Aw, scoot

We wanted to share these things with you, really we did. And we fully expected that we would. But someone else had other ideas. 

If you recall, Glenn ordered the scooter on a whim July 12 during Amazon Prime Day — a $500 impulse buy of a product that normally sells for about $800. Too good to be true? So it would seem, until you see the reviews from hundreds of happy customers. Designed as an affordable and practical means of short-distance transportation where a car might not be available or necessary, the scooter also represented a bit of fun and freedom to supplement exercise walks on nice sunny days when one might want to get away from the house, if not too far away. 

The purchase was part of a larger order that Amazon, in its greater wisdom, decided to send in four separate shipments spanning nine days. Like Christmas morning, it saved the biggest gift — the scooter — for last. It was scheduled to ship from Texas the following week, arriving on our doorstep on July 21. Amazon sent separate tracking numbers for each of the packages, and for the next few days there came a barrage of email updates as items were shipped and delivered from all parts of the country. 

Then came the message Glenn had most been waiting for: the one that showed the scooter had been picked up at a distribution facility in Dallas and was in transit. A couple of days later came the message that the scooter would now arrive July 23, a Sunday. We’ll remember that as the second disappointment, on the heels of learning that the original delivery date was already much later than the rest of the order. But not to worry. Although it meant losing the weekend to enjoy the scooter, rest assured that it would soon be in our hands.

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UNDAY THE 23RD arrived and Glenn awoke to another email from Amazon: the scooter had arrived in the wee hours at the Oakley carrier facility. It had been processed and placed on a truck for delivery at 11:35 a.m. Estimated delivery time: 6-10 p.m.

Ah well, it was probably to be expected, this being Sunday and all, that we’d be the last stop on the carrier’s route as he or she trundled back to the carrier facility that is literally a mile from our house. Good things come to those who wait, right? So we’d patiently go about our day until then.

Around 6:30 p.m. came the update that the scooter would be delivered between 7 and 9 p.m. “Your package is just 10 stops away!” They’d narrowed down the delivery window. Perhaps there’d be time to assemble the scooter and get it charged up for that first ride on Monday morning.

By 9 o’clock, still no package on the doorstep, Amazon began fudging again in the delivery time. They pushed it back to 9:30, then 10 p.m. Finally they updated the status to say it would be delivered “by the end of the day.” And once the clock struck 11 with no delivery truck in sight, the status was updated to read “your package is running late and will be delivered tomorrow.” Um, sure?

It was no surprise. We’d had items delayed before, and always they came a day or two later. We assumed that the courier had been running behind schedule and decided to bag the rest of the day’s deliveries. It would be here first thing Monday, most likely. 

But on Monday there was another update: the package would arrive by the end of the day. No specified time, unfortunately. This had a familiar ring to it and we were growing skeptical of the false promises. Sure enough, no package had been delivered by the end of Monday. “Your package is running late. We are very sorry…” blah, blah, blah.

Then the following day came this message: “Your package may be lost.”  

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G

LENN IS GENERALLY a patient person. Sometimes to a fault. He decided to wait through the week before contacting Amazon customer service to inquire about the missing scooter, mainly because packages have a way of mysteriously turning up, but also because he dreaded the thought of trying to break through the impenetrable wall that is Amazon to reach a live person.

How does a package that was out for delivery on a lazy Sunday morning wind up vanishing before reaching a customer’s home a few hours later? There are some obvious possibilities, not the least of which would be the courier errantly delivering it to the wrong address. But that has happened to us too many times before, and we have received a confirmation photo in email that clearly shows it wasn’t our porch. There was no photo to speak of this time.

The package was scanned when it left the carrier facility but not after that, so maybe it was sitting in the back of the truck somewhere, buried under a tarp or a pile of other packages. Or, thinking of more nefarious explanations, maybe the driver themself thought the scooter looked cool and decided to keep it, slipping it out the side door to a waiting car or… 

…Or maybe it had been stolen. Sad but true, there are criminals who follow delivery trucks around and wait for an opportunity to snatch merchandise when the driver is away from the vehicle. It happens a lot in our area. The delivery companies don’t like to admit this is a common problem and will quietly reimburse affected customers when it happens. 

Rest assured, someone who isn’t Glenn is probably out riding their new Segway Ninebot F40 kick e-scooter that Glenn paid for. 

