On Thanksgiving we set a place for just about anyone... with some exceptions. Try telling that to Phyre, who is patiently awaiting his turkey dinner. Don't worry, bub, you'll get a few nibbles too. Photo by Glenn.
November 30, 2021: We’ve officially entered the Holiday Zone, and that means the days flash by faster than Santa’s reindeer on their journey around the globe as we tick off the remaining days of 2021. Just like that, we’ve gone from the promise-filled first hours of the new year to the bitter dregs of autumn, as we reflect on both the accomplishments and failures of the past several months.
That's a pretty scary face you've got there... and the jack o'lantern is frightening too. This year's Halloween offering was carved using drill bits. Photo by Glenn.
Here's Jack all lit up on our front porch. Photo by Glenn.
We were a bit late to the party with our Halloween decorations. In fact, we did all our decorating a couple of hours before the kids started arriving. We put a ramp next to the porch step to prevent the inevitable trip-and-fall incidents we seem to invite every year. Photo by Glenn.
Ben gets bonus points for dressing up to hand out Halloween candy. Photo by Glenn.
Roni prepared her usual fun feast for Halloween dinner. We've got mummy dogs, jalapeño poppers and Waldorf salad (sans werewolves this year because we were missing a key ingredient.) Photo by Glenn.
The mummy dogs are made more fun with the addition of candy eyes. Looks like we've got a cyclops in the lineup. Photo by Glenn.
This little guy looks way too happy for the occasion. Think we'll eat you first! Photo by Glenn.
Not that we ever need an excuse to enjoy a box of doughnuts, but the occasion for this one is that Glenn wanted to sample the product after investing in Krispy Kreme stock this month. This is the second time around for the doughnut chain in our area, with the nearest store to us now located in Brentwood. Photo by Glenn.
The hat was a freebie. Wear it with pride. Photo by Roni.
Three months after ordering it from the U.S. Mint, our commemorative uncirculated Peace Dollar has finally arrived. Glenn was one of the lucky few to reserve one while he was still in bed one morning during our visit to Pajaro Dunes Resort back in August. Photo by Glenn.
One of the neighborhood peacocks is out for his morning stroll. He's all grown now, and that plumage is really a sight to see when it's in full spread. Photo by Roni.
Oops. Looks like the cats will be enjoying quiche tonight. One benefit of vinyl plank flooring is this was a relatively easy cleanup. Photo by Glenn.
With a big family gathering for Thanksgiving looking unlikely this year, we made time to get together with Glenn's folks for lunch one afternoon the week before the holiday as Dad was in town. Ben had the day off on Nov. 17, so we all went out to eat. Photo by Glenn.
Mom finds out just how much cheese Skipolini's puts on its Prego Pizza. Photo by Glenn.
The Prego is so named because it famously was said to have induced a woman's labor years ago. Fortunately you don't have to be pregnant to enjoy one of these deep dish treats, and because of its size we all had enough for leftovers to take home. Photo by Glenn.
It was one of the darnedest things we'd ever experienced. We were leaving the house to head to the pizza shop and the deadbolt on our front door broke. It was good fortune that we'd bought a lock on one of our new patio doors or we would have had to call in a locksmith to rescue us. Upon inspection we determined the lock was damaged beyond repair and wound up swapping it for a new one. Photo by Glenn.
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas at Home Depot. We're doing some research for our next big home improvement project — which we'll hopefully be able to share in greater detail next month! Photo by Glenn.
Thanksgiving Day finds us in front of the TV to watch the annual Macy's Parade. The crowds have returned, thanks to vaccines and relaxed masking requirements in New York City. Photo by Glenn.
Hey look, it's Pikachu and Pichu bobbing their way down 34th Street. Hard to believe these guys have been park of our lives for a quarter century already. Photo by Glenn.
There you have it. Christmas (shopping) season has officially begun now that Santa has arrived. Macy's has proclaimed it so. Photo by Glenn.
Our Thanksgiving meals featured something a bit unusual this year — a loaf of sweet bread created in the shape of a turkey. Glenn would love to take credit for this creation, but it actually comes to us via Oakley French Bread here in town. It was a lot of bread for our little family, but it was very good. Photo by Roni.
The turkey bread was on the table for our Thanksgiving breakfast, which Ben is already tucking into. Photo by Glenn.
Our table is set for Thanksgiving dinner. This is the first time in a couple of years that we've cooked at home, and Roni put her Foodi Ninja through its paces cooking up a delicious turkey breast. Photo by Glenn.
