Extras

 My wife and I recently had a semi-custom home built. After thirty days in residence, I thought it would be good to recap what additional items we love, vs those that we don't.

1. The house, as designed, came with only a walk-in shower in the master bath, so we added a soaking tub to the plans. Absolute necessity. Nice deep tub to wallow in at the end of a hard day. The walk-in shower works super well in the mornings, and is easy to clean, too.

2. Heated floor in the master bath. Love it!

3. Fan timers in the bathrooms. Love them. Just should have added one more for the walk-in shower fan, as well.

4. USB ports in a number of the wall outlets. Brilliant idea! Never have to hunt for a charger, and the 110v outlets are always available.

5. A large "coffee bar" with a sink. Very handy. I can do everything I need to make coffee without dripping old coffee across the floor to the trash, or having to carry the water reservoir over to the main kitchen sink to fill. Definitely a good choice.

6. Under cabinet lighting. Really nice. It makes a good night light, too, for those late trips to the fridge.

7. Vinyl plank instead of carpet in the living area. So easy to take care of, and leaves you the option of decorating with various colored throw rugs.

8. Paved RV pad alongside the garage. I think this makes way more sense than having an entire RV garage built. It's working well for us.

9. Oversized two car garage. Yes! Almost deep enough for four vehicles, actually, if I didn't own so much junk.

10. Water softener. Love it. No evidence of mineral deposits like we saw in the short time we lived across town. 

11. Gas outlet on the patio. Haven't gotten it completely configured yet, but I know it's going to be handy when bbq/grilling season gets into full swing.

12. 36" Gas range. This is wonderful. So happy to finally have something worthy of a chef.

13. Utility sink in the mudroom. Very handy. We don't have to use our nice sinks to clean paint brushes or wash greasy hands after working on vehicles.

14. Extra irrigation station and hose faucet using pressurized irrigation (not household) water. Great for keeping the garden watered with drip lines, and being able to spritz the flower pots, too.

Lady of the Forest by Jennifer Roberson

 One of my all-time favorite movies was Robin and Marian, a story of Robin Hood coming home from the crusades an old man, renewing his battle with the Sheriff of Nottingham, while during his absence Marian has entered a nunnery, and they are all well past their prime. It contains what I consider to be one of the best declarations of true love I've ever heard.

I've loved Roberson's writing for many years, beginning with her Sword Dancer series, to which she continues to contribute to this day. 

This retelling of the Robin Hood story, beginning shortly after Robin's return from the Crusades, is a far more gritty and realistic version of events than we've seen in the Disneyfied tales we've seen over recent years. Roberson does a fantastic job of revealing all of the major and most of the minor characters' motivations and machinations, jockeying for power, wealth and position. The ending of this tale perhaps displayed a bit more realpolitik than one would ordinarily hope for in a historical fantasy, and less of the happily ever after, but all in all a truly enjoyable read.

2022 Wrap Up

 Looks like we have wrapped up another hundred book plus (126) year, again disregarding rereads such as Toby Daye series and Mercy Thompson series.

Best new (to me) author: Robert Jackson Bennett, with his City of Stairs, City of Blades, City of Miracles trilogy. Runner up - Bernard Cornwell, with his Last Kingdom series.

My 2021 best new author, Jack Carr, has published another four books in his series and the first one has been made into a controversial Netflix series.

Best SF: Hail Mary by Andy Weir is a return to good old hard science SF, for the most part.

Best Fantasy: Nothing in the stand alone category this year.

Best SF series: Dorothy Grant's Combined Operations books, though Nathan Lowell's Quarter Share had a great beginning, and I'd pursue it if the library started carrying them.

Best Fantasy (YA) series: The Scholomancer trilogy by Naomi Novik.

Best Thriller/Mystery: The Whistler by John Grisham

Best Non Fiction: Life, on the Line, by Grant Achatz - personally resonated with me on multiple levels.

So much else that I began reading in non fiction this year just bored me to tears after a hundred pages or so, and I moved on.

Patricia Briggs, Seanan McGuire and Faith Hunter continue to crank out new tales of their heroines, though I think that Jane Yellowrock may be retired at last in Final Heir.

