mikegaynes@aol.com

Comments:

• When we lived near Half Moon Bay we hit Pismo at least once a year. Loved the Splash for the lobster rolls and the salmon sandwich.

  Post: California Free by Ken Cutler

  Link to comment from October 7, 2024

• Near the end of her life, my mom was living in the SF Bay Area, surrounded by family. My TV news job in Rhode Island didn't pay much, so I wasn't able to go out to see the old folks as I would have liked. When a PGA golf tournament came to Rhode Island, they announced a celebrity putting tournament early in the week, and I was invited. First prize would be two free air tickets to anywhere in the US. I HAD to win that. I'd never been much of a golfer, but I could putt. I won my first three matches with ease and reached the final against a sportscaster from a rival TV station whom I didn't like very much. By this time I was totally revved up in full-on Lee Trevino mode. We played an intense match that went to an extra hole. I mis-hit my first putt and left it a good 15 feet short, and I was internally enraged. When the other guy put his putt within three feet, I went to concede it but was so pumped up that I knocked his ball away like a polo shot, vaguely in his direction. Somebody next to the green commented, "I don't know if that's the best sportsmanship I've ever seen, or the worst." I rammed in the 15-footer and won the match on the next hole. I asked United if I could swap the two economy tickets for one first-class, and they agreed. And that trip to San Francisco remains the only time I have ever flown first class. The free wine was great.

  Post: California Free by Ken Cutler

  Link to comment from October 7, 2024

• Jonathan, having doctors you trust is priceless, but it’s also pretty wonderful having an insurance company you trust. I remember when I opened the bill after my first immunotherapy treatments. I saw $104,000 and freaked out. A quick 1 AM call to my insurance company yielded soothing reassurance from an overnight financial counselor. My share of that bill turned out to be $4000. And over the full four years of my illness, surgery and treatment, they covered somewhere close to $3 million.

  Post: Turned Upside Down

  Link to comment from October 6, 2024

• Me too. My palate is nowhere near educated enough to taste the difference between coffee made with tap water and coffee made from the Kirkland bottled stuff. For me, bottled water is only about convenience, not taste, and as time goes on, I find it harder and harder to justify the bottles. Taken collectively they are an ecological catastrophe. I keep a couple of cases of bottled water in the pantry only in case a significant earthquake disrupts our water system.

  Post: Truth is Often Stranger Than Fiction

  Link to comment from October 3, 2024

• I skim most opinion columnists (and skip Rubin completely), but I stop and read carefully anything Ruth Marcus, Karen Tumulty and Thomas Friedman have to say.

  Post: Stay Informed by Marjorie Kondrack

  Link to comment from October 3, 2024

• I'm going to push back a little on the idea that this isn't the proper forum for this discussion. After all, what we discuss here every day is the financial security of our families, and other forms of familial security are valid topics as well in my view. The deliberate or incidental targeting for terror of American families by national politicians or their supporters pushing political agendas that overflow into personal hate impacts security far more than a drop in the markets. The persecution of an Atlanta family of innocent poll workers, mother and daughter, by an outgoing president in 2020 is mirrored by the current experience of a business owner in Springfield, Ohio who publicly defended the quality of his immigrant workers and is now dealing with the impact of death threats against them, him and his own family. Certainly the experience of my family never remotely approached those horrors, but it's a simple fact that we now live near Seattle because when my wife returned to our Oregon beach house in 2020 after six months of pandemic lockdown with her family in Wuhan, a few neighbors in our small coastal community greeted her with anti-China banners and yells. She didn't feel welcome anymore. So we left. Disinformation and prejudice are spewed by certain prominent politicians to win elections, but they have a very personal impact on individual families.

  Post: Stay Informed by Marjorie Kondrack

  Link to comment from October 2, 2024

• Winston, I worked two summers as a toll collector there in the 1970s! Deerfield toll plaza.

  Post: Food for Thought by Ken Cutler

  Link to comment from September 30, 2024

• I SO envy you, Ken. I miss restaurants. My memory cherishes images of a sidewalk cafe in Rome, favored steakhouses and deep-dish pizza in Chicago, dumpling houses in Shanghai and Hong Kong and an insane noodle place in Hangzhou, an eye-wateringly spicy Hunan Chinese restaurant in the East Bay of San Francisco, fish houses in New Orleans, lobsters in Rhode Island, and dozens more. Not to mention what I just ate on a cruise around the San Juan Islands. That chef was magic. Sadly it's gone from my life. The pandemic killed any interest in eating out for my family. My wife and her mom have gone Buddhist vegan, and they like what she creates at home better than any restaurant. So my eat-out life is now a post-workout roll through the Arby's drive-thru, and when my newly Americanized nephew is in town we hit Popeye's, which he has decided is the best thing this country has to offer.

  Post: Food for Thought by Ken Cutler

  Link to comment from September 30, 2024

• Looks like a great book, Adam. I am ordering it from Amazon immediately. I’m glad to see that one of the interviewees mentions the collapse of an insurer as a risk for annuities. A smaller company called First Capital failed at the same time as Executive Life, getting very little of the publicity. It took most of my funds with it, at the same time the failure of the Rhode Island savings and loan system locked up the rest. I had to sell my condo at a 15% discount to prevent losing it to the bank. That’s why I tend to spit when someone mentions annuities without figuring in that risk. It is real and it exists.

  Post: Retiring Smarter

  Link to comment from September 29, 2024

• Not sure why my email address popped up instead of just my name. Working on trying to fix that.

  Post: Anybody Listening? by Jonathan Clements

  Link to comment from September 27, 2024