Lessons Learned
28/01/21 07:18
What should I read next? Of all the books out there what book might I be interested in reading? I tell myself that I like non-fiction but I find myself more often than not losing interest after a few chapters. I think I like it when I'm surprised with just how much I find myself getting sucked into a good piece of fiction. You know, one of those books that you can't put down.
We all know what it's like to start reading a book and finding to our surprise that it just isn't cutting the mustard. One thing I've never liked is starting a book and then not finishing it. I guess that's the chance you take every time you pick up a book. It may or may not grab you. With non-fiction anyway, you know what you're getting into.
Book reviews are great too but they can sometimes just leave you scratching your head. After reading a few pages, you find yourself asking the question, what the hell were they thinking? Maybe the characters aren't compelling enough. Maybe the writing style falls a bit flat.
Maybe there are just too many pages left in the book which now seem somehow insurmountable. I start to think about all the other books I'm not reading while trying to get through a book I'm not really enjoying. What would the book gods think about my reading more than one book at a time?
My guitar thing is going good though. I've decided that I'm not going to keep track of anything as it relates to my practicing or my progress (or lack thereof). I'm just going to pick the damn thing up every day and work on something. Maybe it will be chord progressions. Maybe it will be nothing more than getting my fingers on the strings so I can build up the callouses on my fingertips. Oh, and just so you know, it's all acoustic all the time. For now, anyway.
I watched a video on YouTube yesterday dealing with picking. I got some great tips and can't wait to work those tips into my routine. Apparently, it takes hundreds of hours to train your fingers before it all becomes second nature. I've even played along to one or more songs on YouTube. It wasn't pretty but it gave me something else to work on which is a good thing.
It keeps me coming back for more. I'm not contemplating taking lessons any time soon. Are they even doing that anymore in the era of covid? Maybe I should be worrying about developing bad habits going off on my own as I am. What the hey. Just keep doing what you're doing, Johnny.
Here we are on January, 26th, and I can't remember the last time it snowed. It's been kind of nice actually. I've gotten in a little more bike riding that usual although I've had a few days off recently because of the wind and extreme cold. I mark them on my calendar as "lazy days" since I could have gone but opted not to because of the weather.
If it snows then I mark my calendar accordingly, "snow." I need to ratchet things up, though, because I'm getting a bit lazy and soft in the middle if you get my drift. I'm staying away from the gym until I get vaccinated so there's that. I could get on the treadmill but Nancy is more often than not busy at work in the same room. I could change up my schedule, maybe rearrange it so I can get in there ahead of her, so something to think about anyway.
I'm not against using the treadmill but it is probably a last resort sort of thing. Truth be told, I'm more of a biking and weights kind of guy. Maybe I need to rethink the gym thing. There's also something to be said for getting out of the house. Moving your body and getting up and about. That is one downside of reading that you can't deny. And when the snow does come, I don't want to be caught flat footed. That is to say, I need to be in shape before I go tackling Mother Nature. She can be an unforgiving mistress.
There is some weird shit going on in the financial markets. You know, there's an ebb and a flow of buying and selling in a healthy financial market. When you have too much of one or the other, the market corrects and always reverts to the mean. When things get stretched, you typically see more volatility associated with those reversions.
It's true what they say about the ups and downs of the market. It's stair steps up, and an elevator ride down. And when the fed, and their counterparts around the world, print money endlessly as they are doing day in and day out, the distortions can be seismic to both the upside and downside.
The froth and speculation in the market today is unhealthy and unsustainable. Technicals are in la-la land everywhere you look. It is not a market I want any part of. If you want to chase yields knowing what you know about where we are in the cycle then have at it.
My advice would be to take your chips off the table and bank your profits until we see a little more sanity in the market. The buy and hold investor will weather it all and maybe ignore all but the most egregious plunges, dips, or dalliances into the red. Buying into this market, and especially at these levels, is never a good thing. Think 2000, 2009, etc. We're in late inning action as one financial guy I like to listen to says. When you see company's with no sales trading at unheard of multiples, that's one indication of an overbought condition. There are others.
I finally bit the bullet and went out to buy a battery for my old Volvo. I was getting little tired of wondering every time I got behind the wheel whether or not the car was going to start. I like living on the edge but maybe not so much when it comes to my car.
I can never remember when, where, and how long ago I bought my last battery so I don't usually know if my "battery" problem is really an "alternator" problem. I suppose if I can't remember then it's been a while since I bought the battery and it's more likely than not a "battery" problem. See how that works?