Speaking of retiring, I am seriously peeved at the ending of the latest "woke" Bond film.

2022 wasn't a really great year in newly published amazing books. I've tried some new authors, but not much has stuck with me.

The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell

I don't ordinarily read historical fiction, but it was a slow day at the library for SF and Fantasy, so I thought I'd take a chance on The Last Kingdom. I was pleasantly surprised. Cornwell writes a gripping tales of swords sans sorcery, set in the time of King Alfred. Blood, guts, and glory aplenty.

The Emberverse Series by S. M. Stirling

 I saw the Emberverse series when it first came out, but just wasn't in the mood for post-apocalyptic fiction (I really overdosed on it back in the 70s and 80s) and ignored it for a while. The mood struck, however, the other day, and I got started reading them with Dies the Fire, followed by The Protector's War and A Meeting at Corvalis.

Pretty good stuff, though I seem to have stalled out with the 4th book in the series still sitting in my TBR list

Shadow Rider by Christine Feehan

 This was my first time to try reading Feehan's books - she seems to have published a ton. The concept of Shadow Riders, as introduced in the early going, seemed intriguing, so I pressed on, hoping to find out more about their mission, find out why the heroine was "fated" to be with the hero, and if she had any cool powers, and so forth. Halfway through the book, it descended completely into over-the-top porn, and I gave up on actually finding a plot or coherent story. Plot's evidently not why people buy Feehan's books.

Everyday Millionaires by Chris Hogan

 (written a year or so ago)

Reading Chris Hogan's Everyday Millionaires, to see if there's anything I can learn from it. Oddly enough, though my wife and I became everyday millionaires, and share a number of traits with the 10,000 millionaires his team interviewed for his book, I appear to have gone about it all wrong, for the most part.

 

First, I have never hired a financial professional to help me create and maintain a plan. The two times in our earlier days when we trusted "financial planners" to put us into the right investments and plans, they turned out to be commissioned salespeople who put us into investment types that benefitted them and their companies, and left us with poor returns and high fees. I did much better on my own when selecting mutual funds in our 401K plans, and later on when I began to invest in "dividend aristocrats" via our online brokerage account, as well as taking advantage of ESOP plans that were available to my wife a couple of times.

A Budget Solution

(this post was written in July of 2015, so any reference to current events may seem odd, and wages/prices have changed, minimum wage has gone to $15 an hour in many places around the U.S.)

I was reading a post the other morning on Free Money Finance, and the author was talking about their pastor proposing a biblically based budget of Give 10%, Save 10% and live on 80% of your income.

One of the most interesting comments was "What about the poor? Your church must not have any poor people. They'd find it difficult to give 10%"

My thought, "Define poor." Are we talking about senior citizens living on a fixed income? At our church, they're probably our most consistent givers. Are we talking about broke college students? My daughter, when she was working part time going to college, gave 10% of her income to the church.

Defining "poor" is somewhat like defining "rich" - a tricky subject if the recent experiences of our presidential candidates are any indication. For every person in a given set of financial circumstances who believes they are too poor to give or save, there are others in nearly identical situations who are able to save and give generously.

I suppose someone who is a ward of the state, or has no income whatsoever, might have a tough time following this plan, but I don't think that's its intended audience, anyway. We have a mentally disadvantaged man named Tom who has attended our church for around 60 years, he has lived in an assisted living situation since his mother passed away about 25 years ago. Him, I would regard as unqualifiedly "poor", but I'm not sure he thinks of himself that way. He used to work at a fast food restaurant till they made him retire at 65, and I believe he used to put something in the collection plate when he had a little spending money of his own.

But I digress.

The 80/10/10 plan is a good, easy target for most people (let's just assume they're middle class, eh, and avoid any arguments about the poor) to try for in the first place. If you do something like this, you'll support charitable causes (church or secular), put some money away for a rainy day or retirement day, and probably not feel too pinched, financially, assuming you can keep the rest of your financial house in line. Could be a great starter budget. If you started doing something like this from the day you got your first job after high school or college, you'd probably have your retirement fully funded by the time you hit middle age, assuming the money was stashed in a 401K or IRA with an appropriate asset allocation (that's a whole different topic).

