A Year of Change

Our a/c shut off again! We fixed the fuse in the furnace, but something is tripping the a/c unit when we turn it on. Thankfully it’s cool and not too hot until tomorrow when our guys will show up. I left the windows open all night which cooled the house down a bunch.

Ty is loving LA! What’s not to love if you’re at the beach with nice restaurants, California girls and lots of sun! He and Kristin looked at a bunch of apartments yesterday and then went out to Kristin’s college roommates house for game night with her and her 22 year old daughter and two other girls and a couple guys, one who is an aspiring actor and model. The daughter was in community college but just got accepted to UCLA. I made sure they looked in Brentwood which is probably the nicest and safest area in LA on the west side. He flies home tomorrow morning at 8:45 from LAX. Kristin has been a God send taking care of him and showing him the ropes. I can’t imagine anyone just going out on their own with no help. That’s why we decided to buy him a ticket and send him out for a recon trip. She not only took him everywhere but also gave him advice we talked about to help get him headed in the right direction. And oh yea, Ty’s been sleeping on her couch for the four nights at her tiny $4k a month apartment overlooking the marina. He’s been using the gym and the pool and hot tub every day!

Lori and I went to see the movie Odyssey. It was pretty true to the book by Homer, but a little slow for me in the middle. Still I’d give it a 7 out of 10 as it was good and the actors were good.

Harley is limping a bit this morning. Must be from Lori throwing the ball yesterday. Last week of July coming up! Even though we’re in the middle of a heat wave, Fall will be coming soon. In a few weeks, I think two weeks from last Thursday or yesterday or today, is the first pre-season football game!

Jag went to the White Sox game Friday night in a box suite. Fun time. He takes another SEC test next week so I’m sure he’s studying away, even though between us, he has it down and could have passed it weeks ago. He’s already aced 5 practice tests and you only need 70% to pass. He’s anal that way. Then he can start trading on the exchange.

7am now. Have a great Sunday, stay safe and God Bless.

Ty and Kristin are having a blast. I get it as it has the ocean, beaches and sun. If it wasn’t for the homeless, drug use, crime, high taxes, lack of services, and misguided politicians, it’d be great. For us, it’s a no go, but for a 22 year old kid, it’s probably close to heaven.

They looked at some apartments yesterday and unbelievably a 250 square foot place rents for close to $2000 a month! 250 square feet is really small. Maybe twice the size of an average bedroom. Ty is still months away from moving, even though he’d prefer to go tomorrow. He needs to save up more money for the move. Today they’re going to check out Santa Monica Community College as they have a great theater department where a lot of actors have come from. At least he has a goal and a plan. Good for him.

Lori worked most of the day with her usual group of incompetent people. Six of us guys had cigars in the afternoon. Work is going well. Lori and I might have to go over to the south of France around the end of August. If not, it’ll be the middle of October. I’ve been putting it off but they really want me to come over. We’ll see.

Another nice morning. Yesterday morning we fixed the a/c before the guys could make it up. It was just a fuse as I thought and after switching the one out in the furnace, I went out to the a/c unit out back and pulled out the big fuse and then put it back in to reset it, and voila, we were up and running. Dylan, from the furnace company, who went to school with Ty, showed up an hour later to fix it, but as I said, we were all good. He said to tell Ty hi!

We’re of to the gym. Have a great day, God Bless.

Well, of course, yesterday afternoon we blew a fuse in our a/c unit. Thankfully it was late in the day and cooling down. Oscar, my go to a/c and furnace guy, was heading to the rodeo and since it was already around 6pm, he’s sending Dylan up this morning between 8 and 9 to swap it out. We need to video him on our phone so we can do it next time. We do have a fan above our bed so that kept the room cool all night.

Ty is having fun. He must have walked 10 miles yesterday. Around 8 at night, we told him to take an Uber back to Kristin’s and not walk on the beach when it’s dark! He walked all the way down to the Santa Monica Pier.

Meanwhile Jag has an odor coming from his bathroom somewhere. The landlord sent someone out, but they didn’t smell it. I think it’s low water level somewhere in the building. Hopefully someone will get out there today.

It’s nice outside right now. Not smokey and nice and cool. I have a couple calls and meetings today and I’m sure Lori will be busy all day. She’s had a headache from her neck for a few days. Hopefully it goes away soon. I think it’s from how she sits and types on her computer all day.

Almost August, hard to believe. Summer will be winding down soon. I’m ready as Fall is my favorite season anyhow. I did just get off the phone with France and will need to probably go over at the end of August. More to come. Lori is going to add some pictures of Ty! Fun! God Bless.