I don't know why I took notice of this but I did. I recall it vividly. I was driving somewhere and I happened to notice a couple of oil trucks on the road. It may have been on two particular outings. The trucks were delivery trucks bringing oil to residential customers as best I could tell. The trucks displayed the current price of oil on the rear of the vehicle ostensibly as an advertising tool for prospective customers. I don't know why the prices on display were of interest one way or another since we've only used one oil company for really years now.
I don't even follow oil prices and never have. I assume prices go up and down depending on prices in the spot oil market. I assumed, wrongly as I'm now realizing, that the only way oil companies stay in business is by offering competitive rates to their customers. It's the usual supply and demand equation that we all learned about in economics 101. The oil prices displayed by both trucks were close enough that it supported my thesis about how markets work. That is to say, they were cents apart as I would have expected. So far, so good.
The prices displayed were somewhere in the low $2 range. Maybe $2.10 a gallon or so were I to average the two prices. One thing I haven't mentioned is that Nancy said something about the bill we received recently from our oil company. I don't know that she did the math but the total price of the fill-up was somewhere in the area of $400.
So, the obvious question at that point was, well, how much are they charging per gallon and how many gallons did we get? Nancy wasn't asking those questions but one thing led to another and I ended up taking a closer look at the bill.
Let me see if I have this straight. We are being charged $3.29 a gallon for heating oil while the two prices I saw on my drive were much lower. The average oil tank is 275 gallons. We didn't need 275 gallons when they last delivered oil but that's neither here nor there.
The crux of the matter is that we paid maybe $150 more than we would have paid had we done business with someone other than our current oil company. Thank the baby Jesus that we didn't need 275 gallons! It was a real WTF moment. How do they justify charging such a premium? How long have we been paying these exorbitant rates? Why have we never noticed this before?
Let me call these people and see what they have to say. Maybe I have no one to blame but myself after all is said and done. I might have asked questions sooner. Ya think? They didn't have much to say when I finally got around to calling them. I suspect they get calls like mine from time to time when people have questions about such things. I was more curious than hostile so it wasn't an unpleasant conversation.
I was open to anything they might have to say about why their prices were higher than any other oil company in the area. I looked at all 10 or 12 online that service our area before calling them and the other company's prices were consistently in the range of $2.05 - $2.12. Oddly enough, my oil company wasn't included on the list. Say what?
It didn't take me long to get to the point in the conversation where I asked them to close the account. We've done business with them for years and years and they couldn't have cared less about losing our business. There was no, "thank you for your business all these past years" or anything of the kind.
If I had to characterize her tone, I might have said it was maybe a little gruff or uncaring. I wasn't wanting an apology, a kiss on both cheeks, or even a smidge of sympathy, and she clearly wasn't in the "caring" mode so that was that. Maybe I should have been more incensed but I couldn't blame them for my inattention to such matters so I just let it go. I've already signed on with one of their competitors so we are, as they say in the business, good to go.
And no, I don't need to take this issue up with the Ev man. He's got one of those all-inclusive type of deals where he doesn't have to worry about such things. In other words, his utilities are included in his rent. Not a bad gig if you can get it. He'll be stopping by today and maybe spending the night. I bought a freezer full of stuff from Trader Joe's that he might like so he won't be going hungry while he's here. He's always free to take or leave whatever he wishes from our freezer or elsewhere when he returns home. He just called. He's on his way.
I don't know what's going on in our nation's capitol but I don't think it's good. Biden is moving quickly with executive action after executive action to erase job gains, crater our position in the world as an energy independent country by cancelling oil and gas leases on federal lands, bringing back racist theory training to all federal employees, the stopping of all activities as it relates to building a wall on our southern order to stop the flow of illegals, criminals, and drugs, and he's now allowing transgenders and other sexual outliers to join the ranks of our military. This is just for starters.
More insidious are the actions being considered by Biden and the democrats to label any and all citizens encouraging or promoting anyone wishing to see the return of one Donald J Trump, or his policies in part or in whole, as racist and a direct threat to our nation's security.
This is sheer and naked totalitarianism. Republicans need to push back on these efforts and push back hard. In the absence of any pushback, the democrats will unleash a hellish volley of laws that will criminalize everything under the sun that threaten their one-party rule. Trumpster's need to tread carefully.
To label our current state of affairs in Washington D.C. as toxic would be an understatement. Did I mention that the FBI arrested a man in Florida yesterday for making a political meme? This guy is going to jail for making a political statement. I need to repeat that: This guy is going to jail for making a political statement.
Maybe someone can explain to me why we still have 5,000 troops in and around our nation's capital. Who are they protecting, exactly? It makes our capital look like a military encampment not unlike that which you might see in some of the shitholes around the globe. Our founding fathers must be rolling over in their graves. Oh, and not to worry. They're bring back good old 'Climate Change." The workers who lose their jobs in the oil and gas industry can now find employment making solar panels. That is, after all, as John (do you now who I am) Kerry puts it, "a better choice for you." Excuse me?
