Bug off

The year 2020 is already halfway behind us (thank heavens!), and if it is one day remembered for anything at all, it will probably be the summer of plague and pestilence. Or in our case, just pests. Last month, we made the unfortunate discovery that our property had become a sanctuary for a neighborhood cockroach family. Perhaps more than one family. Hot, dry conditions combined with accumulated plant debris in our yard created ideal circumstances for the insects to venture up onto our front porch and make their way indoors.

At first we feared that the roaches might be living in our walls. We — or rather, the cats — had found a half dozen of them over the course of a few weeks scurrying through our living room and into the kitchen and laundry room. We immediately bought baits and glue traps, then closed off a hole in the wall between the living room and garage that served as a ventilation duct for the central heating unit we never use. Because Glenn had already found a large roach in the garage, we decided the next step needed to involve cleaning the space of the junk we’d piled up in there over the years.

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HE GARAGE CLEANUP is, frankly, something we’ve been doing our best to avoid for at least the past five years. Before our cruise in November, Glenn took all the construction tools and materials that had been taking up space in the backyard and piled everything into the garage, not considering that the saws might have attracted bugs to nest inside their frames while outdoors. Were those tools the source of our roach problem? As of now, we aren’t so sure, but having things jumbled together in the garage certainly gave pests more places to hide, so we spent the better part of a Sunday breaking down boxes and disposing of miscellaneous clutter that we vowed to take to the dump.

The goal was to move objects away from the walls so we could spray pesticides and place baits. But sifting through mountains of clutter that took years to accrue isn’t easily done in a weekend, and so we only got about halfway down the porch-side wall when we decided to call it a day, just a couple of small baits placed and a few squirts of bug spray.

Clearly this effort was not going to solve our problem, especially since we had sprayed pesticide along the outer edges of the front porch the previous night and came outside the following morning to find more than a dozen large roach carcases scattered about the entryway. So we set aside the garage for the time being to focus on the entryway, which is much more accessible.

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E DROVE OVER to ACE Hardware in town and combed the gardening aisle for something potent enough to control any sort of insect infestation. Ants, roaches, fleas, spiders, bedbugs, ticks, pets, people… yeah, they cover all the bases with these products, so naturally we didn’t want to overdo the harsh chemicals. What we turned to — at least for now — is a natural product called diatomaceous earth. You probably are more familiar with it as silica gel, as it is commonly used as a desiccant to remove moisture from pill bottles and packaged electronic products. It is this quality that makes it an awesome weapon in the war on insects, as it dehydrates them to their demise.

Of course the problem with the dehydration method is that death isn’t instantaneous. Contrary to their image in our culture, roaches are fairly fastidious insects. They clean their bodies thoroughly and frequently, and in the case of diatomaceous earth they will ingest the white powder which will kill them from the inside out. They take it back to their nest and spread it to the rest of the colony, which in turn kills future generations as well.

But being the impatient-for-results folks we tend to be in such matters, we hedged our bets by scattering the silica along the edges of the foundation and then added baits and pesticide spray to see what we’d get. For the next week we made nightly checks of the front yard, trying not to be shocked when we saw another dozen roaches here and there, scampering along the driveway or the edge of the garage door. More of the white powder. More bug spray. More waiting and watching.

By now we are convinced that something we tried is working, because the number of new bugs we’ve uncovered has plummeted. Those we do discover tend to be crispy critters, coated in white powder and lying on their backs with their little legs pointed upward to bug heaven. But we aren’t completely satisfied and won’t be until we can open our doors again at night without fear of them getting through.

In fact, we’ve taken to closing the front door and the two patio doors after 7 p.m., before the sun sets and it is prime time for creepy crawlers. This has been problematic with summer weather upon us, as we don’t use air conditioning and keeping the house shut up is no fun when the indoor temperature tops 90 degrees. We have even adopted AC/DC’s “Night Prowler” as our theme song to remind us when it’s time to go on our nightly lockdown. But we hope this situation won’t last too long; we’ve seen just one roach in the house since our eradication effort began a month ago. Fingers crossed…

But while the roach situation may be getting under control, ants are another matter. We’ve been under siege from the little black armies for years, but this year has been one of the worst in recent memory. They are in our master bathroom and bedroom, as well as the kitchen and the living room fireplace. We hoped that by spreading the diatomaceous earth around the perimeter of the house that it would take out some of the ant activity as well as the roaches, but so far it seems to have done little.

