Category Archives: stock market

Bible study, family, Genealogy, letters, stock market

Summer Schedule, New Project

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The typing is tedious, especially reading 83-year-old pencil scratching…

It’s hot out. Not as hot here at the north end of the southern states as it is in the Northeast, but our heat is definitely up. But of course, that’s to be expected for late June, almost July.

So I’ve changed my schedule. After rising, weighing, and checking my blood sugar, instead of going down to The Dungeon to begin various projects or work on my books, I go out and walk in the cool of the morning. I walked Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday this week, going 1.07, 1.28, 1.37 miles respectively. Thursday and Friday were slightly longer distances. And, as evidence of my healing from the many maladies of the last sixteen months, I’ve been able to walk without taking a walking stick to serve as a cane.

…but I’ll get through it, one letter a day for now….

Now, I wasn’t regularly walking before Monday. My excuse? First, the rain. Then the heat. Then tiredness. By the time I come upstairs from The Dungeon and eat breakfast, it’s already a little too hot to walk comfortably. Then evening, when you can walk in the twilight shadows, I’m either busy with TV watching or just too tired after the labors of the day. In fact, it had been well over a week, maybe closer to two, since I’d walked for exercise.

I made the decision last Saturday that I would shift to a summer work schedule on Monday, and so far, I’ve been faithful to it. My target is to be out the front door by 6:00 A.M. The first three days I was right on the money. That’s a little earlier than my normal rising time, so a longer midday nap time is part of the new schedule.

…but I have to admit I’m glad it’s not a bigger bin.

I see very little activity at that hour. A car or two with people heading to work. One time a jogger. One time a neighbor on his front deck drinking coffee and reading something. I’m back home in around 30 minutes. At that point I head to The Dungeon for my normal routine: devotional reading, prayer, check e-mail and Facebook and book sales (actually non-sales. Then, rather than editing, I do my two special projects.

One of those is digitizing my father-in-law’s letters, limiting myself to one a day, either scanning or transcribing as the case may be. At one letter a day, that project will take a couple of years. The other special project is cleaning up old scan files. All the genealogy research papers and letters I scanned had been saved to a proper filing system still resided on my computer and cloud drive as scan files. Perhaps them being in two (really three) places doesn’t hurt anything, but it’s not “clean”. So I’m going through those scan files, verifying that I saved them to the right folder and gave them the right name, then deleting them from the scan folder.

My goal is to clear away 50 scan files a day, six days a week, so 300 a week. I started with 3400 scan files to deal with. As of Thursday morning, I have 1,700 left. Thus, I have around six weeks more on this project. I’ll check back in with you around the end of July or sometime in August to give a report on this as to how the project is going.

After that, I do my morning stock work, eat breakfast, and maybe work outside awhile in the blackberry patch. I come back inside and go to The Dungeon to cool down and do a little editing.  Midday is still reading in the sunroom, though that is now getting so hot I’ll need to move outside to a shaded area on our woodlot.

So what’s the new project, and how am I going to fit it in a busy schedule? Well, the new project is transcribing the wartime correspondence of my father-in-law, Wayne Cheney. These have been sitting in a plastic bin in our house for close to 30 years, waiting on someone to get them out and read them, do something with them. I decided that time had come, and that these letters from 1942-1945 were of greater importance than the newer letters I had been digitizing. Thus, I have suspended working on the newer letters in favor or the older ones.

I’ll work on them at the rate of one letter a day until I finish the scanned files project, then will accelerate the letters until I finish. I have no idea how many of these letters there are. Having now put together four letter collections, I have a system established and have learned to do this fairly efficiently. But I really have no idea how long this will take me because I don’t know the letter count. By the beginning of August, I hope to have 50 or so letters transcribed.  At that point maybe I’ll count the rest and figure how long the whole project will take me, and make a report.

Sounds like I’ll be busy a while. Busy is good: stimulating to the brain and enforcing discipline. Hopefully, while letter transcribing is going on, I’ll be able to finish the old family photos project and get my next Bible study edited and published.