We all know what it's like to start reading a book and finding to our surprise that it just isn't cutting the mustard. One thing I've never liked is starting a book and then not finishing it. I guess that's the chance you take every time you pick up a book. It may or may not grab you. With non-fiction anyway, you know what you're getting into.
Book reviews are great too but they can sometimes just leave you scratching your head. After reading a few pages, you find yourself asking the question, what the hell were they thinking? Maybe the characters aren't compelling enough. Maybe the writing style falls a bit flat.
Maybe there are just too many pages left in the book which now seem somehow insurmountable. I start to think about all the other books I'm not reading while trying to get through a book I'm not really enjoying. What would the book gods think about my reading more than one book at a time?
My guitar thing is going good though. I've decided that I'm not going to keep track of anything as it relates to my practicing or my progress (or lack thereof). I'm just going to pick the damn thing up every day and work on something. Maybe it will be chord progressions. Maybe it will be nothing more than getting my fingers on the strings so I can build up the callouses on my fingertips. Oh, and just so you know, it's all acoustic all the time. For now, anyway.
I watched a video on YouTube yesterday dealing with picking. I got some great tips and can't wait to work those tips into my routine. Apparently, it takes hundreds of hours to train your fingers before it all becomes second nature. I've even played along to one or more songs on YouTube. It wasn't pretty but it gave me something else to work on which is a good thing.
It keeps me coming back for more. I'm not contemplating taking lessons any time soon. Are they even doing that anymore in the era of covid? Maybe I should be worrying about developing bad habits going off on my own as I am. What the hey. Just keep doing what you're doing, Johnny.
Here we are on January, 26th, and I can't remember the last time it snowed. It's been kind of nice actually. I've gotten in a little more bike riding that usual although I've had a few days off recently because of the wind and extreme cold. I mark them on my calendar as "lazy days" since I could have gone but opted not to because of the weather.
If it snows then I mark my calendar accordingly, "snow." I need to ratchet things up, though, because I'm getting a bit lazy and soft in the middle if you get my drift. I'm staying away from the gym until I get vaccinated so there's that. I could get on the treadmill but Nancy is more often than not busy at work in the same room. I could change up my schedule, maybe rearrange it so I can get in there ahead of her, so something to think about anyway.
I'm not against using the treadmill but it is probably a last resort sort of thing. Truth be told, I'm more of a biking and weights kind of guy. Maybe I need to rethink the gym thing. There's also something to be said for getting out of the house. Moving your body and getting up and about. That is one downside of reading that you can't deny. And when the snow does come, I don't want to be caught flat footed. That is to say, I need to be in shape before I go tackling Mother Nature. She can be an unforgiving mistress.
There is some weird shit going on in the financial markets. You know, there's an ebb and a flow of buying and selling in a healthy financial market. When you have too much of one or the other, the market corrects and always reverts to the mean. When things get stretched, you typically see more volatility associated with those reversions.
It's true what they say about the ups and downs of the market. It's stair steps up, and an elevator ride down. And when the fed, and their counterparts around the world, print money endlessly as they are doing day in and day out, the distortions can be seismic to both the upside and downside.
The froth and speculation in the market today is unhealthy and unsustainable. Technicals are in la-la land everywhere you look. It is not a market I want any part of. If you want to chase yields knowing what you know about where we are in the cycle then have at it.
My advice would be to take your chips off the table and bank your profits until we see a little more sanity in the market. The buy and hold investor will weather it all and maybe ignore all but the most egregious plunges, dips, or dalliances into the red. Buying into this market, and especially at these levels, is never a good thing. Think 2000, 2009, etc. We're in late inning action as one financial guy I like to listen to says. When you see company's with no sales trading at unheard of multiples, that's one indication of an overbought condition. There are others.
I finally bit the bullet and went out to buy a battery for my old Volvo. I was getting little tired of wondering every time I got behind the wheel whether or not the car was going to start. I like living on the edge but maybe not so much when it comes to my car.
I can never remember when, where, and how long ago I bought my last battery so I don't usually know if my "battery" problem is really an "alternator" problem. I suppose if I can't remember then it's been a while since I bought the battery and it's more likely than not a "battery" problem. See how that works?
I don't know why I took notice of this but I did. I recall it vividly. I was driving somewhere and I happened to notice a couple of oil trucks on the road. It may have been on two particular outings. The trucks were delivery trucks bringing oil to residential customers as best I could tell. The trucks displayed the current price of oil on the rear of the vehicle ostensibly as an advertising tool for prospective customers. I don't know why the prices on display were of interest one way or another since we've only used one oil company for really years now.
