Totally Tubular Tuesday

October 15th, 2024

That’s breakfast. What am I doing? You’ll find out in a future blog post. What I’m eating is a single egg and bacon on toast. It was as dry as a desiccant pack, and delicious!

We had a late start today and after breakfast revisited several shops to buy the stuff we should have bought yesterday. We brought three travel suitcases but we’re heading home with enough stuff to fill five! It’s mostly food, books and model kits, some of which will be blogged eventually.

Kristin had avocado on a bagel. In one word, she said it ‘slayed’. She gave the crumbs to a tiny bird so plump it looked spherical. As you may infer it’s still not too cold to be outside in the city, although the opposite is true back home. Everyone comments on her hair by the way, which is only slightly brighter than real life in the above processed pic. I helped dye the back!

Some of you will recognize the above mascot, although his ramen brand is far, far too spicy for a plain chicken ramen aficionado such as myself. They were at Bryant park handing out hot sauce packets for people braver than me (including KLS, who got one).

Aren’t those stickers cool? If you look back at my July NYC trip post you’ll see I saw others then. Whoever is putting these up on random street poles: I salute you. Also is that Jane Wiedlin in the first pic?

The hotel staff recognize us now, perhaps not surprisingly since we’ve been staying there for many years. They have renovated half the rooms and when we next stay they’ll have finished all of them. Maybe we’ll stay in an even fancier one next time?

Maritime Metropolis Monday

October 15th, 2024

We went on a cruise today, all around Manhattan Island. I didn’t even know this was possible until a few weeks ago, so I was looking forward to it quite a lot.

The cruise began on the west side at Pier 83, and took 2.5 hours to circumnavigate the island in a counterclockwise direction. There was a little mist at the start but this burned off and the weather was pleasant and sunny, and our views were good.

After rounding the bottom of Manhattan we cruised up right alongside ‘The Statue’ for a good look and photo op. There were other cruise ships scattered around as well: this is surely the big draw as far as NYC Harbour cruises go. This was the closest I’d ever been to The Statue and it was very impressive.

We cruised under many bridges – maybe a dozen – some of which were only about a foot above the top of the boat. We also went through a rail swingbridge, which carries the track that the train to and from Albany travels.

The tour including a guide who was a font of facts and figures and as a NYC resident for 40 years obviously knew the city inside out. He spoke about the city then, now and tomorrow and the great changes it had undergone since Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and of course the pandemic. Even today some of the iconic skyscrapers in the city (such as the Chrysler building) stand mostly empty with uncertain futures.

Perhaps the most interesting thing I learned was that NYC has a rail bridge that was the inspiration for a famous bridge elsewhere in the world. Here’s a photo (from wiki) of the ‘Hell Gate Bridge’, can you guess which other bridge virtually copied it:

After the cruise we had planned to go and see some of the Saint Columbus Day parade but food and shopping got in the way πŸ™‚

Sunny City Sunday

October 13th, 2024

We’re back in NYC for another birthday trip. It’s warm and sunny and unusually nice for mid October (back home it’s much colder).

The city is as lively as ever, possibly because there’s a major parade tomorrow (which we didn’t consider when we booked this trip). We just got back from Times Square and it was bonkers busy.

Today we walked over 10 miles hitting most of ‘our’ usual shops and just soaking in the city vibe. One church we passed was blessing animals today and we saw the minister blessing this police horse. There was also a child waiting in line with a little hamster in a cage. It was very cute πŸ™‚

Those are paintings for sale in the markets near Union Square. They were all massive – about as tall as me, and the choice of subjects was… unusual. We not really sure if that is Jesus in the bottom left. What do you think? And which would you buy?

The hotel costs an arm and a leg but we always love staying here and to our surprise they put us in a newly renovated room with a wonderful view. They even gifted us a bottle of champagne and a balloon for the birthday girl!

We saw police setting up barricades on 5th Avenue for what we assumed was tomorrow’s parade, but then to our surprise a different parade started! It was the Hispanic Day Parade and we watched groups of people from various Hispanic countries dancing in national dress. It was quite spectacular and tomorrow’s Columbus Day Parade now has quite a bar to reach. Will we be able to watch it tomorrow? I hope so, but we have another activity beforehand which may get in the way. Check back tomorrow to see what happens…

Tree Removal

October 8th, 2024

At the end of our driveway, right in the corner of the neighbors property, was a massive eastern white pine tree. It was planted when the house was built, making it older than Kristin and I, and had a trunk wider than me. Today it was removed.

It was an extraordinary process: four large trucks arrived, blocking our driveway and much of the street. They started by erecting this unusual cherry picker to take down some of the lower branches and to (I presume) make way for the bigger crane.

The foliage was so dense it was hard to see exactly how they dismantled it, but the crane you can see was ‘catching’ the large branches and eventually trunk sections as they were cut. The guy doing the cutting was somehow attached to the tree and not using a second crane. Maybe he climbed up? I bet he had nerves of steel.

It took most of the day – at least six hours. Most of this was taking down the top half or so, and the rest was much faster. The noise was endless and extremely loud, much of which came from the industrial wood chipper that they fed the branches into (the red machine on the right). Trucks came and went periodically, probably taking away woodchips.

The biggest noise was toward the end when they picked up and dropped the trunk pieces too big to grind – almost as long as a car – into the back of an another truck. Each drop sounded like a bomb going off, vibrated the house and scared the hell out of our cats.