Stay tuned….

miscellaneous, stock market

Friday—A Non-Post

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Oh my, it’s Friday and I haven’t posted yet. I started the day a little early, got involved in my special projects, including a couple of stock trades, and forgot to post. I had nothing planned, and consequently didn’t get one written.

I had a good day, getting much done. I have two letters ready to go to the P.O., and one long one sent by e-mail. Now waiting for a pie (of the frozen variety) to come out of the oven.

So, I’ll try to have something more meaningful to say on Monday.

family, Genealogy, stock market

Two Great Days

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I write this Thursday evening. It will be sort of a journal entry of the good things that happened the last two days. Having completed a writing project last week, I decided to take a week off from writing tasks. How to fill the time?

My work area in The Dungeon is still a mess. I have to make a concentrated effort at clean-up.

Wednesday morning I awoke feeling pretty good. After Bible reading and prayer in The Dungeon, I gave brief attention to one notebook of letters my late father-in-law left to us at his death. I’m very slowly, limiting myself to one letter a day so that the project doesn’t overwhelm me, converting the letters to digital files, either scanning or transcribing as needed. I started out working on my one letter for the day and dispatched that task quickly.

I then took time to finish my checkbook register, which I now keep as a spreadsheet due to my diminished handwriting after my last stroke. I didn’t quite finish that task, but I got it to the point that I should be able to finish it in about 30 minutes of budgeting. I had sort of planned to do that today, but decided to put it off till tomorrow.

At that point, I decided to get back into stock & options trading. I haven’t done this since my first seizure in December and thus haven’t earned any money—except for dividends on a few positions and interest. As it happened, I didn’t have too many positions when the seizure happened. Thus I didn’t participate very much in the market turmoil that has marked 2025 thus far. But Wednesday morning I put on a one day trade, and it closed at full profit. Made $102. Today I did the same thing, and made another $92. I’ll put that money aside for vacation. Hopefully today I’ll be able to make a similar low-risk trade and make it a trifecta.

That brought me to 9 a.m. and breakfast. Wednesday is our normal trash day, but on a holiday week it is usually delayed a day. But the City had nothing about the delay, nor did the trash company. Being unsure, I got the trash out right after breakfast.

Then it was back to The Dungeon, with 1 1/2 hours to kill until a writing networking time via Zoom. I decided to work on some e-file maintenance. I have over 2,900 files I’ve scanned and saved to a proper filing system, but never checked the scans to make sure they saved properly and then deleted the scan file. So I went back to doing that (I’d done a little the last couple of weeks). In that time, I was able to check around 75 files. Maybe two I couldn’t find in the place I expected to find them, so I saved or re-saved them, taking time to do a better job of choosing the right folder and a good file name. This is not high priority work—just something useful to do in odd minutes between things. But it felt good.

Then came the Zoom meeting, a time of on-line networking with other struggling writers. About 45 were on the Zoom meeting. We were divided into break-out rooms for 15 minutes, then shuffled into other break-out rooms. With some general discussion time, this fill 90 minutes of the planned two hours. At that point I dropped out. I came to realize that this kind of networking probably wasn’t the best use of my time. I’ll likely skip the next one.

Next came lunch and my reading time in the sunroom. I read a few pages in a magazine I’m trying to get through and get rid of, then almost my daily quota in an interesting literature book. I usually struggle to get all my reading done, but was able to come close in this session, though I still needed to carve out some time.

After that, since the ground was soaked from five straight days of rain, outdoor work would have been difficult so it was back to The Dungeon, monitor my stock trade, and on to the next task. I decided to do some genealogy research, spurred on to this from having dealt with some scanned genealogy files that morning. I decided to concentrate on my step-grandfather, find out little more about his first wife and his descendants with her.

Without boring you with the details, I found out a whole bunch, expanding a start to the research I had done the previous July. I created a file or two, corrected a couple of mistakes in on-line genealogy sites, and filled in a bunch of gaps. I worked on this the rest of the day, taking time off only to eat supper and watch some of the Titanic Sub documentary on the Discovery Channel.

