning wind toys to display in our front yard, and an Amazon Echo Auto… because you need one in your car at least as much as you need one in your home.
One gift Roni did not receive was the completed fireplace update we’ve been working on these past four months. The tile work is finished, with grout applied to all the joints. Glenn has been slowly working up to installing the electrical wiring, but there is no timetable currently to finish things. We’ll just have to play it by ear and be as surprised as you will be when it is finally finished.
That’s going to do it for March. Hope you can take advantage of our lovely spring weather and get outside to enjoy the world.
