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

[freebird5825]

I got out of the house today to replenish my Kleenex, TP and cold remedy stock. I did pick up some 12 hour nasal spray (thanks Al ) and so far no reaction to it.
I visited a guy friend who has been missing seeing me for 3 weeks. He made me some chicken soup and generally fussed over me. Nice to have good friends.

The leaves are still changing here, but I am seeing more bare branches lately. I am already scheming up my winter adventures. I have a few stray mutual funds that have low balances (under $5K) that may get cashed out this winter. All done in the spirit of portfolio simplication, of course.

 

[Nords]

Discovered a nasty gas leak on my car over the weekend. Took it to the local garage this morning and got a call a couple of hours later. It was a small crack in the inlet to the fuel pump. Only problem is to fix it required (supposedly) a new pump. Major bucks.

I'd normally ask for a second opinion but I really don't have the time. This is what we tow behind the motor home and we're only two days from launch on our FL trip to see the shuttle - assuming it goes off on schedule: NASA says fuel leak shouldn't delay Discovery shuttle launch

Is NASA using the same repair shop/fuel pump as your toad?

 

[REWahoo]

Is NASA using the same repair shop/fuel pump as your toad?

Don't think so - they certainly wouldn't have been the low bidder...

 

[Gumby]

Is NASA using the same repair shop/fuel pump as your toad?

I wonder which answer we would prefer to hear?

 

[TromboneAl]

Lena "rode her age" yesterday at the Avenue of the Giants. this tradition gets more difficult every year.

Stopped for a little fuel on the way:

 

[NW-Bound]

Received Quicken Premier from Amazon yesterday, and installed it. The import of the MS Money file was less than perfect, and left many transactions out.

I had been using MS Money for many years, but only for its Portfolio Manager features. In fact, I used to use MS Portfolio free Web version, but it eventually could not handle all the equity transaction history that dated back to 1998, and I had to buy MS Money Plus to continue to track my portfolio.

A long time ago, I did buy an earlier version of MS Money to use it for all banking purposes, but the set-up was cumbersome, and the darn PC crashed shortly after due to a Windoze bug, and I never bothered to set it up again. Meanwhile, my wife does her own electronic banking to pay bills and all my involvement there has been simply to make sure there is enough money in the checking account.

Anyway, the import of MS Money file was botched, but it could be due to some weird records inside the file. The darn thing was 287MB (yes, that's 287 Megabytes), and had choked up MS Money itself on occasions. Yes, I have been an active investor, but what could have been stored in that bloated file?

So, I gave up on the import and set out to create accounts from scratch. It was painless to set up Quicken to go into my B of A, Scottrade, Schwab accounts, etc, etc... There remained half a dozen of accounts that I will have to enter by hand, Treasury Direct and my wife 401k being examples.

Now, I know my net worth again each day after the market closes. That pleases this miser.

But, but, what the heck is this? Apparently, Quicken could not go back far enough to see when certain stock shares were purchased. However, it "knows" the shares are there in the balance, so creates a "place holder" for the purchase transaction, and I will have to look it up myself to edit the date and the price. Arghhh.... And of course there is no way I would spend the time to enter all the dividend payouts.

Also, all the closed positions, all those "historical" tech stocks that I bought which have gone belly up, they had been wiped clean, and no evidence of any of my dumb investment mistakes remains. I had been keeping them, so that I could look back and see how many tens of thousand I lost on this, and on that... A guy's got to learn from his mistakes, or at least tries to, don't you think?

 

[harley]

Back from a 5 day camping trip in the VA/WV mountains. The fire road we go up in the GW National Forest is the enforceable border there. The weather was mostly good, but pretty damn chilly. Incredible stars. The wind was bending my tent down to touch my nose at night, but I slept like a baby. Got in a few nice hikes, and one good 4-wheel trip. This was my 26th year doing this trip.

Went to annual Punkin Chuckin festival in Morton, Il. Pumpkins being tossed by humans, catapults, and giant air guns. Toss distances ranged from -50' to over 4000' - even with a stiff headwind. Unbelievably good time

This is one of the items on my bucket list.