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G

LENN BROKE DOWN and called Amazon customer service on July 29. Actually, he texted them — one of the two options available through the Amazon app. He was connected with a chatbot that eventually routed him to a human representative stationed somewhere in the Middle East. The exchange was pleasant enough, but the upshot was that the package couldn’t be located and it was too soon to ask for a refund; wait a couple of days to see if it arrives. Glenn’s texting fingers were too fat and slow, and the conversation got cut off before he could get any further with making his case that the package would likely never arrive. 

On Thursday, Aug. 3, with the “package lost” message still displaying on the delivery status page, Glenn contacted Amazon again, this time choosing a phone call. Amazon prefers the don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you approach, so basically all you can do is send them a request to call you at your provided number. There was no waiting around on hold with this method, so at least it had that going for it.

But despite a live conversation, the answer was still unhelpful: the package had already shipped so the order couldn’t be canceled; it had to be missing for 14 days to request a refund and it had only been 12 days; there was no way to have the missing item redelivered. It was this latter point that frustrated Glenn the most. He didn’t want a refund; he wanted the scooter he ordered. And for the price he paid for it. A refund would mean having to begin the order process anew, and because Amazon said it wouldn’t honor the sale price it would mean paying $300 more for the scooter. Big bummer.

So that is where the sad saga of the missing Segway ends, for now. No scooter. No refund. No photos to share. Maybe it’s a sign from the e-commerce gods that it wasn’t meant to be.

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T

THINGS WENT CONSIDERABLY better when it came time to partake in our annual July tradition of attending the Pear Fair in the tiny north Delta town of Courtland on July 30. This marked the 49th year for the fair, which we’ve attended faithfully since 1988 with the exception of a single year we missed due to Roni’s participation in the Gilroy Garlic Festival recipe bakeoff in 1996, and the two years during the pandemic that the show didn’t happen. So this was our 33rd year.

As with everything else in this inflationary economy, the pear pies were smaller and the prices greater, but that didn’t prevent hundreds of people from coming out to enjoy the festivities on a warm-but-not-too-hot summer Sunday.

We arrived around 10 a.m. with Ben, who has reached an age where he looks forward to attending the fair the way we do, if not for his own reasons. We all have our little traditions. Roni’s is to make sure she picks up a loaf or three of the Lions Club’s pear bread, which despite remaining at $5 a loaf for many years continues to come in smaller tins. She picked up three loaves to be sure to have enough to enjoy a few days. Ben is always on the watch for deals on anime items that can be found at several vendor booths at the show. He loves to browse the used books and videos at the Sacramento County Library booth.

For Glenn, it’s about the country atmosphere and getting his hands on some free swag in the form of bumper stickers and the little yellow pins featuring the event date — those too are shrinking in size, but at least they remain free while supplies last. It’s also about taking home one of the delicious pear pies that are sold as a fundraiser by the Walnut Grove School PTA. They appear to have prepared for bigger crowds this year, because we saw them bringing in crates of pie boxes on a forklift, and later we actually got a free sample from their booth — something that has happened in… never. Usually the pies are in such short supply that they are sold out long before the end of the event. At $21 each for a whole pie, it was nice to get a free taste.

Roni has become a big fan of the La Perita Garden Club booth, where there are always succulents for sale at reasonable prices. Succulents are so easy to grow in our yard, and it’s always fun to pick up a new arrangement when you get the container it comes in. She found a display in a big ceramic pot that was too heavy to lug around the festival, so we had the club hold it for us to claim later — which turned out to be much to Ben’s dismay. He thought he’d have no trouble lugging back the 15-pound pot to our car in the lumpy, dusty parking lot, but he wound up getting lost and finally reached the car exhausted from having to walk around with the extra weight. 

Much about the Pear Fair never changes, including the half-hour line at the Lockeford Sausage booth where you can still grab a brat sandwich for eight bucks. We ate ours under the giant shade tent while listening to country singer Rachel Steele perform on stage. Afterward it was time to catch the parade and its lineup of king and queen candidates along with classic cars, bagpipers, fire vehicles and cheer squads. It is still one of the shortest parades around, which made it easy to catch once as it departed the staging area near the library and again as the procession waited along Washington Avenue for entries performing at the Primasing Avenue review stand. 

We wrapped up our visit just before 2 p.m. with lemon freezes from the Mel’s Mocha booth to enjoy on the drive back down Highway 160, but they had mostly liquified in the heat before our car bounced off the dusty exit road that sends departing visitors through corn fields and pear orchards to reach the main levee road. 

Another Pear Fair in the books and more great memories made. We say this every time, but because you never know what the future holds, we hope to do it again next year!  