In the mornings, I open the garage doors as it gets into the high 80’s in the garage. The temp goes up every night when Lori drives her hot little car in as the fan runs for a while cooling that race car down. Tonight I’m having her leave it in the driveway for 20 minutes when she gets home.

Yesterday I was in and out of Denver before noon. Had to run a couple errands and thought I’d get them out of the way. Jag is doing well and Ty is getting ready for work. His flight tomorrow morning is around 7am. Should be a fun trip for him. Kristin will take good care of him.

At 2am our phones went off with an alert saying the shelter in place had been lifted down by Glenwood. Ugh. Not sure why that was an alert? Anyhow, it woke us both up. We have a small fire on Cottonwood Pass which is the other side of Gypsum. Seems like the whole State is on fire. Right now, there’s a semi on fire at Georgetown on the news. I-70 is closed in both directions says the news, but it looks like it’s open going westbound. West of Glenwood the highway is also closed due to a mudslide from the rain two days ago. Not sure if any of you have the Watch Duty App on your phone, but it’s free and you should download it. It shows fires and floods around the Country in real time.

Rookies report to training camp today for the Broncos! Won’t be long until our first pre-season game. Had a good day at work yesterday with around $300k coming in. Should get our tariff money back, which is another $100k, any day now. My biggest issue is managing to produce all we’re selling as with Europe in a bad way; I need to pre-pay for some of the juice. Crazy times but our new Mimosa’s are crushing it. We’re trying to switch it to a supplier in Oregon which would be a game changer.

That’s it for today! Until tomorrow, be safe, watch your top knot and God Bless.

Yesterday afternoon the monsoons started, I think. Whatever you call it, it rained hard, with big drops, for a good 30 minutes. Then is slowed down to a nice light steady rain for another hour or so. Just what we needed. Might get more today, or this week. Hard to tell. Still in the 90’s though.

Ty’s off to work and Lori is in the shower. I’ll jump in as soon as she’s out. Have a couple calls/meetings today but not much else going on.

Two more days until Ty leaves for California! Should be a fun trip for him. Time to get moving, have a great day, GB.

Still in the 90’s up here. I fill the bird bath a couple times a day and all kinds of birds and the deer use it. I have a little dish on the ground I put water in for the chipmunks too. Water is hard to come by this summer. Remember, Dad always said, water is the new gold. I never forgot that and must have been 12 years old when he told me that. Every year it becomes more and more true. In a few years, some say countries will fight wars over water. They already do in some parts of the World. You can go a long time without food but only a few days without water!

Spain won the World Cup. Good game but not a lot of scoring. I wanted Spain as Argentina seemed like they were the dirtier team. They had zero shots on goal which is unheard of. Congrats to Spain.

Ty’s working again and the next few days until he leaves on Thursday. Lori is in Vail today and I’ll be on the phone and computer.

Tom has a bear at his house! Lori is jealous. He also has just about every other animal you’d think of. He’s in the trees so he gets more wildlife than we do. All the animals are looking for food and water this summer.

6:15am now. Ty works at 7 and just woke up. Lori is making him breakfast now. Time to get moving. Happy Monday and God Bless.

I decided to stick with my truck. It only has 21,000 miles on it and being a diesel, it’ll run for 250,000 miles or more! It’s not like they’ve stopped making new cars, so they’ll always be a deal.

Lori made peach cobbler yesterday along with homemade ice cream. She brought back some pure vanilla extract from Cabo when we went to the conference. The stuff from Mexico is much better than ours here in the U.S. It was really good. Today is National Ice Cream Day! Go get some!

Ty is working every day until he goes to L.A. next Thursday. He only works from 8am until noon today, but it’s more hours.

I’m watching the British Open now on tv as Shultz and Gareth are there. I’m trying to see if I can see them on tv. It’s only 5:43am here meaning 11:43am over across the pond. The World Cup finals are on at 1 today. Crazy game yesterday. Tom called me and told me about all the goals. I saw the beginning and the very end, but missed most of the action. Should be a good game, or match, or whatever they call it.

Yesterday Lori and I were on the phone with Marty when he pulled up to the dump. They always ask you what you have and we heard Marty say, “just two dead bodies and a little nuclear waste, but don’t worry, they’re democrats”! The lady said, “oh, ok, good, put them over there by the hazardous materials”. Too funny. That’s Marty.

No rain up here yet. It’s a little cloudy, but that’s all. Lori just woke up at 5:51. She even looks good in the morning after a nights sleep. She probably secretly wakes up early to primp, ha. Maybe we’ll get some rain tomorrow.

Time to go, have a great Sunday! God Bless.

