So long, 2020, and good riddance

But enough about that. We’ve just completed the holiday season, a time of memories and merriment despite a global pandemic that made for some necessary adjustments, including the process of Christmas shopping and baking. This has been the year of buying everything online, with many brick-and-mortar stores either closed or operating under limited capacity, and popular items in short supply because of supply chain interruptions. Not thoroughly enamored with the digital shopping experience, we’re a bit for the old-fashioned ways of exploring the stores in town to help with ideas first before making gift purchases, and so we did our best to stick with tradition.

One of the items on Roni’s Christmas wish list was the new Apple Watch Series 6 with its many health-monitoring features. Glenn had been mulling the idea of getting it for her and was ready to put in an order with the Apple Store when Roni ran across a buy-one-get-one offer through AT&T. It turns out that Ben had also put the watch on his gift list, and while he really would have preferred one of the new Sony Playstation 5 consoles under the tree, he thought the watch could be useful at work for those occasions when he might need to sneak a peek at a text message without pulling out his smartphone — a practice frowned upon by management.

But the BOGO offer on the watches was only good through Dec. 4, and to take advantage of it meant having to spoil any element of surprise for Roni as the AT&T account is in her name. It proved to be too tempting a deal to pass up, however, so we talked it over and decided to make it Roni’s main gift and bring Ben along for the ride as a surprise. We took a drive to the AT&T Store at Streets of Brentwood that Friday and made the arrangements. Just 30 easy installments on a couple of data lines and we’d have everything paid for sometime in mid-2023. The gift that keeps on giving!

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T WAS WHILE we were at Streets of Brentwood that we did a bit of gift shopping and window gazinging. We headed first to Hot Topic to pick up some T-shirts and pins for Ben, forced to stand outside for a few minutes until one of the masked employees removed the velvet rope to allow us through the front door like we were at a trendy club. Only 25 percent capacity allowed in retail stores right now, thanks to the virus.

Across the way from the COVID-shuttered AMC Theater was a line of humanity that wound around the grassy plaza holding shopping bags. We traced it from its tail to the front of the Bath & Body Works store, where we asked a worker what the occasion was. She told us it was people waiting to take advantage of the store’s 3-wick scented candle sale. Apparently this sale only comes around once a year and must be too good to pass up, but we wondered, given the store’s small size, if there would be enough product on the shelves to handle the crowd waiting outside.

While we did not join the line for the candles, eventually we made it over to Delta Gallery to check out the display of works by local artists. Not being big art connoisseurs, we generally admire the paintings and sculptures before wandering away after seeing the price tag. The true value of art is in the eye of the beholder, of course, so it is tough for us to want to pony up for something we might not want to keep on our wall forever. But Roni has actually met and interviewed many of the artists whose works are on display in Delta Gallery, so it was hard for us not to like many of the pieces we saw. 

After enjoying some idle minutes posing for selfies with the Christmas decorations in the Streets of Brentwood plaza and lamenting the fact that things just aren’t the same when you have to socially distance your way through the biggest shopping season of the year, we took our purchases home and went back to our Amazon searches, not realizing that this was to be our one and only physical trip to the mall of Christmas 2020.

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ELL, PERHAPS WE spoke too soon. While we may not have checked out other malls together following that Dec. 4 foray to Streets of Brentwood, it doesn’t mean there were no individual follow-up visits.

It helped that December also happens to be the month when we have two cars that had to go in for their biennial smog test, Ben’s Corolla and Glenn’s Ford F150. How so? Well, in order to pass the California vehicle emissions test one must be sure the vehicle’s On-Board Diagnostics (OBD) computer is set with all its systems monitors in a state of readiness; having just one check incomplete can mean the difference between passing the test or failing — which unfortunately is what happened when we tried to take Ben’s car in to Fire House Smog in Antioch.

We’d assumed the OBD computer was ready to go, especially after Glenn had cleaned the fuel injectors a couple of years ago before giving the old car to Ben and it had smogged fine then. But we had forgotten about the incident on a hot mid-July afternoon this year when his battery had died, which caused the OBD computer to reset, erasing all the emissions data. You would think five months would be plenty of time to get the computer back in order, but the process requires a series of drive cycles that include high-speed driving, and because Ben mainly uses the car to get himself back and forth to work a few blocks away, he hadn’t taken it on the freeway.

One reason we like Fire House Smog, despite it being more expensive than most other testing stations, is that they offer a free retest in the event you fail the first time. So Glenn went out on the morning of Sunday, Dec. 6, bluetooth diagnostic tool in hand, to drive the car on the freeway long enough to make sure the OBD computer was set this time. The journey took him back to the Streets of Brentwood.

He’d had a restless sleep the night before and awoke with an epiphany: since he needed to take the car out anyway, why not swing back by the Delta Gallery and pick up one of those fun artworks as a gift for Roni? And so that is what he did. Smog re-check successfully completed and certificate in hand, he drove back to the gallery and selected a pair of small acrylic pour paintings that Roni had liked. They both happened to be by the same artist, Sherry Cummings, whom Roni had interviewed for a newspaper article after she was named Artist of the Year sometime ago.

