what did you do today? (2008-2015) (closed)

[Nords]

We're having a "How the heck did we get into this mess?" day.

Two weeks ago a good friend invited us over to their house for Thanksgiving. Score! Gratefully accepted. Even better, they're oenophiles who'll appreciate the suspenseful thrill of a donation of our old bottles that have been sitting in our house for about a decade. They understand that our "collection" is either a yummy vintage or toilet cleaner... we're just not sure which is in what bottle. One of them (the bottles, not our friends) even came from a "bottle your own" winery and another from a grateful stamped-concrete contractor. The stories are probably worth more than the contents.

A few days after our friend's invitation we were also invited by our neighbor, the excellent cook who buys curry powder in five-pound bags. We explained the schedule conflict and she's good with that. So we're lunching at her house and dining at our friend's house. Our neighbor's been widowed for just over a year, but all of her adult children are in town this week so it'll be the usual huge family affair. We're all just hoping to get through it without (too many) tears.

Tuesday evening we got a "mission creep" call from the good friend to prep mashed potatoes for 12. No problem, happy to handle that. Luckily there are enough potato flakes and spices in our pantry to avoid a trip to the store. Hawaii never has a large potato inventory at any time of the year, let alone holiday season.

Last night our neighbor asked to borrow... our oven. Apparently we're cooking turkey #2. So this morning we're strolling up the street a few doors, hauling a broiler-panned bird back to our house, cooking it, and returning it. I'm not quite sure how we'll get a hot fowl back up the street, but we'll figure it out. We haven't turned on our oven since our daughter was home from college in July, but I think that'll be fine too.

So somehow we got invited to two places for Thanksgiving yet ended up cooking most of one on our own.

I'm going to feel a frisson of fear every time the phone rings today...

It is interesting these 'minor disasters' seem to happen at the most inconvenient times. We're currently visiting DD#2 and family for the holiday and the plumbing in one of the bathrooms developed a blockage (don't blame me - it happened just as I was arriving). Fortunately they have two others that remain operable...

Time to start interrogating the two youngest children and completing a 100% toy inventory...

 

[REWahoo]

So somehow we got invited to two places for Thanksgiving yet ended up cooking most of one on our own.

Sounds like they've got your number. Better develop a new strategy before you end up hosting all your neighbors on Christmas.

Time to start interrogating the two youngest children and completing a 100% toy inventory...

Done - but "the dog ate it" still leaves a lot of room for plausible deniability.

 

[imoldernu]

Reading the last dozen or so posts has me exhausted.
What appeared to be a catastrophe on Sunday (DW acute bronchitis - postponed Thanksgiving til next weekend for the family gathering) ... has turned into a blessing in disguise.
With a no-stress Monday Tuesday, Wednesday... it was time for the first major garage cleaning in 7 years. Casual, lazy, rediscovering good stuff. Organized 10 years of indiscriminate hoarding. Repackaged in to new containers for a new 'three years and gone' plan.
DW is fine BTW...
So this AM... cooked the ham and turkey anyway, and spent the entire morning redoing the house for Christmas... as well as watching the Macy's and Chicago Thanksgiving Parades (first relaxed watching in 15 years... Excellent!)
Fantastic meal for two... candles and wine... and...
A loud noise! Like screeching. The sky turned black.. Our dinner table is in an alcove with a bay window. In an instant, at least 5000, perhaps double that... of birds, blocking out the sun and settling in our back yard and in the trees for a hundred yard around the house. As I raced for the camera, they rose and flew in a huge circle.. wave upon wave and flew off. A fitting, fleeting sign of happiness to mark a great day of thanksgiving.

Hope y'all ended the day ok.. and, ain't it great that we don't have to go to work tomorrow?

 

[freebird5825]

Day 3 of playing nurse to a flu stricken Mr B. He caught it from a member of his college w*rk group. Damn her for coming to our house for the study group while she was still sick.

He has no appetite and has a fever we are controlling with aspirin. I am cajoling him into eating SOMETHING and making sure he has taken fluids.
I am constantly washing my hands. I feel like Howard Hughes.

I feel fine today, but I suspect it will be my turn next. Argh!!!!!

