My Desultory Blog

Posted By RichC on January 8, 2023

For the past few years, I’ve enjoyed reading the often contrarian thoughts from Forbes contributor, Brett Owens. He writes and contributes investment advice in several publications, newsletters and columns. He co-authored an excellent book too!

2023 Rule #1: Don’t fight the Fed. Print this rule out and tape it next to your computer. Or the backside of your phone. Or whatever device you use to make trades.

As long as the Federal Reserve is tightening, the obvious path for all stock and bond prices is down.

“Don’t Fight the Fed” was chapter four in investing wizard Martin Zweig’s legendary Winning on Wall Street. He devoted 40 thoughtful pages to teaching readers why they should “go with the flow” with respect to the Fed’s trend.

Category: Advice, Books, Financial, Retirement | No Comments »
Tags: advice, brett owens, economy, fed, investing, martin zweig, saving, trading

Posted By RichC on January 7, 2023

The saying that “if something sounds to good to be true, it probably is” came to mind as I re-subscribed to a WSJ.com and Barronsonline.com for a FIVE-year subscription? Part of me wants to believe magazine resellers are legitimately selling the digital versions for less than going directly to Dow Jones, but the other part of me wonders what happens when the subscription expires and the seller is no longer around – see below (I have used Apple and Amazon to subscribe before so who knows)?

I still question the 5-year offer but since I absolutely HATE the way Dow Jones markets their newspaper subscriptions, I’ll give it a go. They use low intro prices and VERY high automatic renewals. The last couple go-arounds I’ve had to claw back my subscription and charges after an automatic renewal … and then having my ID not eligible for special renewal rates until I’ve been unsubscribed for a while is a real pain.

So we’ll give it a go with an expiring virtual credit card number and then try dispute the charge with my credit card company if something doesn’t go as expected or seem quite right (already my call to Dow Jones has me questioning the sale since they do not sell any 5-year subscription plans … no matter the price).

Category: Business, Idioms, Misc, News | No Comments »
Tags: barrons, dow jones, idiom, idioms, newspaper, resellers, subscription, wsj

Posted By RichC on January 6, 2023

It is hard to resist loving gadget gifts and this past year for Christmas I was excited to receive a Wyze Doorbell from Drew (and Katelyn – Thx!) Although the previous year in 2021, I will admit that I was intimidated … and still am … by the fancy double temperature Bluetooth and WiFi Weber cooking probes. Thankfully with Drew’s help last month, I was able to VERY successfully use it to grill our larger and thicker steaks. I’m just hope it wasn’t beginners luck (see Tweet embed at bottom).

Speaking of temperature gadgets … I still use the Father’s Day Ember coffee mug twice a day as it is an expensive but superb way to keep coffee at the right temperature. If there were one fault, it is that the battery used to maintain temperature doesn’t last long enough … and perhaps if I were driving regularly, it is not intended to be a travel mug. I get about an hour after lowering the temperature to 133F degrees.
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Category: Gadget, Personal, Photos, Social Media, Technology | No Comments »
Tags: christmas, coffee, doorbell, embed, ember, grilling, mug, twitter, weber, wyze

Posted By RichC on January 5, 2023

A little bit of recipe reminiscing for Throwback Thursday #TBT this week. Over New Year’s Day, I enjoyed a “Bean Soup” recipe conversation with my daughter Katelyn. We discussed using the ham bone and pieces of ham from our Christmas dinner. I opted for a delicious Ham and Potato soup and froze a couple smaller containers for later. Shockingly even Brenda liked it!

Katelyn commented over Christmas that she would find my mom’s (her Grandma C’s) recipe for the bean soup and sent a flurry of photos with her new Pixel 7 phone, with it’s impressive camera. She also stumbled on a plastic bag of her Great Grandmother Bluhm’s recipes and notes and I enjoyed seeing the “From the Desk of Dick Bluhm” and my grandmother’s handwriting – a disappearing skill and dying art. It was fun to remember them and have fond memories triggered.

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Category: Archive, Food, Friends, Personal, Photos, Recipe, TBT | No Comments »
Tags: bean soup, bluhm, christmas, grandmother, ham and potato, handley, katelyn, momc, new years day, recipes, TBT

Posted By RichC on January 4, 2023

It has been about a month-and-a-half of steady construction on Katelyn and Drew’s #homebuilding project (the hashtag is how I’ve tagged their home construction on MDB).

Since the Oostras were together on January 1st, they enjoyed a drive out to their Whitehouse, Ohio property as a family to check on the progress. It was shocking that there were roofers working on New Year’s Day (see roof in photo). Glad to see there are some go-getters still willing to work (the question is, are they all legal Americans???)

Of course it wasn’t all just about their construction project as they were together for the Oostra family Christmas and the cute “heavy sprinkling” cookie maker was busy baking too (twice this year there have been some “well” decorated cookies!)

