Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Well, despite the whinging tone of the previous post, I’m looking on the sun more and more as an enemy.  Everywhere it goes, it seems, it sucks value out of the stock markets it shines on.  The International Date Line seems like the Maginot Line for financial markets.  I really wonder if it’s (the sun) not a rogue ship from The Day The Earth Stood Still.

The government has been very busy running around with buckets of cash, trying to shore up the system.  And then this slithers in under the radar:

The five-member Financial Accounting Standards Board decided to provide some flexibility in applying “fair value” accounting where there is no market for a security — like the market for banks’ mortgage-backed assets that has been dysfunctional for months.

The board expects the new guidance to take effect Saturday.

“We’re giving people a wider range of options and input to get to fair value,” said FASB spokesman Neal McGarity.

Fair value accounting, also known as “mark-to-market” accounting, requires banks to value their mortgage-related assets at current market prices. Devastated by the write-downs they have taken on mortgage assets since the collapse of the housing market, banks — with the backing of congressional Republicans — have been pushing hard for the Securities and Exchange Commission to suspend the requirement.

So a central technique for resolving the problem is to change the accounting rules so as to obscure further the toxicity of banks’ assets.  Republicans haven’t lost their taste for Enron Kool-Aid.  Is there a pig these guys won’t put lipstick on?

October.  It’s not an illusion, it’s apparently a reality.  For the first time in months, I was tempted to turn on the heat this morning as my commute led me from bed to espresso machine to desk.  I can’t verify that I could see my breath, because I can’t see much of anything at that hour of the morning.  But it was chilly.

As sobering as it is to contemplate October as the harbinger of fall and inevitable winter, it has a double-witching quality for me because it’s also my birthday month.  Triple-witching if you throw in Halloween.  And while this year isn’t one of those milestone birthdays, 59 seems palpably different from 58.  When you’re swirling some distance from the drain, you feel like you could swim to shore whenever you choose.  As you swirl ever closer and faster, the shore becomes more of a concept than a reality and, for a sinner such as me, your thoughts turn more toward what unmentionable future awaits you in the drain trap.  59 just sounds so much more fourth-quarterish than 58, somehow.

Well, there’s your medley of metaphors for tonight.  Those long summer evenings, especially at this latitude, that allow one to procrastinate criminally and still have lots of daylight to salvage at 8 pm are gone.  But there’s Buckeye football to look forward to every weekend, along with the resultant chatter during the week.

And every now and then, a day comes along full of sun and maturity and experience, doing her best to hide the wrinkles of autumn in golden haze and come-hither eyebrow-arch, and if you’ve played your cards right, you can lock arms with her and kick joyously through the leaves, still in shorts and a t-shirt.

I don’t consider myself a “blinking 1200 person“, but sometimes I just get worn out from the frequency that some new technical device finds its way into the house and condescends to, or gibbers at, me through the pages of its always-helpful owner’s manual as I try to discover how to use it.

No, I’m not a complete idiot.  I don’t resort to the manual first.  I resort to the manual after I have tried inserting the batteries in both directions and pressed every button individually and in all the possible combinations (except “reset” if they’ve been kind enough to label it as such).  I realize that some designer spent weeks in focus groups in order to settle on a set of graphic icons to label each button with, and sent the product into production certain that even a chimpanzee would have no doubt about their meanings.  It’s just that a) I usually can’t see them without a magnifying glass in front of my reading glasses, and b) I have no clue what to do with them because each one looks like an ecstatic amoeba doing different things with a c*alis erection, a sort of one-celled onanistic Tantra.

So, I shamefacedly open the manual, knowing that it was never intended by its authors to be read by the gadget’s users - it contains as little information as possible, perhaps to give nothing easy away to product liability attorneys.  The space on each page that could have been used to provide steady, soothing guidance (necessary because anyone who’s gotten so far as to open the manual is consumed in cardiac-endangering rage) is instead dedicated to repeating a useless English phrase in every language in this rainbow world of ours.  A 50-page manual of this ilk might be able to convey 10 simple steps, but by the time you ferret out the next English instruction, you’ve forgotten the last one.

To add to the fun, I’ve usually decided to learn to use said device about 10 minutes before I need to head out the door for some activity to which it is absolutely essential.

