DIGging those succulents

And then there’s us.

By now we would be checking out the local U-picks and gearing up for fairs and festivals, mainly because Roni would be involved with operating information booths at them for one cause or another. But in the months we have become mostly home bodies during the pandemic, our focus has been much more on home improvement activities than travel, and so it has been that our desire to have a thriving yard has taken priority.

But in California, the desire for a thriving yard often confronts the reality of there being no water to maintain it, and so what once was a semi-attractive backyard oasis during the springtime has been reduced to a tangle of sand and stickers, with weeds being the only thing one can depend on to grow without any human intervention. So clearly this is not the time to go planting lush lawns or flowering trees that need constant hydration.

Lately we have been looking at succulents, which are about the easiest-to-care-for plants you’ll ever meet. They don’t need much water, and they don’t look half bad when used as ground cover, slowly growing and spreading to occupy their surroundings. But they aren’t exactly cheap, and maybe that’s because the home improvement stores have caught on to their rising popularity and can now charge fifteen bucks for a teeny plant in a gallon bucket.

So it was quite the great find when we learned the Delta Informal Gardeners (or DIG, as they are known around here) were hosting their annual plant sale this month in Brentwood. The gardening club has been around for decades, and in fact we occasionally attended their sales when they were held downtown beneath the city’s famed water tower back in the early 1990s. Those events have grown in popularity through the years along with the community, and so they eventually outgrew that tiny venue.

Now DIG sets up at Wolfe Ranch on Creek Road in the somewhat still rural part of town. We say somewhat, because the winding, narrow road to the ranch is bounded by newer subdivisions that are completely out of step with Brentwood’s agricultural roots. And when you get an event like the plant sale, the road is totally inadequate to handle the little traffic jam it creates.

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ONI WANTED TO get to the plant sale early in the day. But our version of early these days is anything before 1 p.m. So we weren’t first through the gate when the sale began, but there were still plenty of bargains to be found if one likes succulents (which we do!) and geraniums. (How do you know you’re getting old? When your backyard starts looking like a geranium farm.)

Well, Roni quickly found a few plants she liked, and then we wandered over to a table near the back of the yard where the club was selling basket arrangements of succulents for pretty decent prices. We’re talking pots and other objects filled with the little plants, all very healthy looking specimens. We honed in on one basket in particular that seemed to be overflowing with sedum that had been marked down from $40 to just $25, mainly because the cheap green plastic pot it came in was cracked and brittle. We could overlook that for getting the arrangement it contained at such a great price, and so Glenn got one of the little wagons from the checkstand and we loaded the basket onto it.

Having a cart provides a great excuse for buying more stuff, and so by the time we reached the checkstand we had acquired almost $60 worth of succulents, geraniums and an oleander. Not that we need more oleanders in a yard that is already filled with them, but when you don’t possess a green thumb you stick with what works.

And because the first rule of home improvement is that every project leads to another project, our purchase of plants soon had us visiting Home Depot and Brentwood Decorative Rock in search of other landscaping supplies. Roni has been tackling much of the yard work on her own lately, and she has a plan for how to eliminate the weeds that involves more plants in pots and more rocks to place over barren soil where squirrels and gophers now dare to raise their furry heads.

We bought small- to medium-sized boulders from the rock place, and two dozen bricks, dirt and chicken wire from the home store that Roni used to make a planter bed in the front yard on what used to be our circle of lawn around the bird bath. There’s still a long way to go, but she’s determined to accomplish as much as possible before the weather gets too hot.

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AVE THE FINANCIAL markets finally bottomed? That’s the question we seem to ask every month this year, but there is recent evidence to suggest we may be at a turning point, if perhaps a temporary one. You might be familiar with the saying, “Sell in May, go away.” Well, it seems a lot of people did just that, selling their stocks this month as we watched a lot of our money go away.

Yes, sadly, May brought another month of carnage in our various accounts, but none as profound as in our taxable brokerage/trading account, which since its peak in early November is now down by about 50 percent. And while many are looking to “buy the dip” with some quality companies trading at fire sale discounts, we have been caught in a vicious cycle of declining equity and forced liquidations to avoid the ever present threat of margin calls.

May 10 perhaps was a watershed moment. Taking stock of his stocks — or more specifically, his devastated options positions — Glenn blew through $30,000 to close a vast majority of his open put options that were continuing to take on water as market indexes declined. He sold off the entirety of his closed-end dividend fund, NCZ, which had fallen to a new 52-week low, to help finance the trades.

Where does that leave us? Of course you never know for sure in a bear market that can surprise to the upside as easily as the downside. But for now, the financial stability of the trading account has vastly improved without the continued weight of margin debt that wasn’t likely going away on its own anytime soon. Which is a good thing, because May was expensive in other ways that involved actually having to purchase shares.

Failed option trades resulted in the purchase of 100 shares each of Columbia Banking System (COLB), Macy’s (M), and Eargo (EAR), the latter two of which were assigned to us prematurely with weeks to go on the contracts. We voluntarily added 80 shares of QYLD in separate purchases during the course of the month, bringing our total to 700 shares since we began buying the fund in March 2020. It’s not a good choice for long term appreciation, but it is an excellent source of monthly income and one of our favorite holdings — or perhaps more accurately, one of the holdings we have left.

With the markets rallying into Memorial Day weekend, a bit of optimism after half a year of despair seems well deserved, but with domestic and geopolitical headwinds remaining in the form of war, high energy prices, rising interest rates, inflation, a wobbly real estate market, midterm elections, and growing talk of a major recession with accompanying job losses, it would be naive to think there won’t be more volatile days to come — and for those, we hope to be ready with a bit of investable cash when they occur.

