Two days to Durham

The occasion for our visit to Appalachia was the annual LION Publishers Awards Banquet in Durham where Glenn and his work colleagues were in the running for an Outstanding Coverage award for a series of stories on homelessness in San Francisco. The stories were written by Bay City News reporter Joe Dworetzky and designed by Glenn as part of his web producer duties with Local News Matters during the spring. We learned in July that we were among the finalists in our small publisher tier and given the opportunity to send a representative to attend the Oct. 3 dinner at The Cookery in downtown Durham during LION’s annual Southeast News Sustainability Meetup conference.

Glenn usually isn’t one to volunteer for such events, but because he played a key role in producing the nominated series and LION was offering travel scholarships to help foot the bill, he hesitantly raised his hand to go. It didn’t hurt that spouses were invited to attend the dinner and we thought it would be a great opportunity to do some sightseeing after the event, maybe rent a car and drive out to the Outer Banks to check out the lighthouses on the coast. But unfortunately those travel plans never happened.

Shortly after returning from Europe and while weighing the options for a North Carolina visit, Roni received the unexpected news that her column at the newspaper was being eliminated due to budget cuts. She had been writing it since 1998, so it was more the shock of losing the longtime gig than the revenue it helped bring in, but it wasn’t a completely insignificant monetary loss either. For that reason, and because Roni still had bad memories of her flight to Amsterdam, enduring cramps and other discomforts, we abandoned the idea of a mini vacation and went back to the original plan that Glenn would fly solo to attend the dinner. 

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F

INDING A DIRECT flight to Raleigh-Durham International Airport — also known as RDU — from the Bay Area isn’t easy, despite it being the 35th largest airport in the U.S. And because it was getting late in the game for booking flights, they were also more costly than between some of the nearby destinations like Charlotte or Richmond, Virginia. With Roni’s travel planning assistance, Glenn secured a roundtrip flight on Delta Airlines from SFO to RDU with a stopover in Atlanta, which is Delta’s hub city and the busiest airport in the nation.

No longer a vacation, we boiled the trip down to the barest essentials to save both time and money. It literally became a whirlwind business trip lasting about 45 hours from the moment of leaving our front door to walking back through it two days later.

Glenn’s adventure began with a late-evening BART ride to San Francisco International Airport on Monday, Oct. 2, to catch the red-eye to Atlanta. Roni dropped him off at the Antioch station just before 8 p.m., and he rode in a largely empty train car to the other end of the line, arriving at the airport around 9:45. Glenn had only a carry-on bag, so getting through security and to the boarding gate for the 11:55 p.m. flight was a breezy affair.

The flight had looked mostly empty when Glenn booked it three weeks earlier, and he had hoped that might mean he would have the row to himself for the four-hour trip, but apparently people really do fly in the middle of the night, and Delta Flight 900 was full by the time of departure. Glenn wound up seated next to a young mother and her two small children, the youngest of whom reached his limit about three hours into the trip and screamed most of the final hour. Sleep on the flight? Not a chance.

But Glenn, who has always been fascinated by the view from 37,000 feet up, had a window seat and wasn’t about to miss out after having been deprived on our international flights in August. The world looks a whole lot different at night, and the trajectory of this southerly route to Atlanta included flyovers of Las Vegas and Memphis, a lightning storm over the Rockies, and the first blush of a rosy dawn over the East Coast as the plane touched down at ATL, nearly half an hour earlier than advertised. 

It was a good thing, too, because Glenn had to transfer to his short-hop flight into Raleigh-Durham and the airline thoughtfully located it at a boarding gate four terminals away from where he arrived. ATL is a mighty busy place, and finding one’s way around it can be a challenge, even with an app. Somehow Glenn managed to stumble onto the right shuttle train at the right moment and got to the boarding gate with a little time to spare, barely managing to squeeze his bag into the overstuffed overhead compartments; some passengers were less fortunate and had to check their carry-ons at the gate. 

The flight to RDU was largely uneventful, and Glenn found himself standing inside the spacious terminal at a little before 10:30 in the morning with several hours to kill before the awards dinner later that afternoon. He grabbed an overpriced sandwich and bottled water from an airport concession stand and sat in one of the lounges to eat and get his bearings. He texted Roni to let her know he’d arrived safely at his destination: “Well, I’m here. Now the hell what? LOL.”  