With that prologue in mind, consider my dilemma regarding a Garmin GPS training device that my mom gave me for Christmas.  I just never got around to taking it out of the box.  I guess I was subliminally avoiding making the effort to learn to use it.  She would call and ask how I liked it sometimes, and I’d say something evasive, and I’m sure she thought she’d screwed up and gotten the wrong thing.  I’d be out kayaking sometimes, however, and someone with me would pull out his GPS and talk about our route and how far we’d gone, and I’d think how cool it would be if I had mine along.  If I wasn’t too lazy and stupid to use it.

Finally last weekend I got sick of kicking the box while walking through my office, and I took it out and set about making it work.  Once I thought I had it, I set out on a bike ride down the Burke Gilman Trail to test it out.  As I rode along, I was equal parts excited to see the result when I got back, and sort of paranoid about being watched and how poorly someone would regard my average speed.  Provided it was even working.

When I got back, I uploaded the trip, and was fascinated with the data it provided.  Here’s what it looked like .  Click on the “larger map” or “Google Earth” link to see more detail.  One flaw - it seems to think that I decided early in the return trip to simply levitate and fly home a la crow.  I think there are parts of the trail that are obscured from the satellites, and the device presumes that you’d proceed as quickly as you could rather than meandering.

High winds on Saturday got some blowdown going on here in the Puget Sound region, and made the trail a little more interesting.

I can’t wait to take this thing out on my kayak.  But, before I do, I think I should learn to use the VHF radio I bought at REI a couple weeks ago, so I can hear the voices of the container-ship crew that runs me over on Puget Sound.

Are in the bag:

The fear is that some dyslexic drum major will try to dot the “m”.  “M” should never appear in an OSUMB formation in the first place!

So, despite the economic gyrations of last week, I got out on an amiable kayak trip Saturday on Hood Canal, a ferry-ride west of Seattle. We’d been promised a weekend of Indigenous-People-Weather, and Manitou or whomever delivered nicely. I arose at an uncharacteristic hour for a Saturday (6:30) in order to secure my gear and boat to the car and drive to the Seattle-Bainbridge Island Ferry (click any photo to enlarge):

I hooked up with a group called the South Sound Kayakers. They tend to organize trips in areas south and west of where I usually paddle, and it helps me extend my range and paddle in new venues. Hood Canal, west of Seattle, separates the Kitsap Peninsula from the Olympic Peninsula. It is home to the Bangor submarine base (if you’ve seen Gene Hackman taking command of his submarine Alabama in a downpour in Crimson Tide, you’ve been there in spirit.

A little bit north of our launch point, there’s a sand spit where someone - sea sprites, witches, local devil-worshiping Democrats - maintains a driftwood evocation of a sea monster.

Now & then I paddle with people who have gone to the effort of building their kayaks from either a kit or a set of plans, and have been rewarded with a sweet-looking wooden boat. This boat, a Redfish kit, stood out from several others I’ve seen lately.

Wooden kayaks garner an inordinate amount of attention from both kayakers and landlubbers. A guy I paddled with a couple of weeks ago, who’s built a boat from the Pygmy company, observed that “if I were all about hooking up with middle-aged men, I’d have it made.”

It’s tempting to engage in a boat-building project, but I think my spare time is better-spent in getting the fuck out on the water with the boat I have.

It was a wonderful weekend. You never know around here when winter will arrive, so I’ll cleave to it while I can. More pictures from this Hood Canal trip here.

The former Washington Mutual Building, photographed from the Bainbridge ferry, Seattle, WA, 9/27/2008

Well, I really can’t let a historic week like this go by without posting.

I’m a child of children of the Depression, and I’ve always adhered to the ethos of conservative conduct in my financial affairs that my dad and grandparents ingrained into me, even if my politics became more progressive as I swung further from their genetic orbit.  I’m lucky, of course, to have been their child, raised in a cocoon of relative comfort.  But that comfort was the result of careful spending and investing, blue-collar midwestern people who distrusted fads and stuck to their fucking knitting, even if that meant that I drove a 60 Chevy station wagon on my 65 - 67 high school dates, and I didn’t hit a golf ball until I was well over 30.

I’ve cleaved to their cautious approach, even when, through the 80’s and 90’s, a smarter person would have bought as much Seattle real estate as the (now evidently stupid) banks would have allowed.

So, I arrive at this pivotal moment in our civic life sort of conflicted.  The prudent child-of-children-of-the-Depression is totally disgusted at the calamitous result of the profligacy of the Wall Street money-jocks, aided and abetted as they have been by the Reagan-induced paucity of regulatory oversight.  I really buy into the whole revenge thing that the populist rhetoric is espousing.