There may be some debate about who created the model I'm going to talk about - I first saw it in a financial article by Liz Pulliam Weston, who writes for MS Money online. It's called the 60% solution, and I think it's an even better model than the 80/10/10, but I'd call it a more "advanced" plan.

The 60% solution goes something like this:

60% - Committed expenses
10% - Retirement
10% - Long Term Savings
10% - Short Term Savings
10% - Fun Money

As you can readily see if you can read, there's no place in this budget for giving - on the surface. When I began to try to implement this in my life, I decided that the 60% Committed expenses would have to include my giving. This actually worked out well for my accounting purposes, as I've been "committed" to giving at least 10% to charity for quite a few years now. So, for the committed giver, this thing looks even harder to implement, on the surface, as now you have only 50% to spend on committed expenses, where a non-giver has that additional 10%.

When my daughter was about to graduate from college, I sat her down for an hour or two and showed her this model. I really need to sit down with her at some point and see how she's adjusted it to her lifestyle as a young married woman, just out of curiosity and to see someone else's perspective on how it all works.
Note: (2022) She and her husband have managed their money well and have both saved for the future and given some away to worthy causes. They should be just fine.

Again, I digress.

Let's talk implementation. I chose to implement this budget plan as applied to my gross income. I imagine one could do something with it on only take-home pay, especially if your retirement savings are not going into a 401K plan at work, and you have to shift them to an IRA yourself, but it seems easier to me to figure it on the gross, and to account for things that are withheld as being in either the committed category or one of the savings categories.

For example, withheld taxes are a committed expense. You must pay them out of every check, and if your income remains constant, so do they. They also tend to rise in direct proportions to most normal pay raises, so keeping them within the committed category through thick and thin keeps them as a pretty constant factor. I also put health insurance costs in as a committed expense. They're deducted from my wife's and my checks, so the amount is right there, easy to account for.

As far as retirement savings goes, here's the easy part. If you have a 401K, just sign up for a 10% contribution to the plan, and that part of the 60% solution is on autopilot from the start. Depending on when you start saving for retirement, you may need to adjust this upwards or downwards at some point - and you can move funds allocated for retirement to a Roth IRA or some vehicle which still allows you to save money, but gives you more options for when and why you're able to withdraw funds. Again, another topic.

The rest of the committed category includes everything that you have to pay on a regular basis, either monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, annually, etc. I've tracked my spending with MS Money for so long, I can predict this category pretty darned closely.

So, where are we? From our original 60%, we deduct 10% giving, and taxes. Depending on your tax bracket and how you've structured your witholdings, taxes are going to cut into that, as well. Let's just say that it's 15% of your gross. So, now we're down to 35% of your gross for fixed expenses. If you've followed the appropriate guidelines for obtaining a mortgage, your mortgage payment is no more than 28% of your income, so now we're down to 7% to live on. This includes utilities, groceries, gasoline, car payments, credit cards...all that stuff. Sounds pretty tough. Yep, it is tough.

It's probably something that's going to have to be implemented gradually, with the ultimate 60/10... proportions in mind.

Let's look at the final two categories, long term and short term savings. I'd say that long term is probably 2 to 5 years, as far as budgeting is concerned. The long term category for savings is for doing something like paying cash for your vehicles. Many PF gurus recommend that you always pay cash for a car that's about a year or two old (so someone else eats the depreciation) and drive it for 8 to 10 years.
Let's assuming you're basically starting from zero as a recent college grad, and you don't own a car yet. If we try to stick with the model as much as possible, but make an adjustment for acquiring a car, we could do the following.

Assume that your job pays $40K annually. If you follow the plan, you could save $4K a year in long term savings, and in 2 years you'd have slightly over $8K put away to buy a car - if you could defer that purchase and walk, bike or bus to work. In 5 years you'd have over 20K - with appropriate interest it'd be around $22K. This should buy you a pretty decent used car.

What if you went ahead and bought a car and financed it? Let's just assume that you bought something in the $8-10K range and financed the whole thing. Over 36 months, it's going to cost you $300 per month, limiting the amount of money you can put in short term savings to around $50 a month for that 36 months, then rising to $360 for the next two years. At the end of this time, you'll have approximately $10K saved up, so you can buy a new(er) car with cash this time, or keep driving the old one for another couple of years, when you'll have about double that.

