How hot is it? If the thermometer is to be believed (and we do!) it is a blistering 110 degrees in the midst of an August heat wave that has left us seeking cooler air indoors. "Cool" in our case is 90 degrees with the air conditioner running. Yes, it's miserable. Photo by Glenn.
August 30, 2020: Here in the waning days of August we have discovered that the scariest thing is not the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, raging wildfires, blustery hurricanes, racial unrest, or even the presidential campaign season that is rapidly heating up — it’s actually staring at a blank screen and trying to decide what to write about when the events in your personal world seem so much less significant than those unfolding in the world at large. But we’ll try.
A rare double rainbow (the second one is just barely visible) appears over our back fence on the morning of Sunday, Aug. 16, after a major lightning storm moved through the area. The beautiful display masked the numerous wildfires sparked by the lightning strikes. Photo by Glenn.
Days after the rainbow, the skies of the Bay Area are choked with dense smoke from at least three major wildfire complexes burning to the north and south of us. Photo by Glenn.
The late afternoon sun is filtered through the smoke. This marks the third year in a row that we have been affected by wildfire smoke. What makes this year different is that we are also in the midst of a major heat wave and temperatures have been in the 100s for nearly a week on end. Photo by Roni.
When we learened that our favorite local restaurant, CreAsian, was recently sold to a new owner, we decided we had to order a takeout dinner before the transition — just in case the menu changes, as sometimes happens with ownership changes. Indoor dining still is not allowed in our county, but our meal was bagged and ready to pick up when we arrived. Photo by Glenn.
Tonight's feast is courtesy of Buffalo Wild Wings and Door Dash. We've been doing a lot more takeout during the pandemic than we care to admit. Photo by Glenn.
First it was toilet paper and hand sanitizer, now it's coins that are in short supply at our local grocery store. Several banks have issued pleas encouraging customers to exchange their coins for paper currency as the banks struggle to supply merchants with the ability to make change for purchases. Photo by Roni.
Protests, protests, protests... This is Day 94 of Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the nation, as curated by Woke.net. It's reality TV, 2020-style. Contrary to what Gil Scott Heron once told us in song, this revolution will be televised. Photo by Roni.
Nothing much is normal these days, except for the bond we share with our pets. Katy enjoys her cuddle time with Roni on the living room sofa. Photo by Glenn.
It's been hot, so Katy hangs out on the cool wood seat of one of our dining room chairs. Photo by Glenn.
We recently discovered the Backyard Critter Cam streaming live on YouTube. Our cat Phoenix apparently has also discovered it. The high definition feed makes him think he is looking at the action through a window instead of a television screen. Photo by Glenn.
That raccoon family is so tantalizingly close. Just like the view of our own patio from our back door, Phe's efforts to get their attention are going ignored. Photo by Roni.
We’ve been spending an awful lot of time indoors these days, and if it weren’t for the occasional walk around the neighborhood or trip to the grocery store, we’d scarcely see the daylight at all. With the exception of Ben who has no other options but to make the trek into his place of business, the rest of us have been working from the comfort of home amid the pandemic and continue to do so even as some aspects of our state’s economy attempt to return to normal. Cloud computing, internet chats, phone calls and Zoom meetings are a way of life that doesn’t appear to be changing for the foreseeable future, and while we embrace our technology like everyone else, occasionally we feel like prisoners waiting for parole.
A case in point in the recent spate of wildfires that have consumed vast areas of Northern California. We awoke early one Sunday morning to the shaking of windows and the not-so-distant rumble of thunder and peered out at a darkened sky to see the lightning storm passing above us. It is seldom that we get thunder and lightning, but when we do it is usually cause for concern because California is basically a giant matchstick in the summer. Weather forecasters had warned of the storm and its potential for dry lightning strikes, but even this seemed worse than usual.
The lightning touched off at least three major fire complexes nearby, including the LNU fires to the north in the Wine Country, and the SCU and CZU fires to the south in Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties. Another set of fires torched land in the Marsh Creek area of Contra Costa County. All of these fires have, needless to say, pumped a lot of smoke into the atmosphere, so for the past two weeks we have been alternating between days of lightly to heavily smoggy air.
The smoke has been so dense at times that even with doors and windows closed we still get a heavy dose of it in the house through fireplace vents and other entry points. It didn’t help that we discovered Ben’s bedroom window was open because he uses it to run a window fan.
As if it wasn’t enough to have to deal with secondhand smoke, this turned out to be the hottest August we’ve experienced in a long time. It included a weeklong spell during which the mercury topped 100 degrees every day, including one blistering afternoon when it reached 110. We don’t have central air conditioning these days, but because of the fire smoke there was no way to open the windows and let the natural breeze circulate. Fortunately we bought a portable AC unit a few years ago during another heat wave and had it quickly hooked up to keep our living room at a semi-tolerable 88 degrees. That was accomplished by closing off our master bedroom and the back hallway to Ben’s room, so while we kept most of the cool air in the room we most wanted to be in, those other rooms became unbearable ovens. We made sure to keep the cats with us despite their insistence they be let back into the bedrooms!
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PENDING DAY AFTER sweaty day with nothing to do but hang out in the living room as close to the AC as possible gave us lots of time to fill, and we did so mostly reading, playing video games and watching TV. The trouble with TV anymore is that most of it is crap. We have Xfinity with its hundreds of stations and On Demand service for movies and still rarely find anything to watch, so consequently a lot of our viewing time has been spent combing the videos of YouTube.