Turkey is in the oven. I bet I can get him to eat a little bit.

 

[M Paquette]

Oog...

*URP*

See also "What did you eat today?"

 

[NW-Bound]

I have been spending some time to look over my equity holdings, with the intention of selling enough, then buying back, to take advantage of the tax laws on cap gains that may go away.

I have held 4 MFs for more than 20 years, and have had quite a bit of gains, hence have been reluctant to sell them and to get ETFs. But when I added up the cost basis, it turned out that much of that gain has already been taxed when the dividends were re-invested.

The short story is that I will get to sell mucho in dollar amounts, before I exhaust the headroom that I have. And selling/buying that much means I could lose some money if the timing is wrong. So, being a [-]market timer[/-] careful rebalancer, I looked at the market movement in the last couple of trading days, and decided to wait a bit more. I still have December to sell-sell-sell/buy-buy-buy.

Off to pack my carry-on to head out to Hawaii. Life is good, although wife said it will be raining where we are headed.

 

[ls99]

Oil & filter change on the Jag. +4 qts of tranny oil change was due. Usually every 2yrs.
While checking the tranny oil level after the change, a liitle chirp was audible.

A quick check using a 4' pry bar as a stethoscope, a bad bearirng in a belt tensioner was identified. Logged onto NAPA web site found one, the local store 3 miles away had one left in stock. Went to get it, $ 23 later own it. R&R the pulley, and all is quiet on the western front.

 

[grasshopper]

Sounds like they've got your number. Better develop a new strategy before you end up hosting all your neighbors on Christmas.


Done - but "the dog ate it" still leaves a lot of room for plausible deniability.

Next year tell them you are only eating tofurky.

 

[Nords]

Sounds like they've got your number. Better develop a new strategy before you end up hosting all your neighbors on Christmas.

"Maui"...

Off to pack my carry-on to head out to Hawaii. Life is good, although wife said it will be raining where we are headed.

The heavens just opened up here and delivered a torrential downpour. Visibility is down to only a few hundred yards, and we even have lightning. We only see lightning a couple times a decade, but all of the vog in the air probably made it super-conductive.

Welcome to winter in paradise!

 

[Walt34]

Must be "oil change day" since I changed the oil & filter on DW's '03 Buick with 151,460 miles on it yesterday. Hey, it might make it to 200k miles! That would set a new record for us keeping a car.

I also went down to the creek at the bottom of the hill in the back yard with a camera and tripod just to see what I could get on an otherwise kind of so-so day, weatherwise. This is a HDR photo from three frames and some mucking around in Lightroom and Photoshop CS6:

 

[ls99]

Nice picture creation.

Reminds me of talking with a BIL a few years ago. He had in the early seventies a full color film and photo development darkroom in his house. Enlargers, baths. rinses, all in a highly temperature controlled room. Color development was extremely temperature sensitive. His cameras were all Hasselblads.
He used to spend hours in trying to get color photos to be exactly as the natural colors, which were in the "real life". He marveled at a video slide show the kids had running on a laptop into a projector.

After some discussion we realized that what we were watching on the screen was "not real", in the sense thet no negative or positive film existed, nor were there any printed photos. We were simply looking at some bits and bytes arranged into an image our brain recognized as a picture.

The marvel of modern technology. Is it all imaginary?

 

[Major Tom]

Nice picture creation.
The marvel of modern technology. Is it all imaginary?

No more imaginary than the clumps of silver deposited on the film (in black and white photography), which form the image. The clumps of silver in film-based photography = the pixels which make up a digital image.

Funny how in the "old days" of photography, it often took a lot of care and time to get the exposure and contrast and (in the case of color photography) color balance just right whereas with digital photography, these adjustments are so much easier.

 

[Walt34]

After some discussion we realized that what we were watching on the screen was "not real", in the sense thet no negative or positive film existed, nor were there any printed photos. We were simply looking at some bits and bytes arranged into an image our brain recognized as a picture.

The marvel of modern technology. Is it all imaginary?