The first piece was a hexagonal shaped canvas designed to resemble a honeycomb and titled “Hive.” The other was a theatre mask set upon a black background and pour-painted in a rainbow of reds and blacks, titled “Rash.” Hives and rashes seem pretty appropriate in this year of medical malaise, come to think of it. The choice of the two works prompted the gallery clerk to ask Glenn if he knew Sherry Cummings, to which he replied, “I don’t, but my wife does.”

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F GETTING INTO the Christmas spirit is difficult in normal years, it has been especially hard in 2020. Roni, being the flame-keeper when it comes to holiday traditions, made sure that this one wouldn’t pass without the lights and decorations we’ve come to love and expect.

We hauled our tree out of the garage the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and despite Glenn’s lack of enthusiasm for the process of setting it up and retrieving boxes of ornaments from the closet, Roni took it mostly upon herself to get the house in shape for the occasion. Being a skilled persuader as well as a decorator, with some coaxing she got Glenn to pull out the wood Peanuts display he made a few years ago, and we set up Snoopy’s doghouse in the entryway next to the cabinet that houses the cat litter box. If the cats were confused at first by the presence of two doors they could enter, they were smart enough to choose the correct one for purposes of doing their business.

Roni made a workaround to bypass the nonfunctional outdoor electricity and so was able to put up a small string of Christmas lights along the edge of the driveway — a pitiful display compared to some of the elaborate presentations made at other houses in the neighborhood, but significant for us considering we haven’t had real outdoor lights in at least four years.

She also got serious with holiday baking after it was decided that we would be giving food as gifts in a few cases. Our new neighbors have made several offerings of food this year, and so Glenn thought it would be a nice gesture to return their generosity. Roni decided on a cookie plate for them, and on Christmas Eve she loaded one up with about a dozen treats that Glenn took next door and delivered. For our own family, she tried out several recipes for cranberry bread that we first had to sample while she perfected her baking techniques, and boy that was one tasty assignment. When she was happy with the results, she filled up some pans with batter and baked up loaves to send back to our family in Hayward.

This being the height of the pandemic and with hospitals close to capacity, our governor recently imposed stricter rules that make social gatherings more difficult. While still technically allowed, traveling to spend the holidays with people outside one’s immediate household is strongly discouraged, and because we didn’t want to be the ones to unknowingly spread COVID-19 to people we know and care about, we elected to stay at home and stick to celebrating online. But we still had gifts to exchange, and rather than incur the cost of mailing packages across town it was decided that our brother-in-law Tom would swing by our place on Christmas Eve to make the swap.

Like Ben with his grocery job, Tom and Glenn’s sister Jennifer are both on the front lines amid this pandemic. He drives an ambulance and she works inside a medical facility, so not exactly a COVID-free environment. But the Pfizer vaccines are starting to make their appearance, and so Tom came to us bearing gifts on the heels of receiving his first shot just three days earlier. He made sure to come by in the afternoon to give Ben, who had been at work, a chance to say hello in person. Wearing masks, we exchanged our present piles and visited outside in the cold breeze of the driveway for a few minutes until the chill got to be too much.

Among the items that Tom brought with him was a plastic container of candied cherries — a gift from Glenn’s mom after she learned that our search for cherries locally had been… well, fruitless. The cherries are a key component of Glenn’s Christmas bread, which he planned to bake later that night, and so it was a timely gift of the baking gods to have them. (Thanks, Mom!)

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HRISTMAS DAY PROVED to be its usual marathon of dining and gift distributions. We got an unusually late start to it all, not having breakfast until after 10:00 and pushing back the start of the unboxing until well after 11:15. We feasted on bagels, bacon and eggs, and Glenn says his Christmas bread turned out well: a near-perfect 9-out-of-10 for flavor on his personal rating system, while appearance scored a 7 and preparation came in at 6, largely because he began the baking process late in the day and had to spend a lot of time first assembling ingredients and washing dishes that had been used previously for other baking activities. 

Ben, who had been lacking confidence in his gift selections, turned in the best performance for originality with his 2021 calendar featuring his own drawings that he created throughout the year. This being the first Christmas since his promotion, he spent a bit more on presents for people because he could. He gave Roni a beautiful, large photo collage frame for our wall, and to Glenn he gave a silver commemorative coin for the Washington Football Team from the NFL Store. To both of us, he gave a set of ceramic dinner plates and bowls featuring unique Asian patterns that we decided to make our everyday dishes.

And while we felt bad that we couldn’t give Ben the PS5 he most wanted, there was always the Apple Watch… lurking out of sight along with Roni’s as the final surprise present of the day.

