Ping's Visit

Ping visited for the day yesterday. Officially, the order of business was to visit our last building that we still own to brainstorm strategy. We closed on the sale of our second building last week. He arrived by bus, and I worked the morning.

We spent some time visiting my newest acquisition. Then we walked up the block to visit our co-owned building. We raked leaves and cleared trash in the front, then raked leaves in the back lower roof as well as the upper roof. The lower roof of this building has several large trees that dump leaves on to the deck and roof every fall. It is a maintenance issue, as the leaves and branches clog the roof drain and result in a pool of water sitting on the roof (never a good idea).

After some physical labor (by our standards), we lunched at Rain, the Chinese place on Lark. We had dim sum. Then, we spent the rest of the afteroon and evening playing poker at Rivers Casino, in Schenctady. I ran into my old boss, who is retired and spends quite a bit of time in the poker room. We took a break from cards and got a drink together to catch up.

Card wise, I endured a long dry spell, but caught some decent cards towards the end and was up a pretty good amount by the end of the night. It was a long but fun day. The only down side was that I missed spending time with the family for dinner and evening. I didn't get home until quite late and the family was all in bed.

Showing a new unit

I had a tenant move out a week ago, after a 7-year stay at our Delaware Avenue duplex. This family had moved in not long after we bought the house, and was the first and only tenant in this apartment. She had three children in the Bethlehem schools, and her youngest is still enrolled in the high school. But she had declined to renew her lease this fall, and after some minor turmoil, moved out on her own accord.

I have been doing a fair amount of renovations at the apartment. Initially, I was thinking of just a minor spiff up consisting of a thorough cleaning of the bathroom, and possibly some painting touchup. But as the work got underway, the renovation scope kept increasing to the point where I am now pretty much repainting the entire interior, replacing a porch door, replacing all the door hardware, reglazing the bathtub, installing new light fixtures all around, and a minor renovation of the bathroom consisting of a new recessed medicine cabinet and a new light. It will be not an insignificant expense, but I think that this will allow me to attract the kind of tenant I am hoping for in this next chapter.

November and December are slow months for looking for a tenant, and in the week and change that I've had this unit listed, I have only had a handful of inquiries. I am resigned to holding on this unit empty until the new year if it comes to that, and not settle for a less than ideal tenant. In the years I have gotten into the landlording business, I have learned that a good tenant is absolutely crucial for success, and in the long scheme of things, having a subpar tenant that is available now is not a good idea.

Today, I had a pretty promising showing. And I have another very promising prospective tenant scheduled for a viewing next Tuesday. If I can get a signed lease (and corresponding security deposit and first month rent) this year, then I will consider this a success even if the new lease doesn't start until January 2019. The money will help to defray the cost of the renovation, but more importantly, I will have a dependable source of cash flow for this asset for the future. I am keeping some Champagne on ice in anticipation.

Dinner with family

Today we are past the halfway point in our stay in San Francisco. The seemingly endless transcontinental flight is a distant memory. Everyone is more than fully acclimated to Pacific Standard Time, the cloudless, perfect blue sky that characterizes "normal" weather in northern California.

Yayoi and I took all the girls, less Minjung to a city pool. Yuna and Juniper passed a "rigorous" swim test, consisting of three laps in the pool the short way, followed by a 1-minute treading session. the reward was a wristband awarding them privileges to access the deep portion of the pool. The primary attraction at this pool were two water slides. Yuna waited her turn in line to tumble down the twisting slide. Juniper is maybe slightly more cautious in her inclination compared to the speed loving daredevil tendencies of Yuna. But she did join Yuna on her second turn on the slide. Afterwards, we hit nearby Japantown for some crepes.

We initially had reservations at the Perennial, a new restaurant owned by Jiyoun and Simon's friends for dinner. But Jiyoun was still under the weather from an apparent stomach bug she picked up while we were visiting our friends in Pacific Grove, so we postponed the reservations and ate in.