That example assumes all other factors being equal. Inflation affecting the price of cars in just the same way as it affects your wages, and maintenance expenses, insurance, and licensing being the same no matter what car you bought. We all know this isn't totally real world, but you can see that it's going to be far better to save up to pay cash than to finance a car, assuming you can live without the latest, greatest status symbol.

Short term savings I think of as a more liquid, flexible thing, easily repurposed as situations change. You can save up for a dining room table, a new La-Z-Boy, a vacation, the kids' orthodontia down payment...whatever might be coming up in six months to a year. You can, if necessary and if you're funding both types of savings, shift a little money from one to the other, but you have to be aware of the consequences of taking money from one to feed the other, the type of delayed gratification implied. Move money from the short term to long term to get a new car more quickly, and you've now pushed out the time table for the new draperies.

(more later, perhaps)

Financial Planning

One of the things that most financial planners will do when you first get started is to have you fill out a survey that determines your risk tolerance, so they can see what sort of investments they can put you in. If your risk tolerance is low, they'll recommend money market funds, t-bills, bond funds. If your risk tolerance is high, then you get a big portion of your investment in the stock market, whether it be in individual stocks or mutual funds. Note - this is a vastly simplified model, the investment options available out there are mind-boggling.

One would expect that in the area of risk tolerance, as in most things, people would fall into some sort of bell curve, with only 10% of us being "out there" on the far end of the risk scale, betting it all on the stock market, wouldn't you? But, as evidenced by recent events, it seems that maybe 90% of us are out there on the high end of the risk scale, even those who by their circumstances (already retired, for example) should be at the low extreme end of the scale.

I submit that there's something seriously wrong with the risk tolerance model. The questions they're asking in those surveys need to change, somehow. What they really need to be asking about is our "loss-tolerance".

"How will you feel when you wake up one Christmas morning, and $350,000 of your $Million retirement fund has just disappeared?"

"How long do you think you'd have to put off your retirement if your income from your portfolio was only 70% of what it was last year?"

"What will you do when you find out that the last five years of your 401K contributions made no difference to your balance - it's basically gone?"

You see, these types of questions would perhaps more accurately allow financial planners to pick the best investments for folks, and avoid a heck of a lot of whining by those who:

"don't mind a lot of volatility",

"are willing to take a risk to get a higher long term return",

"have a long-haul, buy-and-hold investment philosophy",

and "can ride out the market's ups and downs"

I'm just sayin'.

Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss

 Some bits and pieces I found interesting in Ferriss' book:

“I always say that I’ll go first. . . . That means if I’m checking out at the store, I’ll say hello first. If I’m coming across somebody and make eye contact, I’ll smile first. [I wish] people would experiment with that in their life a little bit: Be first, because—not all times, but most times—it comes in your favor.

“If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.”

‘Is that a dream, or a goal? Because a dream is something you fantasize about that will probably never happen. A goal is something you set a plan for, work toward, and achieve.

“What am I continuing to do myself that I’m not good at?” Improve it, eliminate it, or delegate

"You might need to CTFO (chill the fuck out) a few minutes a day before you BTFO (burn the fuck Out)"

“Far more money has been lost by investors trying to anticipate corrections, than has been lost in corrections themselves.’—Peter Lynch”

"In order to move fast, I expect you’ll make some foot faults. I’m okay with an error rate of 10 to 20%—times when I would have made a different decision in a given situation—if it means you can move fast."

The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman

Just some noteworthy tidbits from the book:

 Consider the job you’re currently in. Chances are, you accepted that job because you were willing to take on certain responsibilities, and your employer was interested in having you do the work. You were interested in being paid a certain amount and your employer was willing to pay you at least that much. Your interests overlapped, which resulted in a job offer and a paid position at the company. That’s common ground.

Only four ways to increase revenue:

1. Increase # of customers served

2. Increase average transaction size

3. Increase frequency of transactions per customer

4. Raise prices

Delegating makes sense if the person you delegate to is 80% as good as you are (or better)

Moving towards the Beauty

 I had a bit of an epiphany the other day. My wife and I own a ton of wine glasses, some obtained as wedding presents, gifts, others bought to "furnish" our vacation home, and so forth. We also have a gorgeous set of hand blown glasses that we bought in Murano, Italy, that we drag out when we have company. 

