I've been mostly absent the last couple months. Call it discussion-board burnout and a personal lack of new material to write about-- coupled with a whole slew of family business and backlogged projects. But I was a bit surprised to find that I didn't miss ER discussions as much as I'd expected.
However this place still helps me clarify my thinking and make plans.
Been a few changes:
- Our kid has been accepted "early decision" to Rice University on an NROTC scholarship (tuition plus a stipend). She passed the military entrance physical. It took us over three years to get her to change her mind about USNA, but last month when she read Rice's e-mail it only took her about 10 seconds to make the transition.
- I've finished a rough cut on our tax returns to estimate the college FAFSA & PROFILE forms.
- FAFSA and PROFILE are done. Yay, only three of each left and I'm already tired of them. Luckily I don't have to get back to taxes for another 2-3 months.
- Our kid's continuing the scholarship search for room/board funding but she may just end up going through the motions without getting any merit awards.
- I visited my aging father. In the rural Rockies. In the middle of freakin' winter with snow on the ground and zero humidity. More on that visit in a separate thread.
- I've spent an extraordinarily painful amount of time working out, but I passed my 2nd-dan black belt qualifier tests (pushups, situps, & running). However our kid isn't as motivated this year (didn't need that résumé bullet on her college application anymore!) and she hasn't put in the time or the miles. It wouldn't feel right to take the test without her so I'll skip this year and do my 2nd dan next year while she's at college.
- Five days of surf camp on the North Shore. It was so totally and spectacularly awesome that we ran out of superlative modifiers. I'll add a post to the surfing thread.
- More query letters to book publishers. No response from Ten Speed Press, Military.com, or U.S. Naval Institute. Next up is Wiley, the "... For Dummies" publisher.
- Finished refinancing the rental property. 4.625% from Bank of America for non-owner-occupied real estate, and they didn't even do a real rental analysis. No wonder they're not making any money.
- The joys of landlording: we replaced the rental property's microwave oven and washing machine over the holidays. The microwave's control panel died just out of warranty; I'm still troubleshooting the card but it's a $100 replacement and I can't isolate it down to a particular component. (On the other hand they must have a heavy demand for this card because it's going to take three weeks to get it from Canada.) The 15-year-old washing machine finally wore out its tub thrust bearing. We found a brand-new replacement within 24 hours for $250-- Craigslist rocks.
- Repaired a friend's garage door sensor. We're still working on their bathroom shower door. This (and our landlord stuff) all happened only a couple weeks after we helped a neighbor replace her washer/dryer, so we're a bit burned out on handyman skills.
- Rebalancing our solar array's panels. We have two separate strings of photovoltaic panels feeding into our inverter, but they're not balanced to produce the same voltages. When I added more panels to one of the strings I didn't understand the inverter's maximum power point tracking (MPPT) feature, and I think the voltage difference between the two strings is dragging down overall conversion performance. We're going to balance the voltages by switching two panels from one string to the other and see what happens. Between rising production and our kid leaving for college, we may soon be generating 100% of consumption.
- Read way too much non-fiction, especially texts & research papers on writing covered call options. I'm already beginning to suspect that it's hours of boring, tedious minimum-wage analysis interspersed with periods of fear, panic, and unanticipated loss of asse(t)s. Oh, wait, I already did that for a career.
- Compensated by reading a lot of fiction, which probably consumed any spare time that I would otherwise have spent here. I've re-read most of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan novels, which 15-25 years later offer a offer a very interesting perspective on current events.
- Besides all the quality family togetherness we spent a lot of time with neighbors & friends. Best holiday season in years.
"Whaddya do all day" indeed...
Search: New Posts Showing results 1 to 25 of 256
... guess I'll be catching up on my reading.
