07:58 – Barbara arrived home around 19:00 yesterday evening. Colin and I celebrated by barking, wagging our tails, and doing a circle dance. It’s good to have things back to normal.
Of course, Colin will miss the Heartland marathon. While Barbara was gone, we got through the last three episodes of series five, all of series one, and the first half of series two. Colin likes to watch the horses. He also likes it when Amy encourages the horses in her sing-song voice, “Good boy!” He was particularly intent watching one episode that featured a cattle drive, with a Border Collie herding cattle. I’m sure he’d love to have been there, working the cattle himself.
Work continues on the new batches of biology and chemistry kits, along with prototypes of our next kit.
11:31 – Sorry for the service interruption. The shared server that hosts my web sites was down. Apparently, I was the first person to inform Dreamhost. A few minutes after I submitted a problem report they rebooted the server and everything appears to be working normally. We now return to our regularly-scheduled program.
Since you’re in the South, shouldn’t you and Colin have done a line dance?
Nah. We do the traditional canine circle dance. The main difference, other than the geometry, is that in line-dancing you don’t wag your tail. Well, not as much, anyway.
When I first moved into Tiny House, there were many vacant houses on Tiny Street, which is only three blocks long. After a little more than a year, every house became occupied. Now, during the last two months, two houses have become vacant: the one right next door and the one across the street. With one becoming vacant, I would say that says nothing about the economy, but with two now vacant, it has to mean something other than coincidence. One is for sale; on the other, no clue as to what is going on. A younger single mom bought that house for back taxes two years ago, and lived there with her now kindergarten-age daughter. She moved out one day when I was working away from home, so I have no idea what happened. Nor do any of the neighbors. Some guys with a truck came today and got the washer and dryer out of the house, but they were hired hands and know nothing about what has happened, and the washer and dryer were going to somebody other than the mom who lived there.
I was hoping things were looking up for a spring sale of Tiny House, but this may affect that timetable.
I’m really wondering if Tiny House is worth the effort you’re putting in, especially with the new liberal Democratic mayor.
There’s a phrase “throwing good money after bad”, that might be applicable.
I’ll be facing the same situation soon. I’ll be selling my 4 BR 1500 square foot single story house next year, and (of course) the local market is in somewhat of a slump at the moment. I want to get $550-600k so I can get a nice place in Adelaide. Hope I’ll be able to.
Are you changing employment? or retiring?
One never knows if the money spent is worth it, but one factor is sure: I will not be hanging onto it long enough for the fixes to be fully depreciated. I have not put a lot of money into it, and all of that has come out of current earnings. What I am doing is basically repairs that were ignored as my parents got older and did nothing to the property. Things like interior painting and replacing light fixtures, I am doing myself.
Biggest current fix I am facing is the plumbing vent to the roof. It has been repaired so many times (with duct tape in some cases) that the whole line needs to be replaced. Actually, the pipe for that vent makes a short horizontal run in the basement, and it has fallen under the weight of improper support as it goes up the house to the roof. So due to the slant of the horizontal run, water occasionally fills that pipe and blocks it when I shower. When that happens, sewer gas backs up the basement drains and smells up the house. Running the air-conditioning fan removes the smell, but I will never be able to sell the house with that defect.
The heating and air-conditioning works so well that I fear wherever I move next may have second-rate systems. I have fixed up the Ethernet, TV/FM, and telephone distribution networks so they work terrifically well, and I will face having to do that at the next place.
Houses here are selling for reasonable sums now, however, as the bank foreclosures and tax take-overs are now few and far between (that took about 4 years). But if I put nothing into the house, I would be lucky to sell it for a tenth of what we put it on the market in 2007. I will recover everything I put into it; I just will not make any profit at all on it. That’s alright; it is a place to live in the meantime. Just too far away from my work and kids.
Retiring. If I retire on my 55th birthday I get $20k per year less pension than if I *resign* two days before 55, be unemployed for two days then I get my lump sum and a much better pension.
