Like mother like son (or perhaps daughter), our neighborhood peacocks have become quite the fixture in our front yard recently. And yes, one of these two is the offspring of the other, now almost fully grown after a few months. They seem to approve of our lack of a lawn, which makes for better dust baths. Photo by Glenn.
October 29, 2020: We’re just a few days out from Halloween, and the only thing scarier than ghosts and goblins might be the latest surge in coronavirus cases and the resulting limits that are being placed on one of our favorite seasons of the year. Trick-or-treating is “not recommended” by our state and county health officials, and attending parties… that’s out too. So we are left to decide whether we should load up on candy for those who are brave enough to haunt our doorstep on Oct. 31, and if we do that, how to safely distribute those sugary morsels to the kiddos.
We're back at Eden Plains nursery to pick up the juniper bushes we ordered a few weeks ago. This is another of the resident cats, whose name we never did learn. Photo by Glenn.
Roni has been hard at work transforming a portion of our dead front lawn into a new garden for juniper, garlic, succulents and sea pinks. Photo by Roni.
This is why we can't have nice things. We thought we were planting a garden, but apparently we were creating a day spa for peacocks. Who knew? Photo by Roni.
Roni has added several bags of lava rock to the new garden. Let's see if the peacocks try to stir this up! We've got our Halloween decorations out, too. Photo by Roni.
Ben models this year's Halloween outfit for us. He picked up the hat and mask from the Spirit Halloween Store in Brentwood. Sadly, his boss said he can't wear it at work. Photo by Roni.
A few more of our Halloween decorations. Ben has gone all out on his bedroom window. Photo by Glenn.
A few months and one new battery later, we have at last gotten the truck to the dump to get rid of some of the yard waste we've been saving up. Roni works to remove the tarp as we prepare to offload. Photo by Glenn.
And here is allllllllll the stuff we got rid of today... Well, actually just the futon mattress, sink counter and the branches you see just to the left. The rest of that mountain is someone else's junk. Photo by Glenn.
Roni's efforts to rid the backyard of weeds is starting to pay off. We removed a dead pine tree from the center of this area and it opened up the yard for the first time in years. Now she wants to put plastic over the space to keep the weeds from returning this winter while we decide what to do next. Photo by Glenn.
Our evergreen ash isn't looking evergreen at all these days. We've started cutting it down, limb by limb. The extension ladder isn't quite tall enough or as stable as we want to easily finish the job. Photo by Glenn.
Our new neighbors surprised us with a gesture of friendship in the form of homemade pozole, a spicy Mexican soup made with hominy. It was very tasty. Photo by Roni.
Here is something no seller of put options wants to see. This is what happened to Fastly (FSLY) stock after the company spooked investors Oct. 14 with advance news that it would miss its earnings forecast this quarter. That huge gap from peak to valley represents a drop of more than $66 (roughly 50 percent) per share in less than two weeks. We hold two options on this stock, and it may be a while before we recoup the loss — which for the moment is still only on paper, thankfully.
One last time in the arena for these two before Election Day. We're not sure who won this debate, but the real question is whether we'll know who wins the Electoral College before December. Photo by Glenn.
Phoenix is weary of politics. So are we. Photo by Glenn.
Normally we get into the Halloween spirit by decorating our front porch and creating a miniature cemetery scene on our front “lawn.” (The grass actually died a couple of years ago, so it lends to the authenticity of it all.) Roni has taken up the task herself of getting the house in shape for the holiday, so she braved the clutter in the garage one weekend and pulled out a few of our collected decorations, although perhaps not as many as we have enjoyed in previous years. There are still giant spiders hanging about our porch, and not just the live ones we failed to scare away with pesticides earlier in the summer. Ben also contributed with a few spooky decorations he brought home from the Spirit Halloween Store one day when he visited there with a couple of coworkers. We’ve got lights, but probably no sound effects for the first time in several years. Glenn says he already has his idea for a jack-o-lantern carving, so stay tuned.
