Good Morning!!!! 46F @ 8:30AM. Partly cloudy. High 63F. Winds light and variable.
Rain tonight and tomorrow, again Sunday, then starting Tuesday for the rest of the 10-day. We need it badly, and I need a reason to be cooped up inside and work on fun things like paperwork.
Eric, does your new radio require line-of-sight to work?
I use two-factor authentication based on text messages when I log in to my brokerage house, and that stopped working when I activated the new iPhone. I finally broke down and called them to see if they could help, and after cancelling the service and signing up to it again, it's back to working. The associate I worked with noticed the high percentage of money market assets in the portfolio, which started a long conversation on investment strategies. I shared my philosophies and concerns with him, listened to some of his personal as well as corporate strategies, and walked away mostly unchanged in my direction. The output publishes a list of ETFs it offers, and it contains several performance measures for each ETF. Painfully obvious is that almost all of the ETFs based on government bonds are showing negative performance numbers year-to-date, as of 1/19/2021. We talked about that, too, and agreed that's it's because all the volatility lately is driving a flight to security, and knowing this, the feds are able to sell their bonds with lower coupons. Stocks, on the other hand, are reaching for all time highs again, I think because at least now we know who's going to be sitting in the White House. I'm in the process of paring back the stock allocation in the portfolio because of last year's good results, and because buy-low-sell-high doesn't work without the sell-high part. And that's the limit of what I'll say here about politics.
Walmart sent me an email that the second half of my motor oil delivery has been cancelled, and the cost refunded. Something about it being damaged in shipment. Guess I'll have to go into the store Friday while out on my grocery run. Also had one of the suppliers for the discontinued spark plugs write to tell me they've cancelled the order. The other outfit saw fit to send resistor plugs when their product description said they were the non-resistor variety, so those have to go back, and I have to keep on looking for new-old-stock. Not sure that's a Covid problem or not, but it's very fashionable these days for somebody out there to try to call it that.:stirthepot:
A new shirt I ordered a couple weeks ago from
Wilderness Tactical also showed up yesterday, and I just love it! It's basically a Hawaiian shirt, made from soft cotton fabric, cut a bit more generously to break up the outline of anything you might be carrying under your arm or on your belt. It also has a couple of chest pockets both of which are large enough to accommodate the new portly iPhone.
I did such a good job of measuring the pallets to make sure that the fork spacing on the new pallet jack would work that I neglected to notice that the wheels out on the end of the forks need unimpeded access to the floor. The plastic pallets I have can be used either side up, meaning that the side that is down has a plastic grid over the bottom of the tunnel through which the forks run. I was able to get the forks through the tunnel, but when I tried to jack the pallet up I was treated to a sickening cracking sound as it attempted to break out the bottom of the tunnel. Short of exchanging the pallet jack for one with longer forks, all I could think to do was cut out the offending material. The good news is that a wood blade in the Makita saber saw made quick work of that job, the bad news is that I had to empty the pallet of wood to get to the under side. And I had six of the eight pallets full of wood. Slightly less bad news was that the new Makita batteries that came with the chain saw won't fit in the saber saw because there's some sort of bump on the rails. So I've also got some carving to do on the new batteries, but fell back to using the knock off batteries for now. And recharging them with the charger in the middle of the concrete front porch. I was able to get a pair of pallets butchered and refilled with wood, moved them into the container and got them stacked, clamped a couple of ViceGrips on the upper/lower tubes to keep them from shifting, and moved the stack into position with the new pallet jack. There was a little swaying of the top pallet, it was all I could do to get the wheels to bump over a weld in the steel decking of the container, and there will be just enough room to get two stacks to sit side-by-side if I'm careful to not let any of the splits hang out outside of the hoops. Whew! So that leaves two empty pallets that have been converted, and four full ones that still need to be hacked. I could save a LOT of time and backache if I get 'em a foot or so off the ground with the forks on the tractor, block 'em up with a pair of jack stands, and then go after the offending plastic with the Makita chainsaw. But I'm not sure I'm brave enough to do that, as each of the full pallets weighs close to half a ton and would be a very bad place to be if anything went wrong.
Hang in there, gang, Friday's comin'!
