What's wrong with this picture? Well, absolutely nothing! For the first time in two years, Roni is working the information booth for the Ironhouse Sanitary District at a local festival — the Heart of Oakley celebration on Sept. 25, in this case. The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a lot of canceled public events, so it is great to finally be able to attend one again. Photo by Glenn.
September 29, 2021: Our dishwasher has never been the most quiet appliance, but when it suddenly started sounding a lot louder than normal and left a cesspool of stagnant water sitting in the bottom of the tub, eventually we couldn’t help but notice. The pump, we assumed, was having “issues.”
Saturday at the Brentwood Farmers Market finds things looking almost normal. The pandemic is still with us, but many people are now vaccinated and we're learning to live with COVID, including its latest variants. Photo by Glenn.
The gubernatorial recall election is just days away, and the local Republicans have a booth at the farmers market as they make their final pitch to get out the vote. This flag was affixed to the side of a business near their booth. Californians weren't in the mood to listen, apparently, as the recall failed by a wide margin. Photo by Roni.
After the farmers market, we paid a visit to Brentwood City Park, where they have a lovely rose garden. Roni wishes we could grow bushes like there. Photo by Glenn.
Nothing fuels a visit to the farmers market like a good cup of coffee. Glenn tried the dark roast from Big House Beans, so named because the business hires former inmates to help them reenter the labor force. Roni doesn't drink coffee, but she won't hold it against her DH. Photo by Roni.
The farmers market had some tasty looking poblano peppers, so Roni decided to try her hand at chile rellenos. She made them in the Nina Foodi air fryer and they came out great. Photo by Roni.
Ben got a raise at work, so we got him a Nothing Bundt Cake to celebrate. Photo by Roni.
What would a celebratory cake be without a scoop of your favorite ice cream? Photo by Roni.
Speaking of celebrations, we are in Hayward on Sept. 12 for a pre-birthday party for our niece Shannon. It is also the first weekend of pro football season, and the guys are nervously watching the last moments of the 49ers-Lions game on Sean's cell phone. Who needs a 70-inch flat screen television anyway? Photo by Roni.
Shannon is turning 21 tomorrow. Time to put out some little flames. Photo by Roni.
There's a pile of presents to unwrap. We all gather in the family room to witness the proceedings. Photo by Glenn.
One of Shannon's gifts was this custom-designed half scissor blade sword from one of her favorite anime shows. Everyone had fun passing it around the room while improvising its many possible uses — so much so that Jenny decided the entertainment value more than justified its price. Photo by Roni.
Ben holds up one of Shannon's gifts — a sign that reads, "I can't adult today." It appears that Uncle Sean is having a difficult time with that as well. Photo by Roni.
It's a little after 3 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 25, and Roni has been visiting with the crowd at the Heart of Oakley Festival. Ben has dropped in following a day at work. That big green thing on the table is a diorama showing what goes on inside the sewer pipes under the city's streets. Let's check it out... Photo by Glenn.
...This is a wad of so-called disposable wipes and other cloth rags that work together to clog sewer pipes. At their worst, these collect grease and other solids to form giant "fat-bergs" that can only be removed with special equipment. Photo by Glenn.
...And here we see a few of the vectors that make their home inside sewer lines — everything from rats to roaches. (A few of the kids that stopped by the display wanted to know if the critters were real. Alas, these were only made of plastic and rubber.) Photo by Glenn.
Roni gives her spiel about the inner workings of the sewer pipes to a couple of rapt festival visitors. Photo by Glenn.
What fun is a festival booth without some swag to give away? Today we have some imprinted ballpoint pens featuring spring-loaded Planet Earth bobbleheads. These were a hit with the kiddos. Photo by Roni.
Roni has always wanted to try her hand at resin crafting, so she bought some silicone molds from Hobby Lobby and a few supplies on Amazon to give it a go. Photo by Glenn.
Two-part resin is tricky to work with, as Roni discovered. This is her first pour and it's going pretty good, in general. She's making a geode-shaped coaster as a test. A second one she made didn't set firmly, unfortunately, but that's how you learn. Photo by Glenn.
There's a group of peacocks at the front door. We told them we don't accept solicitors. They took their sweet time wandering away. Photo by Glenn.
Sure enough, upon closer inspection, Glenn determined that the rinse water wasn’t being siphoned off into the sink at the appropriate moment, which led him to conclude that either something was blocking the pump or perhaps a gear in the control box had broken, causing the machine to skip a most critical cycle. In any event, the choice appeared to be a simple one: repair it or replace it.
Never one to easily admit defeat when it comes to broken machines, Glenn decided that he could attempt the repair himself, and he was emboldened by YouTube videos that seemed to suggest that any chump with a screwdriver and a bit of elbow grease could have their dishwasher disassembled and put back together better than new. What is that old line about not believing everything you see on the internet? We seem to have forgotten that on this project.
