My brief encounter with Fisher Investments

 It was a little over a year ago that I gave Fisher Investments a try.  It took less than an hour for me to figure out that it just wouldn't work for me.  I had already built a substantial portfolio, but my thought was that if they could help me improve my returns it would be so much the better.  Instead I found that what they were offering was in fact a time bomb, at least from my perspective.

 They seemed to have a one size fits all strategy, and I need to emphasize 'seemed' because I can only speak to what they wanted me to do with my portfolio.  It comes down to a significant difference in strategy.

 I started my Schwab account when I started my own business.  The account is a SEP (Simplified Employee Plan), a variety of IRA.  With a SEP IRA the employer can create an IRA for the employee and contribute tax deferred money to that IRA.  That contribution, as is salary, is a deductible expense to the business.

Over the years I invested the money in a combination of stocks, mutual funds, and exchange traded funds. Each of the investments either paid interest or paid dividends.  The dividends I set to automatically re-invest, so that all through the year, even though the business only added money once a year, the account would continue to grow.  The interest I just let collect, and when a big enough pile had accumulated either bought a CD or started a new stock position.

When I decided to give Fisher Investments a try, I was still working, but close to retirement. If I turned off automatic dividend re-investment, then between dividends and interest and what I would be getting from Social Security I would have a not lavish but comfortable income that would continue to pay me for the rest of my life.

So I was pretty satisfied with what I had done for myself, but I thought  I would give Fisher Investments a try to see if they could improve upon what I had done. After all, they do this for a living.

Now this was all happening over the phone.  I don't remember if I was sharing a screen with them.

First of all, they had no interest in what I had already done. They wanted me to sell everything and start over.  So they would give me a position they wanted me to buy, and I would sell enough of the portfolio to cover that buy.

I noticed that the none of the stocks that they were recommending I buy were dividend payers.  After making several trades I brought this up.  That's when they explained the strategy behind their plan.

Based upon my age they estimated that I would likely live about another 20 years.  So each year I would sell some of the positions, and that I would be just about out of money when I died or shortly thereafter.  Not much left to leave children and grandchildren.

My grandmother lived into her 90s.  I prefer not to gamble on being broke the last few years of my life,  I also don't consider having some money left over to pass down an unreasonable expectation.

So I told them that their plan just didn't work for me, and  they politely returned my money. I sold the stocks they had me buy, and bought back positions I had sold.  I have since opened a taxable Schwab account so that as I take my required minimum distributions I can simply move positions (instead of selling and moving cash) from the IRA into that account, not having to sell of the securities.  I had to pay tax on that required distribution but the positions will continue to grow and accumulate cash from paying dividends until I need the money. 

Each year I will repeat the pattern, moving positions with an equivalent value to the required minimum distribution into the taxable account, letting the income from them to supplement my social security as needed.  

Lenovo - How Slow can you Go

 In my lifetime I have owned 2 Macintosh computers, two Windows laptops, and two Windows workstations.  That is until my last Windows workstation died.

Fortunately, I was taking a break from work, so there was no immediate need.  Having a functioning laptop, I didn't feel the need to rush out and replace it.  When I did get around to it, I went looking with some very specific criteria.

• Plenty of USB ports
• Support for dual monitors
• Dual disk drives

Not a really challenging list of requirements.

 I ended up at Office Max, where I found a Lenovo desktop that seemed to meet all my criteria.Just in case it means something to anyone, the product number is 90T2000SUS.  I picked up a couple of reasonably priced monitors at Costco and proceeded to assemble my workstation.

I didn't have a lot of software to add.  I use UEStudios (UltraEdit, UltraCompare, UltraFTP), Oracle client software, Peoplesoft client software.  I also added LibreOffice.  Not a big load for what seems like a reasonably beefy workstation.

From pushing the start button to being presented with a logon page takes somewhere between 3 and 5 minutes.  It seems to vary.  Once logon credentials are entered (initially it asked only for a passcode, no user id/password combination, eventually I got that sorted)it is going to be at least another 3 to 5 minutes before you get either your desktop, or about 25% of the time, the black screen of death.