Joining us for dinner at home was my aunt and uncle, in town for my cousin's wedding the previous week, but also for tonight, my grandfather and my uncle in San Jose was also visiting. I took on the task of preparing a meal for some fifteen people, plus a plethora of little people. I covered Jiyoun's kitchen with bacon grease as I embarked on an abbreviated version of David Chang's Chicken and Egg (oyako donburi).

I hadn't seen my grandfather in many years. I knew that he had moved in with my San Jose uncle (his eldest son) a few years ago. I was surprised that he didn't attend my cousin's wedding last week. It appeared that he was not so mobile and perhaps it was difficult logistically to attend the ceremony. He spent a long time in the bathroom, and left behind a soiled adult diaper, which my mom and aunt disposed of discretely.

My grandfather was apparently not in the mood to eat any dinner or cake, and spent the hours during dinner slumped on a couch, sleeping. He was oblivious to the energetic chaos of the little girls, his great granddaughters, playing around him the whole time. He declined to eat a thing, even dessert. Towards the end of the evening, he wanted to go home, but my uncle insisted we stay a bit longer so he could catch the ending of the NBA finals, game 1 (GSW VS CLE). My grandfather seemed to be expressing an interest in stopping by a yogurt place on the way back, but my uncle seemed to be saying that by the time they got back to San Jose, the place would be closed.

Seeing my grandfather and his state of health at the time of his youngest granddaughter's wedding made me project into the future to my own parents. Would they be healthy and able to attend Minjung's wedding? She is basically being raised by them in her early years. She is very attached to my mother and my father plays the part of the doting grandfather, basically unable to see her cry and rarely says no to anything.

We are in the process of buying a house in Delmar. We are very excited, and I was wondering is this our last house purchase? Would we retire here? It's sobering to think that maybe eventually, my own parents will need closer help, and would we want to consider relocating nearby to SF so we can be near them? Traditionally, the eldest son takes on the primary responsibility of caring for the parents in their old age. Certainly, my sister will have a great house for them to all cohabitate, as my brother in law has been laboring mightily to finish their dream house. But would their work hours and the demands of their own three children allow them to provide the care to my parents? How would I be able to afford the astronomical cost of living to be anywhere near them in SF? Currently, the real estate in SF is probably five to six times what it costs in Albany. It's hard to imagine a scenario where I could afford that.

Guerilla Gardening

When we lived in Brooklyn, we owned a tiny, 600 SF 1-BR apartment in Park Slope, with no outdoor space save an emergency staircase. This was one of those hair raisingly horrifying, metal staircases attached to the exterior of the building. We were on the fourth floor. Our building had been renovated to introduce an interior staircase that would serve as our way out in an emergency, but this relic of the pre-renovation condition remained. This is a pretty common feature in much of the older brownstones in Brooklyn.

In the warmer months, I would take advantage of this tiny plot of space for plants and vegetables. This space wasn't much bigger than 6 SF, if that. But to a New Yorker deprived of any outdoor space to call his own, this was very precious space.

Living in Delmar, we obviously have a little more space. But we still do not have any indoor space to cultivate much in the way of plant life. With the imminent arrival of Spring, I have been incessantly dreaming of what vegetables to grow once the ground thaw in earnest and all the piles of old ice and snow finally melt away. Our house suffers from a dearth of space near the windowsills, and this has been a source of much angst and brain wracking for me in recent weeks.

My solution was to seek out some unused, unclaimed window in my office building and appropriate it for some starter beds. I work in a very large office building, and I just realized there is an adjacent bay that is completely empty of occupants. It has a huge window, and there are lots of boxes being stored there, awaiting archiving.

My plan is to set up my starter seeds on the window sill, securely tucked away behind those boxes and take advantage of the daylight afforded by the big windows. Unfortunately, the location only gets direct light in the mornings, as it is close to due east. But this is still a palatable and exciting solution for me, one I am eagerly looking forward to executing next week. Pics to follow.