I’m not adverse to working if another job comes up but I must not arrange it before my 55th birthday. Any time after that is okay. I want to leave because I no longer enjoy my job. From 1985 to 1990 I would have done it for free if I didn’t need the dough. Even being called in at 4.20 AM on Saturday morning couldn’t make me hate it. Now it’s all Cobol (the computer language of hell), filling-out-forms, doing everything by the book, etc.
I also want to live in Adelaide, where I grew up, to be near family and old friends. Adelaide is also on the coast, which I love. I may look for a job there, or I may do volunteer work. But the pension and payout is enough. Life’s too short to do a job you hate if you don’t need the moolah.
Kids! Get off my lawn! Grrr…
I remember as a kid we went through a phase where some bunch of teens would come by in the middle of the night, tie a rope to our mailbox and pull it out of the ground. My dad would replace it, it would get pulled out again. Great fun for all!
Now I’m on the receiving end, and it’s firecrackers blowing the mailbox up. Well, “firecrackers” that blow a heavy-duty metal mailbox into it’s component parts and scatter said parts over a 20-meter area. Again, I’m sure it’s great fun…for somebody.
Grumble…lawn…grumble…
Boy, the site is really, really slow today. Just now took about 2 minutes to refresh this page.
My uncle here in Tiny Town, had his mailbox,—which is the rural kind on a post out at the street,—either knocked down or pulled out so many times, that finally—working in management at a steel mill—he got a solid, round stainless steel post 6 inches in diameter, and sunk it into concrete 6 feet deep. That was about 40 years ago, and that post is as straight and new-looking as the day he placed it.
The mailbox on top of it has had to be replaced a couple times, but pranksters will never pull that post out of there again without some heavy equipment and a lot of noise.
It is a Federal offense to destroy US mail, and occasionally, one does hear of firecrackers being set off in rural mailboxes, but the perpetrators are usually caught, and even if teens, generally spend some time in jail. I cannot remember that we had any problem with mail in Berlin, where anybody can put stuff in a mailbox. Posting a sign that one does not want junk mail (businesses pay people to go through neighborhoods stuffing mailboxes) has no effect whatsoever. Bitte, keine Reklame.
http://img3.imagebanana.com/img/rih7kb/keine_Werbung.png
(translation: Please no advertising (only pornos))
Meanwhile, the effects of Sandy cleared out last night and it is sunny and just a couple degrees above freezing. We got 2 days of light, gentle rain, which would have been much more welcome during the summer of drought. Meanwhile, the jetstream is far south of us, insuring very cold weather into the foreseeable future. Hottest summer on record and now an already colder than normal fall.
Looks like I will have 1 more round of lawn mowing, as even in the near freezing temps, the rain has caused the grass to grow fairly substantially. Ground is still too wet to do that today, however.
ttgnet site speed seems ok for me. More accurately, the entire intartubes seems slow today, and ttgnet is no slower than anything else.
The thing to do about “pranksters” is teach them the error of their ways. You have to make sure you aren’t the one teaching anyone who’s pranking your mailbox. Instead, find someone like me who is willing to lurk out of site for a week and then frighten the bejesus out of them. The trick is to teach them two lessons: actions have consequences, and teenage boys aren’t the big predators they think they are. (Not to worry. The times I did that for someone, I doubt there was any permanent physical damage. One “playful youth” may have had his fertility reduced from being kicked repeatedly in the balls, but he was so stupid that he probably shouldn’t be breeding anyway.)
Arglebargle. Blasted homonyms. “lurk out of sight“. Lurking out of site would be utterly pointless.
Back in the early 90s, we had a group of three young men with a 15 foot pipe driving down the neighborhood in a pickup knocking the mailboxes down. They had the pipe extended out the passenger side window about 8 foot or so and would hit the mailboxes at 20 mph. They got my brick mailbox one weekend and it looked like an explosion hit it.