Roni was surprised when she received her artworks from Delta Gallery, as well as a book on acrylic pour painting techniques that she has said she wants to try herself if she can figure out how to protect the house from the messy process. Glenn, never much one for lists, was mostly surprised by his gifts that included a commemorative Apollo moon landing proof coin and a bobblehead figure of his namesake Glenn Rhee, a character from “The Walking Dead” TV series. He also received a 36-pack of Gillette razors and a chair cushion that we’d picked up on a recent visit to Costco; even though he was there when they were purchased, he knew he would be surprised by them on Christmas morning after forgetting about them for several days, and he was!    

We broke away from our own gifts to join in on a FaceTime call with our Hayward family members and opened gifts with them. By the time it was all done and we’d returned to the last of our presents, watched Ben and Roni try on their watches, and grabbed a few breakfast leftovers to tide us over until dinner, it was after 3 p.m. We’d spent nearly four hours unwrapping gifts!

All the talk of the impact of the pandemic on Christmas season, and here ours has seemed rather opulent. We didn’t plan it that way, but that is surely how it would appear to many others, and we know there are a lot of folks who didn’t share such blessings in 2020. The fact that we can still pay our bills and our family have remained in good health (for the most part) without becoming deathly ill from COVID are things to be thankful for as we prepare to put this year to bed.

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F WE HAVE to remember 2020 for anything, it will be for the amazing volatility it brought to the stock markets and the effect that has had on our investments. Down at one point in April by nearly $225,000, our collective accounts have surpassed pre-pandemic highs amid coronavirus vaccine news and federal stimulus hopes. An aggressive move to selling naked put options and covered calls has been wildly successful, and December saw our fourth-best month as we pulled in more than $3,100 in premiums alone.

We were able to successfully close out of high-margin option trades on Boeing (BA) and Fastly (FSLY) in mid-December that dramatically lowered our margin balance and enabled us to launch several new positions with less-expensive stocks. Among the names we are trading into the new year are electric-vehicle maker Workhorse (WKHS), Rocket Mortgage (RKT), Palantir Technologies (PLTR), solar energy firm SunPower (SPWR), Ford (F), and Virgin Galactic (SPCE), the latter of which has been a steady cash generator since we bought shares in February.

One option trade that didn’t go so well was on Best Buy (BBY), which has plummeted since hitting record highs in November. We were forced to buy back our put at $1,550 and roll it into late February for a net credit of $258. Judging by the way the stock has performed during December, it may be months before we can work our way out of that hole. But our patience with Boeing eventually paid off, and that was a much worse situation. This will likely work one day too, assuming the company doesn’t go bankrupt — always the number-one fear when selling puts.

We bought actual shares of just one company in December: a renewable energy startup called SunHydrogen (HYSR) that is developing technology to extract green hydrogen fuel from ordinary water. Trading for literal pennies on the OTC market, we bought 500 shares at 8 cents each as a speculative play in Glenn’s Roth IRA. The stock has so far both doubled and been down nearly a third of its purchase price since we bought in. A wild but interesting ride. It was a $40 purchase, so if it goes to zero we haven’t lost much, but considering the alternative if it ever rises substantially...

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ND OH YES, back to the smog checks… So after getting Ben’s car taken care of, there was still the Ford to deal with. This being the first time we’ve had to smog it since buying it used off of Sean two years ago, we really didn’t know what to expect. But given our experience with Ben’s car, Glenn made sure to use the diagnostic tool and run a pre-check of the OBD system before wasting time visiting Firehouse Smog. And guess what?

Yep, monitors not set. Argh! Just as Ben hadn’t done enough driving since his battery incident, it turned out that we hadn’t either — at least not in the truck, which had been used so little during the pandemic that its tank was still mostly full from its last fill-up back in November 2019. The truck had sat unused for weeks, such that its aging battery had died and we were forced to replace it this fall, so it hadn’t yet been operated enough to reset the OBD computer.

Glenn spent most of December attempting to get the final monitor, the evap system, to set. To run that check requires the fuel tank to be between a quarter and three-quarters full, so that meant unnecessary short trips about town to waste gas. We took the truck places where normally we’d only take Roni’s Corolla — to Sprouts for grocery shopping, to Costco so Roni could buy new glasses, to order bagels for Christmas. Still the monitor wouldn’t set.

On the Sunday after Christmas, with the registration renewal deadline rapidly approaching and the monitors still not set, Glenn decided to give it one more shot and then just take it into Fire House Smog regardless of the outcome. He put the truck through its drive cycle, let the engine idle for a couple of minutes as instructed with the fuel meter hanging just below three-quarters full, and then… success! All systems go, and so it was just a matter of getting the test done.

Half an hour and $65 later, Glenn had his smog certificate in hand and the registration has now been paid. Looking forward to using the vehicle for practical purposes more in the new year.

And looking forward to the new year in general. We’ve all been through hell in 2020, so here’s to better days ahead. Please be well.

 

Glenn, Roni and Ben