A response to an article on NYT about Zingerman's: http://nyti.ms/1mUtTti

Hey Harv,

Great article. Zingerman’s is an Ann Arbor institution, one of the first stops for any visitor to Ann Arbor. I went there many times during my years in Ann Arbor. And yeah, their prices are high but their quality is unparalleled and I feel good about giving my business to them (for many of the reasons the article explores in some depth).

In fact, the fireman that fought for my wallet and was instrumental in getting it back to me, I tracked down which fire house he works at and I sent him a Zingerman’s gift basket. The wallet only had like $40 in it, and the gift basket cost way more than that (like $70, with shipping), so it was a net loss to me in terms of cash. But obviously, this was not about the cash, but rather about a gesture to recognize an amazing act of selflessness in a world filled with opportunistic thieves and people all too ready to make advantage of other people’s misfortune.

I also thought about the values expressed by the founders of Zingerman’s in this article, and their approach to growing their business (rejecting the easy money of a cookie cutter franchise model, but staying true to their core values, even if it meant the foregoing of the chance to “cash out” for instant millions. The motivation to create something lasting and that has a positive impact on its employees and its neighborhood, well that’s very admirable and rare these days. Is the ultimate goal of business (or broadly, “work” to make money? Or is it to build something like Zingerman’s? Something that provides a sustainable and livable lives for its employees, creates a clearly superior product than its competitors, and is something that one can be proud of at the end of the day?

Awhile back, I sent you a Lifehacker post from the founder of Treehouse, and his awesome work routine and his business. You wondered whether that business will still be around in five years, with the dizzying change of pace in technology, whereas you knew with certainty that your old world business of owning investment real estate will most certainly still exist. I thought that this was an interesting comment because it only mattered what your ultimate goal of your work was. If your goal was to make a fortune, than the founder of Treehouse couldn’t care whether it ceased to exist next year; he will already have made millions, and will simply move onto the next startup. But if the goal is to build something that is lasting, or maybe even more ambitiously, that is lasting and also provides some “good” to its employees, users, and its neighbors (in a broad sense, whomever it may be), than Jonestree Properties may outperform Treehouse by those metrics.

Memento Mori (from an old blog entry)

In preparation for our impending parenthood, Yayoi & I recently learned CPR. The class taught CPR for adults, but mainly focused on the procedure for infants. The class was filled with other couples, with the woman often with a bulging stomach revealing their motivation for being there.

During the class, we all leaned over our own rubber infants and vigorously blew into the tiny mouths and nostrils of our make-believe babies. The scenarios laid out by our instructor were unnerving for any future parent. While she assured us that the chances of us ever having to perform CPR on anyone, baby or otherwise were very slim indeed, it would undoubtedly be every parent’s worst nightmare.

Koreans have a saying which states that giving voice to a terrible thought will make that event more likely to come true. Literally, it may be translated “The utterance becomes the seed”. I also subscribe to this school of thought and make it a habit never to discuss even hypothetical scenarios too terrible to conceive. This is also why I find it extremely annoying when my non-Korean friends will casually suggest terrible hypothetical scenarios involving me in order to make a point.

This “see no evil” attitude towards dealing with mortality presents a conundrum for Koreans when trying to prepare for these unfortunate events. Purchasing life insurance, preparing a will and other steps which acknowledge the possibility or inevitability of evil visiting our lives make me very unhappy and nervous. With a baby about to join our family, I was forced to get over my culturally inherited apprehension of addressing our mortality.

I find that it becomes a more difficult pill to swallow as one’s identity grows to encompass other people. When I was younger, my own mortality did not bother me so much other than the sadness it would cause to my parents. But as I added a wife, and now a baby, my mortality became something to fear and curse because it meant that the remainder of my identity would suffer if I were to pass away.