While moving all of our belongings to our temporary apartment the other day, I decided, "Life is too short to not enjoy the beautiful things we own. I am getting rid of all the mundane wine glasses, and we'll just start using the Murano glasses, instead of mostly letting them be decorations in our kitchen."

I also have a very lovely hand-made cutting board that has served as a wall hanging in my kitchen, and I decided a day or so later that I should just start using and enjoying it for the purpose it was created and get rid of the stupid disposable plastic cutting boards that I had been using up to this time. Why not enjoy the visual esthetics of a beloved possession every time I slice and dice?

Over the years, we have also acquired a ton of cheap, bulk kitchen towels. In the last five years or so, however, we have either been gifted or have purchased a number of hand-woven cotton towels that are both pleasant to look at, and extremely absorbent. Trying to use the cheap towels for greasy messes, or those that might leave stains on the cloth, while enjoying the others for less damaging cleanup chores.

I'm about to the point of doing the same thing with a couple of my chef's knives that I usually keep hidden away, a wonderful Kramer Damascus steel one, and a hand-made knife from a local Oregon craftsman. Usually, I just pick up the old utilitarian Victorinox or the Chicago Cutlery knife we got as a wedding present 40 years ago, but I think it's time to really experience everyday life with a luxurious, high-end knife. With knives, it's a little tougher choice, since I also have a great set of "workhorse" German made knives I used to use in my restaurant.

As I continue to unpack, I think I am likely to keep winnowing out the chaff, and only hang on to those things which, as Marie Kondo says, "bring pleasure".

Just Do It!

 Off topic today, but I had some thoughts I wanted to get down on paper.

I've heard various financial "experts" over the years, repeat the adage, "Investment success doesn't result from timing the market, but from time in the market." After about three and a half decades of personal experience in my own life, I have to conclude that they are 99% certainly correct, and I only use that figure because it is possible that someone, somewhere out there is smart enough to do it, but if so, they're keeping their mouths shut. Anyone who claims to have a "system" is simply trying to sell you something.

Ok, so my wife and I have saved and invested for our future in a number of ways, but primarily through 401k contributions, as well as a couple of employee stock ownership plans. We have also purchased individual stocks and mutual funds in our brokerage account, put money in our HSAs, bought CDs (way back when yields were over 6%). I've made selection errors, and suffered high fees, especially when we followed the advice of friends who had become financial planners and sold us variable annuities. 

But despite the various errors, fees and disappointments, one thing remained constant above all...we never stopped investing. Regularly, persistently, consistently, and with a fairly high to extremely high percentage of our income. In fact, the last five years before I retired, I was putting 50% of my salary in the company 401k, and my wife was contributing 25% of hers during that time period, as well as maxing out our HSA contributions and taking advantage of all company matching.

All of this has taken place over about 35 years, half a dozen major market corrections, and other market peaks and troughs. We just never quit putting money away. Instead of spending everything we made or, like some folks, more than we made, we kept our expenses down, sacrificed some of our personal desires - though never any of our real needs - and put our money to work.

You might think that we were only able to do this because we were high-income earners. I'm sadly afraid that this has not been the case. For most of our careers our income was not significantly greater than the national average, and even in recent years, most recent college graduates have higher starting salaries than we have ever enjoyed.

When markets went up - we invested.

When markets went down - we invested.

When we got a windfall - we invested.

When things were tough - we invested.

Every paycheck. Every year.

The end result of our consistent policy of saving and investing for several decades is that we have enough money in our retirement plans and other investments to live comfortably in our old age, regardless of whether Social Security pays out or comes crashing down someday. This isn't to say that a black swan event like the collapse of the U.S. or world economy couldn't take us down, but in that situation, I think we're all going to have real problems.

I say this not to brag, or to claim credit for the blessings God has given us, but rather to encourage anyone out there who doesn't think it's possible, that the system is rigged against the little guy, or that you have to have a huge salary to be able to become wealthy. Simply follow a consistent and persistent plan of investing over the long haul, and you can reap the rewards. If you start early and young, the total results will be astounding.