I went to bed about 11, but my mind was so full of the productive day’s activities I knew I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep. But surprisingly, I think I did after wrestling my mind to quit dwelling on the good day just finished. Alas, a small disturbance later and I was wide awake. I got up at ten minutes after midnight and read. I completed the few pages left in the daily quota of the literature book and read in a missions book that I’m trying to get through simultaneously with the literature book. That was good.

You might ask, “How was it good to lose sleep?” Not to lose sleep, but to get my reading in. Instead of going back to bed, which would just wake me up, I turned the light out and leaned back the recliner. I must have fallen asleep right away, for the next thing I knew it was three hours later. The time I went back to bed and slept another three hours.

That brought me to Thursday morning, to the same routines tackled and finished. Except, instead of organizing files, I completed my research on my step-grandfather and his first wife and did most of the work of properly documenting that research. When I say “finished,” that’s a relative term. Genealogy research into anyone is never complete. You just come to stopping points and take breaks, waiting for that time to pick up that strain of research again.

Oh, and perhaps the best part of these two good days: I identified a grandson of my step grandfather, reached out to him on social media, and he responded. He and I are step-first cousins. We had a nice exchange of messages. Connecting with a newly found family member is always good.

What does Friday hold? Probably decumulation tasks, and getting closer to going through photos from one of our four main family lines.

Decumulation, Genealogy, stock market, Writing

The Word Is “Decumulation”

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Pulling writing papers out of the milk crate. I hope to be able to get rid of the crate.

This week I’ve back in the saddle, working in The Dungeon every day. Except this week I decided to do something different. I have only one chapter left to write in the Bible study I’m writing. And that’s the last of eight volumes in the Bible study series, only one volume of which I’ve so far published. I figure four more days of writing on this project.

But that is laid aside now, along with my normal stock trading activities, in favor or decumulation work. Yes, I finally figured out that’s the correct word to use for the process of getting rid of stuff. I’ve been using the word “dis-accumulation,” and all my spellcheckers have balked at its use. I don’t remember where I found the right word, but I was glad to do so.

I sold this box of books within a day of listing it. I wish all my books would sell that quickly.

We need to get out of our big house, into something smaller, hopefully closer to one of our kids. But that requires a lot of decumulation. We’ve been working on that, but perhaps somewhat half-heartedly. For the last six or so years we’ve been saying we’ll decumulate so that we can move in two years. But that two years keeps slipping.

Well, after being gone to Massachusetts last week to visit our son and his husband, I decided to make a more serious effort at decumulation. Saturday, I got another 35 books listed for sale on Facebook Marketplace. Twenty of those were in two boxes of 10 each for one price. I sold those this week, though haven’t yet got them in the customer’s hands.

A pile of papers here, a pile there. I’ll slowly whittle them down over the next few weeks.

Monday, I decided to tackle the many papers in the house. I’ve done much of this over the last few years. These papers fall in three categories: stock trading, genealogy, and writing. I’ve already discarded most of my stock trading learning courses. I scanned and digitized a lot of genealogy papers, but was holding back a few key 3-ring binders. Well, beginning on Monday I started scanning, digitizing, and discarding those papers. I figure I’m averaging close to 200 sheets of paper a day. I’m down now to about four notebooks, which I think I’ll get through two by Saturday, and the other wo next week.

Tuesday evening, I pulled from my closet the milk crate I’ve used to storing drafts of most of my early writings. This saving of drafts/edits/research papers is what an experienced writer suggested in a conference I attended many years ago. He’s a successful novelist—no telling how many boxes of papers he has in his basement. He might not be thinking about downsizing. Or if he does, he’s famous enough to donate his writing papers to his alma mater and they’d be happy to receive them. I don’t have that status.

So all his week, I’ve gone down to The Dungeon, and spent time at my scanner. Scan something. Got back to my computer, pull up the scanned file, and save it to an organized place on my computer. With my genealogy papers, I had to first create some folders and move old scans from temporary places to the new place. But that didn’t slow me down much.