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A

RE WE GOING into a recession or not? That seems to be the question on every investor’s mind lately with stocks continuing their slow grind higher amid mixed messages from corporations, politicians and economists. It’s at times like these when the experts advise us long-term buy-and-holders to tune out the noise in the media and focus on where things are likely to be a year, five years, or decades from now. While we may not have the luxury of waiting decades at our age, we can handle at least five years as we continue to prepare for a retirement that is drawing closer.

July was a happy change of pace from what we experienced throughout 2022 and a chunk of this winter. With bullish optimism filtering into the markets, both of our IRAs reached all-time highs last month. We now joke each afternoon that we can either retire now or not, based on whether stocks finished in the green or red that day— it’s about that close. But the reality is that we probably won’t be kicking back in our easy chairs for a few more years regardless of the markets, simply because we’d both likely be bored and it’s better to stay in the game while you can until Social Security and Medicare kick in.

While the retirement funds are doing great, our battered and bruised taxable account continues to wobble, always suffering from a lack of available cash to offset numerous bad trades that occurred during late-2021 and last year. But the rising tide of the S&P 500 and NASDAQ lately has greatly expanded our margin account, and so we are (cautiously) taking on some new option positions once again.

The current initiative for the trading account is to accumulate shares of Boeing (BA), which we began doing in mid-July. We bought one share of BA for $214.69 with cash generated from the $220 premium received on a naked put option we sold with a two-week expiration. That option expired worthless on July 28, which is exactly what was supposed to happen, so we basically own the share for free. Rinse and repeat. We sold another put contract on Aug. 1 for $500 that will expire on Nov. 17. With the premium, we purchased two more shares of BA at $238.10 each. So we are three shares on the way to our goal of 100. There is no timeline for this, but think at least five to eight years.

Most of our recent buys have been in Glenn’s IRA, however. We added 100 shares of AT&T (T), 50 shares of Apple Hospitality REIT (APLE), and our monthly 10-share purchases of the PIMCO Dynamic Income Fund (PDI). We also initiated a small stake in PayPal (PYPL), which has been trading near multi-year lows amid uncertainty about interest rates and possible recession; we purchased 50 shares at $64.92 on Aug. 3, when the stock fell after earnings.

 In a rare stock sale, we departed with all 100 shares of Upstart (UPST) that we held in Glenn’s IRA for the not-so-handsome price of $37 a share. It looked a lot more handsome on June 30 when we optioned the stock at that price for Aug. 4, but over the past month the shares nearly doubled in price, making it far too costly to attempt to roll the position, so we let the stock get called away and will use the additional $3,700 in cash to buy something else that hasn’t run up too far in price. That is getting harder to do lately as the markets continue their recovery.

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O

UR LITTLE NEIGHBOR cat “Nomad” is pregnant once again. We figure she’s about a month along, which would coincide with roughly the time her previous two kittens Laser and Skittles vanished from our front yard.

We’ve been feeding her cat milk and scoops of dry food pretty regularly, and usually she wolfs them down, although recently she hasn’t finished the food which leads us to believe that someone else in the neighborhood (other than the neighbors that own her) has also been feeding her on the sly.

Glenn has been busy with work that seems to take more and more of his time lately, with several large story packages produced for Local News Matters. The site continues to grow along with demand to post more content — a challenge when you’re mostly a one-man band. That might not be the case for much longer, as they just hired a new full-time person based in the Philippines to help with posting to the site and some other duties. Glenn spent a little more than two hours on a Zoom call the other night helping to train the new hire. Accounting for the time zone differences, it was 6 p.m. Friday our time and 9 a.m. Saturday in Manila — a 15-hour difference.

Glenn got some exciting news this week that a series of stories on homelessness he helped design for LNM has been named a finalist for Outstanding Coverage in the LION Local Journalism Awards presented by the Local Independent Online News Publishers association. The awards will be announced Oct. 3-4 in Durham, North Carolina, so it is highly unlikely we’ll be on hand when they are presented, but it is exciting to be recognized nonetheless.

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Y

OU MIGHT WELL ask why this month’s newsletter is so early. Normally we’d be frantically scrambling to upload it to our server with hours to spare on the final day of the month. And it is for this very reason that we needed to get this one posted well in advance, for our next edition is liable to be exceptionally long and we’ll probably need until the end of September to compile it, photos and all.

Well, we’ll let you guess why.

In the meantime, enjoy the rest of your summer and Labor Day weekend, and we’ll see you back here in the football-filled fall.

Glenn, Roni and Ben