Helicopter Parenting in the Modern Age: When is the responsibility of the parents to step in, VS pulling back? and other thoughts about being a coach/parent of a child/athlete

Emma started soccer this spring. It is her first time playing soccer, after following Yuna to several seasons of soccer. Emma knows the drill. She has eaten oranges at half time, gets the team popsickles (an all important rite of soccer at this age), and has seen many practices and games. But this is the first year where she is herself playing, with her own cleats, shinguards, and a team shirt. I wasn’t sure how she’d do, as neither she nor Yuna has shown a particular affinity for sports thus far. Emma did far better than I expected. While she was not a star player, she seemed interested, following the action around the field, if not yet “getting in there” to mix it up with the five or six pairs of little four and five year old legs fighting for the ball. Emma is a lover, not a fighter, a very gentle soul.

There is a child on Emma’s team, a boy. From what I understand, he briefly attended Emma’s Montessori school, before there was a “mutual” understanding that it was not a good fit. But he remembers Emma. He is hyper active, rarely listening to the attempts by the coaches to run a drill or teach a group of four year old children about the fundamentals of soccer. He runs around the periphery of the soccer field, kicking the balls of the other children, or occasionally even kicking the children. He continues to mildly harass Emma, in his mind all in just good fun.

I was planning to be a coach for Emma’s team, but a mistake when signing up meant I was relegated to a garden variety parent, with no coach’s team shirt, and no official standing to intervene. I have had raucous and hyper active children before on my teams. After it was clear who they were, I always made a point of keeping a special eye on them, both to make sure they weren’t disruptive to the team, but also because discipline is an important part of team work. But unfortunately, the coaches on Emma’s team were probably fairly new to coaching (this was a pre-K team, after all). They made some mild pleas to this child to pay attention, to stop kicking other children. It was an exercise in futility.

To my dismay, the parents of this child were on the side lines, paying scant attention to their child (and oblivious of my silent pleas to step in and discipline their own child). Maybe they figured that since they have deposited their child at soccer practice, now it is the sole responsibility of the coaches to keep everyone in line. Or maybe they are familiar with his behavior, even accepting of it (boys will be boys), and allow it. The question I have is, isn’t it ultimately the parent’s responsibility to coach their own children, to discipline, to teach, and to otherwise keep in line? Does that fall to the exclusive domain of the coaches/teachers once the child is dropped off or transferred into their care?

I have been coaching Yuna for many seasons now. It is really no additional time commitment, as I am at all of Yuna’s practices and games anyway. I started coaching because the first season Yuna was playing soccer, I was really underwhelmed by her coaches. I thought the coaches were more interested in playing soccer related games rather than actually trying to teach the children how to play soccer and improve at it. They looked to me like they had little to no prior experience with competitive sports. It’s not that one must have had played sports at a high level (Division I? ) as a qualification to coach. I certainly haven’t. I didn’t even make the tennis team at my Division III college. But I have and continue to play sports competitively, where one does novel things like “keep score” and compete. So after Yuna’s first season, I volunteered to coach and have been coaching ever since.

Emma has been really enjoying her soccer practices and games. She is at this point not so interested in physical contact. She is one of the lightest and littlest children on the team, and has no appetite for mixing it up in close quarters with more rambunctious children. She hovers on the periphery, near the action but not really in it. If the ball were to squirt out, she may take a kick at it as it rolls by her, but she certainly is not athletic enough to keep pace with the movement of the ball on the field.

Yuna has really improved as a soccer player. She still has the distinction of never having scored a goal in four plus seasons of playing soccer. But she loves being out there with her team, runs hard and is a great sport. For me, I have no designs on either of my daughters playing soccer at a high level or earning an athletic scholarship to college. But I do want them to play a team sport and learn how to be on a team. I love soccer because it is the ultimate team sport. There is one ball, but all the players move in concert with the movement of the ball, and the team must play as one to be successful. The half time oranges, the post game popsickles, the lining up to shake hands with your opponents following the game, those are all important rituals that I am very glad my children are learning. In today’s society, if you can’t work on a team, you can’t work. The age of the solitary genius is over. There is little patience or place for the anti-social but brilliant artist types. No matter your chosen profession or walk of life, it is essential to learn how to work with a plethora of other people, on a team. And this is the goal with soccer.