With the black screen of desth, all is not lost.  Clicking on that page give you a drop-down list   offering to log out, launch task manager, or restart.  If you select task manager, and then close that window, you finally see the you desktop, and are able to actually use your computer.

Did I mention, Lenovo keeps trying to sell me shit? The app where you would check for updates to any of the Lenovo installed software is essentially a come-on to sell you a service contract, software to 'enhance your performance' (so they admit that they deliberately slowed down the machine) and software to help locate the machine if it is lost or stolen.  For a desktop?

Because I have a network file server, I do not have a whole lot of data saved on this machine.  So I won't have a lot of reinstalling to do when I wipe down the hard drives and install vanilla windows, rather than the ad-ware version of Windows 11 that came on this machine.

The draft dodger started a war

Here are.three things to.look up online that will help clarify how Trump avoided the draft.  All three are readily available,  with a simple search.

1.  What was the physical condition that kept Trump out of the draft.

2.  Would [fill in condition name] heal on it's own or would surgery be required to correct it?

3.  Did Trump ever.have surgery to.correct [fill in condition name]?

Not being a golfer myself, I have no idea how this condition would impact his golf game.

Now I can't say that the fake injury was Trump's idea. In fact what I have read leads me to believe that this was his father's idea.  But to this day he still leans on it as an excuse.

Look what I found!

 I am on several political mailing lists.  I don't always read everything sent to me, but something I recently received I just had to pass on.

Do you ever wonder about the honor of the senators and congressmen and women you voted for?  By that I mean, how much of what they are doing is to benefit you and me vs how much is to benefit themselves. 

Well I got to find out how our representatives are using their positions and the information those positions provide to feather their own nests.  It is on a website called https://www.purchasingpolicy.org/

 

 

When they talk about high US Taxes

The right is always talking about high US corporate tax rates.  You could compare us to places that have legalized slavery and always make us look uncompetitive.  Instead lets compare us to a successful industrialized country, one that is essentially eating our lunch in the marketplace.  Let's look at Germany.

First let's start with the VAT (Value Added Tax).  That is essentially a sales tax, that is tacked on to each transactions at each level.  The rate is generally 19% but for certain foods, books, magazines, flowers, some transportation, it is 7%.  And some things are exempt.  Doctors do not charge VAT tax, nor do public theaters, museums.  This is not a complete list of things that have a reduced or waived VAT tax, but you get the idea.

The tax is charged by the seller. The manufacturer pays it on the raw materials they buy.  The distributor pays it on the finished goods they buy, the consumer pays it.

Let's take the case of the manufacturer.  On a quarterly basis they will pay the tax that they charged to their distributors, minus the tax they paid buying raw materials.

Then there is the corporate tax rate.  According to taxrates.cc the combined (federal and local) tax rate for corporations is 33.3%.  This is actually a rough summary of three different taxes applied to corporate income.  And unlike US corporations, German corporations are taxed on their world wide income, minus of course any taxes paid on income in other countries.  So they cannot hide their income in low tax countries.

Now let's talk about the other two facets of this.  How are German companies doing under this burden, and what do the German people get for their money?

Well, you know that in manufacturing and exports, they are beating us in the marketplace and have been for years.  So paying employees a decent wage, a mandatory 25 vacation days, and taxes on their world wide income does not seem to have stoped them from doing well.  And look at CEO salaries, well in 2009 Deutches Bank CEO Josef Ackermann had a total compensation 9.55 million euros.  He was the higest paid CEO in Germany that year.  It does not compare to some of the packages US CEOs were getting in that same year, but he is still getting rich.

And what do the people of Germany get for these taxes?  How about universal health care, pensions, and tax-funded child care, housing, and educational allowances?

So our taxe rates are not, and never have been what is killing our manufacturing, destroying our middle class.  Rather it is the blind faith that if you only appease the oligarchy that owns this country enough, that they will eventually share a few crumbs with the rest of us. 