We got our meager display together just in time for our annual October wind storm, naturally, so as we write this and hear the wind gusts howling outside the house, we know there will probably be a lot of scattered decorations (and garbage) come the morning.
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SIDE FROM COVID-19, stock market mayhem and an election cycle for the record books, 2020 will forever be known in our family as The Year of the Dead Battery. In March, Roni spent her birthday trying to get her car back home after it died in downtown Oakley. In May, it was Ben’s turn to be stranded in a mall parking lot on a blistering spring afternoon. This month was Glenn’s turn.
Back in June and July, we moved some clutter out of the garage and then pruned up the big pine tree in our front yard parkway in preparation for a visit to the dump. So certain were we that we’d be making that trip soon, we loaded up the bed of the pickup truck without a thought to the fact that it had been a few months since the last time we had driven it anywhere. The Ford’s six-year-old battery behaved predictably: it died the moment we tried to crank up the engine.
And so we let the load in the bed sit. And sit some more. Nearly three months we let it sit, until finally we decided we’d procrastinated enough and that the battery wouldn’t magically recharge itself. For his birthday, Glenn received from Roni a portable battery charger that was supposed to have more than enough juice to jump start a truck battery. Perhaps for one that was only slightly dead, but ours was very dead. Glenn spent the better part of an afternoon without success trying to jump start the truck, and finally he was ready to give up when he brought Roni out to take a look and lo and behold it turned over!
Well, now that the thing was running we were afraid to turn off the engine. Too bad it was already dark and the dump was closed. At least we knew the jump had worked and the battery could hold a charge — or could it?
Two days later, we decided to make the dump run. This would be the real test of the old battery, seeing as how it hadn’t been used since the night we’d jumped it. And of course the thing died when we tried to start the Ford. Grrrr. So it was either the battery or the alternator, and being that we prefer cheap repairs to expensive ones, we opted to replace the battery. We picked up our replacement from Auto Zone for around $140. We got it installed within minutes and breathed a huge sigh of relief when it started right up.
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OT WANTING TO take a chance that maybe it was still the alternator and we’d deplete the battery again if we waited, we decided to keep the truck running and make our dump run. It had been a couple of years since our previous visit to the Contra Costa Waste Services Recycling & Transfer Station in Pittsburg, and the price had gone up a bit to $34 a ton. Our load wasn’t anywhere close to that, so they charged us the minimum and we spent a few cathartic minutes heaving our branches and old junk onto the giant debris pile.
We felt a bit cheated for having brought so little to dispose of; the truck is capable of much larger loads, limited only by how high we can stack them. Might as well fit as much stuff as possible back there to minimize the number of trips and cost incurred. So Glenn has vowed to build wood sides for the tailgate before the next trip we make. Another project to add to his list of about 400 things he wants or needs to do.
With the truck already on the road, we decided to take advantage of the hauling capacity and pick up some more landscaping rocks from Mt. Diablo Landscape Center, which is about a mile away from the dump station. Roni has been replacing the old bark in the front yard with lava rock, and she discovered early on that “just a few more bags” is never enough for such a project. She had already gone through 10 bags on two previous trips, so now we decided to pick up 10 bags of the 3-inch rocks — something we never could have done in her Corolla. The strong men at the rock center quickly loaded the bags into our truck bed like they were sacks of flour. We were back home in a jiffy. Total time for our dump/garden center round-trip run: less than one hour.
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ONI HAS BEEN working up a storm in the yards — mainly because she is worried about storms of a different sort as we close in on autumn winds and rain. There is plenty to do, and she looks at it both as a way to get projects moving that have sat for far too long, and a chance to get some exercise as she spends more of her days at home instead of sitting at an office (thanks, COVID.)
She transformed a portion of what once was our front lawn into a planter area for ground juniper and succulents. She needed the lava rock to fill in around the plants while they mature, hopefully sooner than later. Not only will it keep the dust down in the meantime, but it will also deter the neighborhood peacocks, which we discovered like to take dust baths and are perfectly happy to do so in our front yard planters.