I take a break at noon to do some reading and have kept evenings clear. I feel good about what I’ve done so far. Perhaps in a week I’ll be able to report significant progress at decumulation.

rant, stock market

Tired of E-mails From Financial Gurus

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Dateline 19 Dec 2024. I’m writing this early and scheduling it to post on a day when I won’t be available for posting.

Every now and then we have subscribed to a stock trading service, trying to improve our financial management and our financial outlook for our retirement years. Rarely have these services done anything valuable for us. Most of the time we’ve broken even or done a little better than the cost of the service.

It used to be that people would contact us and offer stock trading tips for $4995 per year, or just $5995 lifetime. Slowly, those numbers came down to $1995 and $2995. Eventually, we started getting pitched newsletters for a few hundred per year. The last time I checked, most of the newsletters were down to $49.99 per year, almost cheap enough to take a risk.

These offers come via e-mails. No doubt the stock trading services we once were with sold out email address to other services, who sold to others. These guys are great at collecting e-mails, but do they really know any more than I do about stock trading?

How many of these gurus are out there. I just went through my email trash folder, and these are the “services” I found in it , all from e-mails deleted from Dec 1 to Dec 19.

  • Prime Trading Alert
  • Long Live American
  • Market Commandos
  • Market Trend Alert
  • Proud for Profits
  • Wave Traders
  • Global Income Experts
  • Peak Hours News
  • Bald Eagle Traders
  • Safe Investing Daily
  • Daily Gold Index
  • Capitalists Today
  • Profit Tools Journal
  • Strategic Finance Hints
  • Market Guru Digest
  • Groovy Trades
  • Easy Budget Goal
  • Fresh Market Data

C’mon, people. There really can’t be that many experts in stock trading. They may be experts in newsletter writing, but they make money off those newsletters and the occasional sucker who buy in for $2995 lifetime.

I unsubscribe to all of these, and they all disappear. But new ones are always there to take their place. The cheapness of transmitting e-mails makes it easy for them to do. The fact that I never asked them to send me an e-mail seems of no importance to them.

End rant.

Bible study, letters, reading, stock market, Writing

On Again, Off Again Journal

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For several years I’ve been keeping a journal. I’m not very regular with it. My typical time to write is in the evenings, after everything else is done and we are watching TV.

  • Up at 5:50 a.m. Weight 202.0; blood sugar 117.
  • Walked 2 miles, my fourth straight day to walk that distance, and my tenth day of morning walking in an effort to improve strength and stamina ahead of my surgery.
  • To The Dungeon, without coffee. Devotional reading (currently in a book on prayer) and prayer.
  • Begin work on the Bible study I’m writing. My goal was to write one section, about 600 words. I was able to do that. Had time left, so began work on the next section. It was a good time of writing.
  • No book sales when I checked early.
  • Reviewed the stock market and made one trade.
  • Upstairs for breakfast of sausage-onions-peppers-eggs-cheese on pita bread, then outside to do some light yardwork.
  • Checked on two home improvement items. Our propane company did change out the hardware on the propane takes as I asked. Someone called me about it a couple of weeks ago but the reception was so bad that I couldn’t understand him. And, I called the plumbing supply store about the replacement toilet seats I wanted to buy. They had never called me. I learned they couldn’t find one of the right size, material, and color that I need. So I researched and found one on Amazon and ordered it. Let’s hope the color matches.
  • Worked on scanning documents to save electronically and then discard the papers. I got rid of three stray genealogy papers and a number of writing site papers. I only need two more days at that pace to get rid of one more notebook.
  • Read in the sunroom. Cloud cover made it easy to do today. May have napped a little out there.
  • Lunch of leftover pizza, crackers, and blackberries.
  • Made a blackberry cobbler to give away.
  • Back to The Dungeon for a few more computer tasks, including managing correspondence.
  • Looked through some books to choose a couple to take to the hospital with me.
  • Rested upstairs in my reading/TV watching chair. Worked on crossword puzzles but fell asleep.
  • Read three letters in the Carlyle Letters Online.
  • Had supper of leftover taco salad, still quite good on the fourth day. Dessert for me was, you guessed it, blackberries with a little sugar sprinkled on them.
  • Wrote a letter to my second grandson, which I’ll mail tomorrow.
  • Remembered I needed to write a blog post for tomorrow, and so started writing this.

