Running Bear's November 2025 Coffee Shop

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TLOC said:
Word of advice. If a nephew or niece have financial suggestions where to invest, run, run, run. She didn’t run



Have a great day
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I learned an important (and very painful) lesson when I first started vesting. Don't invest in anything you don't completely understand.

I jumped into a big REIT MLP, in Houston, around the beginning of the 1980's. It was touted as the greatest investment I could make at that time by my fathers investment advisor. The oil bust & the connected commercial real state bust happened several years later, including the Hunt brothers silver debacle . When the class action law suit was settled several years later I walked away with .10 for every dollar I had invested.

I never put my money into anything, company, or industry I didn't completely understand after that. It's paid off.
 
Marlin39 said:
I learned an important (and very painful) lesson when I first started vesting. Don't invest in anything you don't completely understand.

I jumped into a big REIT MLP, in Houston, around the beginning of the 1980's. It was touted as the greatest investment I could make at that time by my fathers investment advisor. The oil bust & the connected commercial real state bust happened several years later, including the Hunt brothers silver debacle . When the class action law suit was settled several years later I walked away with .10 for every dollar I had invested.

I never put my money into anything, company, or industry I didn't completely understand after that. It's paid off.
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Yes, tough lesson to learn. I learned mine playing the commodity market in 1990. If you don’t understand it don’t invest. What a disaster
 


Good morning all!

I was here earlier then got sidetracked.

Warming trend will continue today. Currently 44F heading up to a decent high of 57F. May touch 70F tomorrow.

Usual household chores today. Actually I already have the dishwasher emptied, second load of laundry is spinning
in the dryer. I do have to make a store run, but will wait till later on my way to get my daughter from basketball
practice.

Yea, I had high hopes all day yesterday about catching the Northern lights again since they said it was going to be
more active than the previous night. I watched the sky off and on for several hours and nothing....

Will be in the train room later tonight. A rare night where there is nothing going on after dinner.

Have a safe day everyone!
 
Kusojiji said:
Ah, they'll probably end up in my carport. Everbody else's leaves do.
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Same here. My yard seems like the catch-all for all neighborhood leaves.

I have no trees in the back yard since they were all removed to add the fence and only 2 small ones in the front.
Right now I have a yard full of leaves from everyone else and I mulched them all on Sunday and have to do it again
this weekend.
 
santafewillie said:
Good Morning All. Clear and 51°, headed in to the 80's today. It's too bad about the freeze Sunday night which took out all of my remaining Tomato and Pepper plants; because the next 10 days are going to be perfect weather. Well, maybe rain on Wednesday.

Last day of PT yesterday, nothing special. I can do all of the routines at home except one which requires a piece of equipment. I honestly can't say that it helped, I still experience shortness of breath when exerting too much. I'll keep doing many of the routines though.
Wife got her stitches removed yesterday; that only partially relieves her self-consciousness though.

It's the weekly grocery trek again today. The store is having their Grand Opening this week after 5 months of remodeling. Supposedly hidden savings everywhere! I'll see, but I normally just shop by my list and don't do any other looking. I already have mixed feelings about the new interior arrangement. By the time I get used to it, there will be a new Tom Thumb grocery store opening 12 miles closer to me. My wife really hates traveling to the Kroger store for some reason.

Out in the train shed yesterday, I mostly ran trains. I am pleased with my recent purchases from ScaleTrains of the GP30's and the SD40-2's that I received about 6 weeks ago. I have removed what I think is the last Athearn Blue Box loco from the active roster. They have served me well over the years.
I also painted the sign on the side of the Downtown Deco Hydrocal structure. This picture is before I touched up those stray white spots. I just forgot to take an after shot. I'm not even sure how they got there to begin with unless the stencil removal took off the black and the brick color underneath that.
View attachment 247828
I am also going to try my hand at lightly sanding it so some of the underlying bricks show through before giving it a wash of India Ink/alcohol. Hopefully it works as planned, because I destroyed the stencil when I removed it. These kinds of signs were still common although aged, during the early-70's around here. Most were painted over with murals later in the decade and no longer exist. Lots of art majors at UNT in Denton.

Hughie -

That's pretty close to the coast, I wasn't aware that they could be seen that far south. We developed a fog last night so I didn't even bother to go out and search.
Good luck with your recovery and thank God it wasn't worse.
Kevin - Have a safe trip home.
Karl - You should know that the same wind that takes your leaves away will bring your neighbor's leaves to you!

Everyone have a wonderful and safe Thursday.
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In my home town, painted advertisements on the side of brick buildings can still be seen, if very faded. They did this from the late 1800s to about 1940 in my town. Looks good Willie.
 
Patrick said:
The Colorado just showed that I had a low tire (not really helpful)
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My City Express was the same and I couldn't make it go away!
Patrick said:
An air gauge is a lot cheaper than the sensors.
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I with you!
Patrick said:
Neither vehicle has a monitor in the spare, but I check those about bi-monthly,
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Twice a year is probably enough, but it can't hurt doing it more often. I proved several years is too long!
 
migalyto said:
Same here. My yard seems like the catch-all for all neighborhood leaves.

I have no trees in the back yard since they were all removed to add the fence and only 2 small ones in the front.
Right now I have a yard full of leaves from everyone else and I mulched them all on Sunday and have to do it again
this weekend.
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I have a stand of 12 walnut trees on my fence line. Leaves galore! There is also three maples that add to the leaf litter. I don't rake though. I like that 'forest' look that my back yard has at this time of year. I wish it was like this all year.