Among the accomplishments, we must count the installation of our new Milgard Tuscany premium vinyl windows and doors that arrived just a few days before Halloween. We’ve had a month to get to know them, and so far we continue to be generally impressed with their appearance and performance, although we have yet to receive the two screen doors we paid for. Supply chain delays continue to be the excuse, and we’ve been assured that once the screens arrive from the factory that they will be sent directly to our home for installation by the pros.
Meanwhile, time rolls by and we still had to go through our visit from the city building inspector to sign off on the permit. A mere formality, of course, because the professional window and door installers do this every day and they know what the rules are, etc. Still, we don’t like strangers wandering around our home too often, especially when they have the power to accept or reject whatever questionable building code situations may exist. Not that we have any, of course.
Roni, ever the worrier when it comes to the city, cites the situation of our next door neighbors, Brenda and Ramon, who put on a new roof and were told when the inspector came that their front yard landscaping was deficient. They were cited and had to replace their dead lawn, which resulted in an extensive overhaul that included the removal of trees and shrubs and addition of dozens of bags of redwood bark that now blows into our yard and has to be refreshed every spring.
Our own front yard, which we updated a little more than four years ago, is no longer looking so fresh. The sod lawn we put in has long since withered away in the drought, replaced by short weeds. The bricks we installed around the front planter area have been pushed up by gopher activity and the roots of the pine tree we had removed back in June. Our roof gutters are rusty. In short, there are at least a half-dozen issues a sharp-eyed inspector could call us out on if they had their druthers.
So what was it they actually did take issue with when the inspector showed up one afternoon to review the windows and doors? Fire alarms.
It turns out that the local fire district updated its code requirements in 2019 to require carbon monoxide detectors in every sleeping area of the home. That is in addition to fire alarms in any hallway located outside a bedroom. We’d always had the hallway units, but because we’d never had a visit from the city before now, this was the first chance to notify us of our code deficiency in the bedrooms — and they did. The inspector shoved a clipboard in Roni’s hands and told her to sign a statement acknowledging that we had installed the missing CO detectors. She handed it to Glenn so he could sign his life away instead.
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ELL, NOW THAT he’d affixed his name to a statement that was in essence untrue, it was off to Home Depot to pick up some smoke/carbon monoxide alarms to put us back in the good graces of the code enforcement police. We needed to update the existing hardwired alarms in the two hallways and add new units to our bedroom and Ben’s room. We picked up units manufactured by Kidde, both for their relative affordability and ease of installation.
Replacing the units in the hallways was a relative breeze and probably should have been done 20 years ago, as they only have a life expectancy of about a decade. It was a simple matter of removing the old units, changing out the wire harness with the included plug adapter, and then screwing the new bracket to the junction box. Each unit took about 10 minutes and worked like a charm.
The bedroom units were pretty simple too, once we figured out where to mount them. Just pop some crews into the included bracket and twist the unit in place. It clicks on, automatically engaging the battery in the process. There are no user serviceable parts; it functions for 10 years until its battery depletes and it alerts you that it’s time for a new one. Easy peasy.
And now back to those doors and windows…
One thing we did when we chose our doors was to add a keyed lock to the slider in the dining room. It only cost an extra 20 bucks, which we thought was worth the small investment because so often we use that door as a shortcut through the backyard to get to the Raley’s shopping plaza. Better to keep make it so we could lock it behind us, which we had never been able to do with the old doors.
We had no idea what a smart decision that would prove until Nov. 17, the day we decided to get together with Glenn’s parents for a lunch outing here in town. We’d been leaning toward not going to Hayward for Thanksgiving dinner this year, and so this would be our opportunity for a pre-holiday feast with us and them while Glenn’s dad was in town from Hemet. Ben had been looking forward to it and came with us on his day off from work.
We’d chosen Skipolini’s Pizza for our destination. We were all getting ready to head out and Roni was locking up the front door when she said something was wrong — the key wasn’t able to fit inside the deadbolt. It turned out to be worse than that, actually. The lock itself had somehow failed, leaving the latch engaged with no way to insert the key to unlock it. Doh!
We were all ready to despair until we remembered about the keyed lock on the patio door! Ben went around to the back, let himself in, and was able to unlatch the front door from the inside. Saved! Except now we had a new problem — we needed a new deadbolt.
So after a couple of days during which we had to let Ben in through the front door when he came home from work, we ventured over to ACE Hardware to pick out a replacement lock. We were disappointed because we’d bought the lockset originally as part of a new door handle package and didn’t want to have mismatched hardware on our front entry door. But the replacement we picked out happened to be from the same manufacturer (is that necessarily a good thing?) which made the installation process immensely simple. Glenn just popped the broken latch out of the door and inserted the new mechanism in its place. At least we got to keep our antiqued bronze handle and lock housing.
