One year ago today: November 15, 2018, WIP
Five years ago today: November 15, 2014, NPR, radio for the unraveled.
Nine years ago today: November 15, 2010, a ramble-on post.
Random years ago today: November 15, 2006, at the doggie wig place.
We were cooped up for the cold weather most of the day. I used some of the time to review which cities are experiencing population declines, something I like to check when real estate prices are rising. I was awed a bit by how many of those cities I’ve stayed in. Bakersfield, Yakima, El Paso, etc. I’m not surprised about the Atlantic northeast, with its crime rates, high taxes, and lack of opportunity, but Yakima? The listed reason is these western places have above average crime rates, so they are not the towns I visited within the past twenty years. It says one of the most serious losers is Macon, GA. That one I believe, and I said as much going through there by sidecar just a few years ago. It was like driving through Berlin after the war.
That’s when I found this weird shaped piece of property that wraps around another property. It’s over five acres of trees, but sports a 3 bedroom mobile home. I look at it and see many of the lots in the area are also shaped funny. There is no picture. The boys and I should go out there for a peek tomorrow. I wonder what is wrong with it? I ran the numbers, and it is very doable. And less than ten miles from here, over half of it freeway. I have the down payment tucked away, but the total price is just out of reach. I don’t know, do I want to die on a Tennessee acreage? Sounds better than most of the alternatives.
Three hours later, there is your picture of the premises. Looks like a real shack, huh? That’s the porch, I think the guy built it with untreated lumber. The rest is one of those super long mobile homes, something like 84 feet., singlewide. The property has been logged, but is covered by mid-growth forest., the part I saw was mostly shrubs with isolated larger timber. That means mosquitoes and gnats, beyond that, the roof needs tarring and that veranda has to go. I wonder if it has been condemned? The frontage road is narrow. This early in the morning light traffic means at least it isn’t a shortcut.
The Reb’s concern is that this area is a tornado path. But the odd of a hit a tiny, I’ve lived half my life in such areas and I’ve never even seen a tornado. I’ve been twenty years in Florida next month and saw only the wing of a couple hurricanes. Plus, most of the newer mobile homes are higher rated than stick-frames. I’m not counter-arguing, just saying it is less of an issue for me. With today’s weather satellites, you have plenty of warning to make friends with somebody who has a root cellar. For that matter, if I can bury electrical cable in my back yard, I can dig one of those myself.
Eminent domain protest.
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Here’s a shot of the building showing the lengthy side. On the return leg, I put on NPR and it was a courtroom drama with really bad actors. I could not even tell what was being tried. It was embarrassingly bad acting with leading questions that would never be allowed in a real court. And the way the witness struggled to remember her lines, well, that was beyond humiliating. I almost expected her to blurt out that she forgot what they told her to say. Then came the station break and behold, it wasn’t some bad skit, it was the Democrat show trial, the impeachment hearings. It was that canned diplomat, now dubbed by this blog as Weird Mary Yankovitch, staging a truly awful and badly rehearsed anti-Trump testimony.
What a pathetic performance as she struggled and back-pedaled trying to give the same circular non-answers to the other side. When asked what she was doing, she said fighting corruption. How long? Three years. Could she give one single example or name of a successful anti-corruption event during that time? Prolonged silence, then she launched into this wild tale that she was busy holding a luncheon for another lady who was anti-corruption. Boo-hoo. She avoided the rest of any direct questions with this same tactic. People like Weird Mary are what Trump meant when he said “drain the swamp”.
We got back here cold and hungry. I had to stop to mail a letter, so I saw a nice 1x8” board in the 70% pile. I grabbed it and the register lady rang it up as $8.46. I said I thought the plank was 70% off. She said it is, that board normally sells for $28.70. My jaw hit the floor. I foresee the day when lumber will be sold shrink-wrapped.
Two days ago I put some minutes on my phone. This will demonstrate how pervasive the festering crime of telemarketing has become in the USA. Within 24 hours I began receiving local telemarket calls, one from an outfit pretending to be state troopers volunteering off-duty to raise money for their annual save something event. He asked for me by name, these jerk-offs are so clueless they actually think my name is Donald Duck. If I had not been in the checkout line of an up-scale pet food store, he’d have got a piece of my mind. Mr. Trump, end this scourge.