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W

HAT, INDEED. ASIDE from showing up for the dinner, there really was no plan once Glenn had arrived in North Carolina. He was dead exhausted from not sleeping on the flight and wanted only to close his eyes for a bit before heading to downtown Durham. Fortunately he was able to check in early at his hotel, the Springhill Suites, just outside the airport, and he napped for a couple of hours. 

The dinner started at 5:30 p.m. sharp. Glenn was able to catch the free GoTriangle shuttle bus at the terminal located right across from the hotel, which dropped him off in the downtown with a couple of hours to kill before the event. That gave him the opportunity to check out the American Tobacco Historic District, where Lucky Strike cigarettes were once manufactured. Today the factory serves as an upscale dining and entertainment venue with several shops nestled amid man made streams and meadows. The old smokestack and water tower that once served the factory have been preserved. 

The historic district is located next to the baseball field where the minor league Durham Bulls play, and is also home to Burt’s Bees, famous for its lip balm and other bee’s wax products. It was all worth an hour’s visit, but probably better dressed in casual attire such as shorts and a T-shirt rather than the long-sleeved button-up shirt and dress shoes Glenn had on for his dinner. The temperature was in the low 80s, and there was just enough humidity to make things uncomfortable if you had to be out in it too long. 

The Cookery was about a mile away from the historic district, so Glenn walked over and arrived about 20 minutes before the event, enough time to find a table and chat with one or two of the other attendees. The LION awards were set up much like the Academy Awards, with the nominees recognized on screen and winners coming up on stage to accept their awards and make short acceptance speeches. 

Glenn hadn’t counted on that, but in the end it didn’t matter because he didn’t have to go up on stage; Local News Matters lost out to another news organization from New Mexico, which didn’t even have a representative on hand to accept the award. Glenn hadn’t expected that his team would win, but the loss was disappointing all the same. At least the dinner was good and the trip entertaining (and mostly paid for.) He caught the shuttle bus back to the hotel and slept well that night, trying to rest up for the long flight back home the next morning.

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D

URHAM IS WHAT is often referred to as a college town. It is home to Duke, NC State, and North Carolina Central universities. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is just a few miles outside of town. As you might imagine, sports are a very big deal there, and this was abundantly clear to Glenn while waiting for his homeward flight on Wednesday morning at RDU. Young people dressed in school sports uniforms wandered through the terminal, and at least one girl strolled up to the boarding gate with an armload of tennis rackets. “Is she actually planning to carry those onto the plane?” Glenn wondered, considering how crowded the overhead bins were on his two previous flights. 

He needn’t have wondered, because it turned out that “Racket Girl” was his middle seat mate on the flight. He didn’t make the connection until it was time to unboard in Atlanta, and she had to retrieve the rackets from the overhead compartment at the end of their row. The rackets weren’t bundled together, but rather piled individually into the bin so that she had to take each one out separately — a process that held up the line of people eager to get off the plane, some like Glenn who had connecting flights they had to reach. 

Fortunately Glenn was able to squeeze around Racket Girl and make his mad scramble from Terminal A to Terminal B in time to board his connecting flight to SFO, which had already started boarding before his flight from RDU had arrived at the gate. By the time he arrived at the boarding gate, most of the other passengers had boarded and he was told he would have to check his bag because the overhead bins were full. (This turned out not to be true, but he didn’t find that out until once he was on the plane and his bag had been checked in.) 

As was the case for all of his flights, Glenn had a seat by the window. He also had a middle seat mate who he nicknamed: “Coughing Girl.” Yes, she spent the whole four and a half hour flight with a little cough that left Glenn expecting that he would come down with something after his trip — his consolation prize for not winning the LION award. 

Sure enough, less than a week after returning home, Glenn had a sore throat and the sniffles. Of course in the post-pandemic world no one can simply have a cold anymore, and Roni assumed the worst, so she ordered Glenn to take the dreaded COVID antigen test. Fortunately it came back negative — which was a good thing, because Glenn had an eye doctor appointment a few days later that he didn’t want to miss. And it was during that visit to Kaiser in Antioch that he stopped in and got a dose of the new COVID vaccine along with his flu shot, so he should be all set to face the harsh winter ahead. 