Success in Racquet/Paddle Sports

 I played racquetball for about thirty years, and though I never achieved any sort of elite status, I was able to glean some thoughts about how the game should be played. One of the things I noticed when I hung out with guys who played at the pro level was that their shots - their stroke - always looked the same, backhand or forehand, flowing through a "strike zone" - there may be some parallels to baseball here as well. Rather than reach out too far and awkwardly attempt a shot when the ball was not optimally placed, they would move quickly to position their bodies so that the ball would fly right into the perfect area for their stroke, and their footwork and body position was such that the ball was pretty well certain to go in just the right direction, rather than popping off the racquet in a random direction, as my shots often did.

I'm starting to get the same feeling about the basics of pickleball. When I stop long enough to analyze the reasons why I didn't make a particular shot, it's generally because a) I didn't take the time to get into position so that the ball was well within my "strike zone" or b) didn't stop and align my feet and body to put the correct amount of power in the proper direction into the shot, or c) didn't follow through completely with a smooth motion. The only other major error-causing problem is failure to keep my paddle at the proper angle, which often is the result of trying to reach a ball outside of my strike zone.

If a ball simply arrives too quickly for me to react, then the failure on my end was more of a mental or strategic error where I failed to anticipate my opponents' most potentially deadly return. 

As is often the case, these failings are a lot easier to see in others than in myself. However, the more I see a fellow player fail, for example, to properly line up their feet and body for a shot or try to hit the ball while moving forward instead of getting into a set position, and watch the ball go flying off in an unexpected direction or sail straight into the net, the more it reinforces my conviction about the importance of these basics. 

Some of this, perhaps, is the reason you'll see so many players "walking around" a backhand and hitting a forehand shot from a disadvantageous court position. They don't have a "ready" position in their repertoire for a backhand, so they feel more comfortable taking the extra effort to move until the ball is in their forehand zone.

In the world of professional poker, there is a thing called "going on tilt". It happens to players after a series of bad beats, usually, and causes them to be so upset that they no longer play rationally, but make their bets based on emotion, especially anger. This can happen in pickleball, too. If you go through a period of time when your shots are inexplicably going astray - into the net or out of bounds - or every ball your opponent hits seems to end up exactly where it needs to be, while you struggle, it is easy to "go on tilt" and begin to play with anger or even depression. If you can avoid this emotional type of play, and simply weather the storm, you can generally come out the other side of a losing streak and begin to play well - and even win. Sometimes, if you can't seem to shake the emotional side of things off, it's best to just give it a rest and play another day.

Dresden Revisited

 Last week, in the interests of mindless entertainment, I decided to re-read books 7-12 of The Dresden Files, which slowly but surely push Harry, Molly, Karen, Butters and the rest of Harry's friends into becoming the figures I believe Butcher intends them to be for the events of Peace Talks, Battle Ground, and beyond. I added Ghost Story and Cold Days to the binge, as well, but having recently re-read Skin Game in preparation for the release of the latest duology, I stopped at that. Not quite up to the emotional impact of Battle Ground at this point. Changes was tough enough. Don't know why I get so wrapped up in the lives of Butcher's characters; good writing, perhaps?

Anyway, that's been my reading life lately.

Spelunking through Hell by Seanan McGuire

 I tried, I really tried, to like this book, but I just couldn't care enough to finish it.

The point of view in this story switches to Verity's generation's grandmother, Alice Price-Healy, who has been mentioned a number of times in the other Incryptid stories. She is searching for her husband, who was taken away and stranded in a pocket dimension by the Crossroads, as the result of his deal with them for saving Alice's life. 

I should have felt more compassion for Alice and her quest, perhaps, but for some reason the whole thing just fell flat. Maybe McGuire has said all she really has to say on the subject of incryptids and the Healy family, but just didn't know when to quit.

Hoping that her October Daye novels don't grow stale, as well.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

 Well, here we are, at the close of another five year chapter in my life. Today is the last day I will be operating Surfer Sands, my little sandwich shop on the beach. The sale closes today, and I am officially retired. This may actually mean more book blogging over the long haul, though there are a zillion little details to take care of to wrap up my business dealings, so that should keep me entertained, not to mention that the garbage disposal at the condo died yesterday, so I need to replace that, and my lovely wife probably has a list of other projects for me that she's been hiding until I had no excuses left.