Category: Archive, Personal, Photos | No Comments »
Tags: construction, family, homebuilding, new years day, ohio, oostra, roofers, whitehouse

Posted By RichC on January 3, 2023

The Lake Superior State University list of banished words from 2022 for 2023 is out! It has been fun to regularly include their words and a link on MyDesultoryBlog … it has become a January tradition! Check out their full archive by year from when it started in 1976.  

This year, nominations came from most major U.S. cities and many U.S. states, plus Australia, New Zealand, France, Italy, Portugal, England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, the Netherlands, Belgium, the Czech Republic, India, China, Namibia, South Africa, Nigeria, American Samoa, Malaysia, the British Virgin Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, and throughout Canada.

Here are the list of the banished words and terms for 2023 and the reasons for their banishment:

1. GOAT

The acronym for Greatest of All Time gets the goat of petitioners and judges for overuse, misuse, and uselessness. “Applied to everyone and everything from athletes to chicken wings,” an objector declared. “How can anyone or anything be the GOAT, anyway?” Records fall; time continues. Some sprinkle GOAT like table salt on “anyone who’s really good.” Another wordsmith: ironically, “goat” once suggested something unsuccessful; now, GOAT is an indiscriminate flaunt.

2. Inflection point

Mathematical term that entered everyday parlance and lost its original meaning. This year’s version of “pivot,” banished in 2021. “Chronic throat-clearing from historians, journalists, scientists, or politicians. Its ubiquity has driven me to an inflection point of throwing soft objects about whenever I hear it,” a quipster recounted. “Inflection point has reached its saturation point and point of departure,” proclaimed another. “Pretentious way to say turning point.” Overuse and misuse.

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Category: Blogs, Misc, Tidbits | No Comments »
Tags: annual, banished, lssu, words

Posted By RichC on January 2, 2023

This content is restricted.

Category: Memories, Music, Travel, Video | No Comments »
Tags: dan fogelberg, florida, memories, mp3, mp4, music monday, same old lang syne, winter

Posted By RichC on January 1, 2023

I would like to wish everyone visiting MyDesultoryBlog.com a Happy and Healthy New Year … and after seeing this “black ice” social media shared video from last months deadly winter storm … safe traveling in 2023. Whew … very frightening.
 

Category: Holiday, Social Media, Video, Weather | No Comments »
Tags: black ice, crash, driving, mp4, social media, video, weather

Posted By RichC on December 31, 2022

If you were filling your tank, paying to keep the lights on or buying groceries (or shopping for nearly everything) … 2022 has been a struggle. If you were saving for college or retirement, it was also very painful. Will 2023 be a continuation or a painful recession … or is there a chance inflation retreats and the stock market recovers?

With prices rising at the fastest pace in 40 years, the Federal Reserve and other central banks aggressively tightened monetary policy. The result was a painful series of interest-rate hikes that hammered stock valuations and raised fears of recession. That, in turn, fueled a selloff that claimed the technology sector darlings of the past decade as its greatest casualty.

The Dow has fallen less than 9% this year, protected by resilient value stocks in the index. But the S&P 500 has shed nearly 20% and the Nasdaq is down 33%. All three indexes fell into a bear market, although the Dow finished the year in bull territory.

It was the worst year for the stock market since 2008, with volatility to match: The S&P 500 saw 46 daily moves of 2% or more in either direction, the most since the 2008-09 financial crisis.

Full story on Barronsonline

Category: Financial, News | No Comments »
Tags: barrons, economy, inflation, investing, pain, retirement, saving

Posted By RichC on December 30, 2022

Prior to 2022, I managed phone numbers and contacts on my iPhone poorly – perhaps “the wrong way.” Every year I created a new A/SPAM list of callers and emailers and self-managed these lists. Of course this didn’t stop callers or text messages from new unknown phone numbers. So I tried a couple of different blocking apps for the iPhone with questionable results. Eventually I did settle on using Truecaller … BUT it wasn’t and isn’t foolproof … nor did it really do the job all that well … especially when it came to managing all those new and old messages.

This past year I finally discovered a simpler and better way to manage as well as clean my contacts and pile of texts that were unwanted and part of the SPAM test message problem … and you might want to make it part of your 2023 New Year’s resolution? Thankfully it is pretty simple and included in the iPhone’s Message app settings – yet it isn’t often known by Apple iOS users.

1. Go to Settings, then Message, then Unknown and Spam
2. Toggle on “Unknown Senders”
3. In my case, check the Truecaller app (not a necessary app or step)
4. Disable notifications from unknown
5. Go back to Messages app and touch “Filters” (arrow above)
6. To clean up,then  select “Unknown Senders” (Junk, Promo, etc) and touch 3-dot menu/Select Message, then “All” and “Delete”
7. From this point forward, use only view Known Senders and then occasionally toggle to Unknown for for the 2-factor codes, etc AND to clean up your unwanted text messages in bulk

Category: Apple, Cellphone, How-To, Productivity, Tablet, Technology, Tidbits | No Comments »
Tags: imessage, ios, iphone, messaging, tech friday, techfriday, text messages, tidbit, tip