Today is an exciting day for our family: Elijah is getting his first vaccine shot! We got on the list pretty quickly after it was announced but the wait times were a couple weeks everywhere I called. So three weeks from now he’ll get his second shot. Two weeks from then he’ll be fully vaccinated, and that will be the best (late) Christmas present for our whole family.
On a broader scale, it’s been over five months since my last post and the whole situation has gotten more and more frustrating. Now we’re in an argument about whether or not you can force someone to get a shot. Why is this even an argument? How did we get to a point where people are fighting against helping themselves and everyone around them by getting the shot? I pray that we quickly get to the point where science will outweigh politics, but I think we’re in for a very long haul and we might not have seen the worst of it yet both in terms of infections/deaths and in the economy.
So… woosah… I’m thankful that Elijah is able to get the vaccine now. Thank you to all the doctors, scientists, researchers, manufacturers, and government agencies that have joined forces around the globe to give us this life-saving option. Soon my family will be able to reassess the risks and figure out what things we can do that we weren’t doing before. We’ll be able to do that with much less risk of getting COVID ourselves or spreading it to the vulnerable population that we encounter.
P.S. Here are a few links I’ve found helpful lately:
This week went almost exactly as the ratings predicted for our league. All the top seeded teams won except for a spousal battle in the Scherschel household. Chelsea got her second win with authority by putting up the highest score that was 17 points higher than anything we’ve seen since week 7! I pull in the honor of closest loss this week with the frustration of Patrick Mahomes putting up a slump-busting 46 points on my bench. It’s hard to argue that I “should have won” that matchup with such a bonehead move in retrospect. But regardless, that means that Logan is now in sole possession of first place with an astounding 8-2 record! Next week’s key matchup is probably Tyler and Nick sitting in 4th and 5th respectively. We are 2/3 of the way through the season and we have to start looking at who will nab those top 4 spots for the playoffs.
Here are the power rankings. Check out Chelsea moving up to the fourth spot! Want to know who is in 8th spot in the power rankings right now? It’s our third place team: Andy. Chelsea takes on Andy this week so let’s see how that one plays out!
Logan
Tyler ▲2
Ben
Chelsea ▲3
On to the weekly awards…
This Week
This Season
All Time
Highest Team Score
Chelsea had 141.3
Andy had 167.86 (Week 6)
Luke had 202.63 (2019)
Lowest Team Score
Luke had 83.89
Andy had 60.86 (Week 9)
Andy had 41.29 (2015)
Biggest Blowout
Tyler beat Luke by 45.71
Chelsea beat Andy by 77.04 (Week 3)
Luke beat Andy by 113.02 (2010)
Closest Win
Logan beat Ben by 0.92
Was: Luke beat Nick by 1.01 (Week 9)
Tyler beat Nick by 0.01 (2018)
Longest Active Winning Streak
Logan has a 4 game winning streak
Was: Andy and Logan had 3 game winning streaks (Week 3) and Logan and Ben had 3 game winning streaks (Week 9)
Micah (2011) and Ben (2015) had 8 game winning streaks
Before we decided to order the Model Y, I spent a lot of time researching the charging options to understand what kind of work would need to be done in our garage.
Teslas come with a mobile charger which fits in a small bag. It has a standard 110v plug adapter and a 20 foot cable. On the Model Y, that’s good for about ~3 hours of range per hour. That’s not something that you can rely on for regular usage, but in a pinch, you could use it to get enough juice to make it to a regular charging station.
When we had the transfer switch installed for our generator, I had the electrician add a 220v 20 amp breaker for the table saw. That circuit will give us ~14 miles of range per hour. That’s probably the minimum I would be comfortable with, but it’s easily a workable situation. Our typical daily usage will be around 80 miles per day and we are done driving around 4pm in the afternoon. So by 10pm we would have already recovered what we used during the day. My current plan is to install the NEMA 6-20 receptacle between two of the garage doors and have a hanger there for the cord. The only downside to this plan is that it will be on the same circuit as the table saw. Ideally the Tesla would have a dedicated circuit, but for now, my plan is to disconnect the charger when I’m woodworking.
If that gets annoying, the next option is to have an electrician come out and install a subpanel. Our current panel is so full that we cannot fit another 220 breaker. The subpanel would give me room to add a 50amp line with a NEMA 14-50 receptacle. That would bump us up to 29 miles of charging per hour.
It’s tempting to do the subpanel now. 1) There are some federal and Washington state tax breaks for installing home charging equipment. 2) It opens up the possibility of some other things I want to add to our panel like a whole house surge protector and per circuit usage monitoring. 3) It would be good to have at resale time. But for now it’s a chunk of money that can wait until we have the Tesla in the garage and decide that we need it.