You want to see jobs moving back to this country?  Stop giving businesses a free ride to hide their profits overseas forever. When you give them economic incentives to send your job overseas, what do you expect?

This morning's emails

As usual, I had a lot of emails waiting for me this morning.  Of the first 13 emails, 12 were asking for money.  One was from Doctors without Borders, to whom I already donate monthly, and the rest were from political candidates. 

Of the political candidates, none of them were running to represent me or anyone else in my state, and none of the elections (except perhaps judges, not sure about those races) were going to be held any time soon.  And yet each is written with the false sense of urgency I would expect from a con man.

Then there are the impossible goals.  Constitutional  amendments that would never be enacted and impeaching Trump is just as unlikely.

I made one political contribution about six weeks ago and this is the result of that.  Pissing me off like this is counterproductive.

Suspected drug smugglers

Every article I read about the navy destroying a ship, the article refers to them as 'suspected drug smugglers'.   In no instance have I read that an armed boarding party was sent to the ship to inspect the cargo.  I think that falls into the same category as 'he's black, must be a gang banger'.

They may have intelligence leading them to suspect a specific ship is a drug runner, but without actual proof, destroying the ship and killing the crew is an act of piracy and murder.  

Yes, boarding the ship does expose the crew to risk.  It is the same sort of risk every cop is exposed to when they break down a suspected drug dealer's door.  If the police, who don't have cannons backing them up can do it the right way, so can the navy.

The military has rules of engagement. I was in the army, not the navy, but I suspect that "there's a boatload of brown people they must be guilty of something" doesn't meet the criteria. Of course the draft dodger in chief wouldn't know anything about that. 

 Using the navy to interdict drug trafficking is not in and of itself a bad idea.  By all means board suspected ships, and arrest the crew members if they find contraband.  Those ships found to be carrying illegal drugs should be confiscated and sold, not sunk, with the government retaining the proceeds. 

And the drugs?  Those are the evidence to be presented in a US court, after which they can be destroyed.

A reminder of the greatest generation

On my recent trip to Europe, I spent most of a day at the museum and graveyard on the cliffs above Omaha Beach.  I have always enjoyed museums but this experience was something entirely different.

Some was just a recitation of history while much of it told individual stories of people who not only walked into danger but gave their lives to protect their comrades.  That was walking through the museum.  

This is what I saw as I walked out of the museum.  This photograph doesn't come close to capturing of what I saw,

 Before leaving I took this video to capture a little more of the scale of this place.

 

 

I tend to be stoic about a lot of things, but I spent much of that day holding back tears. A lot of these graves hold teenagers.  During World War II, you could enlist at 17 with parents consent, and be drafted at 18.  Somewhere between two and three thousand died on Omaha beach, and many others on the Utah, Sword, Gold and Juno beaches.

 The next time you watch a World War II movie that includes the D Day assault, like the The Longest Day, give a thought to the sacrifices made that day.  

If we really want to conquer space, then start building the technology there, not on the ground.

To go from earth orbit to the moon or Mars or the asteroid belt requires a conceptually different craft than something that lifts you off from earth.   By that I mean there need be no consideration in the design of those spacecraft for taking off or landing because the sole purpose should be going point to point in space carrying a lot.of cargo, passengers or both .   And it should be intended to repeat that over and over rather than being for a single use.

Because such a craft isn't designed to take off or land, it needs to be built in space.  That is where the planned private space stations should be directing their efforts, on manufacturing the spacecrafts that will be the workhorses of space exploration. 

It may take many years before we develop vehicles that are single stage to orbit and back, but point to point in space is well within our grasp today.  And it is those spaceships that will give us the entire solar system.

They will take colonists and supplies to Mars and prospectors to the asteroid belt.  They will bring back raw materials from the asteroid belt to build more ships in orbit and to supply industries on earth and the moon and the colonists on Mars.