20251113_100001.jpg
 


Good morning folks, 58 here, supposed to hit 75 and sunny today. Just taking it easy here, this place is super nice, but the coffeemaker is on it's last legs. I'll let them know when we check out. No plans for today except to let Lady C plan what she would like to do. As she said, next week is gonna be a busy one for her, cleaning the house for Thanksgiving company and Dinner Invasion. I wonder if the ladies will plan Black Friday Attack Shopping this year?
 
bnsf971 said:
A daily walk around, and monthly pressure checks, are recommended practice for casual drivers. Check first thing in the morning before driving.
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i agree, but I like to check my tires whenever I get fuel, usually twice a week, but I am no casual driver.

Bruette said:
Twice a year is probably enough, but it can't hurt doing it more often. I proved several years is too long!
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To clarify, I was referring to the spare tire.
 
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Yesterday it clouded over late morning and was overcast all day so I didn’t bother to go out to try and see the N Lights.

As the forecast at the beginning of the week showed overcast from the middle of the week with some storms at some point, I was surprised to look out at 9:30am and see bright blue sky. And it’s already 61F by then. About 30 mins later 63F. All the storms and cold expected earlier this week are out of the forecast. Party cloudy or. Ostkyvsunny and mid 60s through Sunday. Two days after that show “chance of rain” on Monday and Wednesday and only two days with a high below 60 next week. I’ll take it.

Daughter wants me to take pics of her and her friends and their dates this Saturday . It’s the girls choice Sadie Hawkins dance. Though they just call it “Sadies” and didn’t know the older full name.

I need to find my umbrellas and stands and my stash of pro AA rechargeables and figure out how it works again. Last I used them was to take train photos on the kitchen table.

It will be dark out and I thought to use my umbrellas to get indirect lighting. I’m no pro but we’ll see. I’m not charging anything. My daughter asked me after one of the moms said she’d do it for $15 a couple. She’s not a pro either.

I figure I should start to worry about it today and not wait until Saturday afternoon to try and find them and figure it out. I knew where they were before we moved from the old house.

I’ve been working on a project the last week and a half for an interview process with a consulting firm that has a new contract with a major airline in the PNW 😉. I’ve not gotten 8 hours in every day but I should have been done after a day. And I was except that I read more into the assignment than I think they expected or wanted so I’ve been trying to solve some issues that this tech we’re using make harder.

Tuesday I figured out I’d probably misread the assignment and emailed the recruiter to clarify it. She emailed me back yesterday that she’s on PTO and she’s ask for me I probably won’t be able to get an answer Until next week. So I decided to just finish the way more involved one since I had a basic working version by that time.

After a little over a week I finally came up with a solution and it works and yesterday I did a massive cleanup and fixed some minor performance bugs. I’m taking the time to add a few features that show capability and competence in some areas that they’d be interested in. I probably will be done with that today. Then I’ll resurrect one of the earlier efforts I did last week that is probably more in line with what they expected and add that so I cover both bases. It’s already basically done but needs to be cleaned up and adjusted to fit changes I made in some low level infrastructure.

The assignment was basically read data a chunk at a time from a remote server (they’re using a Pokémon data server that’s public) and allow one to continuously scroll over it and just read new chunks in the background. To manage the data behind the scenes — loading and caching. I read that to be scroll up and down and only ever have the on screen results plus some small amount off screen on both ends. So as you read in new data as the user scrolls you purge out the old data no longer inside that window.

Easy enough and I had the data loading and management part done easily. The problem is that the tech they’re using is a declarative tech (not imperative) and so you have to tell the scrolling code where to get the data and as that data disappears from the lower part as you scroll forward it readjusts and changes what you see. You need to reset it so that it matches and it’s easy on the side you add new data to to keep the current lien about the same but when you remove data earlier it messes up and no matter what you do it looks bad.

I researched blogs and stuff and they all said it was not really possible to fix the bad UX when earlier data disappeared. I also “talked” to one of the blog writers who’s an accepted expert in this tech and he said yeah it wasn’t really possible.

I solved it by keep a list of all data indexes in memory and scrolling over that index. Using each index to retrieve data from the internal data store. I purge the data from that data store and keep around 30-40 elements in memory but the list of indexes never gets updated so there is a small memory overhead for that but it solves the problem.

I need to take last weeks one that loads and adds in as we go but doesn’t purge stuff that scrolls off screen. We probably can scroll stuff off screen at the bottom and go backwards and purge. It’s the data at the front that’s hard. That will be the second submission. Most of the code will be the same.
 
Well, howdy there internet peeps and those with furnaces and AA batteries

It's Troy again.

Been grilling up a storm and watching a marketing analysis video (book markets not investing)

Here's the meatloaf. Got done about three hours early because I thought the grill temp was supposed to be 275 instead of 250.

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So it is in the oven on "Warm" until the wife wants dinner. She needs to make the cornbread she promised.

I think it's nap time.
 


I dont get insurance brokers.... they sign you up for a plan you want, and when the insurance company calls to verify, it's not the plan you thought you were signing up for. I'm retired and on medicare, but my wife is trying to find medical insurance for her health care since she doesn't work (happy homemaker) and wont be eligible for medicare for a few more years.

I spent a couple hours on the riding mower mulching the leaves.
 
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