And then, there’s the retirement investor side of me, worrying about my portfolio.  I’m sure I have a lot of company here.  Our guts are telling us to scream, “let the fuckers stew in their own foul juices!”, while we realize that our own nest eggs are redolent with those same juices.

I’m not so worried about the part of my paltry portfolio that’s managed by Warren Buffett.  It may rise and decline with the market, but it’s invested in diverse and proven businesses.  It’s kind of cool to see my stock price jump every time he’s quoted in the Wall Street Journal.  This quote from last week epitomizes why I cling to my BRK investment even in the face of Warren’s imminent demise.  Berkshire has been sitting on an inordinate amount of cash for several years, with Warren being frustrated that prices were too high for him to make many major acquisitions.  Then, these Wall Street firms feeling the Arctic breeze on their naked asses started calling him:

Mr. Buffett received a call at 4:30 p.m. that Saturday from a private investment firm trying to assemble a group to buy the embattled financial giant. “I’m calling about Bear Stearns,’” the private investor began, according to Mr. Buffett. “Should I go on?’”

Mr. Buffett recalls thinking: “It’s like a woman taking off half her clothes and asking, ‘Should I continue?’ Even if you’re a 90-year-old eunuch, you let ‘em finish.” Mr. Buffett says he passed on the proposed deal. Bear Stearns was bought by J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. the following day.

So now he’s made a couple of adroit investments in Constellation (an energy company that was teetering) and Goldman Sachs.  Presumably, he got the full frontal, but we’ll have to wait for his next quarterly SEC filing to know for sure.  Even in today’s bloodbath, BRKA only got a scratch.  While that’s not guaranteed to continue if things continue to deteriorate, I’m in for the long term.

So I’m torn between emotion and pragmatism regarding this taxpayer bailout.  I don’t want to take it in the shorts as a taxpayer while Wall Street geniuses skate on their golden parachutes, and I don’t want to take it in the shorts as an investor while the Wall Street geniuses still skate on their golden parachutes.

I’m glad I can still earn a living by working and can take a (not-as-much-as-previously) long-term view, but I still cleave to my 1983-vintage feeling that “the “Reagan Revolution” was built by invading all of society’s safety margins.”  Environmental, financial, social.  Line ‘em up and mug-shot ‘em: Social Security, mentally-ill homeless people, savings & loans, a coordinated energy policy, the coddling of a DOA auto industry that should have been left to die, Lehmann-style, in the mid-80s.

Who knows what happens tomorrow.  I’ll still get up and do work for clients that seem to be able to pay me, I’ll still watch in gob-smacked horror at the stock market, wondering if it’s a once-in-a-lifetime buying opportunity, or a ruinous armageddon.

The good thing is, I’ll probably still get up tomorrow.

So, my mom had a birthday last weekend, another one of those that can only be expressed in logarithmic notation, but I’m delighted to have her every day, let alone every year.

And she’s squeezing everything she can out of these years of sentience and energy.  She plays bridge at least 2 times a week (and wins with a suspicious frequency), participates in a book group at her community library, attends plays, operas and zoo concerts.

But when I saw this bumper sticker:

I knew she was underachieving.  Mom, you need to go downtown and get kicked out of one or more bars if you want me to still respect you.   I know you’re up to it.

Perspective! (Click to enlarge):

I’m attending a sea kayaking “symposium” in Port Townsend, west of Seattle on the Olympic Peninsula. “Symposium” seems a little over the top, but it’s a fairly large event, with classes on & off the water, and, of course, lots of gear vendors hoping to snag some of our dollars.   (Click photos to enlarge)

I took a short class on advanced paddle strokes yesterday and actually learned a few techniques I hadn’t known about before.  During the class, one of the women capsized and was rescued by our instructor.  He was something of a hunk, and I couldn’t shake the suspicion that she did it on purpose.

These “Jesus boats” are gaining in popularity, though I can’t imagine spending more than half an hour on one.  They’re basically a surfboard:

I paddled out into the Strait (of Juan de Fuca) to get a larger view of the coast and to look over this lighthouse.  It had been drizzling for a lot of the day, and I was surprised, as I turned the corner, to actually see some sun.

OK, I’m headed out to the water again.

Harvest moon, taken last weekend on a neighborhood stroll.