There’s one other home charging option and that is the Tesla Wall Connector. It’s a dedicated Tesla charger and, when connected to a 60amp circuit, it will provide 42 miles of charging to the Model Y per hour. That charger maxes out at about 48-kW. For comparison, a Tesla super charger peaks at 250-kW which results in 150 miles of range in about 15 minutes. If we somehow forget to charge up the car and don’t have enough juice to get through our day, we’re less than 3 miles from the nearest supercharger.
So for today, all I’ve done is order the NEMA 6-20 charge adapter. They have been out of stock for months but recently became available. I ordered one already to make sure I’m not stuck when the Model Y finally arrives. I will need to run some cable and add the new receptacle too but that will be a fun project as we prepare for the arrival of our new car next summer.
After 2.5 years, I’m back with another “Best of YouTube” post! How have you found anything to watch without these incredibly valuable posts? I’m definitely not claiming that these are the best videos I’ve seen since that last post, but I don’t think any of them will disappoint you.
Frank Howarth’s meticulous combination of math and woodworking resulted in an amazing wooden globe. He went into great detail about the process and the complexities of getting this all to work correctly. Wonderful! If you like this one, his followup video where he makes a stand for the globe is good as well.
The Swiss Army knife that I’ve had since I was a child has a sewing awl in it. I’ve never had any idea how to use it. If I had to do it in an emergency, I probably would have poked the awl and thread through, pulled the thread out of the awl and all the way through the hole, rethreaded the awl on the other side and poked it back through. Now if I have to do it, I’ll know there is a better way… but I probably won’t remember the details so I’ll be stuck with the same dumb approach as before.
It’s a traditional old man joke to see a flyover at a game (remember when we didn’t have parenthetical comments after talking about public events?) to say “There’s our tax dollars hard at work.” It turns out that those flyovers are actually valuable training opportunities and not just ostentatious displays of money burning.
As penance for the last 2.5 years, I will not just give you a fourth video, but I’ll give you hundreds of videos. I recently started watching the very popular Donut Media channel. I wouldn’t call myself that much of a car guy but the production value of these videos is fantastic and most of the videos interest me. They put out videos every day and they have a variety of content types. My favorite so far was a “High Low” series where they bought two identical trucks and then outfitted them with overlanding gear. One truck would get an expensive version of the item while the other truck got the budget version. You can see the whole season in this playlist or just watch the summary video. That playlist also includes a previous season where they did the same thing with 350Zs.
The highlight of our league this week was the game between Luke and Nick. Going into Monday night, Nick only had his defense left and needed about 10 points to overtake Luke. Defenses generally start with a lot of points and then lose them since part of their score is based on the number of points scored by the opposing team. With 2:47 left in the game, Luke was winning by 0.01! He went on to win by 1.01 but any time a score is that close, I wonder if a stat correction will come in and overturn the result. But as it stands now, Luke found his second win of the season. This was the second time this season that Nick has lost by less than two points.
In other league news, Andy had a very rough week, beating his previous record for season low score. That dropped him out of the tie for first place. Logan and I are alone in first and we face off next week so when the dust settles, we’ll have someone in sole possession of first place.
There were no changes to the power rankings:
Logan
Nick
Ben
Tyler
On to the weekly awards…
This Week
This Season
All Time
Highest Team Score
Tim had 121.41
Andy had 167.86 (Week 6)
Luke had 202.63 (2019)
Lowest Team Score
Andy had 60.86
Was: Andy had 68.06 (Week 4)
Andy had 41.29 (2015)
Biggest Blowout
Tim beat Andy by 60.55
Chelsea beat Andy by 77.04 (Week 3)
Luke beat Andy by 113.02 (2010)
Closest Win
Luke beat Nick by 1.01
Was: Ben beat Nick by 1.96 (Week 5)
Tyler beat Nick by 0.01 (2018)
Longest Active Winning Streak
Logan and Ben have 3 game winning streaks.
Andy and Logan had 3 game winning streaks (Week 3)
Micah (2011) and Ben (2015) had 8 game winning streaks
Longest Active Losing Streak
Chelsea has a 5 game losing streak.
Was: Luke had a 4 game losing streak (Week 4) and Chelsea had a 4 game losing streak (Week 8)
Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday! At the bottom of my incredibly long post about why we ordered a Model Y, I included the disclaimer that I own Tesla stock. One share to be specific. Buying individual stocks is a no-no for me. It’s a losing game. (If it was possible to be good at it, the game wouldn’t work.) But it felt like if we were going to own one of their cars, it would be fun to own a share of their stock. It’s a lot less dorky than buying a hat.