The cats’ food dishes seem to be the preferred target of these almost daily invasions. It is hard enough to get our pets to eat under normal conditions, but they will have nothing to do with a bowl full of food overrun by ants, and who could blame them? We also have a problem with sugar ants, which are the nearly microscopic cousins of Argentine ants but equally voracious. They have unfortunately been invading our kitchen from beneath the floor, finding the tiniest gaps in the flooring planks to pop up and raid the cat food and other things such as dropped nuts. We saw them reduce a wayward almond to nothing but the husk overnight. Little pests.

Is it because of our hot, dry weather this year that we are facing so many infestations? Or maybe there’s more to the coronavirus pandemic than we understand. Are the aliens waiting to take over? Or maybe it’s the Russians — we seem to blame everything else on them these days, so it is at least partly plausible. Our struggle is real.

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OW THAT WE'VE been under COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders for more than 100 days here in the Bay Area, we begin to realize how much we miss the little pleasures of life before the pandemic began. Simple acts like eating out at a restaurant, watching a movie in the theater, shopping at the mall… or getting a haircut.

We had no idea how desperate we’d be to get a trim by now. Given that our last visit to Designer Cuts was in early February, it had been more than four months since Roni had gotten her hair colored or Glenn had seen himself without hair covering his ears. So when the state allowed hair salons to reopen in the middle of June, Roni wasted no time booking our appointments. Because of high demand, we had to wait 10 days to get in, and Glenn periodically announced the countdown — in hours and minutes — while he waited anxiously.

Our appointment arrived at 10:45 a.m. on Friday, June 19. We had an appointment, but not everyone showing up did. One young mother and her little boy nearly shoved us out of the way so they could get their names on the day’s waiting list. A lot has changed since our previous visit. Gone is the waiting area with its box of toys and magazines; health regulations require customers to wait in their vehicle until called in. Plastic curtains have been strung up between each stylist station, and every customer gets a forehead temperature scan to make sure they aren’t running a fever — a possible symptom of COVID-19. And of course everyone has to wear a face mask.

We didn’t want to risk getting hair clippings in our “good” cloth masks, so Roni bought a box of disposable paper ones to take to the appointment. We wondered how easy it would be for the stylist to work around elastic bands strapped over our ears, and apparently it isn’t — Glenn had to undo his straps and hold the mask over his mouth and nose with one hand while the stylist worked, which meant coming away with very hairy arms. And of course the price went up by $4, but we can’t hold it against them too much since it has been at least a decade since the last increase and a decent haircut is worth its weight in gold, or highly inflated currency. At least we feel human again with shorter and uniformly colored hair.

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HAT GOES UP eventually comes down, and such has been the case with the stock market this month as hope and irrational exuberance concerning an economic recovery have given way to renewed fears of a growing coronavirus spread here in the states. Our investment strategy shifted significantly after the March crash, and we have recently bought very little in the way of stock shares except for a couple of small purchases that seemed to make sense at the time. The risk for dividend cuts and further depreciation seems high, so instead of taking chances on that Glenn has been dealing almost exclusively with options.

Two of his most successful options plays during May and early June were with Apple (AAPL) and Boeing (BA), both of which found momentum and rose in price rapidly. Selling put options on Apple as it stormed to record highs led to a couple thousand dollars in profits, with the ability to sell a contract one week and then close it for 50 percent gains or more a few days later. A trader’s dream.

Boeing was more of a mixed bag, however. While we own shares of Apple, we hold nothing long term of Boeing, and so selling options against it was purely speculative. A short backgrounder on BA: the plane-builder’s stock was flying high in early 2019, on its way to $400 a share prior to a pair of crashes with the company’s 737 MAX passenger jet. Since then, the company has been rocked by scandals and canceled orders as the problematic 737 was grounded by the FAA and airlines have reduced flights in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. In March, Boeing stock traded at a low of $89.