Well, that seems to describe a full day. Maybe I’ll actually find time to write this in my journal.

miscellaneous, stock market, Writing

A View Looking South

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[Dateline 31 May 2023, for posting 9June 2023]

From my reading chair in the sunroom, looking south. It’s hard to tell, but I recently spent a couple of hours cleaning the window fan from years of dirt. Gotta be healthier.

Summer is here—maybe not by definition, but by the reality of temperatures. When I finish my morning work in The Dungeon (writing, stock trading), I go to the sunroom with either coffee or water, and read for an hour.

The sunroom is not air conditioned, and it gets hot in the summer. A time will come, in July and August, that it will be over 90 degrees by noon and more or less unusable. Right now, however, it’s around 80 degrees at that time. Each year I make an adjustment at this time. I swivel my reading chair around to face south, put a fan in the window just a few feet away, and make do with the air flow making the room fairly comfortable.

I made that change yesterday. I would have done it a little earlier, but the fan desperately needed cleaning. That took a long time, as I had to removed the grill (which turned out to be a pain) but couldn’t fully remove it due to some clips on one end. Thus, I had to reach my hand in between the spread grills and clean it as best I could. I finished that on Monday, and used the fan for the first time this season on Tuesday.

Now, when I sit there, I’m looking out the south windows a couple of feet away, rather than the north windows on the other side of the room. What do I see? Well, the chair is low enough, and the window ledge high enough, that for most of the view, all I can see is trees. Oak trees. Most of them with 12-inch or larger diameter trunks. They are dense. The canopy is fairly solid and very little sunlight penetrates it—that’s even after thinning the trees to make our woodlot somewhat park-like. If I raise up a little, I see more of the trees and trunks. The ground is lower, and falling away.

Except for off to the right. There the ground slopes up steeply. I can see the tree line at the edge of the woods, the grassy area between the trees and the street, and the asphalt strip of the street. The grassy area isn’t solid. It is punctuated by blackberry bushes that I’ve allowed to spring up. I can even see a small pile of cuttings from this morning’s yardwork, which I plan to move to a compost pile tomorrow.

Further away, across the street, I can see the woods across the street. A hundred and fifty feet into that lot is the fort I build with my grandsons, but it’s too far back in the dense foliage and I can’t see it from the sunroom. I know it’s there, but I can’t see it.

This new view means that I can no longer see the birdfeeder on the deck; it’s now behind me. However, today I noticed that I can see the birdfeeders reflected in the south windows. It takes concentration to look at the glass and see the small reflection instead of looking straight at the south woods. I was able to see birds come and go, but the reflection wasn’t clear enough to know what type of birds they were.

I have about a month more to enjoy the south view if temperatures are normal. It might even be a little longer than that, if I change my schedule and read in the sunroom before the heat of the day warms it beyond the edges of enjoyment level. Or there will be the occasional rain day, when I can use the room all day.

So what point am I trying to make? To change your schedule according to the needs of the moment? To enjoy whichever view life gives you? To observe the panorama of views that life gives you? I suppose all of the above.

Now in my fifth year of retirement, I’ve come to enjoy my noon reading time. I’m usually up at around 6:30 a.m. and in The Dungeon working by 7:00. With only a short break for breakfast, that’s close to five hours of writing or whatever work I have to do. Reading makes a nice break. The sunroom is nice venue. I have enough books in this house to find interesting reading material for the next 50 years—no exaggeration.

So I keep busy in the sunroom. At times I even look out at the windows and simply enjoy the view.