Anyway, that is the story of Glenn’s blitz of North Carolina — the first and probably last time he’ll ever see Durham. 

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D

O YOU HAVE your new iPhone yet? Just about everyone in our family seems to all of a sudden, as several people wanted or needed to upgrade from much older models. The iPhone 15 lineup was released at the end of September, and Glenn was eager to be one of the first in line to replace his aging iPhone XR.

We think of our phones less as phones than as personal communication devices with cameras attached to them. Most of the time we are texting, gaming or checking out social media, and when that’s not happening we are taking pictures — or at least we would like to do more of that if not for an ongoing lack of storage space on the phone itself. Even though Glenn bought the 128GB model when he got his XR nearly five years ago, its capacity had long ago been maxed out and most of the rarely used apps had been relegated to an offloaded life in the cloud.

The old phone probably could have gone another year on its gradually deteriorating battery, but the lack of storage couldn’t be ignored. That became especially clear during our trip to Europe and the Durham excursion, where at times on both outings the phone ran out of storage and Glenn had to trash old photos and videos that he’d already backed up to the computer at home. 

So despite a bit of hesitation over which was the right model at the right price, Glenn at last decided on a 256GB version of the base model iPhone 15, which despite being at the low end of the product line could still run circles around the old XR. AT&T had a good trade-in deal going, so Glenn placed an order before leaving for Durham, and it was sitting on the table waiting for him the day he returned home. 

So far things with the new phone are going well. It’s great to have storage space available once again, and the new software and camera optics are a vast improvement over the old model. At $900 it wasn’t cheap, but it is still quite a savings over the top of the line iPhone 15 Pro Max at $1,200. 

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L

AST MONTH'S NEWSLETTER was totally devoted to our visit to Amsterdam and British Isles cruise, but there were other things happening in the month of September that we didn’t have the chance to share.

We returned home to our neighbors’ very pregnant cat, who we refer to here as Nomad because of her feral lifestyle. The poor thing is barely a year and half old and already working on her second litter of kittens — or at least we assumed she was. Shortly after our return, Nomad disappeared for a day or two, and the next time we saw her she was much thinner.

“Ah, kittens!” we said. Like the last pair she’d had over the summer, we expected to see them in a few weeks, romping and playing in our yard. But mama cat quickly resumed her daily visits to our porch and hanging out there as if she didn’t have a young family to attend to back home. In fact, we’ve seen nothing to indicate there are kittens at all, and it has gotten us to wondering if they either met an untimely fate somewhere out in the wild or were “disposed of” before they were old enough to be on their own. 

In any case, as of this writing there are no kittens and Nomad is looking thinner and more neglected than we’ve ever seen her. A few weeks ago, she “gifted” us with a ground squirrel she caught in our backyard, depositing the carcass on our patio and proceeding to rip it apart and eat half of it. And the other day when we went to pet her, we were immediately blown away by the odor of skunk that convinced us she’d probably encountered one of the critters that frequent the neighborhood.

Indeed, it appears she may have tangled with something much larger and meaner than she is, as she now has bite marks on both her ears and is missing a good sized patch of fur on the back of her neck. The level of neglect is astonishing and we feel so bad for her. And even as she has now been pregnant twice, she remains unspayed and her male suitor — the beefy black cat we call Baby Daddy — is back to hanging around with her for what we assume may already be round three of parenthood.

We continue to feed her occasionally and give her cat milk, but we fear she may not be long for the world. Are we the only ones who care? Probably.

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O

NE OF RONI'S biggest projects this past year or so has been the creation of an education trailer for Ironhouse Sanitary District. This would be a 12-foot, fully enclosed utility trailer the district purchased last year from a dealer near Sacramento and brought back to be tricked out by workers in the district’s maintenance department. They installed windows, cabinets, solar electric, TV monitors and flooring, among other amenities.

The trailer made its debut at the Heart of Oakley Festival on Sept. 23, where it was well received by the public and the district’s board members. Roni built a demonstration of the UV light purification system the district uses to clean water at its wastewater treatment facility, using parts she found at the local pet supply store. It was all very creative.