There is sometimes considerable debate about that within the photographic community. My take on it is that what is possible digitally now has always been done to some degree in the darkroom, it's just available to more people now. The "poor man's digital darkroom" - Lightroom and Photoshop Elements - combined with a camera that can shoot RAW (unprocessed) files has never been so cheap.

And in some respects I suppose it is imaginary because a still camera captures only a fraction of a second, or usually at most several seconds, and that is not the way people perceive the world, in fractions of a second. People perceive a constant stream of images. Which, of course, is why a photo of a party balloon popping is so interesting. We know it happens but it's over so fast we can't see it.

Which is one of the characteristics of photography that is so interesting to me - capturing that fraction of time that will never happen again.

 

[ls99]

Yes, digital photgraphy amd photo manipulation is infinitely more affordable than a full color lab.

+ can work on the phots in normal lighting and no wait for the results until after developer, bath, fixer, rinse, dry. Then realize a speck of dust in the wrong place.

Incidentally, using an enlarger to transfer an image to paper, the trick was to focus the background granularity of the film, rather than try to optimize the actual image focus.

I do like my pcket Cannon, where I can instantly decide, looking at the captured image, if I want to keep a shot.

Yet, I am always amazed at the ability to look at a just taken photo.

 

[freebird5825]

I am on Day 2 of the flu from h*ll.

I decided I needed something to cheer me up, so I am watching Mary Poppins on TV.
Chim chiminy chim chiminy chim chim cheree....
It's fun to watch Julie Andrews trying to keep up with Dick Van Dyke on the dance numbers.

 

[kyounge1956]

Drove to Lacey, checked on my house, and put a splash block under the downspout that didn't have one already. All quiet on the southern front. Met my neighbors from across the intersection, and another lady from down the cross street, wrote down names and who is in which house for later reference. The natives seem very friendly so far. There are two or possibly three species of what I suspect are edible and tasty mushrooms sprouting under the big spruce tree in the front yard. I will have to get specimens and see if I can get them ID'd at Fungi Perfecti (a nearby commercial grower and supplier of spawn for home mushroom culture) next time I am down there. Also discovered the lock in the garage door handle is a different key than the other doors, and I don't have it. But I want to put an automatic opener on that door anyway. Detected a low spot in the back yard. If it isn't a collapsing oil or septic tank, it might turn into a "rain garden". The drainage ditch along the street looks like it might need to be re-graded. I may have to get some of those giant Post-it notes and start keeping a "to do" list on the inside of the garage wall. Discovered after arriving that I had left my street map in Seattle, and on the way home missed the turn back to the freeway in the dark, drove 10 minutes or so past the place before I was sure I had gone wrong, and another 15 or 20 before I could find somewhere to turn around. Ooops!

 

[Nords]

I finished rebuilding the blog's blogroll (which was mangled by the move to Bluehost & Genesis) and added a few more links.

Google AdSense sent me a $101.74 deposit for the last three weeks of October. As of 22 November we're already over $110. Thanks to everyone who's been clicking the ad links-- if this keeps up then we'll donate over $1300/year to Wounded Warrior Project & Fisher House.

In that vein, I started filling out our 2012 tax returns.

I think we know rental income & expenses for the rest of 2012 (or at least I hope nothing else happens to change them) and we don't plan to take any more capital gains (we've already rebalanced quite enough). Now we just need to extrapolate the interest & dividend income, figure out the Schedule E net rental income, and add up the deductions.

Then I can start form 8606 for a Roth IRA conversion up to the top of the 25% income tax bracket... if there's any room left?

 

[MichaelB]

We decided to have an easy family get together yesterday, make it the last cookout of the season. Murphey’s law paid a visit – everything that could go wrong, did, and we learned a few new things.

For example, we now know that the non-stick cooking spoons actually do melt. Also, the plastic food steamers (Joseph Joseph Lotus) do as well (separate incidents). Grilling bison skirt steak isn’t a good idea when the outdoor temperature falls below freezing. It does help, thought, to check just how much salt is on hand before doing all the cooking. The guys at the fish counter understand “please clean the fillet’ to mean not just take the remaining bones out but also remove the skin and a fair amount of meat as well.

We’re all still good friends. And some of us are even talking with each other.