But as it turns out, through a lot of luck, I purchased the stock right before it went on the biggest run in the history of the stock market. (The green dot below is where I purchased.) Fortune.com did an article about how in 12 trading days, Tesla added more market cap than any other company in the history of capital markets. I bought the stock on October 15 and in the next 12 days, Tesla’s stock went up over 45%. The first jump came after they announced their Q3 earnings. Then a few days later Hertz announced that they were purchasing 100,000 Teslas for its rental fleet. That will mean Teslas make up 20% of their entire fleet. And all of those Teslas will be purchased at full price just like the rest of us. Yesterday it went back down because Elon announced that he’s selling a chunk of his stock either as some combination of freeing up capital to pay some of his taxes or to appease people who think rich people don’t pay enough.
The percentage increase isn’t a record, but Tesla was already so highly valued that this represented almost a $400 BILLION increase in the market value of their company. Tesla is now worth more than a trillion dollars making it one of 7 companies in the trillion dollar club.
For comparison, let’s look at the market value of some other car companies you might have heard of:
Ford: $77 billion
General Motors: $85 billion
Daimler: $93 billion
Fiat Chrysler: $64 billion
Toyota: $292 billion
Volkswagen: $87 billion
Tesla is at $1.15 TRILLION. That’s almost twice as much as all those other car companies combined.
Is it justified? Who knows. They keep raising prices and the order list keeps getting longer. They’re building out new factories, securing lithium deals in huge quantities to make batteries, and opening up their charging network to the world. Yes, their valuation seems very high right now, and I expect that at least some of the other car companies will eventually catch up, but they’ve got a long way to go to catch Tesla and it’s not like Tesla is resting on their laurels.
This feels like the time I walked into a casino, put $20 on red, won, and then walked out with my winnings… except I haven’t walked out yet.
(Somehow I forgot to blog about this project from December of 2020 so I’ll make up for it now…)
I often walked past our guest bedroom and thought that it was kind of a wasted room or at least a luxury. We had entire room of our house that got used maybe a week out of the year. Then COVID hit and it was clear that we weren’t even going to have house guests for even that one week of the year. We decided it was a good time to put in a murphy bed.
It’s not a cheap project though. First I had to buy a hardware kit. There are a number of similar items on the Rockler website, but I chose the Vertical Deluxe Murphy Bed Hardware Kit. I chose that one largely because it had a tension adjustment so that the spring could be tuned for the weight of our specific mattress. There was a lot of wood to buy for the project too, but since it was going to be painted, we saved some money with pine plywood and poplar for the trim.
I looked at a few designs around the web and we liked having bookcases and drawers on each side of the bed along with some extra trim and hardware on the front to disguise it a bit.
For the bed itself, I used the plans that came with the kit. I didn’t want to mess with that at all as the pivot points need to be very exact for everything to fit. For the side pieces, I mostly used some plans from a different murphy bed kit on Rockler’s site. It was a big build but nothing was too complicated. It was a bunch of boxes inside of other boxes, but I suppose most woodworking projects could be described that way.
I usually use random paint from the big box store, but this time I decided to try an water based acrylic alkyd paint from Sherwin Williams. You can read up on that kind of paint yourself, but it was supposed to give a nicer finish than a standard latex paint. The weather was too cool to paint in the garage which meant our bonus room got turned into a painting zone. I laid out drop cloths and painted as many pieces at once as I could fit. It probably would have been even nicer if I could spray it on, but it looked great even brushing it.
I had a difficult time getting the rectangle around the bed to be square (the part that stays upright.) I could hide the gap difference with the trim on the front/bottom of the bed, but it was very obvious when I put the bookshelves next to the bed. I ended up caulking the gap and voila, problem solved.
The bed and the shelves cover up an outlet so I added some recessed power strips to the bed-height shelf on each side. They have two power plugs and two USB plugs each which should be enough for people who are charging their phones at night. We’ll add a small lamp to each side as well, but we haven’t gotten around to that yet.
After painting everything and attaching the pieces to the wall so they wouldn’t tip, I moved on to the trim pieces. Everything on the face of that bed is fake. The whole bed folds down as one piece, but the trim and extra hardware pieces make it look more like cabinets and less like a murphy bed.
Elijah slept on it one night and declared it a success, but otherwise, the bed has remained folded up and we’ve been enjoying the extra space. It’s our Room of Requirement! Most often it has been used for puzzles so we can easily close the door and keep the cats away when we’re not in there.
This was a big project but I knocked it off in just a few weeks. I had a lot of vacation time to use up at the end of 2020 so this project kept me busy and made me feel like I wasn’t just wasting my vacation away.
The Jaguars make the Seahawks look good! It was fun to watch a game where it was obvious that the Seahawks would win, and it was the first time I had ever seen an onside kick returned for a touchdown. Only 10 players have done that in the last 27 years. Believe it or not, the Seahawks are not in a terrible spot looking at the NFC wildcard race. They are currently on the bad end of some potential tie-breakers, but we’ll see where the season takes them.