One of my neighbors sunk a pole for his mailbox about 4 foot deep into concrete and they tried to get him after a while. Tried is the operative word here. I drove into my rural subdivision one afternoon and they were lifeflighting (helicopter ambulance) the young man in the passenger seat to the ER. When the pole (it was four inch drill pipe!) hit the concreted pipe, it came out of his hands and went back into his chest, breaking his upper ribs and driving the fragments into his lungs. He did not make it.
I never heard if they did anything to the other two young men or if they were badly hurt also. I suspect they both did some time since the other young man died.
I love a story with a happy ending.
I know kids do dumb things, but does it not seem intuitively obvious that if you hold a stick or pole out the window of a moving car, it is going to be levered by whatever it hits? possibly with great force at 20mph?
Here’s another happy ending. When my dad was a teen, a friend who ran around in his group, used to hold his hand out the window and kind of touch mailboxes with his fingertips as he drove by them. He came around occasionally to visit my dad when I was a kid. He did not have a left arm.
And another one. We had some friends in Boston whose dog often stuck his head out the window of their moving car. Dog was killed by something that was flying through the air and hit him. I still see people around here who let their dogs stick their heads out the window. Too bad for those dogs they have dumb owners.
So many happy stories today, the day after All Hallows Eve…
Here in New England a common trick of homeowners who are plagued by yokels bashing their mailboxes is simply to fill it with a cinder block or some bricks at night.
But I sorta wonder how that neighbor felt after that kid died. I maybe would wanna teach ’em a lesson but not permanently.
Yeah, I’m with OFD on this… I’d feel guilty if my attempt to preserve my mailbox killed someone. Thankfully, in the UK we just have slots in our doors, so I doubt I’ll ever face that problem.
I don’t know why anyone should feel guilty about an action taken by someone else. None of us are obligated to maintain weak mailboxes for the entertainment of Darwin Awards candidates. Natural selection isn’t pretty, but it does improve the gene pool.
Because not everyone is strong enough to resist the brainwashing from the public schools. And most churches, for those who go.
Back in the Sixties someone blew up my parent’s mailbox. I think they found out who it was, not sure what happened to him. We got a new one that looked much nicer, IMHO.
Someone broke an egg over mine about 15 years back. Irritating but not hard to clean up. It was finished off when strong winds blew a tree on to it.
Lnbb wrote:
“One of my neighbors sunk a pole for his mailbox about 4 foot deep into concrete and they tried to get him after a while. Tried is the operative word here. I drove into my rural subdivision one afternoon and they were lifeflighting (helicopter ambulance) the young man in the passenger seat to the ER. When the pole (it was four inch drill pipe!) hit the concreted pipe, it came out of his hands and went back into his chest, breaking his upper ribs and driving the fragments into his lungs. He did not make it.”
It’s nice to see that there’s justice in this world, sometimes.
Years ago on a highway out of Sydney some idiots were on a bridge dropping stuff on vehicles as they passed underneath. One hit the driver of a semi trailer and he died. The dopes came back the next day while the cops were investigating. Something they said or did made the cops suspicious and an investigation showed that they were responsible. They got s0me time in jail, but not nearly enough IMHO.
eristicist said:
“I’d feel guilty if my attempt to preserve my mailbox killed someone.
Don’t feel guilty, you’re doing the world a favour. Do you think we need people like that? They’ll probably just spend a life drawing benefits.
OFD wrote:
“But I sorta wonder how that neighbor felt after that kid died. I maybe would wanna teach ‘em a lesson but not permanently.”
Permanent lessons set good examples for other idiots. I’d be more worries about being sued by an ambulance chasing lawyer.
The legal standard in English-speaking countries used to be what a “reasonable man” would have thought or done in a particular situation. In the case of these morons who drop concrete blocks off bridges onto the highways below, any reasonable man would have foreseen that that action might lead to the death of an innocent motorist. I think they should be charged with first-degree murder on that basis. There’s no question about premeditation. If it were me and they were convicted, I’d hang them, short drop, from the bridge where they committed the murder.