On Friday, I saw the sun rise…
…and set:
Both times over water, so you know it was a good day. The sunset came with a group:
I haven’t been kayaking in forever, so it was a good evening. We came for the moonrise, but clouds obscured the view. Even when you miss it, though, there’s something about paddling for home down the Detroit River at night that feels pretty great and makes up for everything.
On Saturday we went to the Detroit Golden Gloves tournament with my trainer and his wife. This bout was called a draw early on, when the guy on the right got a bloody nose:
And I include this pic for the ref’s mullet, which was amazing:
We came out into a heavy rain, which only got heavier. Our fave pizza place down the block was closed, the alternative had a one-hour wait, the second alternative was closed and by then, it was raining so hard I was worried about getting home. No way was I taking the freeway, not after seeing what happened the last time. So we headed back on surface streets, with the visibility almost nil — that’s how hard it was coming down. I couldn’t see where the deep spots were, but there was a car in front of me, so I just watched his tail lights. Of course — of course! — these people were undeterred:
They cannot be stopped. They are the cockroaches of the party scene, and will survive when every other place in town closes. I call them the Woo People, because every time you see them, the people onboard are saying WOOOO. On the water Friday night, there were the aquatic version, i.e. floating tiki huts with a small outboard motor, the most ridiculous things you ever saw, but they seem popular. There were also two larger ones, pontoon boats with free-spinning, non-functional “paddle wheels” on the back, along with flashing LED lights. Just ridiculous. As the rain continued to come down harder and harder last night, we passed one of the pedal pubs with its isenglass curtains rolled down, because cuz, there’d been a big change in the weather.
Everybody who’s spent time in the Midwest knows these storms; sometimes you have to pull off the freeway under an underpass to wait it out. They rarely last longer than a few minutes, but this one went for half an hour, easy.
When we got home, the basement was dry. As Aretha says, don’t know what I’m doing, but I must be living right.
So the plan to squeeze all the juice out of summer is going well. I just wish this rain would give us a break. Our butterfly bush is dying, and Alan says it’s from being drowned. I don’t doubt it.
A little bloggage? Sure.
J.D. Vance continues to devolve into an ever-more-horrible p.o.s. To wit:
Vance also took aim at the Democratic Party, saying that it had “become controlled by people who don’t have children.” He also claimed that politicians running the country do not have a “personal indirect stake” in improving it because they do not have children.
“And why is this just a normal fact of American life, that the leaders of our country should be people who don’t have a personal indirect stake in it via their own offspring, via their own children and grandchildren,” Vance asked, noting that he was not referring to people who are unable to have children.
Joe Biden has children. Nancy Pelosi has children. People all over the Democratic caucus have children, children, children. Vance’s principle principal sugar daddy, Peter Thiel, has no children. Fuck this guy.
Meanwhile, you think it’s bad here? This is the U.K. Do note the Trump flag in the crowd:
I can’t believe I’m tweeting this. As an ICU doctor who has given everything they have trying to save lives this makes me want to cry.
“Get their names, email them to me. At the Nuremberg trial the doctors and nurses stood trial, and they hung”. pic.twitter.com/9tZeqru1Vk
— Dr Samantha Batt-Rawden 💙 (@sbattrawden) July 24, 2021
And with that, I have to clean a bathroom and finish overhauling a closet. Happy Sunday/Monday, all.
Deborah said on July 25, 2021 at 11:31 am
Butterfly bushes do very well in Santa Fe, they must like it dry.
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LAMary said on July 25, 2021 at 11:54 am
Thanks for the Oklahoma clip. I used to have that cassette when my boys were little. On long car trips we’d sing along off key to Oh What a Beautiful Morning or Surrey With the Fringe on Top. Sometimes Oooooklahoma! They aged out of that fun stuff and would groan if I popped that cassette into the player. It was replaced by James Brown. The boys in the backseat did the horn section for I Feel Good. That worked for me.
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Connie said on July 25, 2021 at 12:38 pm
Power has been off since the sirens went off last night, branches down all over. I am sitting in my car charging my phone and enjoying the air.
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Jeff Borden said on July 25, 2021 at 12:40 pm
The climate apocalypse will get us one way or another. Drought and fires in the west. Torrential rains and floods in the Midwest. Monster storms and tornadoes in the south. And the seas keep rising, rising, rising.
And so to shitty writer and newly emerged tRumpsucker J.D. Vance, who in his best Maude Flanders voice is shrieking “What about the children?”, I say fuck off. If you and the collection of brain dead dolts now infesting the QOP are truly serious about the fate of children and grandchildren, perhaps you will start to address the calamitous climate changes or you are consigning them to a horrible life on a grieving planet. Increasingly, I find myself wishing Meemaw would’ve dropped that smug sack of shit on his head when he was a baby. Perhaps it would’ve saved us from his victim-blaming book and his nascent political career as Peter Thiel’s sock puppet.
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basset said on July 25, 2021 at 1:04 pm
I started his book and just couldn’t do it, even before he ran for office.