That is how we truly become an interplanetary species, by building the spacecrafts that can become the trucks and busses of space.

Taxes and unemployment

The gospel according to the republican party is, cut taxes on the rich to reduce unemployment.  And the only problem with that idea is that history as shown again and again the opposite is true.  The periods of our greatest prosperity have corresponded to the periods with the highest marginal tax rates.  And not coincidentally, the periods of high unemployment have typically followed lowering the marginal tax rate on the wealthiest Americans.

One explanation I have read is that when tax rates on the high ends of income are lowered, it tends to encourage speculation, leading to bubbles in the economy.  And we know that bubble will eventually burst and there is hell to pay.

Now the correlation between tax rates and unemployment is something you can look up yourself, but I will site a few examples, just to make the point.

In 1980, the top rate for individual taxes was  70% and unemployment was at 6% and it had been falling since 1975.  In 1981 the top tax rate for individuals was cut to 50%.  This began a series of tax cuts for individuals, corporations, and capital gains.  The unemployment rate rose, spiking at over 10% in 1983.

Yes, you can say that's all ancient history,  which is true.  But it is a pattern that has shown some consistency. 

Another day, another murder

Any murder is tragic, be it is the stranger you read about who was raped and murdered, a shopkeeper killed in an armed robbery, or a public figure who preached that murders are just an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of the constitutional right to keep and bare arms.

Still, I suspect that when making those remarks he never imagined that he would be one of those paying that price.  If he had known, would he have felt the same way?  

If you put yourself out there in the public eye then there has to be at least some awareness that the Mark David Chapmans of the world are out there.  I don't think this one of those, simply a deranged individual fixated on a celebrity.  Was it a political statement?  Was it karma?  I don't pretend to know, nor do I know the potential motive of the primary suspect.

What I suspect though, is that we may very well be headed into an era when the current political rhetoric will trigger more actions of this sort targeting both ends of the political spectrum.

Reasons I really like my neighborhood

 I don't get mail where I live.  This is by choice.  I have a PO box over in the next town which is about a twenty minute bicycle ride away.  It is my not so subtle encouragement to exercise six days a week.

A few doors down from where I live is an entrance to a bike/walking trail.  It runs along a seasonal creek bed, crosses a quiet residential street then continues along the creek for a ways before crossing a rather busy road (there is a crosswalk and light for pedestrians and cyclists to cross ) and then it continues through a small park. After the park I have to switch to the bike lane on the parallel street.

Returning from the post office I saw this along the trail.  The bird did not seem concerned when I stopped to take the picture.

 

 

 

After taking the picture I continued on to the residential crossing and detoured onto the street just because the ride is a little bit longer. that way. The more I ride the easier it gets. That's when I rode by this house.  I have driven passed it many times, and seen the sign but being on a bicycle instead of diving a car made it easier to stop and take a picture.  I couldn't resist the opportunity to do that.

 

 This isn't the only sign reflecting pro-immigration sentiment in the neighborhood, but it just struck me at the moment.

So, I like the vibe, I like cycling on the creek side trail, and I like that I can ride my bike, or even walk to the downtown from here.  It is the kind of downtown that existed in a lot of small towns before highway 101 was turned into freeway..  

Unlike many of those towns, this downtown has survived. There is a road parallel to the freeway that goes through the downtown that was highway 101 until the freeway was constructed.  It is still well traveled, I presume mostly by locals. It has restaurants, bars, small stores and a large park all within walking distance.

The vanishing Republican town halls

This probably won't come up, because what I have been reading indicates that during the most recent recess, Republicans have mostly been avoiding their constituents.  I am guessing that facing their constituents is uncomfortable, sort of like waking up in a dirty motel room next to someone you don't recognize.  

But if your representative does dare to show their face and take questions from from you, their employers, then here is a question to ask them..

"When you were voting to take health care away from many of your constituents, were you also voting to take away your own?"

  

Political contributions, half truths, and lies.