Lor and I were talking the other day about retirement, again. It’s a process, but one thing we do know is that we don’t want to be working two years from now. One thing about retirement is that to make it work, most of us have to change our spending habits and will be on more of a fixed budget. The largest expenditure for anyone is housing. The bad news, if you’re retiring, is housing continues to go up and up. This is of course good if you’re young and trying to build wealth but makes things harder when you move to a fixed income. For us, it means we need to downsize in what we spend on a home. That doesn’t mean in the size of our house, but in the cost. Size wise though, we can go down a bit on the actual home, but I want to go up on the lot size.

First up is we need to lock down the location. All the metrics say Montana, and being specific, looking at everything from airport access to health care to weather and taxes, northern Montana in particular. Then you have to set a budget as to retire, we need to buy a house for cash, so we have no mortgage. To do this, we could spend around $2 million dollars, but Lori and I have decided to look for something ideally around $1,25 million. Luckily, there are a lot of nice, newer construction places in our range, 3200 square feet or so with 5 acres. We won’t be on the water, (would love to be on a river) as it’s not possible in that price range. That’s ok though, as you can see water from a lot of places and Marty has a place on the lake with a boat.

So, the search with these new parameters is on. Every decision we make now is based on retiring in a couple years. I’m looking at trading in my 3/4-ton pickup for a nice highway cruiser like the Lexus LX700 or the Mercedes GLS 450. It’s hard to pass the deal on the Mercedes as I have the dealer offering me $16,000 off of a $96,000 car. That’s like a 15% discount which is almost unheard of. Then if I want a truck, Chevy will give me zero percent for 60 months on any half ton truck plus $10,000 off. Not sure if I can swing both, but that would be the way to go. I’m working up a budget now.

We’re also cleaning out the house and the garage. This means our closets, basement, and stuff we’ve stored for years. We dumped a bunch of tv subscriptions we didn’t even know we had. We’re upping the contributions to Lori’s retirement fund and fixing up little things around the house. We’d like to put it on the market in the Spring, depending on how the market is. Thankfully our neighborhood has held steady and hasn’t dropped in value. I’d like for things to get better by Spring as then I think we’d walk away with $2 to 3 million or more when we sell. That’d go a long way. Spring will be here before we know it. Time to get busy and stick to our plan. More to come.

Ty’s off to work. We might go to the dump after the gym. Nice and clear up here. Lori’s two little fawns show up daily and she’s feeding them and their moms apples. You’re not supposed to really feed wildlife, but the moms are pretty skinny. The biggest thing is we fill the bird bath daily with water. All the animals love that! Time to get moving, have a great Saturday and God Bless.

Up here, it’s pretty nice. In Chicago, you can’t go outside today. The ACI, or air quality index, is way above hazardous. Yesterday it was off the charts which top out at a rating of 500. 300 is hazardous. Today it’s around 350, so Jagger and the rest of the office are staying home from work. Hopefully it clears up by tomorrow afternoon. I don’t know if they’ll have the World Cup game in New Jersey or not on Sunday as the smoke is supposed to linger on the East Coast through the weekend. Fires in Canada are the cause as Canada doesn’t really manage their forests at all.

Ty’s off today. Yesterday afternoon he drove to Grand Junction for the restaurant to pick up fresh peaches. He brought a box home for us! He works tomorrow. Lori was at the office all day yesterday with a research patient who was having surgery. I picked up five dozen eggs from Kellie, my egg girl, and went to Costco. Today I’m going to work a bit more on my closet.

Looks like we’ll get some rain next week, about time. Still 94 degrees in Denver today meaning high 80’s or 90 up here. Lori woke up at 4:30am with leg cramps and I couldn’t get back to sleep. Not sure if we’re going to the gym or taking a day off.

That’s it, time to get another cup of joe. Wonder how coffee got the nickname of “joe”. Have a great Friday. It’ll be August soon and that means football! God Bless.

Lori works today from around 11am until maybe 3. She has a research patient having surgery today and her nurse is out today. Both her nurse and her PA came back from the conference with a bad cough. Looks like they picked up a cold or something in Hawaii.

We’ll go to the gym early this morning so Lori can get back and get ready to go to work. Hopefully the gym is not too crowded. It’s been busier than usual.

Robi, or should I say Bobby, made the Big Ass Chocolate Chip Cookies from the Yellowstone Cookbook last night. I told her to send me some but I’m not holding my breath. I even sent her my Fed Ex number! We’ll see, she probably ate them all and said she would send me some, but they’d make me fat! I’ll have Lori make some on the weekend.

Pretty clear outside this morning. Ty’s getting ready for work. He goes to L.A. a week from today. Lori’s making Ty’s breakfast to go, which she does every morning, for him to take to work. Not sure who will make him food, do his laundry, clean his room and other stuff when he moves! He’ll need to figure that out pretty quick.

That’s it, time to get moving and head to the gym. Have a great Thursday, God Bless.