And things being as they are nowadays when it comes to our home improvement projects, that “simple” afternoon repair task sat for three weeks until the odor of stagnant sewer water so overwhelmed us that even the most gifted procrastinator could delay the project no longer. On Sept. 26, we cleaned the pile of dirty dishes out of the kitchen sink and Glenn drained the swamp so that he could disassemble the 20-year-old machine.
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HOUGH THE MIND might be willing when it comes to DIY projects, the body at 56 isn’t always able. So it was in short order that an otherwise peaceful Sunday afternoon was filled with the grunting and groaning of an out-of-shape handyman playing tug-of-war with a stubborn appliance.
When we remodeled the kitchen nearly three years back, one of the most noteworthy feats of engineering was how we redesigned the sink cabinet to accommodate an oversized farm sink. The cabinet wall was about half an inch too narrow, so rather than send the sink back for a smaller one, we instead removed part of the cabinet wall and moved it back into the space occupied by the dishwasher. There was just barely enough clearance left to squish the washer inside — not a problem, so long as we never had to access the dishwasher.
But of course these things never go as planned, and sooner rather than later we found ourselves confronted with the challenge of how to get the dishwasher out of its tiny parking stall. Unfortunately, the motor is located on the base of the machine, which meant the only way to access it was by pulling it out and tipping it on its side. Not an easy task in a galley kitchen.
An unpleasant job became more so when midway through the move the dishwasher would go no farther. The drain line and power cord had already been disconnected. The feet were above the edge of the vinyl plank flooring where it could no longer obstruct them. The blanket insulation and hoses mounted to the sides of the machine had cleared the cabinet edges. Yet still the dishwasher wouldn’t come free. It was as if something was still tethering the machine to the wall…
The water line! It was then that Glenn remembered he hadn’t disconnected the copper tubing feeding the dishwasher from the hot water intake. No problem, he just needed to shut off the valve at the wall and disconnect the compression fitting. Done and… leak city! But the valve was off, so why was there now a geyser spraying across the sink cabinet? Well, we’d forgotten how old the valve is; just because the handle was in the off position didn’t mean it was still functional.
The only thing left to do was to shut off all the water to the house, which Glenn accomplished via the valve on the front yard faucet. But to his dismay, the sink valve continued to spurt water. For several minutes with no signs of letting up. On and on it went, and the only remaining option was to stick a bowl underneath to catch the stream — a bowl that would have to be dumped every 10-15 minutes. Outdoors too, because the dishwasher line had been removed from the sink garbage disposal, meaning that any water poured down the sink drain would flow into the cabinet beneath.
So while unfastening the copper tubing succeeded in freeing the dishwasher from the cabinet so that Glenn could work on it, the next three hours became a juggling act of dissecting the pump motor and scrambling to replace the drip bowl. And remembering that Glenn is not the most physically fit person these days, his body was suffering the effects of repeatedly having to crawl under the cabinet to replace the bowl.
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VEN WITH YOUTUBE to guide him, figuring out what parts to remove to access the inside of the pump proved difficult. It was plain to see that the impeller motor was not spinning freely in its housing, but even after fully disassembling the pump, cleaning off years of accumulated gunk, and putting all the parts back together, it appeared the exercise had accomplished little. When in doubt, pray.
Satisfied he’d done all that was humanly possible, Glenn reassembled the pump and returned the machine to its cabinet space, now thoroughly exhausted but thankful to finally have the water intake hooked back up so that it was no longer leaking. This was the moment of truth. Had our sweat equity repair effort resulted in a functional dishwasher without the use of paid professional labor? Only one way to find out.
Glenn spun the dial to the “light duty” cycle and immediately the pump started grinding in a hideous new way that suggested not only had the repair effort failed, but the problem was actually worse than before.
The kitchen was a mess. The sink cabinet sopping with spilled water from the leaky valve. The cabinet drawer removed and sitting on the living room carpet. Bottles, boxes and cleaning products occupying every countertop after being removed from the cabinet for better access. Smelly, dirty, sewer water-laden rags piled everywhere. Gritty sand and concrete dust rough under foot and spread across the floor. Tools galore. And in the middle of it all, an extremely sore and dejected repairman.
Roni was already on the Home Depot website shopping for a new dishwasher, quickly discovering that just because a product is listed online doesn’t necessarily mean it is available. In fact, thanks to the pandemic, a lot of appliances we once took for granted are in short supply. We still haven’t received the (mostly paid for) new doors and windows we ordered nearly three months ago, and now we were seeing wait times until Christmas on some of the most likely candidates for our next dishwasher.