 Because I am still working, I can afford to make the occasional hundred dollar contribution to political and social causes.  In another 12 days that will be less true.  But even after I retire at the end of May, I will continue to send $25/month to Doctors without Borders.

I get regular emails from Doctors without Borders asking for additional contributions, but I will wait and see how my retirement budget is working for me before adding to that.  It is the political emails I want to talk about today.

If I give fifty dollars, I am almost instantly asked to give a hundred. If I give to one candidate, then suddenly candidates from all over the country are asking for money.  And so many of the emails insult my intelligence. Like the 'surveys' that end with a pitch for money, and don't provide a way to submit the survey unless a contribution is entered. 

 Then there is "If we can get 100 people to give $100 by midnight then we will be able to do (fill in the blank) and they are talking about an election 6 months away when there isn't even a declared candidate.  I will continue to contribute to political and social causes that seem worthy, in amounts that are within my means.  But here's the caveat, if you are treating me like an idiot, and behaving like a con man, then I will be treating you like a con man.

Where are we now, and where are we going?

 If you haven't already figured that out, go read (or re-read) George Orwell's Animal Farm.  

 

Then you will understand exactly what the plans for the current administration are.

But what is the second year price?

 My virus software is approaching the end of my subscription, so I have been shopping around.  Every damned one I look at shows me the first year teaser rate but not what renewals will cost.  I presume that means they are outrageous.

But it isn't only the vendors themselves.  I have tried all sorts of searches, and the only thing that ever comes up is the teaser rate.

Now I know the rates may change from year to year.  I don't expect that the second year rate someone is paying today will be exactly what I would pay after a one year subscription expires.  But it would give me something to honestly compare different products.

So, that's what all of the various vendors seem to lack, honesty.  So why should I trust their product?

Take my job - please

 I took a rather circuitous route to my current employment status.  I don't think I have met anyone in my line of work who got here quite the way I did.  It all started when I got out of the army.

The GI bill paid for me to go to school, and I was studying computer programming.  This was back when punch cards were still a thing.  Eating, paying rent, and paying for school, even just junior college was a challenge.  I had a few short term jobs and then I landed a job as a swing shift computer operator.  I worked there for several months before realizing I could not keep up with my school work and hold that job.  Food and shelter being a higher priority, I quite school.

The computers I was running were IBM System 3 computers, who's primary programming language was RPG II.  That was a language I had learned in school.  I was running a computer, which consisted of running jobs, with the job control language on punch cards kept in the run book, loading floppy disks into the reader with the data that had been keypunched during the day, and mounting paper or forms on the printer.  

While I was there I noticed one task that would be more easily performed with a program than by the operator by hand.  So I wrote a program.  One program.  That was all I wrote while there, but it was above my pay grade to do even that.

I had been there around two years when we moved from Oregon back to the bay area.  An absolutely glowing reference from the owner of my former company got me a job offer.  My new employer had sold a computer to a small manufacturer of candles.  It had been installed for a few months, and still wasn't working.  They were threatening to sue.  My job was to make it work.  Somehow I did.

I was able to leverage that job to get a programming job for an electronics manufacturer that was in the process of implementing modern (for that time) manufacturing systems.  Things like Material Requirements Planning, Shop Floor Controls, and Inventory Management.  It was all written in RPG II.

A couple of years later they decided to bring in packaged software, and would be writing in house all of the reporting and interfaces that didn't come with the package.  All of that was written in COBOL and used the IDMS database. It also contained software called ADSOnline, which was used to build online applications to inquire into and update the database,   That meant all the programmers on staff were paid to take classes, both on the software they were bringing in, and the tools required to maintain and enhance it.

My girlfriend at the time was working at a shipping company that used the same tool set.  I had been using that tool set for a couple of years by then.  That shipping company used the same tool set, and was looking for additional help.  Not as an employee, but as a contractor.  I spoke with an accountant, filed the necessary paperwork, and became a one person corporation.  I left the electronics company, and worked for the shipping company for a couple of years.

