A year’s worth of updates

Time flies when you’re ignoring a blog, right? I’ll catch up.

  • The Mercedes is gone. After everything I’d fixed on it, when the transmission decided it didn’t want to work reliably any more — screw it, I was done. It was an awesome car to drive, but not so much fun to own. I replaced it with a much newer 2018 BMW 540i Xdrive, which has been wonderful.
  • Still flying occasionally, but nowhere near as much as I should or want to.
  • Nothing’s happened with the Mustang, other than getting the engine put back together.
  • We’ve picked up a couple more rental houses; that enterprise is going pretty well overall.
  • We switched from Visible to T-Mobile. Visible had great service when we signed up; it slowly degraded to barely usable. TMO has been better, but not great.
  • I just dumped CenturyLink. Our CenturyLink fiber service has been down since Wednesday morning (it’s Friday now). It took me three hours to get through to a human there, on the phone, who told me they could have someone out Saturday morning. Absolutely appalling service. We were up and running on Cox within an hour of leaving the house to go pick up their equipment.
  • Now I remember why I didn’t like Cox’s equipment… zero flexibility, no control over your own local network at all. You can’t even set your own DNS, so my Pi-Hole is not functional. I’ve got new equipment coming this afternoon. New cable modem, router, and mesh wifi.
  • I left my long time employer (a bank) a little over a year ago and now work for another bank.

A stock market bloodbath? Meh… maybe.

Looks like the Dow dropped over 1100 points today.  Part of me wants to be shocked and a little panicky — that’s a big-ass hit, and for us personally it means a significant hit to our retirement savings.  I mean, that’s a lot of dollars gone in one day.

Looking at it a little more calmly, though, what we lost is about what we had gained in the past few weeks of ridiculously over-optimistic frenzy.  Berkshire, for example (BRK.B, not the hoity-toity flavor) dropped to its early January price.  AAPL dropped a little more, down to where it spent the majority of the second half of last year.  The index funds, like QQQ, DIA and SPY, have all dropped to about where I’d have normally expected to see them about now.  In other words, if you look at the chart for the past year, and extend the trend line — there you are.  We just erased a very anomalous growth bump that just reeked of a near-hysterical speculative bubble.

Now, if we can just go a few days without continued hysteria we’ll be in good shape.