So I'll be seeing y'all at the World Championship this year in Bridgeville, DE? It was a good time last year, although I almost got brained by a misfire.

 

[GregLee]

The wind was bending my tent down to touch my nose at night, but I slept like a baby.

Thus, since you were asleep, not noticing that the tent was touching your nose.

 

[harley]

Thus, since you were asleep, not noticing that the tent was touching your nose.

Not to mention that it was colder than ****, and my nose was frozen.

 

[Ronstar]

Back from a 5 day camping trip in the VA/WV mountains. The fire road we go up in the GW National Forest is the enforceable border there. The weather was mostly good, but pretty damn chilly. Incredible stars. The wind was bending my tent down to touch my nose at night, but I slept like a baby. Got in a few nice hikes, and one good 4-wheel trip. This was my 26th year doing this trip.





So I'll be seeing y'all at the World Championship this year in Bridgeville, DE? It was a good time last year, although I almost got brained by a misfire.

DW wants to visit every state. Certainly the world championship punkin chunking would be high on my list of things to do on the east coast - but we cant make it this year. Your misfire incident sounds like it was a lot of fun.

 

[Nords]

We're enjoying two nights in the Napili Sunset near Kapalua on Maui's west side.

It's a completely different Hawaii from the urban version I've lived in for 20 years. Our 2nd-floor condotel room looks down on the beach (northwest) from the center of the arc of Napili Bay. There's a great pile of rocks on the south for tidepooling and a couple of shallow reefs in the center for snorkeling. The shorebreak is literally 20 yards from our lanai so you can barely be heard from one end of the condo to the other. Yesterday on the tidepool we watched from one side of a rock as four (!) honu cropped limu from the other side. One larger-than-expected surge popped a guy with a three-foot shell on top of the rocks, where he first finished snacking on virgin limu territory and then eventually struggled back in with the next surge. We could've reached out to shake a flipper and written our names on his shell. No carvings or tags on him-- they might just be too common here to merit labeling.

Kapalua airport's runway looks about as big as a flight deck. (You can watch the landing from anywhere in the cabin, but there are crosswinds. Spouse noted that the pilot put down the right wheel considerable sooner than the left one. I kept my nose in my book and chose to remain blissfully ignorant.) “Baggage claim” is a shelf at the edge of the runway where the handling vehicles park. They only fly during daylight hours.

Last night was dinner in the cutely-named Cafe O'Lei. (Maybe the owner is Hawaiian-Irish-Spanish.) Good food, great view, enjoy your leftovers for tomorrow's lunch and don't look at the prices. This morning I sipped Kona on the lanai while watching more honu surface in the bay. The sunrise highlights Molokai to the northwest and Lanai to the west. I'll bet the whalewatching from here (starting next month) is absolutely stunning. Today we'll do some snorkeling and then see if we can find a couple of good seafood places. (Snorkeling always makes me hungry for seafood.) Maybe this afternoon we'll see what the winter's first big northwest swell does to Slaughterhouses (Honolua Bay? Mokuleia? I forget) and drive around Kapalua Resort. Or maybe we'll find other ways to spend the afternoon.

Yesterday we were talking story with the staff at a snack shack when the manager came over and asked me “You there, where are you from, with your local accent and your Maui HC&S t-shirt?” Local accent? Me?!? She says her son goes to Kapiolani Community College on Oahu and feels like he's been plopped down in the middle of “Bright Lights, Big City”. After a couple days here I can understand how he feels.

Ironically we're enjoying this idyll tranquility because I'm here for a late-afternoon meeting, one requiring actual professional attire of pants/shoes/socks. We probably never would have thought to visit here otherwise, yet we're already planning our next trip. I'll have to strap our inflatable Handiracks on the rental car's roof and rent a standup board. Molokai can't be that far of a paddle...

So, Freebird, how's that winterizing thing coming along?

 

[Walt34]

10:00 AM Dr. visit for a follow-up. Return library books.

Put together a collage of photos for SIL's upcoming surprise retirement party.

Took a nap.