After that I kicked around a little, picked up a couple of short term contracts.  Then a technical writer I had worked with at the shipping company called me up, and told me that a friend of hers, another technical writer, was contracting with a city retirement agency.  They were building a new system and just happened to use the same tool set I had been using now for a number of years.

I got a 6 month contract.  At the end of that I got a 1 year contract with a small pay raise.  This went on for a couple of years, each time with a small increase.  The system we were building was really quite good.  Then the project manager, also a contractor, was hired as a permanent employee.  She left our group and went to coordinate things like getting the retirement offices wired, so that there was a computer on everyone's desk.  She was getting printers set up so that reports could be printed locally, managing security so that staff could only see or change what they were entitled to have access to.  A new manager, a city employee this time, was brought in to manage us developers.  Then the project took a left turn.

I don't know where the idea came from, but somewhere in management, a decision was made to buy packaged software for printing the pension checks.  It was a good call, because the check printing software they were using was not only ancient, but somewhere along the line they had lost the source.  The same software was being used to pay all the city employees.  The input to this programs was a series of 80 character records, so it had originally been built for punch cards.

This software not only printed checks but also kept a record of them, that would be available for review online.  So we needed to design a method to take the information from our old database, and port it to the new database once a month.  This used a different programming language and a different database management system.  Then the unthinkable happened.  They sent me to classes.

Normally, you train your employees when you bring in new software.  You hire contractors that already have that skill.  To send a contractor to classes as far as I knew was unheard of.  And that wasn't the last time.  Initially, I softened the blow by waiving my fee for the duration of the class.  As time went on I even stopped doing that.

Over the years, employees came and went, and I was still there.  Software was enhanced, replaced, and sometimes customized beyond recognition.  I had become the institutional memory.  All of the changes and enhancements that were made, the little customized things and the whole subsystems written to accommodate functions that the delivered software didn't address.

My contracts were still running (fiscal) year to year.  They expired June 30th of each year.  My last contract was for the year I turned 69.  In the fall of that year I approached the manager and told him I would not be needing a new contract, that I planned to retire, at the age of 70, when my current contract expired.  I told him then so that they would have more than six months to bring in a replacement, so that I could help bring them up to speed.

It being a government agency, they dicked around for months.  My replacement started June 1st.  That gave me one month to try and bring her up to speed, teach her what the system did, where we had made major modification to delivered functions, and where we had written entire subsystems that were tightly coupled with the delivered software.  In essence, teaching her what had taken 20 years to build.

In the following months, I dissolved my business and began the process of simplifying my life.  I filed the short year corporate tax returns and had everything wrapped up by September.  Then I got a phone call asking if I could come back for just a short project.  Maybe a month or 6 weeks.  I made arrangements with a third party to pick up the contract, and became their part time employee.  Six weeks became three months and I practically had to pry myself loose with a crowbar.

I am about to turn 72 and I have spent more time working than not.  Part of it I understand.  Even if I didn't build it, I was there when it was all built.  A lot of the original design was created at a nearby Starbucks.  We had a manager at that time who believed that us getting together to talk was wasting time.  So we would all decide to go out for coffee at about the same time, and talk about how we thought this new function or that process should flow.  All those people are long gone now.

Since then there have been a whole series of enhancements responding to the legal environment, labor environment, or simply to supply the management of the pension system with more tools to support their members.

So, if you know Oracle and Peoplesoft, and perhaps even Pension Administration, I know where you can get a job with good pay, better than average benefits, and a defined benefit pension plan.  Take my job, please!

 

 

What I do Best

 For someone who is retired, I am spending a lot of evening, sometimes very late evening hours sitting at the keyboard.  For a while now I have been reviewing this function, making tentative stabs at how it should be changed to meet the new requirements.  

 I write code, it doesn't look quite right.  I go back and talk to the user about how the finished product should work, then I go poke at it some more.  But tonight is different.  The back and forth is done, and I know exactly how it is supposed to work.  Now I just have to actually make it do that.  And that really is the easy part.