Nashville may be the world capital of those party wagons, downtown is infested with em both pedal and motorized. Dance floors, hot tubs, bachelorette parties squealing and carrying on, all rolling down the street and getting in the way. One example: https://biggreentractortours.com/
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jcburns said on July 25, 2021 at 1:07 pm
Pickup trucks are a plague on Canadian streets. And…in that country south of Canada too!
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Deborah said on July 25, 2021 at 1:49 pm
I do not get the huge pick-up trucks craze. There seem to be millions of them in NM, many with Texas plates. They are the bane of my existence when I’m driving, especially the ones that are jacked up and blow black exhaust, and speeding, they’re always speeding and honking. I have seen more stuff fly out of the backs of pick-ups, the last 9 years that we’ve had a presence here, and I’m sure I’ll see a lot more.
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Julie Robinson said on July 25, 2021 at 2:12 pm
Wouldn’t that be a personal direct stake, not indirect? Am I reading that wrong?
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Dexter Friend said on July 25, 2021 at 3:26 pm
Fort Wayne’s riverfront rec area on the St. Mary’s has bar boats , well patronized, floating along.
What the hell does this mean? > “Then there is security. Anyone who has recently traveled down a Canadian highway has been asked by a speeding pickup driver.”
Asked what, how? I know, someone was dictating this and not typing, but for a second it threw me off guard.
I have had pickup trucks, many of them just because I like driving them and it was easy to throw bicycles into the bed and take off for anywhere. One time at work, small-talk time on break, I mentioned to a farmer friend of mine I had just clised the deal on a sweet F-150. “Why?”, he barked, “…you goin’ into farming?” I blurted out no, I just liked them. The farmer did not understand at all. He, you see, was just too practical.
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Suzanne said on July 25, 2021 at 4:19 pm
Regarding Vance, well, white trash gonna be trash. Give him lots of education and money, but he’s still trash.
I was having a discussion last night with a friend in Indy about what a pain in the woo those pedal bars are. Woo people! WOO!
I am becoming more and more convinced that people don’t grow out of adolescence any more.
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David C said on July 25, 2021 at 4:32 pm
I love my city’s common council. They killed a proposal for pedal bars. They said our main street is too narrow, which it is, and that it would impede traffic downtown, which it would. There are plenty of other opportunities to go WOO around town without getting in everybody’s way.
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alex said on July 25, 2021 at 4:36 pm
We get a lot of use out of our Toyota truck, and practically none from our Solstice convertible, so we’re in negotiations to sell the latter. The buyer is a bit squeezed for cash but offered a newish pontoon boat with both a bimini and a hardtop and a nice Evinrude motor as part of the deal and we’re considering it as we had been wanting a better boat. Of course we’ll need our truck more than ever to haul that thing around.
I bought that truck new in 2005 and it has been the best investment ever. 262K miles on it and still going strong. No, not everyone needs a truck, but once you get used to having one it’s one of those things you wouldn’t want to be without.
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Deborah said on July 25, 2021 at 5:16 pm
When I was married to my ex we had a small pickup. I don’t remember what make or model, I rarely drove it. I had an MG then so I was used to very tiny, easy maneuvering and parking. That pickup was half the length and height they are now. Lots of kids are gonna get killed in their own driveways by those monsters.
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jcburns said on July 25, 2021 at 5:22 pm
Pontoon boats are a plague on our freeways, too.
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David C said on July 25, 2021 at 6:12 pm
The Toyota Hilux and the old Ford Rangers were good defensible pickups. The monstrosities now are good for nothing but butch points for the drivers. I worked with a woman who drove a Mazda 3. Some idiot in an F-150 sideswiped her. The pickup driver said to the cop “I’m not responsible for looking out for every little shitbox on the road”. The cop told the pickup driver that he was and wrote him a ticket. That’s their attitude. We’re supposed to look out for them. I guess because we’re suppose to be in awe or something.
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basset said on July 25, 2021 at 7:25 pm
Haven’t noticed any “truck nuts” for awhile, you remember those anatomically suggestive devices some pickup drivers used to display below their license plates. Maybe they’ve just internalized whatever message they were trying to get across.
Most days I go through “today in nn.c history” and look at what I said years ago on various topics. Finally struck me today how angry a lot of it sounds, at least at this remove. I don’t recall meaning most of it that way.
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alex said on July 25, 2021 at 7:56 pm
Looking back, it seems like what was outrageous on the part of conservatives back then would be considered downright civil and restrained today.
Well, the “Dunne Deal” will need to be rechristened and my husband wants to call it “Nauti Buoy.” I’m open to suggestions.
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Deborah said on July 25, 2021 at 8:12 pm
I admit I drive like the little old lady I am, so I’m cautious. It drives me nuts when one of those jacked up monster trucks is behind me with a driver wearing mirrored aviators honks at me for not turning right on red fast enough for them. I’ve had them roar around me nearly causing a major accident taking us all out. Toxic masculinity.