Looked briefly at the motorcycle to try to figure out why the driving lights up and quit working. No power to the switch but fuses are okay. It has to go to the shop soon for servicing anyway so I may leave that to them to figure out.

 

[Fireup2020]

Sort of playing hooky/w*rking from home today...getting around to wrap up some organizational duties in the office (recently moved in with DBF) - I got fed up with our his & hers sorting/purging for the spring yard sale...this crap is piling up in the hallway...nothing feels organized - and I have reached my pigstye limit! Chaos does not work for me! Since he is having a few weeks of w*rk hell and we have been running around like crazy, I figured I'd start to attack this. Feels good!

 

[Khan]

Farmers market, grocery store, laundry (clothesline) made large pot of vegetable/ham soup.

 

[bruce1]

Farmers market, grocery store, laundry (clothesline) made large pot of vegetable/ham soup.

OK Now I am hungry

 

[Khan]

Breakfast set off the smoke alarm.

 

[TromboneAl]

Breakfast set off the smoke alarm.

You need Beano.

 

[RonBoyd]

Breakfast set off the smoke alarm.

Like that's a bad thing?

 

[Khan]

Like that's a bad thing?

It does upset the cat.

 

[Ronstar]

Did some woodworking and took the boat out for the last ride of the year. Just ordered a pizza, and now I'm waiting for the Blackhawks game to start

 

[Nords]

Just e-mailed PenFed 16 attachments of scanned tax returns, pension statements, bank-account statements, brokerage/IRA statements, rental property leases, tax-return-release agreements, and signed copies of a half-dozen of their forms.

At least they say they'll verify the balances of the accounts we have at PenFed.

They actually specified that we had to include all pages of a brokerage statement (Fidelity numbers theirs "page 1 of 6" and so on). Now I'm going to get a bunch of nosy questions about the covered-call transactions we didn't care to discuss with them...

 

[Khan]

Got thank yous from several folks.
Got a picture of a new stray cat.
Will probably not be a marrow donor.
First (all the way down to the ground) frost.

 

[NW-Bound]

Bought an old TI-55 programmable calculator at the Goodwill for $3. (It is vintage 1977. I had one in college). It came with the original manual and the groovy naugahide zippered belt pouch, but no charger. So when I got home, I removed the charge pack and rigged the calculator to operate on a regular nine volt battery. Works like a champ now, and the retro red LED display is pleasing. Now, I just need to refresh my programming skills.

I had the same TI-55 in college. Bought in 1977 too, to replace my first calculator, which was a Novus made by National Semiconductor. The TI-55 had shortcuts for rectangular-to-polar conversion and back, which were useful for complex number arithmetic, which again was much handy for numerical solutions to network or transmission line problem calculations.

Alan, being an RF guy in college, probably still remembers this kind of problems given on a quizz.

A load of impedance 75-50j Ohm at a frequency of 10MHz is driven with a coax of 50 Ohm impedance and a dielectric constant of 2. Design a single shorted stub to tune the SWR to 1:1.​

By the way, SWR above stands for Standing Wave Ratio, and not something you enter into FIRECalc.

I would still have this calculator, even if it is now obsolete, if it weren't stolen in a house burglary.

 

[freebird5825]

...So, Freebird, how's that winterizing thing coming along?

Boat pulled from lake, winterized and shrink wrapped on contract...CHECK
Winter wood delivered and stacked outside...CHECK
Underground water line to garden drained...CHECK
Mousetraps set in garage...CHECK
Mouse corpses removed...IN PROGRESS as needed
Snowplowing service arranged...CHECK
Air conditioner unit removed from master bedroom window..CHECK

Wood carried up from woodshed to stay dry in back porch...
First sign of little white stuff out of sky...CHECK as of this AM

Grumbling about living at 43N latitude...CHECK

Oh the weather outside is frightful, but the....

 

[W2R]

We made another Goodwill run this afternoon. Considering how much the two of us have donated in the past month, and considering how many others are doing the same thing, we wonder how Goodwill can possibly handle the huge quantity of donations they receive.

We speculated that perhaps they have a big unmarked truck driven by masked employees, that secretly moves donations to the local landfill in the middle of the night...