I zero in on where to put the first change.  This is collecting a bit of information that gets painted on the screen at the very back end.  I change it, test, it breaks and I fix it.  I keep going through that, until that part of it is doing exactly what I want, then move on to the next bit.  I know it sounds like trial and error, but it really isn't.  Because I now I have a clear picture in my head as to exactly how it should work.  I just have to get past the part where after all these years at a keyboard I still can't type.

I probably do this differently than most people would.  I have three changes to make.  This first one is the easiest, but I will make this change and then go through the entire process of testing, to make sure it appears where it is supposed to at the back end.  That done I can start on the second bit.

My experience has shown me that it is a whole lot easier to find one bug than to find three.  So if I can make sure that this works as intended all the way through the process then if there is an issue with change number two, then I will know it really is about change number two and not have to try and first figure out which change made it crash.

It is just about nine o'clock at night, because Xfinity decided shutting off the internet to this neighborhood in the middle of my work day was a perfectly fine idea.  And no, I can't bill them for the $100/hour I missed.  But for now, I have just about finished my glass of wine so it is time to test.

Things I will probably never do again

Trot a horse on a switchback trail through a redwood forest.

I no longer own a horse, it has been years since I have.  And although I am pretty sure I could still ride one, I am not at all sure I could swing my leg over a saddle anymore.  I'm just not that flexible.

Check raise through four rounds of betting, and have the sucker that was betting into me call every time.

 I am sure I will have the opportunity to play against someone that oblivious again some time, but you can only do that playing 7 card stud.  They don't play that anywhere I know of anymore.  The best I could do that would be three times playing hold-em.  I should add that I did try to do that once in a hold-em tournament on a cruise ship.  I flopped kings full of aces.  Had I gone all in at that point I might have chased out the player who eventually beat me with aces full of kings,

Ride a non-electric bicycle from Nicassio to Point Reyes Station and back.  

That's about 17 very hilly miles.  I was still doing that into my late 60s.  My riding companion was riding an electric assist bike, and mine was fully manual.  Then COVID hit and I didn't ride for a couple of years.  The last time I rode with that friend on a much shorter route I lost sight of her, and she had to wait for me to catch up.

Work outside of my home

A few years ago, perhaps more than a few, I took a hotel room in the city a couple of blocks from my office when I was doing some kind of upgrade/conversion that was going to take all weekend.  It allowed me to go back to the hotel when I had kicked off a long running job and grab some sleep.  Then I could go back to the office and pick up where I left off.  It allowed me to squeeze in all the processing into a weekend and not impact the day to day operations.  Now, if I was even willing to take on a project like that, I would be doing all of it from my living room.

Break up a double play

I played softball for years.  I was never a power hitter. I had one career home run, and that came from hitting a sharp line drive that got between two outfielders before they could close on it.  Towards the end of my playing days, I hit a clean single into right center field and jogged into first.  The batter behind me was mostly a ground ball hitter, and he didn't disappoint.  He hit a ground ball towards second and I took off as fast as I could, going into my slide just a moment too late.  I am not sure how long it was before I regained consciousness but I had broken up the double play.

 

Costco, a little less oil in your Almond Butter please

 I know, almond butter is not peanut butter, so I don't expect them to be exactly the same.  But I find myself wondering, what exactly am I supposed to do with it?

It doesn't matter how much you stir it, you will never get it to the consistency where you could spread it on a sandwich and not be dripping off all sides of the bread.  I suppose if you used a level teaspoon of it then it wouldn't drip, but then all you would taste is the bread.

It tastes good, although not substantially better than peanut butter.  But at it's current consistency I can't really find a way to eat it that doesn't either not taste like anything at all, because I have to use so little of it without it ending up all over my hands, or bake it into something.

I really don't need a bunch of brownies or cookies around the house, because there is nobody here but me and if I bake them I will eat them.

Costco, I generally think of your stuff as quality, but you really missed the mark on this one.