Looking forward to spending some time with my three remaining fans.

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

 I had read some of Novik's Temeraire series a while back, and she seemed like a good author, so I took a chance on her new YA series. 

The first book was quite entertaining; enough so that I checked out a copy of the 2nd book in what appears to be destined to be a trilogy. 

The Scholomance is like Hogwarts without a sense of humor, perhaps more like a Marine Corps boot camp which tries to eliminate, in this case with extreme prejudice, most of the recruits before their incompetence might kill other fighters. Or maybe it's got a bit of a deadly serious version of Clouseau vs. Cato, where one can be attacked at any time without warning.

Good fun.

Another Deuce

 Continued my streak of unremarkable books with Dirty Magic, by Jaye Wells. It seemed like it had at one time been a police drama/mystery/romance novel that someone simply edited with a find and replace function to make it into an urban fantasy. 

Bad Run of Cards?

 I seem to be having a bad run of luck in my book selection process right now. 

I barely managed to finish Dead Lies Dreaming, by Charles Stross, which is in the Laundry Files universe, but which really wasn't up to his usual standards.

Then, I tried to get into a book about blockchain and crypto, but it was very poorly written and edited - rambled on and on, so I gave up.

Next was a book about corruption in the FBI, but it turned out to be a rehash of the Russian collusion narrative, and so I gave up a couple chapters in.

Then, I picked up the first novel, Isolate, in a new series by L.E. Modessit - a great author whom I have followed for years - and I hung in there for two weeks trying to finish it, but at last, alas, I decided that I just didn't give a crap any more. It just rambled on and on, repetitive and uninspired, going nowhere in particular, for around 700 pages.

Then there was Red-Handed, by Peter Schweizer, whose works I have really enjoyed over the years. Unfortunately, most of the subject matter in this book had already been covered by him a while back, and is merely topical again due to Biden being in the White House. Gave up about three chapters in.

Most recently, I decided to try the Invisible Library series by Genevieve Cogman. About 50% of the way through it I realized I didn't care what happened to the characters in the slightest, and didn't even like them very much, so I gave up on that one, as well.

Currently reading another book on Bitcoin, which, while it does contain a few factual problems, at least is better written than the crypto book and fortunately is short enough to avoid the rambling, unfocused approach of the aforementioned.

I'm going to try another new author tonight. Hope something finally is worth completing.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel

 There was nothing terribly surprising to me in this classic by Malkiel. I'd pretty much read or heard it all before.

That said, however, for someone just getting started or looking for facts and figures and objective truth about the most effective way to invest their money without the ups and downs of the stock market keeping them awake at night, this book is a great primer.

Some choice tidbits:

"The key to investing is not how much an industry will affect society or even how much it will grow, but rather its ability to make and sustain profits."

"Discount brokerages make money on the spread between bid and ask prices on stocks."

"The golden number for American xenophobes—those fearful of looking beyond our national borders—is at least fifty equal-sized and well-diversified U.S. stocks (clearly, fifty oil stocks or fifty electric utilities would not produce an equivalent amount of risk reduction). With such a portfolio, the total risk is reduced by over 60 percent. And that’s where the good news stops, as further increases in the number of holdings do not produce much additional risk reduction."

"It turns out that the portfolio with the least risk had 17 percent foreign securities and 83 percent U.S. securities. "

A good definition:

"Some stocks and portfolios tend to be very sensitive to market movements. Others are more stable. This relative volatility or sensitivity to market moves can be estimated on the basis of the past record, and is popularly known by—you guessed it—the Greek letter beta."

There was a study performed investigating herd mentality, how people are influenced by those around them to do things that are irrational or counterfactual - often the case in investing.

"If caving in to the group was the result of social pressure, the study reasoned, one should see changes in the area of the forebrain involved in monitoring conflicts. But if the conformity stemmed from actual changes in perception, one would expect changes in the posterior brain areas dedicated to vision and spatial perception. In fact, the study found that when people went along with the group in giving wrong answers, activity increased in the area of the brain devoted to spatial awareness. In other words, it appeared that what other people said actually changed what subjects believed they saw. It seems that other people’s errors actually affect how someone perceives the external world."