We’d love to tell you that we got everything figured out, but as of this writing we are still shopping around with no idea where it will all lead. What we do know is that we will be hand washing our dirty dishes for the foreseeable future. Stay tuned.
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OT ONLY HAS the pandemic interrupted the availability of consumer products (remember those toilet paper shortages?) but also the scheduling of public events. It feels like forever and a day ago that we spent any time at a fair or local festival, yet prior to COVID-19 that was one of our favorite weekend pastimes. For Roni, holding down a booth at many local events was a way of life during the summer and fall months as she handled public outreach for the local sanitary district.
This month we managed to attend not one, but two outdoor events. Our first was the Brentwood Farmers Market on Sept. 4, which while technically not a festival still had many of the elements we’d associate with one — food booths, live entertainment and unmasked crowds gathered along First Street. It felt great to get out on a pleasant summer morning and check out the fresh produce and other edibles, but we must say it felt a bit awkward wandering about with our masks off among so many others doing the same.
Of course, there were plenty of people who still had masks on, begging the question of who might or might not have had their vaccines. We are among the double-vaxxed, and so we tend not to worry about these situations, but it can be uncomfortable when you know that others do. We haven’t exactly come to terms yet with our new social realities.
Our second public gathering was the Sept. 25 Heart of Oakley Festival right in our own downtown. This would be the event that replaced what once was the Oakley Almond Festival, and so for us it always carries bittersweet memories. For Roni, who was there on business as a representative of the Ironhouse Sanitary District, it was the first time she’d run a booth in two years — since the 2019 Heart of Oakley event.
Apart from a bit of breeze that buffeted the shade canopies, it was a pleasant afternoon and a decent sized crowd that came to visit. Roni worked the booth mostly solo, although she was joined later in the afternoon by Ben after he got off work from the grocery store across the parking lot, and by Glenn who walked all the way from home to the downtown plaza to spend some time in the booth. We wrapped up the day by ordering a pizza from Aladino’s to take home with us.
And although it wasn’t a public festival, it was the occasion of our niece Shannon’s 21st birthday that brought us to the Ferreira homestead in Hayward on Sept. 12, one day before the official event. We noshed on brownies and organic party fare, watched the guest of honor unwrap her gifts, and played a round of trivia to pass the time — proving to ourselves how little we know about the pop culture of the eras we all grew up in.
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UR INVESTING ADVENTURES continue as we prepare to close the books on a volatile September that saw roughly $4,400 income from options premium. It was far from our best month, but not at all bad when considering that September is historically one of the worst months in the markets, and that theme has been playing out the past week or so as fears of inflation, China and a looming government debt ceiling showdown dominate headlines.
But while several of the biggest names that make up the Dow and S&P 500 have been struggling of late, a few of the tickers we trade — speculative small cap growth stocks in the space, EV and renewable energy industries — have mostly bottomed or begun to move higher, which is good news as we hope to eventually close some of our open positions heading into the final quarter of 2021.
Because of an accounting change made in July, Vanguard is finally telling us we have cash available to withdraw from our taxable account. And while we’d love to believe that is the case, we also know that any cash on hand will be needed in the event of more market volatility, which is pretty much inevitable between now and the end of the year.
September saw another slew of share purchases. Via option assignments, we acquired 100 additional shares of Rocket Companies (RKT) and 300 shares of ChargePoint (CHPT) — 100 additional in Glenn’s IRA and 200 in separate lots to start a position in the taxable brokerage account. We also bought 100 shares of Eargo Inc. (EAR) after the stock crashed more than 65 percent in a day on news of a criminal investigation. A speculative play, to be sure, but fairly low risk on a stock that now trades in the mid single digits. Because we have accumulated so many new positions since May — 1,500 shares spread across nine different companies — and given the uncertainties of the markets, our focus has shifted a bit from selling naked put options to concentrating on covered calls.
In theory, it is safer to sell call options against shares you already own. The premiums aren’t as good, but in the event you are assigned by the holder of the contract, the proceeds from the sale come back to your account as cash. If the contract doesn’t get exercised, you as the seller get to keep the premium along with the shares to option again if you choose. Think of it like a landlord renting out a house and collecting the rental income, all the while planning to one day sell the property for a profit. Well, that’s the general idea with covered calls.
We remain on pace for about $54,000 in options premium this year, and while we continue to sell contracts on a weekly basis, many of the trades have been pushed into next year where they will settle at the time they are closed. So we keep the premium as cash today but won’t be taxed on it until the 2022 tax year. Likewise, any losing trades we roll into next year will offset our proceeds for this year, so there is some method to the apparent madness.
That will wrap things up for this month. Halloween is just a few weeks away, which as far as we’re concerned is the most wonderful time of the year! See you then.