 

Bible study, reading, stock market

Working Hard

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It’s 6:26 a.m. on my blog posting day. I normally try to have this written long before this on the day before, but circumstances worked against my getting that done.

The circumstances are, we are in West Texas again, the third of four trips here this year. The first was to babysit the grandkids while our daughter and son-in-law were on a mission trip to Thailand. The second trip and this one are to help out as they begin transitioning to a new location, south of Houston. Richard is down there two weeks and back here two. While he’s gone, we’ll come here to help out.

Yesterday I got the three older grandkids working on pre-move projects. They couldn’t get on screens until they had achieved a certain degree of completeness. They did it without complaining. In the evening, I worked on Bible quizzing with the two middle ones, as they will have a competition in June.

During the day, I have so far been working on yardwork tasks. Yesterday I completed the main task I had, though in reality there is much more to do. I’m going to take today off from outdoor stuff, I think, as I was quite worn out yesterday. I also slightly injured my chest swinging an ax to cut out some old, dead roots from a long-gone hedge. But that’s done, the debris discarded, and I need a day for the old bones—or perhaps it was muscles, ligaments, or tendons—to heal.

We’ve eaten leftovers so far. Today I’ll have to cook something. I can’t say I’m looking forward to that.

I’ve had plenty of indoor time to work on my other “jobs”. Over two days I added over 3,300 words to A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 7. I’m down to only one chapter left now, most likely three days of writing. Then I’ll have the Introduction to do and, of course, editing to turn it from a first draft to a publishable book. On to the little bit of work left to Part 5 of AWTHW, which I hope to finish in May. I’ve had time the last two days to do my stock trading. Fortunately, the type of trading I’m doing right now doesn’t take a lot of time. It’s relatively low risk, yet I’m ahead of the market for the year. That’s nice to see for a change.

I’ve been able to get a little reading in, but not a lot. It’s been good reading, however. To be a good example to the grandkids, I’m reading in a print book when they are around rather then one of three books I have going on my phone.

So, it’s been a good trip. Still more than a week to go before we head home. Lots of work to do. Today I’ll have to take a little time to work on The Key To Time Travel, as the cover designer has reached the point where she needs book dimensions and back cover copy. Since she’s there, it’s time for me to get a few last-minute edits done. I should have that published in May.

Christianity, Engineering, stock market, Writing

Thoughts on Occupations and Leisure

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In my last post, I made some comments on C.S. Lewis’s essay “Christianity and Culture”. I decided to re-read it, finishing it on Saturday. I’m now in the process of reading the train of criticism it provoked and Lewis’s response to the criticism. Last night I went looking for the criticism, and found it on-line. Alas, it was all behind a paywall. In the next few days I may spend a little more time to see if it exists somewhere else on the internet that doesn’t require a financial outlay.

But Lewis got me to thinking, and I journaled about it Saturday night and may journal about it again. Lewis wondered, several years after his conversion, if the cultured, educated life he was living and earning his living from was compatible with Christianity. He said that he had come to the conclusion that the end/goal of the Christian’s life must be to glorify God and see His kingdom increased. Did the cultured life, a.ka. the literary life wherein literature is pursued as an end in itself, contribute to these two aims of the Christian life?

Lewis concluded the cultured life was not incompatible with Christianity. To do so he searched the scriptures, the early Christian writers, and many later Christian writers from Catholic and Protestant sources.

All of which led me to wonder whether my vocation and leisure was compatible with the aims of Christianity. Of course, I left my vocation behind for retirement. For 44 years I spent my time engineering public infrastructure and private developments. I did this in five states and three countries. I earned a good living at it. I think I helped the world, and in some cases changed the world, by practicing that profession. While doing so, I believe I did it as a faithful and devout Christian. When asked to pay a bribe while in Saudi Arabia—a request made by a fellow American expat—I refused. When some Bible extract booklets were shipped to be by mistake, I distributed them in-country, including to a Lebanese Muslim expat.

