Ted's Blog

With some of the coldest weather of the season on the way, on Thursday I noticed that the furnace wasn’t coming on. I could hear the exhaust fan starting, but the burner wasn’t coming on and no air was coming out of the vents. I got a very efficient Lennox system 8 years ago and it has had a lot of issues. Fortunately it came with a 10-year warranty, but I still have to pay for labor, which isn’t cheap. I called the people who installed it and they said they would send someone out the next day. It was 63 degrees in the house and would drop to 58 degrees by the next morning, which is pretty cold. They came out in the morning and said the gas valve was shorted out and would need to be replaced, but they would have to order the part from Lennox. It should be arrive Monday. The problem was Saturday it was supposed to go down to 24 degrees. I could move out of the house, but the pipes might freeze, so I was looking up how to drain the pipes. The repair guy asked if I had any space heaters I could use, which I don’t.

I looked up space heaters and found that about the highest capacity heaters they sell are 1500 watts. Walmart had some for $26, so I bought two to try them out. They are bookshelf size with a fan and a ceramic heating element and three levels: 700, 900, and 1500 watts. I have a good guide to which fuses or circuit breakers control which outlets and put the two heaters on different circuits, but my guide had a flaw and I wound up blowing a fuse when both outlets were using the same fuse. I have extra fuses and made a note to my guide. 1500 watts is about 12 amps and the fuses are only rated for 20 amps, so yeah, it was definitely going to blow. Anyway, they worked, so I went back to Walmart and bought two more so I could heat more of the house. I haven’t blown anymore fuses.

Continue reading “Furnace Out”

When I first thought about joining the Disney Movie Club, I took an average of different rankings of their animated features (the Disney canon) to prioritize what I should buy. I am now on my sixth enrollment in the Disney Movie Club and have bought about two thirds of the Disney canon. I had not seen a lot of the movies on the list or it had been so long that I didn’t remember much about them, so it has been fun going back and watching and seeing how the movies developed over time. The differences between the first movie, the hand animated Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and a more recent movie like the 3D computer animated Zootopia could not be more stark, but that isn’t to say they aren’t both good and they are both artistic in their own ways. The difference is kind of ironic in particular for Zootopia since it is based on noir movies of the time period when Snow White came out.

I was happy to get Disney Plus which has all of the Disney canon (except Make Mine Music for some reason), letting me watch some of the movies that I probably would never buy. I have had Disney Plus now for two years and still haven’t watched all of the canon yet, so that may never happen. So this list still has a few omissions (I really need to watch Pocahontas, which I own, but haven’t seen since its first release, before I was saving reviews. I was going to recalculate a ranking with the latest Disney movies, but instead, I decided to just plunge forward into my own list. Continue reading “My Disney Rankings”

I first joined the Disney Movie Club five years ago and have cancelled and re-enrolled repeatedly in order to stock up on a lot of blu-rays from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars. Eventually I got pretty much everything I wanted so I have been picking up newer movies. During my fourth enrollment, I picked up a lot of referrals and got more movies from the referrals than enrollment. Eventually the referrals started to dry up and I joined a fifth time in February of last year. Since then I only picked up one referral, but the bigger problem was that once Covid hit, there were fewer movies being released and therefore fewer blu-rays. Now things are picking up again and I was able to put together six titles I wanted for a new enrollment. Disney’s releases lately haven’t been great, but still decent enough to justify $8 or so per movie and I wound up picking up Onward (B+), Cruella (A), Raya and the Last Dragon (A), Black Widow (B), Luca (B+), and Soul (B+). I could easily pass on Black Widow, but I didn’t want to wait for Shang-Chi (B+) or Free Guy (B+) to be eligible for enrollment (usually 9-12 weeks after the movie is released on blu-ray). I definitely would not get Jungle Cruise (B-) or Ron’s Gone Wrong (D).
Continue reading “Disney Movie Club, Part 6”

Last year, the Black Friday sales on blu-rays were spread out over the month of November, but were mostly not great. This year, that happened again, but it was even worse because Best Buy doesn’t even make ads anymore, so you just had to wait and see what they put on sale. For the most part, they started a sale on November 1 and then another one on November 15, and kept the prices the same for most of the month. Their selection and prices were not great, with a few $7.99 4K discs, but mostly $9.99 and more. They finally released a few blu-rays at $5.99, but pretty sparse. I had about $40 in rewards credits at Best Buy, so I wound up picking up a few 4K blu-rays including Ad Astra¹, Jojo Rabbit², and Gattaca³ for $9.99 each and then picked up A Quiet Place⁴ for $7.99. I wasn’t crazy about Jojo and have never seen A Quiet Place, but both had slipcovers and digital copies which is a nice plus. Gattaca is a favorite that I never got on blu-ray and Ad Astra was a neat movie too. I thought about getting Tenet for $9.99, but decided I didn’t like it enough to upgrade my blu-ray that I had gotten cheap from Redbox. On Black Friday they had Shazam⁵ blu-ray for $5.99. That was a fun movie, so I went ahead and got that for $1.07 after using a $5 reward. Only 5 movies from Best Buy is pretty low for me.
Continue reading “Blackish November”

Lately inflation has edged up. Some are saying it is temporary, due to supply disruptions caused maybe by Covid shutdowns. Others say inflation is back. Meanwhile Mom was looking for a way to get a better return on some money she had in a money market drawing less than 1% return. We started looking at bond funds. I like Vanguard’s short term corporate bond fund, VFSTX (or its ETF equivalent, VCSH) which I use like a savings account, but also a place to put money in reserve if I feel like the stock market is due for a correction. But Mom already had some money in some USAA mutual funds, a short term corporate bond fund similar to VFSTX called USSBX, and a junk bond fund called USHYX. So we just added her money to those existing holdings. USSBX actually seems to have a slightly higher yield than VFSTX (1.8% vs. 1.7%), so I put some money into that too. One way it does this is by having slightly higher risk bonds which pay higher interest. USHYX, the junk bond fund, buys all lower quality bonds, so it is yielding around 5%, but there is more risk there plus the bonds are longer term, meaning the value of the bonds will go down more if interest rates rise, which they seem to be doing.
Continue reading “I Bonds Again?”