But that was nothing compared to the cacophony of the robotic stump grinder:

The guy standing next to it controlled it remotely. It took quite a while – at least half an hour – for him to finish grinding the stump below ground level, and the noise was like a million wasps surrounding the house.

And then they were done! A dozen or so guys and a small fleet of trucks packed up and left. I can only imagine how much the entire operation cost.

I know the neighbor was sick of cleaning up pine needles (which were incredibly abundant last year) and concerned about branches or even the tree itself falling, but it’s a shame such a regal and aged tree is now just… gone. I’ll miss it, and I hope he plants something in its place.

Bean Counting

October 6th, 2024

I spent many hours this summer in the attic, emptying out boxes that had been sealed in some cases for decades, and disposing of lots of things that we didn’t need to keep anymore. I ended up reducing the attic storage by a factor of about 75%, which was very liberating. In a few years I’ll do another pass and likely toss out more.

The last step of this years clean-out was today, specifically taking care of this:

This is our Beanie Babies collection, purchased during the fad in the late 1990s.

A lot has been written about the Beanie Babies phenomena, but the quick history is that these little stuffed animals became popular in 1996 and very quickly it seemed everyone was collecting them. They were sold almost everywhere, created long lines and shopper hysteria when new ‘waves’ were released, and spurned an entire industry around them as people latched on to the idea they were not just toys, but investments that would one day make them rich. And then in 1999 the whole fad fell apart and by 2000 almost no one cared about them any more, and the world moved on.

We bought them for a few years, then put them in a box and forgot about them until now. Had you asked me how many we had I would have said a few dozen, so I was quite surprised to find we had 111 of the things:

It is surreal to think back on that era. People were legitimately insane for Beanie Babies (there’s at least two good documentaries about them), and in particular went crazy for the teddy bear types. I always found the bears repellant, but we somehow managed to get 9 of them:

People were selling some of the bears for hundreds of dollars in those days. Beanies were about 10% of all eBay sales during the height of the fad, and by 1998 the madness was worldwide. We never bought in to any of this, since it was abundantly obvious since with everyone buying them there wouldn’t be a sellers market in the future πŸ™‚

Some of our Beanies are unusual – including one that isn’t even an animal – but these mostly come from the end of the fad when all the normal animals had already been made.

I don’t like any of these and can’t remember ever buying them. In fact both of us were surprised by some of the ones we own that we don’t find attractive in any way. I suppose we just bought them because they were inexpensive.

That said, one of ours has a $15 price tag on it!? It’s hard to believe we ever paid that and indeed I don’t recall every buying one on the secondary market (like a toy show) so this remains a mystery.

McDonald’s got in on the action as well with Happy Meal ‘Teenie Beanies’ toys several times during the craze. We have 18 of these, from the 1996, 1998 and 1999 series. As with the full sized beanies, these were extremely popular and sought after at the time. In 1996 the first series was the most successful Happy Meal promotion McDonald’s had ever had to that point!

As you can see the McDonald’s ones (on left) are about half the size of the normal toy (in the middle). At the right is a ‘Beanie Buddy’, and no I don’t know why we own that either.

A small few of ours have ‘tag protectors’ on them to keep the red cardboard tag on good condition. But we also had a pack of dozens of protectors that we never bothered putting on, which perhaps shows how much we valued this ‘investment’! Some collectors bought elaborate storage cases or even sealed them in lucite. It was important to keep the investments in tip top condition πŸ™‚

So let’s talk money. In 1996 the suggested price of a Beanie was $5, and it seems this continued until at least 1998. We have one from 1999 with a $5.50 price tag, but that was probably just a store marking up due to demand. I think it’s reasonable therefore to estimate – at the low end – that we paid about $555 for our normal Beanies plus at least $36 more for the McDonald’s ones (Happy Meals were $2 in those days). The above photos therefore represent an ‘investment’ of about $591.

I’ll say again that some people truly thought these would make them rich one day, and such beliefs continue through the endless eBay auctions where sellers don’t understand the market died 25 years ago and never recovered.

The truth is Beanie Babies are worthless today. Every single one we have can be obtained for under $1 on eBay right now, and collections are selling for much less than $1 per Beanie. If you search you’ll find that the vast majority of auctions for these things don’t actually sell at all, since everyone has them in their attics and no one wants them! I’m sure there’s a few diehard collectors out there seeking holy grail error Beanies (and good luck to them), but it doesn’t change the fact that 99.99999% of the things now retain no value at all.

So our $591 we spent between 1996 and 1999 has now become… well maybe $50 if we successfully sold them on eBay, which is not what anyone would call an investment! But what if we’d ignored the Beanies entirely and spent our $591 back in 1999 on a true investment like the Dow Jones or Apple stock?

If we’d spent $591 on a DJIA mutual fund in December 1999 we’d have about $2458 worth of stock today.

If we’d spent $591 on APPL (Apple) stock in December 1999, we have about $171,800 in Apple stock (yes you read that correctly) today.

But we didn’t, and today we simply have worthless Beanies! We selected a ‘favourite’ each (the term is used lightly) – Legs the frog for KLS and a dubiously coloured Platypus for me – and put the remaining 16 kg of them into a different type of permanent storage:

Goodbye Beanie Babies. We’ll never forget you.