We bought an Apple TV box a few months ago solely for the ability to stream YouTube on our 70-inch living room screen. Lately our feed has been filled with images of protests in Portland, Seattle, Kenosha, Wisconsin and elsewhere, presidential campaign news, and dozens of live cams from around the world.
One discovery we’ve been spending a lot of time with is the CritterVision Critter Cam. It is a 24/7 nature camera trained on a South Carolina backyard teeming with all sorts of woodland creatures — from deer and raccoons to opossums, squirrels, foxes, geese and even an alligator. When we become bored watching everything else, inevitably the screen returns to the critter cam and we just keep it on, listening to the chirping of the crickets while we go about our other activities and wait for the next animal to put in an appearance. The wait is usually very brief.
The image quality is very good, so much so that our cat Phoenix one afternoon saw a family of raccoons at the feeder and ran up to the screen in an attempt to touch them with his paw. He was unsuccessful, of course, but it gave us a well-needed laugh.
The other thing we have been seeing far too much of lately on our big screen is political protests. The Black Lives Matter movement that has riveted the attention of most of the country since Memorial Day seems to descend to new levels of violence and destruction each day. What started as a reaction to the police custody death of George Floyd in Minneapolis quickly became the “CHOP zone” shutdown of a police precinct in Seattle and nightly riots attempting to burn down a federal building in Portland, Oregon. We discovered Woke.net through its daily live stream of all of it — the fires, marches, shootings, sit-ins, lootings and riots — and mostly just want to shake our heads. Is this the nation our founding fathers envisioned, or that Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of? How can we have come some far since the Civil War and yet manage to be nowhere? Will it take another bloody conflict of that scale to get our divided country on the same page again? It is looking that way with all that has transpired this summer.
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ACE RELATIONS ARE not all that has been in turmoil recently; the economy is in its own moody state as the coronavirus continues to dominate our daily lives. California has been slow to reopen, and millions of people across our state and the nation remain out of work or school while politicians argue over how much or little to do. We are grateful to not be in a situation where we are reliant on a stimulus check to pay bills.
This is not to say we don’t appreciate having income, and August proved very kind to our investments. A lot of that we owe to Apple, which announced at its recent earnings call a decision to split its stock 4-for-1. That sent the share price up by more than 30 percent in less than a month to close around 500.00 on Aug. 28, the final day before the split went into effect. We already owned 100 shares in our taxable account and 7 more in Roni’s IRA, and we picked up one more for her at 411.50 on July 31, the day after the split was announced. So now we’ve got 432 shares and change. We’ve endured a few reverse splits this past year of other stocks we own, so being on the receiving end of a positive split — our first — in AAPL feels great.
The meteoric rise in AAPL accomplished something else: it increased the amount of margin we have available for options trades, and Glenn took solid advantage of it in August, placing earnings-related trades around Target (TGT), Fastly (FSLY) and Best Buy (BBY) that helped net more than $3,500 in options premium. Because we are mostly selling puts, we receive the premium in cash up front and get to keep it as long as the stock remains above our option strike price. That cash enables us to purchase other stocks that pay dividends, and to date this year we’ve reinvested close to $9,000 in that endeavor, most of it in the Global X Nasdaq 100 Covered Call ETF (QYLD), which itself has grown nearly 8 percent for us since April.
But too much of a good thing can be hazardous if one isn’t careful, and so our goal for September is to reduce our margin balance heading into autumn and the election, which historically have been challenging headwinds for the stock market.
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EN RECEIVED A bit of unwelcome news recently when he went to the mailbox and discovered a summons for jury duty waiting for him. It’s the first time Ben has been called, and unfortunately it would entail that he would have to make it out to Richmond each morning if selected to serve on a jury panel. It’s daunting enough to get summoned, but the added pressure of a lengthy commute from home to the courthouse when he’s still not comfortable with freeway driving is more than he wants to deal with.
Although we are convinced he isn’t likely to be called to report (because they tend to draw upon prospective jurors who live closer to the court first) he isn’t sure he wants to leave it to chance. He is considering trying to seek a medical deferral. Whatever happens, we’ll know by the end of next month how it all plays out.
We broke our home improvement store drought on Aug. 30 when we ventured into Home Depot for the first time since… we can’t remember now, January? There are tons of projects we have backlogged amid the pandemic, but what finally lured us to the store was something more mundane — window screen. Phoenix, always lusting after the great outdoors despite being an indoor cat, finally figured out that if he clawed at the screen door long enough eventually he could create his own exit. And that is exactly what he did one recent evening, poking a hole through the bottom of the patio door and escaping to freedom.
We’ve known for some time that the screens on all our doors and windows needed to be replaced, but clearly we wanted something more heavy duty than the flimsy stuff barely useful for keeping out insects. So this time we splurged and bought the stronger “pet screen” that sells for around 20 bucks for a 4x8-foot roll. We hope it will do the trick, but the solution may be temporary because we are now thinking about replacing our screen doors that have served us well but are showing their age.
We have always been political junkies when it comes to the presidential election cycle, so it feels strange that we managed to avoid watching most of the Democrat and Republican conventions this year. Political preferences aside, the absence of live speeches (for the most part) and the energy of a crowded convention hall reduced the events to little more than four-day prerecorded campaign commercials and made them basically unwatchable. Another casualty of the COVID crisis. Hopefully there will be presidential debates and they won’t have to take place on a Zoom video call. Our democracy deserves better than that.
Well, that’s about it for this month. Looking forward to the beginning of football season next month, and maybe an easing of some of these crazy coronavirus lockdowns we’ve had to endure. See you in September.
