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Don’t buy a cheap cell phone, buy a used flagship phone! I was never really happy with the new $150 LG Charge android phone I got a year ago. I just got a used Pixel 2 from swappa.com for $190 and it’s a wonder! Fast, awesome camera (I got it pretty much exclusively so I could take better photos of Abigail), and a lot of nice features. Hurray and hurray!

For my birthday I asked for a potluck party. It was fantastic! We had some 20 friends and we were able to spread out in our big place on the little hill. The food was so much fun, the energy level great. There are definite plans to do this monthly-ish!

I like the plaque in front of the El Cerrito Library

El Cerrito Library
Where the individual may acquire
the wisdom to contrive
the strength to support
the beauty of the arts
that adorn man’s undertakings

Adopted by: El Cerrito Albany Masonic Lodge No 686
July 4, 1996

At my first reading aloud to Abigail, I saw it all spinny-aroundy:

Where the individual may
acquire the wisdom
to contrive the strength
to support the beauty
of the arts
that adorn
man’s undertakings

Possibly full of beautiful hidden meaning, or just my tired brain.

It looks like it’s an annual event around here. I have achieved inbox 0 at home! Celebrate! I should be getting my next email any moment now… waaaah!

Previously

Did you ever wonder how terrible it would be if you used that expired medicine in your medicine cabinet? In brief: far far less bad than you might think! Here’s an article from the Mayo Clinic about the US military Shelf Life Extension Program (SLEP). Nearly every drug tested out of the 122 drugs they tested maintained full potency 2-8 years after their expiration date. The only ones on their list that lost potency was Albuterol and Diphenhydramine (Benadryl). If you store your medicines in less than ideal conditions, your mileage may vary. Read it for yourself. Especially look at the tables.

Mayo SLEP

Did I mention that I have the most amazing, wonderful, daughter in the entire universe?

A few months ago we were at the ECPC Messy Art Day. Abigail had just gotten off of the spin art ride and while they were mopping up her spin art and making it go away I said to her “It makes me a little sad when they make the art go away.” And Abigail responded, “It makes me happy because they are going to make new art.” My job here is done.

I’m looking for help fixing my Mediawiki installations. Ready to pay $. Comment or email me.

Update 7-21-19: Turns out, fixing Mediawiki is easy. Just insert 8 hours of your life into the slot

For the last 10 years or so I’ve been earning airline miles and cash with credit card offers. The whole family usually flies on miles alone. I get about $2,000 in value per year out of it. Here’s how:

In brief:

Every three months or so, sign up for a new credit card that offers miles or cash back. Spend the required amount, set the card in a drawer for a few months then cancel the card. Keep a log of all the cards you’ve used and your accumulated miles. Use the miles and cash-back whenever!

All of it:

• When signing up, pretty much the only important benefit is the signing bonus. Look for credit cards that offer things like “25,000 miles if you spend $2,000 in the first 3 months”. Offers for 30k or 50k miles are even better. Don’t bother with any reward smaller than 25,000 miles.
• Only be working on one credit card at a time. But having 2 cards in your wallet is a good idea just in case.
• Keep track of your cards by physically putting notes on them. I print out a document in 6 point font and tape it to the card. Notes usually read something like “spend $2k by [date] for 25k miles. 2pts/$ on restaurants. Cancel by [date] or $95 fee”.
• Always pay off your credit card in full every month. Always. If you are tempted not to, stop reading right now.
• Cancel the card before they charge you a yearly fee. Most cards say something like “$95 per year, waived for the first year”. It is rarely worth paying the yearly fee for the next year’s bonus like a free companion airline ticket or points-back. I sometimes give my reason for cancelling as that I don’t want the temptation of overspending.
• It mostly doesn’t matter what airline or offer you sign up for, you’ll find a way to use the miles eventually. The offers keep changing and the airline codeshares keep changing. So just earn miles on whatever airline and it’ll probably work out. Lately I’ve been earning and spending on American and Alaska (they codeshare), previously it was United. I stay away from hotel miles because I rarely stay in them and hotel miles aren’t worth as much. “80,000 hotel miles” sounds like a lot but it isn’t, but 25,000 airline miles is usually a round trip ticket! Most miles expire after 1-2 years; if you are getting close to expiration, you may be able to convert the miles into Amazon gift cards; the exchange rate is sometimes not great but a little free money is better than no free money.
• To start with, just get one new card every six months. Once you start getting the hang of it, you can get a card every two to three months. Juggling too many cards for your comfort zone is no fun and companies may worry something funny is going on and you might get denied.
• Keep track of when you sign up and receive rewards. Many cards stipulate something like “Signup reward is not available to those who received a new Cardmember bonus within the last 24 months.” In 1-4 years you’ll probably be coming back to this card.
• Keep track of your earned miles from all your airlines and such in a document. When you have enough miles for a flight, use them!
• If you have a business, you can open cards under the business’ name and use more cards.
• Always consider the “exchange rate” of points to dollars when you are considering a card. Earning a penny per dollar is the “norm”, like on a “1% cash back” card. But when you pay attention to signing bonuses, you are earning more like 10 cents on the dollar. It’s like getting 10% off EVERYTHING!
• Where to find the best offers keeps changing. Google “credit card offers” and you’ll find lots of them. Here are some of my go-to spots: http://milecards.com/, http://www.flyertalk.com/, http://milevalue.com/, http://boardingarea.com/viewfromthewing/, http://www.hustlermoneyblog.com/,
• Keep track of all your cards and all your accumulated miles in a document.
• Here are the credit card perks I pay attention to. All the other perks are usually not worth my time:
  • Signing bonus
  • Free first checked bag on an airline. Otherwise, checked luggage can cost $35/bag
  • Can I trade the miles into dollars at a reasonable rate?
• Keep your oldest credit card, even if you don’t use it. That will help boost your FICO score.
• If you are worried about your credit score, I’ve been doing this for more than eight years and my FICO score was above 780 last time I checked.

This was a really great Father’s day!

Family let me sleep in late, oh so nice! We went out to Cafe Leila in Berkeley and had a great brunch. We had fun chatting and playing while waiting for our food. Their pancakes were impossibly fluffy “like chewing on a cloud”, Leila Omelette with sauteed spinach and mushrooms were divine, and Abigail’s breakfast burrito was pretty darn good! Then off to Target for casual shopping! I got some nice clothes and we stayed for almost 2 hours. I was actually happy that the store had remodeled, I was beginning to think that ALL stores were on their way out in favor of Amazon. At home, I got a wonderful dad nap while Megan and Abigail played. Then Abigail and I spent a good while washing her tricycle, sitting out there watching the garden grow, Abigail pay attention to the suds, and the sun shine was oh-so nice! Abigail was bent on cleaning some windows of the house so we went around to the front of the house with a bucket of water and sponges at it went well. Then it was off to a new Nepalese restaurant in the neighborhood, Zomsa that had just perfect noodle bowls and dumplings and everything else! THEN Baskin Robins! We laughed and had so much fun trading ice creams: their cotton candy ice cream is so light and cotton-candy-ish!! And their chocolate cheesecake ice cream is so chocolate cheesecakey, and mint chocolate chip so cheerfully mint chocolate chip! Hurray!

And I got to talk to my father, whom I love so much!

(this was supposed to be published After Father’s Day 2019 but didn’t make it out of my Drafts folder until June 2020, during the stay-at-home pandemic. I don’t know how the post languished in my Drafts folder for so long except to say that I spend a lot of wonderful time with my daughter Abigail! I’ll try to be more prompt about my Father’s Day posts in the future! :-) )