The trailer is still a work in progress, with plans to eventually add a vinyl skin that is being designed by an outside firm, so it wasn’t on hand for the Oaktober Festival that took place a few weeks later at Civic Park. But hopefully it will be ready for prime time next spring when fair and festival season get underway once again.

The idea is to have a trailer filled with interactive exhibits that teach visitors about water recycling and environmental sustainability — themes that resonate with families and especially children today. The trailer may make the rounds of the local elementary schools once it is complete, so we’ll watch for that. 

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S

EAN'S WEDDING IS just a few weeks away, and he and his fiancee Chi have already been settling into their new home in South San Jose. We got to see it for the first time when they held a housewarming party on Sept. 9 that we attended along with about 50-60 other guests.

Ben made the drive down there with us, despite being nervous about the prospect of meeting many people he didn’t know. He held up pretty well, considering all the activity. It was mostly members of Chi’s family and a few coworkers of hers and Sean, but we represented for the future groom along with Glenn’s mom and sister Jennifer and her family, all of us coming and going in shifts.

Sean and Chi’s house is on a cul de sac and comes with a fairly large yard, which was perfect for the gathering. We didn’t spend much time in it aside from seeing it on the grand tour, as we made our way to the family room where we sat and ate our hors d’oeuvres and lunch while visiting with family as the party swirled around us.

The house got a complete makeover, courtesy of Chi’s parents, when Sean and Chi bought it in June. It has all new composite wood floors they sought to protect by having guests remove their shoes at the front door. It was funny to see the giant pile of shoes once everyone had arrived — sort of like the legendary shoe closet of Imelda Marcos. They’ve got a couple of spare bedrooms that they have already rented out to help defray mortgage costs, but with luck they won’t need to do that too long. 

The food was great and it was fun getting to see the house, even as it is hard to meet a lot of people when there is so much activity going on. Once the wedding is over in early December, we hope there will be some quiet opportunities to get together with the newlyweds. 

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T

HERE IS AN old saying in financial circles that goes, “Don’t fight the Fed.” The wisdom of those words applies whether the Federal Reserve Board is lowering interest rates, as was the case for much of the 2010s, or raising them steadily, as has happened for the past year and a half as the Central Bank strives to bring down inflation. If lower rates are conducive to bull markets and higher demand for stocks, the exact opposite is true when rates rise with no end in sight; buyers flee the market, leaving prices depressed along with the spirits of those brave or foolish enough to hold on to equities.

Unfortunately, the latter has been the case for us for most of the past two years. We’ve documented the path of devastation that has carved its way through our tech-heavy taxable portfolio since its peak value in January 2022, now down more than $110,000 since then due in part to bad timing and bad choices coupled with a lack of knowledge about the consequences of an unprecedented spike in inflation following two years of a COVID-fueled economy. 

As recently as July, when markets appeared to be stabilizing, we were growing optimistic that our accounts might be on the rebound despite higher interest rates. But the three months since then have written a different story, and we now find ourselves plumbing new lows, forced to sell things we didn’t want to in order to exit old options trades gone bad. Despite efforts to whittle down our margin balance, we still find ourselves weighed down by the escalating value of those losses. That reality has led to the difficult decision that it is time to liquidate what remains and start over. 

October has been especially painful. On Oct. 26 we were assigned $10,000 worth of cumulative shares for three different stocks (ChargePoint, SunPower and Fuelcell Energy) as the result of options contracts we entered months ago that have since lost more than half their value. The result was that we immediately sold all three stocks for a big loss and still had to come up with roughly $4,000 in cash to cover the remaining debt. We dumped everything we owned of Blacksky, Boeing, and our Invesco mortgage REIT ETF, along with shares of Quantumscape and Ring Central. The names matter less than that the things we sold are all trading at or close to their lows of the year, which meant they were already at a deep loss in our portfolio. 

The good news is that all those sales expanded our margin balance. The bad news is that we still need to come up with about $19,000 to close all the remaining options, so it looks like we’ll be forced to sell about half of our remaining Apple shares next month. It’s a slow process of unwinding, but one that needs to happen in order to prevent further losses. 

Well, if all that wasn’t scary enough, we still have to get ready for Halloween. So that’s it for this month. 

Glenn, Roni and Ben