In our league, everyone underperformed the Yahoo estimate except Nick. And Nick did that with a last minute scratch resulting in 0 points for his wide receiver. When you see that he has the closest loss, that hurts even more. In other painful loss news, Luke finally played the team with the second lowest score of the week and still lost. Ouch. Also, be sure to check out the record for winning with the lowest score because Andy just beat his previous record!
It’s going to be a busy week on the waiver wires as there are a lot of big bye weeks and injuries leaving empty spots for next week.
We’re over halfway to our league playoffs. There are only seven weeks left of the regular season in our league. I think it’s going to be tough for Luke and Chelsea to crawl back, but it’s not impossible and they can still have fun playing the spoiler. The top four positions are up for grabs for everyone else, but Tim is starting to get into must-win territory.
Power rankings:
Logan
Nick
Ben ▲ 1
Tyler ▲ 1
On to the weekly awards…
This Week
This Season
All Time
Highest Team Score
Ben had 124.51
Andy had 167.86 (Week 6)
Luke had 202.63 (2019)
Lowest Team Score
Luke had 81.39
Andy had 68.06 (Week 4)
Andy had 41.29 (2015)
Biggest Blowout
Ben beat Tim by 22.93
Chelsea beat Andy by 77.04 (Week 3)
Luke beat Andy by 113.02 (2010)
Closest Win
Logan beat Nick by 2.66
Ben beat Nick by 1.96 (Week 5)
Tyler beat Nick by 0.01 (2018)
Longest Active Winning Streak
Logan and Ben have 2 game winning streaks
Andy and Logan had 3 game winning streaks (Week 3)
Micah (2011) and Ben (2015) had 8 game winning streaks
Welcome to Tesla Tuesday! We’ll see how long the series last but there are a few things that might be interesting to share so I’ll put them up on Tuesdays.
Last Tuesday was the very long post about our rationale for ordering a Model Y. One thing that wasn’t in there was any mention of federal tax incentives. D.C. has been kicking around so many different options for most of this calendar year, that we made our purchase assuming that there won’t be any savings when we take delivery. Teslas don’t qualify for any of the current federal tax credits because Tesla has sold too many vehicles. The only thing we get here in Washington state is no sales tax on the labor for installing chargers in our homes.
Some of the variables in the proposals are caps on the MSRP of the vehicle, caps on the salary of the purchaser, whether or not unions were involved in the assembly of the vehicle, how much of it is made in America, how many EVs the company has sold previously, and differences in how the money is given back (tax credit, point of sale, etc.) These things change dramatically with every iteration so I don’t get too invested in any of them, but the current bill would give us between $7,500 or $10,000 back as a tax credit. It’s notable that this is currently worded as a non-refundable tax credit which means that if your tax bill is less than the credit, you don’t get the difference back in cash.
This whole thing is obviously fraught with politics. Plenty of union lobbyists are working to keep Tesla from getting any benefit. Additionally, each side of the aisle has their own views on government spending combined with thoughts about whether an incentive like this actually drives EV adoption and whether or not that’s good for the environment and/or for our citizens. I have my own thoughts about how the government takes my money and uses it, but whether I would personally vote for it or not, you can bet that if they’re handing out money, I will be taking advantage of it. Until then, I’m not holding my breath and I’m prepared to pay the number on the screen when we clicked Order.
After seven weeks of the season, Logan, Andy and I are all tied at the top with 5-2 records. Nick Tyler and Tim aren’t far behind, but Luke and Chelsea are really going to have to pour on the coals to make a run for it.
There weren’t really any close games in our league this week. Logan came back to beat Luke on Monday night but he ended up winning by 19 points. I knocked off first place Andy (even though Mahomes gave me less than 8 points), Tyler beat Tim and Nick beat Chelsea.
Power rankings:
Logan ▲1
Nick ▲ 3
Luke ▼ 2
Ben
On to the weekly awards, where Luke picks up the “Highest losing score” again. The old record for the toughest season schedule was Tyler in 2018 where his opponents scored an average of 133.22. Luke’s current season opponents are coming in at a whopping 146.35!
This Week
This Season
All Time
Highest Team Score
Nick had 150.67
Andy had 167.86 (Week 6)
Luke had 202.63 (2019)
Lowest Team Score
Andy had 86.84
Andy had 68.06 (Week 4)
Andy had 41.29 (2015)
Biggest Blowout
Nick beat Chelsea by 46.66.
Chelsea beat Andy by 77.04 (Week 3)
Luke beat Andy by 113.02 (2010)
Closest Win
Logan beat Luke by 19.37
Ben beat Nick by 1.96 (Week 5)
Tyler beat Nick by 0.01 (2018)
Longest Active Winning Streak
Nick and Tyler have 2 game winning streaks
Andy and Logan had 3 game winning streaks (Week 3)
Micah (2011) and Ben (2015) had 8 game winning streaks