I could go on blowing my own horn, but that’s not a good thing to do. I only do so to show why I come to the conclusion that the decades I spent in my chosen profession were compatible with Christian discipleship, a conclusion arrived at with considerably less searching than Lewis did.

What about now? I actually have two new professions. One, of course, is writing. My books and stories are a mix of overtly Christian and secular underpinned by a Christian worldview. I don’t have a lot of sales and no notoriety, but it’s difficult to see how that would be incompatible with Christian discipleship.

My other “occupation” in “retirement” is stock trading, or securities trading as defined by the IRS: buying and selling stocks and options for the ake of generating income and building wealth. On the surface that looks a little more iffy. Again, taking a somewhat superficial look at it, securities trading is not inherently evil. It could be looked at the same as buying and selling paintings, or buying and selling baseball cards, hoping to have a gain. With securities, it’s all done in an account, you don’t have an inventory of goods to deal with.

It would seem to be acceptable so long as you do it right. No insider trading (as if I had access to such). No risky speculation. Tithe the gain and give offerings on top of that. Pay taxes on the gain according to the law. It would seem to me that with those stipulations this second retirement vocation is not incompatible to Christian discipleship.

One other thing to consider is if following these retirement occupations is causing me to shirk other responsibilities. My answer to that is no. As I look at the things I do around the house, in the family, in church and community, I think I’m doing okay with what I do.

This little bit of thought has taxed my brain. I’ve given all this a cursory, perhaps shallow, analysis and concluded I’m not wrong in my retirement pursuits. I hope I’m right.

miscellaneous, self-publishing, stock market, Writing

What to Write on a Rainy Monday?

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Actually, I wrote that title while it was raining. Right now the sun is shining. No, wait, it’s behind a cloud again. The rain stopped close to an hour ago. The forecast is for more rain during the day, but right now the radar doesn’t show anything close.  I’m not sure what to expect.

The forecast for this blog post is also a little uncertain. I still have those three short books to review, but don’t feel like doing any of them today. I have a few book sales I could report on, but nothing earth-shattering, so I’ll pass on that. Stock trading is going ok. We aren’t killing it, but nothing really to report. Engineering has totally disappeared, as CEI no longer calls on me for anything. I guess that’s not bad, as I don’t miss it. The two years of hourly work was a good transition into retirement, but is now over.

Health is okay, maybe even good. Can’t seem to lose any weight but am not gaining any. My heart seems strong, my blood sugar is under control, I had covid19 and I have also been vaccinated for it, so I don’t fear going around without a mask. I still wear it in situations where it is posted that masks are required or requested. I may wear it a few other times as well. It was hard for me to get in the habit of mask wearing and it will be hard (maybe not as hard) to get out of the habit.

Work on the church anniversary book has slowed, but as soon as I finish this post, and maybe reach a new threshold in the book. I think I’m still on target to finish it around the end of June. I’m reading for research in the next Documenting America volume. Otherwise, I don’t have any other writing in my head that is just demanding that I get the words on paper or pixels.

So, this is a good time to work on this website. Not on the layout or the bells and whistles of a WordPress site, but the content. A writer friend recently looked at my site and suggest some improvements. Or, rather, just said it needed improvement. Then, today, a writing blog that I read had a post about improving your website. I’m always hesitant to do any changes to the website content for fear of screwing something up.

I’ve known for some time that I have things to do with this. Maybe this is the time to knuckle down and do them, while other tasks are not urgent. It’s been suggested that I move my bio from the landing page to a separate tab and have different content on the landing page, perhaps news about my books, or links to them. I’ll have to think about that.

One other thing I really should do this week is some Kindle Direct Publishing work on my book series, to turn them into true series, properly linked on KDP. I’ve been told that easy. I don’t think I’ll work on that today, but perhaps over the next couple of days I’ll look into that.

I believe the next three days will be a mix of the anniversary book and the website.  After that, who knows? Just as the sun-clouds situation here today (cloudy right now but no rain) has been uncertain and changeable minute by minute, so my writing plans are.