So when BA, which had been holding its own around $120, suddenly went on a tear higher to double in price in a few weeks, it was too tempting not to get on board the rocket ship. Glenn did so through selling cash-secured put options, meaning you must have cash in your account to cover the purchase of 100 shares of stock should it be “put” to you at the option strike price you select. Like Apple, Boeing stock rose so fast that an option sold one day was already very profitable a couple of days later, so Glenn traded in and out of them, raising his strike price from 140.00 to 165.00 and eventually to 215.00 to capture high premiums. That’s a great strategy — in a rising market.

Remember that part about things that go up coming down again? Yeah, that was Boeing. The stock peaked at 234.20 on June 8 and promptly reversed course although we didn’t realize it immediately. That June 26 put option with the 215.00 strike price? Doomed. To make matters worse, the day after the stock peaked, a Tuesday, Glenn decided to open a second put option trade on BA, selecting a 212.50 strike that would expire in three days, thinking the price looked safe given the recent upward momentum. A quick $450 trade. Not. The stock crashed back to $190 by Friday, representing a loss of about $2,500. Now multiply that by two.

To compound the pain of having two BA puts worth a combined market price of $42,750, bear in mind that they are cash-secured, which is fine and dandy if you happen to have that kind of cash just sitting around. We don’t, which means that the trade is partly secured by our broker’s margin account, a credit line that is based on the value of the account from day to day. Boeing stock was not the only thing falling in June. The rest of our stocks were sliding too, so while our losses deepened on the BA puts, the margin available to secure them was shrinking along with the rest of the account. Nail-biting time.

The bright side to options trades that go bad is the ability to “roll” them, meaning closing an existing option to move it to a later date and/or different strike price. That is what Glenn had to do with his two BA puts, moving one to July 10 and lowering the strike to 197.50, while pushing the latter one to Nov. 20 at a 200.00 strike, netting an additional $425 of premium cash in the process. It wasn’t an ideal solution, as it means weeks and months we’ll have to wait until the next opportunity to possibly close those trades for good, but it lowers the total margin requirement to $39,750 and buys time for the eventual turnaround in the market. Let’s hope it recovers before Boeing goes bankrupt! Always wise to remember that a little bit of leverage goes a long way — up and down.

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E KNOW WE'RE getting older when people we’ve known for 30 years while living here in Oakley either move on or pass on. We prefer the former to the latter, of course, and so it is with our friends Rick and Cyndy Lemyre, who this month pulled up stakes to move to Georgia.

Rick is an iconic figure in these parts, having once held a motor delivery route for the San Francisco Chronicle before deciding to study journalism and launching his newspaper career at the Brentwood News in 1991 while Glenn was the editor there. Rick had answered an ad seeking community columnists, and he was soon entertaining readers every week with his humorous adventures and observations on life. Near the end of that decade, Rick moved over to the competing Brentwood Press, where he rose to become its managing editor and a partner in the business.

Rick became an active member of the business community and involved himself in several organizations, from the Brentwood CornFest and the Rotary Club to the Friends of Marsh Creek as both a volunteer and paid fundraiser. A lover of local history, he participated in Civil War reenactments and later headed up efforts to save the John Marsh Stone House in Brentwood, which resulted in a partnership with the California State Parks system to preserve the property and open it for public use.

But there comes a point for even the most dedicated community leader when you have to put family first, and such was the case for Rick and his wife. With children grown and moved away, they decided it was time to spend their golden years doting over grandkids. And so it was they chose to move to a small town close to Atlanta.

But in true Rick fashion, a simple goodbye on social media wouldn’t do; he made it a point to personally visit everyone who had made an impact on his life in some way during his time in East Contra Costa, and that meant us as well.

Given that things are different now in the age of COVID-19 and close contact is discouraged, Rick embarked on his “six-foot selfie” tour to photograph himself with his friends — from a socially safe distance of six feet apart, of course. He met us at Big Break Regional Shoreline on June 2. And while we’d like to say that we all wore face coverings and observed social distancing guidelines, we must confess that we didn’t. Nothing can replace a final heartfelt hug when saying farewell to a longtime friend we may never see in person again. Although, of course we hope there will come another day. Maybe a better one in a world no longer fearful of a pernicious virus that yet has the upper hand on us all.

 

Glenn, Roni and Ben