 

[freebird5825]

I awoke to 2" of snow on the ground. It is indeed pretty, but only once a year. Snow is still falling very gently as I type this post.

Mr B and I are slowly recovering from this flu bug. We normally both have gotten our flu shots by now, but between him studying for school and going to PA to buy a used 2011 Ford Escape last Monday , we both forgot to go for the flu shot.
I finally had the energy to get up out of the recliner and do a load of laundry today.
I have a cooked turkey that needs carving, a pumpkin pie to make, etc etc.

One thing at a time...

 

[pb4uski]

....And selling/buying that much means I could lose some money if the timing is wrong. So, being a [-]market timer[/-] careful rebalancer, I looked at the market movement in the last couple of trading days, and decided to wait a bit more. I still have December to sell-sell-sell/buy-buy-buy.....

You can minimize that risk of loss by selling and buying back as immediately as possible (assuming you are buying back the same ticker). I'm looking at something similar and am thinking about talking with my MF provider of allowing a sell and buy the same day - I'm not sure if they allow that. Since the transaction would result in a gain there is no need to worry about wash sale rules (wash sale rules only apply to transactions that result in losses).

 

[braumeister]

Brewed my last batch of homebrew for the year. Since I have to run a hose from the house out to my brewery (backyard shed), I can only do it when the temperature is above freezing, and I have to drain all the lines to let them survive the winter.

Even though today was borderline for temperature, I had a great brew day. Made 12 gallons of American Pale Ale, of which 1.5 gallons was canned to use for future yeast starters. Got the whole system cleaned, drained, and closed up.

In a couple of weeks, this batch will be legged and put in the rotation, and will probably start making me smile in about a month. My normal beer consumption averages out to two pints per day, so one batch lasts me a couple of months, since there is some commercial beer consumed as well.

 

[Ronstar]

Brewed my last batch of homebrew for the year. Since I have to run a hose from the house out to my brewery (backyard shed), I can only do it when the temperature is above freezing, and I have to drain all the lines to let them survive the winter.

Even though today was borderline for temperature, I had a great brew day. Made 12 gallons of American Pale Ale, of which 1.5 gallons was canned to use for future yeast starters. Got the whole system cleaned, drained, and closed up.

In a couple of weeks, this batch will be legged and put in the rotation, and will probably start making me smile in about a month. My normal beer consumption averages out to two pints per day, so one batch lasts me a couple of months, since there is some commercial beer consumed as well.

Great way to spend a day! My "brewery" has the same problem. I brew outside and have to run a hose as well. I'm brewing Friday - a 5 gallon all grain version of the White House Honey Porter. This will put my stockpile at close to 30 gallons. I don't know when I'll brew again once daily temps fall below freezing, so my stockpile may have to last a while.

 

[Nords]

I've been working through a multi-page list of "things to put on the blog", and today I tackled Google Analytics.

I read about it and figured out all the things it can do for blog statistics, but I want that 30 minutes of my life back.

It seems to be a [-]12-pound sledge[/-] 90-pound jackhammer and it duplicates a lot of the statistics that I already get on WordPress. For a small blog without AdWords it doesn't seem worth the effort... let alone the implied threat (in Google's "Terms & Conditions") that they may someday charge for the service.

But it was nice to cross a line item off the list.

Hey, I think I'll do some more tax paperwork.

 

[freebird5825]

I woke up at 4 AM.
So did Mr B.
Considering we hit the bricks at 8 PM last night, no wonder.

Coffee is made, laundry is in the dryer, and I feel great!!!!

After 4 days of doing nada, I have my list at the ready.

Carve turkey and freeze
Make pumpkin pie and freeze
Fold laundry
Empty dishwasher

Go downtown to the pharmacy for a prescription and more cough syrup for Mr B. He is going to the doctor no fail today [-]under threat of being duct taped, put in the car and driven there[/-].

Empty out the Jeep prior to driving it to a mechanic friend who wants to buy it. He has access to used engines at a fraction of the retail cost. I'm hoping he can put in an engine and end up with a great vehicle for himself. At this point, I will accept anything above the price I would get from a junkyard. Case closed.

I might even go out for a beer later.

 

[ls99]

East nowhere has a downtown?