Glenn hasn’t been completely absent during this ongoing yard transformation, but his odd hours put him on a schedule that isn’t conducive to getting projects done early in the day when the weather is cooler, and by the time he is revved and ready to start it’s usually too late for Roni’s taste. Still, he has been tasked with removing two trees — a project that seems easy on its face yet is quite the challenge in reality.
Our so-called “Independence Tree” in the backyard, an evergreen ash we planted on July 4, 1997, a few weeks after we bought our home, has unfortunately been dead for a number of years and looming like a leaning skeleton over our yard. One good wind storm will eventually send it crashing down. To avoid that, Glenn is trying to get the thing sawed down with nothing more than an extension ladder and his demolition saw. The main limbs are just beyond easy reach with the ladder, so he has been trying to extend it as far as can safely be done and using the tree itself to support him — much to Roni’s chagrin.
Perhaps it is that he isn’t as young as he used to be or maybe just the fear involved with working high up with little support, but Glenn had only managed to remove a couple of small branches when his legs began shaking uncontrollably and his arms turned to jelly while holding the demo saw. He had to quickly descend the ladder or the saw surely would have dropped, possibly along with its user.
That incident convinced Roni that it might be best to hire someone to cut down the remainder of the dead tree and the much larger live pine tree that is growing too close to the house in the front yard. While Glenn isn’t excited about the idea of hiring out for a job he’d prefer to do himself and would have in his younger days, we are considering our options for tree trimming services.
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E AREN'T THE only ones who have been doing yard work as cooler weather approaches. Our new neighbors have been on a nonstop home improvement program since they moved in the middle of July. We awoke one recent weekend morning to the sound of sledge hammers next door, which turned out to be workers removing a deck and concrete patio that had been behind their house. That preceded the pouring of a new concrete slab a few days later, then more pounding and sawing as they built a new patio and wood covering to provide an improved backyard sanctuary.
Improved for them, although perhaps not for us. At least not in the interim as we’ve had to endure a couple more weeks of construction activity that has literally caused our whole house to shake. But we hope this will be the last round of major projects there for a while, given that the weather will be turning soon.
They have done their best to be friendly towards us, however, perhaps in part because they realize they have been generating a lot of noise. About a week ago, their eldest daughter brought over a container of homemade pozole to share with us, and we all agreed that the spicy hominy soup was an excellent addition to our evening meal. Now we are trying to figure out something to bake for them in return. Maybe this Christmas.
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ITH THE PRESIDENTIAL election campaign nearing its merciful conclusion and great uncertainty about the coronavirus and the state of the economic recovery, the financial markets have been quite volatile this month. That has created some adventures for our investment strategy.
October marked our first new stock purchases in several weeks. Glenn bought 50 shares of AT&T (T) for his IRA when the price dipped ahead of the company’s quarterly earnings report. He also acquired 100 shares of Carnival Cruise Line (CCL) as the result of an option assignment on Oct. 16, what would have been expiration day for a position he’d planned to roll into another month; the contract price of $15/share was just slightly higher than the market price that morning, so it is a forced trade he’s comfortable living with and opens the door to now selling covered calls against it for extra income.
Such is not the case with another of our option trades: Fastly (FSLY). A young and highly volatile edge cloud computing company, the stock has been a favorite of younger investors since March and the options command high premiums. We sold one put at 96.00 at the end of September for $1,010, and thought it was on cruise control when the stock price vaulted to over 138 a few days later. That was before the company issued an earnings warning that revenue would be lower than expected, and the stock price since has tanked to 70. Yikes!
So instead of holding an option that looked on pace to expire worthless on Nov. 6 (which would have allowed us to keep our entire premium), now we are faced with having to buy it back for about $2,500 (as of this writing) or accept 100 shares for $9,600. To paraphrase an old childhood nursery rhyme, “Roll, roll, roll your puts gently down the stream…” The one good thing about option trades is that if at first you don’t succeed, you can keep trying until eventually you do.
Well, that’s going to do it for this month. Now it’s off to study our sample ballot in preparation for Election Day. Get ready for an exciting November, however this thing plays out.