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E GOT A couple of big surprises when it came to filing taxes this year. Make that three surprises. Because of Glenn’s heavy involvement in options trading during 2021 that resulted in not insignificant gains, we had been bracing for a major tax bite this April. In fact, it has been a major source of stress through the recent market collapse as we fretted over both how much it might cost and how we would come up with the money to pay for it from investments that have been so devastated.

So it was much to our relief when our tax preparation software showed not a deficit, but a refund — a somewhat significant one, made more so by a variety of COVID-related tax credits that included an additional $1,400 in stimulus payments it said we were entitled to. How could that be? Uncle Sam had given us so much throughout the pandemic that we’d lost count of it all, but if he wanted to give us more then who were we to complain? We mailed in our Form 1040 and eagerly anticipated the money that was about to flow into our bank account.

Well, surprise! Our hearts filled with dread the day we received an official envelope from the IRS concerning our return. Were we being audited? But upon further inspection, the letter informed us we were getting a refund — just not the one we expected. As it turned out, it said we had made an error in claiming the additional $1,400 stimulus credit, so what the government had given it would now be taking away. Curious.

Not wanting to throw away $1,400 that might be due us, we checked our bank statements and discovered that we actually had received the money way back at the start of last year. It was part of a $2,800 deposit that included $1,400 for each of us. Yet when it came time to prepare our taxes, we could only find one letter from the government addressed to Roni verifying our receipt of the payment. Because we file jointly, we thought that letter covered both of us, and so the tax software assumed we had only received half of our stimulus money.

So while we had hoped the error would be in our favor, ultimately it appears the government number crunchers know what they are doing and made the right call. What it means is that we will still enjoy a nice refund for 2021, but it might put a damper on any lavish vacation plans this summer!

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E CELEBRATED BEN'S 28th birthday on May 2 with a party so subdued that had it not been for presents, you might have mistaken it for a normal day around our home. To that end, he actually put in a full shift of work at the grocery store before coming home for the evening meal in his honor.

He decided he didn’t want an ice cream cake this time, so we picked up a conventional cake from Nothing Bundt Cakes in Brentwood and bought him a pint of his favorite ice cream on the side. He has been flexing his artistic muscle with traditional media lately, so many of his gifts were art-related, including a portfolio that contained an easel, paints, brushes and some small canvases he can take outdoors if the inspiration strikes him.

In an effort to provide some variety, we added some oil-based paints and several more canvases in different sizes, as well as a large package of brushes. Ben says he guesses he’ll have to create some paintings now. We’re eager to see what he produces.

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E HAD A bit of excitement over Mother’s Day weekend, and it had nothing to do with celebrating moms. On Saturday the 7th, a day after one of our noisy neighbors’ wild parties, we were enjoying the relative calm of the weekend when Roni saw what appeared to be a person with a backpack wandering through our backyard. What’s more, this person stopped to test the handle on our dining room patio door before moving on.

Rattled, Roni asked Glenn, who had been asleep in the bedroom at the time, if he had seen what she had. No, he said, and of course it was because his eyes were closed and the curtain was too, or else he might have not thought that her sighting was merely the giant crow that occasionally visits our fountain for a sip of stagnant water.

By the time Glenn had woken up enough to make sense of the situation, the unwelcome visitor had disappeared. We poked our heads out into the rear yard and saw nothing but weeds. Then we looked across the fence to the home of our other neighbors, the Sanchez family, and saw the husband Ramon looking over his fence out to the railroad tracks. Not only had he also seen the phantom dude, but the guy had apparently tried to open their back doors as well.

And it was at this moment that we became thankful for having purchased locks on our sliding doors as well as the fact the doors actually had been locked on this particular afternoon.

While we were sorting things out and comparing notes with our neighbor in the backyard, Ben was at the front door answering the knock from Oakley police Officer County who was going through the neighborhood with other cops looking for whoever this person was. While Ben was talking with him, the officer got a call over his radio that the suspect had been apprehended. What a relief.

We don’t know what the guy was wanted for or where he had committed his crime, but we shudder to think what might have happened had he found his way inside our house with us in it. We’ve gotten pretty complacent about our surroundings in this neighborhood, but this was a wake-up call that this isn’t the sleepy rural town we moved to 31 years ago. These days we’ve got characters that loiter in their vehicles smoking pot, stealing mail and catalytic converters, spin doughnuts at every intersection and race through the residential streets with their obnoxiously loud vehicles. We’ve got a marijuana dispensary a little more than a mile up the road from us in Antioch. The once vacant lot that used to be the DuPont property is a haven for homeless encampments and is being redeveloped into Amazon distribution warehouses. Our “quiet” corner now sees about double the traffic it used to. In short, we’re getting more urbanized.

Another indicator… graffiti. We rarely if ever were affected by taggers here on our corner of the subdivision, but that changed about a decade ago when our back fence got hit for the first time. We were quick to power wash away the paint back then, but that wasn’t so easy the second time less than a year or so later because the homeowners group here had decided to paint all the fences in a beautification effort, bless their hearts. So on that second incident, we had to rely on someone painting it over with a more-or-less approximate match of the chosen shade of brown.

Our latest graffiti incident occurred sometime in the past month. We were returning home from the grocery store to discover that someone had hit a couple of our fence panels with yellow and blue spray paint. We didn’t race out to clean it up, and a couple of days later some little cretin added to the display. So as of this writing we are trying to decide whether to paint over the mess ourselves or call in the city’s graffiti abatement folks to do it for us. That is, assuming there is such a department anymore.   

Looks like that’s going to do it for this month. We’re off in search of new adventures as we head into June. Peace out.

 

Glenn, Roni and Ben