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E GOT A bit behind with our Halloween preparations this year — so much so that we didn’t get to any of our outdoor decorating until that Sunday afternoon. So there wasn’t the usual array of spooky spiders and disembodied shrunken heads we usually put out to entertain the kiddies. Nor did we do our cemetery display on the front lawn circle beside the driveway. But we were able to liberate a few pumpkins, bats and the strobe light from the clutter of our garage. And with the addition of some luminaries along the driveway to prove there was a reason for trick-or-treaters to come up to the porch, we had a semblance of Halloween spirit.
Last year we were too late to buy pumpkins from the grocery store to carve into jack o’lanterns, so this year when we found them on sale at Raley’s a month early, we bought three of them with the expectation that we’d be doing a lot of pumpkin carving. We didn’t, of course, and so it came down to Glenn scoping out a quick-and-easy design from online to ensure we at least had one hollowed gourd on the porch.
It was the simplest of designs — a surprised face carved using drill bits and hole saws of various sizes. With some pumpkin seed guts spread on top to resemble hair, it looked a bit like Mr. Bill from the old Saturday Night Live series. Whatever. It took less than 30 minutes to make and you could stick a candle in it.
The first of the children arrived before dark, even as we were putting the finishing touches on our display. Although Glenn handled candy duties for the first few groups that showed up, it was Ben who performed the bulk of the handouts. He was feeling a bit nostalgic for the days when he used to ply the neighborhood dressed in his own costume, treat bag in hand, and so he decided to dress up just for the heck of it. Not only did that save us from the steady stream of trick-or-treaters who came to the door, but it allowed him to enjoy the compliments he received on his own costume.
Roni was doing her best to stay off her foot, which had become sore recently as it does periodically. She did, however, manage to throw together another of her fun feasts of mummy dogs, spooky jalapeno poppers, and Werewolf in the Waldorf salad (minus the werewolf part because she couldn’t get alfalfa sprouts from the grocery store this year.)
We gave out a ton of candy, although we still had leftovers to tempt us afterward. And while it seemed things went generally well, we have vowed to do better next year with our display.
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OVEMBER IS SLIPPING into December, and that means less than five weeks on the trading calendar as we remain on pace to meet our investment cash flow goals for the year. The month surprisingly turned into our biggest of 2021, as we brought in more than $8,000 in our taxable account. That figure can be attributed to a couple of things, one of them not so positive.
On the downside, we had to “eat” a couple of very expensive option trades that didn’t work out. Peloton (PTON) experienced a spectacular plunge of its share price following its quarterly earnings announcement, and even though our position wasn’t scheduled to expire until January, we closed it weeks early to absorb a $3,700 loss that will help offset some of our gains come tax time.
The other expensive disaster came with Upstart Holdings (UPST), a fintech payment company that has been on fire since summer. It had peaked at 401.48 in mid-October before slipping to 322 the day before earnings. We sold what was supposed to be a three-day put option for 260.00, thinking it unlikely the shares would fall that much — and naturally we were wrong. UPST has plunged since then, trading as low as 189.00 on Nov. 23. We’ve rolled our “three-day” put twice already, so that now it expires next April at a strike price of 210.00. Accounting for premium received, we currently have a realized loss of close to $4,000.
So how do you remain cash-positive when absorbing big losses? You sell more premium. And with markets generally lower throughout the month thanks to inflation and COVID variant worries, there were numerous opportunities to sell more puts while calls we already had sold expired worthless.
We started three new positions during November and expanded an existing one. We bought 100 shares of doughnut maker Krispy Kreme (DNUT), 100 shares of satellite launching company Rocket Lab (RKLB), and 7 shares of Canadian energy producer Suncor (SU) — the odd number resulting from selling a put option and using the premium received to purchase as many of the dividend-paying shares as it would buy. We also added 100 shares of Invesco Mortgage Capital (IVR) to enhance our dividend portfolio.
The best thing about the DNUT and RKLB purchases is that they were financed entirely from premium obtained by selling long-dated put options. In each case, a trio of 15.00 strike puts that would require us to buy 300 more shares should the stocks trade below that price at expiration. For RKLB, that gives us until January 2023; for DNUT, it’s January 2024.
To say we are exhausted from the market’s gyrations right now might be an understatement, but whether up or down there are always more opportunities to be found. We will continue to sell for premium through the end of the year, rolling any losses we have to absorb into 2022.
That’s a wrap for November. Hope you have a great holiday season.