I don't even follow oil prices and never have. I assume prices go up and down depending on prices in the spot oil market. I assumed, wrongly as I'm now realizing, that the only way oil companies stay in business is by offering competitive rates to their customers. It's the usual supply and demand equation that we all learned about in economics 101. The oil prices displayed by both trucks were close enough that it supported my thesis about how markets work. That is to say, they were cents apart as I would have expected. So far, so good.
The prices displayed were somewhere in the low $2 range. Maybe $2.10 a gallon or so were I to average the two prices. One thing I haven't mentioned is that Nancy said something about the bill we received recently from our oil company. I don't know that she did the math but the total price of the fill-up was somewhere in the area of $400.
So, the obvious question at that point was, well, how much are they charging per gallon and how many gallons did we get? Nancy wasn't asking those questions but one thing led to another and I ended up taking a closer look at the bill.
Let me see if I have this straight. We are being charged $3.29 a gallon for heating oil while the two prices I saw on my drive were much lower. The average oil tank is 275 gallons. We didn't need 275 gallons when they last delivered oil but that's neither here nor there.
The crux of the matter is that we paid maybe $150 more than we would have paid had we done business with someone other than our current oil company. Thank the baby Jesus that we didn't need 275 gallons! It was a real WTF moment. How do they justify charging such a premium? How long have we been paying these exorbitant rates? Why have we never noticed this before?
Let me call these people and see what they have to say. Maybe I have no one to blame but myself after all is said and done. I might have asked questions sooner. Ya think? They didn't have much to say when I finally got around to calling them. I suspect they get calls like mine from time to time when people have questions about such things. I was more curious than hostile so it wasn't an unpleasant conversation.
I was open to anything they might have to say about why their prices were higher than any other oil company in the area. I looked at all 10 or 12 online that service our area before calling them and the other company's prices were consistently in the range of $2.05 - $2.12. Oddly enough, my oil company wasn't included on the list. Say what?
It didn't take me long to get to the point in the conversation where I asked them to close the account. We've done business with them for years and years and they couldn't have cared less about losing our business. There was no, "thank you for your business all these past years" or anything of the kind.
If I had to characterize her tone, I might have said it was maybe a little gruff or uncaring. I wasn't wanting an apology, a kiss on both cheeks, or even a smidge of sympathy, and she clearly wasn't in the "caring" mode so that was that. Maybe I should have been more incensed but I couldn't blame them for my inattention to such matters so I just let it go. I've already signed on with one of their competitors so we are, as they say in the business, good to go.
And no, I don't need to take this issue up with the Ev man. He's got one of those all-inclusive type of deals where he doesn't have to worry about such things. In other words, his utilities are included in his rent. Not a bad gig if you can get it. He'll be stopping by today and maybe spending the night. I bought a freezer full of stuff from Trader Joe's that he might like so he won't be going hungry while he's here. He's always free to take or leave whatever he wishes from our freezer or elsewhere when he returns home. He just called. He's on his way.
I don't know what's going on in our nation's capitol but I don't think it's good. Biden is moving quickly with executive action after executive action to erase job gains, crater our position in the world as an energy independent country by cancelling oil and gas leases on federal lands, bringing back racist theory training to all federal employees, the stopping of all activities as it relates to building a wall on our southern order to stop the flow of illegals, criminals, and drugs, and he's now allowing transgenders and other sexual outliers to join the ranks of our military. This is just for starters.
More insidious are the actions being considered by Biden and the democrats to label any and all citizens encouraging or promoting anyone wishing to see the return of one Donald J Trump, or his policies in part or in whole, as racist and a direct threat to our nation's security.
This is sheer and naked totalitarianism. Republicans need to push back on these efforts and push back hard. In the absence of any pushback, the democrats will unleash a hellish volley of laws that will criminalize everything under the sun that threaten their one-party rule. Trumpster's need to tread carefully.
To label our current state of affairs in Washington D.C. as toxic would be an understatement. Did I mention that the FBI arrested a man in Florida yesterday for making a political meme? This guy is going to jail for making a political statement. I need to repeat that: This guy is going to jail for making a political statement.
Maybe someone can explain to me why we still have 5,000 troops in and around our nation's capital. Who are they protecting, exactly? It makes our capital look like a military encampment not unlike that which you might see in some of the shitholes around the globe. Our founding fathers must be rolling over in their graves. Oh, and not to worry. They're bring back good old 'Climate Change." The workers who lose their jobs in the oil and gas industry can now find employment making solar panels. That is, after all, as John (do you now who I am) Kerry puts it, "a better choice for you." Excuse me?