11:20 – Several people have suggested renting/leasing the Winston house rather than selling it. I’d actually considered doing that, on the idea that I’d rather have an income-producing asset than the equivalent cash in the bank, which produces essentially no return. But I’m also fully aware of the downsides to renting: landlord hassles, damage to the property, dead-beat tenants that are essentially impossible to evict, and so on. I brought up the idea with Barbara this morning. She is not just opposed to renting/leasing, but adamantly opposed. As in “ABSOLUTELY NOT.” So we’ll sell it.
I just ordered a two-pack of those Costco LED shop lights and a pair of Adidas running shoes. The 4-foot shop lights are rated at 3700 lumens, which is about the equivalent of 2.3 100W incandescents. There are four 100W bulbs in the basement lab area right now, so two shop lights should provide a bit more light than those four incandescents. If I’m happy with the shop lights, we’ll get rid of the incandescents and install two more shop lights. That’d give us the light output of about nine 100W incandescents, but with only about 150W of power draw. Or I may just install three of the shop lights in the lab area and use the fourth one to supplement the fluorescent fixture in the garage.
Among the easter eggs I found on our last trip down to the Winston house was two bricks of .22LR ammo. It probably dates from 1978 or 1979, and at the time I probably paid $6 or $7 per brick. Call it maybe $0.014 per round. Nowadays, if you can find it in stock, it’d be $0.07 or $0.08 per round, five times what I paid. In today’s dollars that’s roughly the same amount, or perhaps even a bit more. There aren’t a lot of things that hold their value that well.