What happens to those who lose their “job”? Nobody cares any more. Just get rid of them. Why, with all the deportations, let them go pick tomatoes. I know all about people who don’t finish school. The FCC has the power to issue fines, something like $200 million so far. But no power to enforce collection, now that is an denunciation of DC politics at its worst. Turn the matter over to private collectors, they’ll get the money. And fire the whole lot of those spineless FCC goofs. All of them, top to bottom. If they complain, tell them to go get jobs as telemarketers, see how they like it.
ADDENDUM
Being that it is on or about my birthday, and this is the 52th year since I first ran away from home, I looked up the old place on the Internet. The house, which was the last one on the edge of town, is still there, but everything around it is demolished except the corner store. The nearest neighbors are two blocks away now. The row of trees I planted to try to cut down the blasting prairie blizzards have all been uprooted. The trees were on the vacant lot next door, which now is used to store pallets of roofing material.
The house has been sided with what looks like aluminum and the doors are still on the side instead of the front. That’s the house where I dug a hole in the basement and built a room for myself just to have a little privacy. It was always freezing down there in the winter, but with eight people in a tiny three bedroom, it was better than the alternative. My family were the laughing stock of that town and every town they set foot in. Not one of them amounted to a hill of beans. Neither did I, for that matter, but look at the bright side. At least I got out. I finished school, albeit ten years late, and I didn’t work my life away as a debt slave.
Yep, 50 years ago I ran away from home (for the last time). And 23 years 11months ago I retired. The blog covers what happened if I ever get it entered here. Hard times, broke times, I drove taxi and slept in abandoned cars. I worked the lumber mills and factories. But I never gave up going to school, even if it was courses that I never used. I like to tell how I was in school at some point of my life for 36 consecutive years. I didn’t give up trying to get somewhere, I was just realistic about it. I calculated what the minimum parameters I needed to live my live as if I had attained middle class status.
I think that was one of the few things that worked better than planned. I’m not rich, but I work when I feel like it. I travel most anywhere I care any time. I owe nobody and the rest you can pick up from this blog. I have my peeves and people I don’t like, but when I look at others in my demographic, the view is ugly. They are just getting near retirement. The fact is, they worked their lives for nothing, for what, a house to die in that is like a stone around their necks? A few of them got out and became successful, all with one thing in common. Supportive parents.
The others? Live nothing, love nothing, have nothing, do nothing, that’s their reward. Untraveled, uneducated, unread. A lifetime at the beck and call of the Establishment has made them bitter as hell or worse. They even quit having reunions and nobody blames them.
It’s buried in this blog somewhere, but when I say middle class status, it refers to my “millionaire equivalency formula” of my late 20s. We were told back then that you needed a million dollars to retire. I invested and it taught me one thing—that I would never have enough invested to get anywhere. But what I did notice is that even if you had the fabled million bucks, you would slowly be going broke. Put a million in the bank at 5%. You lose instantly because true inflation is more than that. So you make $50,000 per year and say, you take home $36,000 of it. That’s $3,000 per month. Very few people attain that by investing—unless they got a head start in life, in which case they still didn’t attain it.
What I did was figure out how to get the equivalent of that income. Right, if I could arrange my affairs to have an income of say, $1,500 per month, I’d be half as well off as the millionaire. I can’t give you the details but one of the smartest moves I made in my 20s was putting in an extra $19.34 per paycheck into the company pension plan. My co-workers laughed. The company matched my contribution. This meant by the time I took the buyout package, I had plowed back just under $3,500 extra, I said extra, into the retirement plan.
While that is no big deal, the next part was. I didn’t cash out when I left like everybody else. I took a chance and vested that for the next 16 years. That stretch is well-documented here. If I have anything above subsistence these days, it was what became of that $19.34 per paycheck so long ago. No jumping for joy, however. Massive inflation will soon erode that—but not before I make another move. It’s not like I can go around buying birdhouse planks at $28.70 apiece.
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