In other words, the people you associate with can affect your apprehension of reality. Scary, huh?

A Perfect Day, with Explosions by Dorothy Grant

 I have literally read everything Dorothy Grant has written, pretty much all in novelette length, and enjoyed it immensely.

A Perfect Day, with Explosions is the latest in her Combined Operations series, set on a planet where terrorist groups are rebelling against the Empire which controls the planet. Each story seems to consist of a heroine thrown into wild and crazy combat operations out of an ordinary life of innocence, yet somehow rising beyond who they were, thriving through trials and tribulations, and finding love with a special forces guy.

Nothing terribly deep, dark, or heavily philosophical, but just good fun and an evening or two of entertainment well worth the ebook price. 

Dissolution by W. Michael Gear

 

There's a "diary entry" in this book that talks about how, when the triggering event occurred, our politicians and media had done such an effective job of setting Americans at odds with each other that there was not enough trust left between factions, and society by and large simply imploded. Doesn't require much in the way of science fiction's "willing suspension of disbelief" to accept the premise, I'm afraid.
I've often said over the last decade or so that money is a ficitional concept, based on nothing but the agreement to treat it as a valid form of exchange between consenting adults; a bunch of ones and zeroes in cyberspace, for most part. Our fiat currency, the US dollar, used to be backed by an actual "hard" asset, gold, but that was done away with around fifty years ago, so Gear's story about hackers taking down the banking system and destroying, first, the US, and later the world economy could happen at any time.
Do you have faith that your fearless leaders in the free world actually understand economics and could rapidly restore or rebuild our system without running roughshod over our liberties? Better read Gear's book to see how things could all end up in the crapper.

I've been reading Gear's books for decades, and this author hasn't disappointed yet.

Other series of note:
Way of the Spider
Donovan

All I Want for Christmas is more Time to Read

 By the time the year is through, I should finish just over 100 books for the year, disregarding some of my re-reads, such as the Sten series by Cole and Bunch and the Chalion books by Bujold, and a dash of Tolkien.

The best of the year:

Best new (to me) author - Jack Carr (not SF or Fantasy)
Best Fantasy - The Ile-Rien series by Martha Wells
Best Urban Fantasy - A Terrible Fall of Angels (new series start by Laurell K. Hamilton)
Best Science Fiction - Governor (new series start by David Weber)
Best Science Fiction series - Donovan series by Michael W. Gear, or Dread Empire's Fall series by Walter Jon Williams, or The Palladium Wars series by Marko Kloos, or Major Bhajan series by Asaro. All worth the time.
Best Mystery/Thriller - Serpentine by Jonathan Kellerman
Best non-Fiction - Kitchen Confidential by Andrew Bourdain

In other news, Benedict Jacka's Alex Verus series finally wrapped up with Risen, there were new iterations of October Day and Jane Yellowrock, Bujold's Penric, Weber's Honorverse, 

Smile, Dammit!

 When I was about twelve years old, I got involved in local civic theater productions, beginning as one of the Workhouse Boys and Fagan's Gang in Oliver!, singing and dancing my way around the stage with the rest of the cast. This was followed by similar roles in Hello Dolly, Bye Bye Birdie, and a number of other productions over the years.

The resident director, Fred, spent countless hours with large groups of amateurs, of varying talents and inclinations, attempting to meld us into an ensemble that delivered a high quality show. Whilst we were all dancing our little feet and legs off to the musical numbers, he would all too often shout out one line, which has stuck with me for the rest of my life.

"Smile, Dammit!"

You see, when you are trying to remember all the steps of a dance, maintain your spacing with all the other dancers, belt out the lyrics of the song simultaneously, you have a tendency to grimace and frown, which is not exactly the expression the song should convey to the audience. 

Fred's imprecations were meant to remind us that no matter how difficult the task, the most important thing was that the people watching our performance believe it was delightful and merry.

So, whenever the task seems too hard, the road too long, or the effort excessive, I have to remind myself, "Smile, Dammit!"