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Deborah said on July 25, 2021 at 8:16 pm
Case in point, stuff flying out of pickups https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/25/us/metal-pole-crashes-suv-windshield-trnd/index.html
Edit: ok it flew off of a trailer that was being hauled by a pickup.
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Dexter Friend said on July 25, 2021 at 11:42 pm
My Ford Ranger was THE p.o.s. of the world. Just a terrible truck. Skip to the demise: 2 days before 9-11 I drove to a White Sox game. I noticed the clear skies as I was cresting the Skyway bridge, the 9-11 perfect weather system already was here. However, my rearview mirror revealed a grayish pall trailing me. Uh-oh. My engine was disintegrating. I was almost to the game, so I went. Somehow, I made it all the way home, trailing that foul smoke. The next day I started it up and was driving it to the repair shop for a look-see. A woman driving behind me flashed her headlights, pulled up beside me and said I was now trailing a thick stream of motor oil. End of that engine, so I had another motor installed. It was junk. Engine #3 was a little better, then I junked it shortly afterwards.
Also, my older brother from Chicago drove extensive miles on freeways in a Miata. A woman in a Hyundai Santa Fe didn’t see that little car and knocked my brother into a violent high speed spin and crash. The car was totaled, no injuries, somehow. The Santa Fe driver told the cop the same thing, didn’t see that little car. Mirror was focussed too high, I reckon.
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Dexter Friend said on July 26, 2021 at 4:17 am
A friend’s wife was a sales rep for a cosmetics company, and drove a lot. One day I showed him a photo of a completely flattened car at a toll plaza on the Ohio Turnpike; this was in the days I got many newspapers every day. A 22,000 pound cold-rolled coil of steel broke loose from a flatbed trailer and crushed a car and its occupants, very gruesome. It’s a small world, and my friend said he knew all about it, as his wife was driving just three cars behind the gruesome scene.
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ROGirl said on July 26, 2021 at 5:44 am
Pickup truck drivers seem more aggressive on the road these days, especially the big Rams and F-150s. They tailgate until there’s an opening for them to blow past, leaving me in the dust. They remind me of that old Stephen Spielberg TV movie about the menacing truck that follows a guy. It doesn’t end well, as I recall.
I am very wary of big 18 wheelers and try to keep away from them as much as possible. They flop over into other lanes a lot, and I don’t want to end up under one because they don’t see my car.
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alex said on July 26, 2021 at 7:29 am
On this day in 2007, Nancy linked to a Tim Goeglein guest column unaware that it had been largely cribbed from the New York Sun.
Thank God I didn’t sign over my car title yesterday, and I felt like I was being pressured. I had looked up the Kelley Blue Book value for trade-ins but hadn’t bothered to see what the car is actually selling for, and the hits I got are all just about double the trade-in value and in some cases quite a bit more than that.
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Suzanne said on July 26, 2021 at 8:24 am
Funny about Tim G discussing John Wayne, although heaven knows what he was saying. I recently read the book Jesus and John Wayne which discusses evangelicals progression of what constitutes “Biblical manhood” from the days of fighting the commies to Promise Keepers emotionalism (“I love you man!”) to the current vision of Jesus as a gun toting tough guy.
This podcast did a 4 part series on it which is quite informative
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-holy-post/id591157388?i=1000526859717
Helps me grasp the evangelical support for a guy who displays none of the morality they claim is missing in the country.
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Bitter Scribe said on July 26, 2021 at 10:49 am
What kills me about Vance is that he’s turning himself into a completely loathsome asshole for no reason at all. He’s getting beaten like a rented mule in the Ohio Senate primary by Josh “Trump is the Rightful President” Mandel. Nothing will change that, and once the primary is over, Vance will have nowhere to go and nothing to do.
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Icarus said on July 26, 2021 at 11:23 am
Speaking of trucks…my time as a Chicagoan is ending. Our house is under contract and we are moving to Olive Branch, MS, buying our in-laws house. Thus we drive the first moving truck this weekend.
If anyone wants to see the home we are selling, here it is
https://tours.positiveimagelive.com/1864548?idx=1
Deborah, I regret I probably won’t be able to make your NNC Chicago Chapter party this fall.
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nancy said on July 26, 2021 at 11:27 am
Congratulations, I think. Why are you buying your in-laws’ house?
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Icarus said on July 26, 2021 at 11:42 am
@Nancy Indeed, not something I’m jumping for joy about.
Long story short, The In-laws are getting up there in age and have health issues (especially Faux News influenced FIL). They get to downsize from their 1.4-acre lot.
This allows us to move to a lower cost of living area, get a better school system, a more modern house, and the ability to retire a decade earlier than society expects us to.
it’s been very stressful because we had a very short time frame to sell the house because school starts sooner down there.
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Connie said on July 26, 2021 at 12:07 pm
And we have purchased my mother in law’s house and are in the midst of moving. Right now I have three brothers in law and assorted trucks and trailers loading out. Since we dont actually move until next week I think we will be here for several days with bed and suitcase. Only 40 miles away for us.
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Suzanne said on July 26, 2021 at 12:10 pm
What a lovely home, Icarus! It must be hard to leave it.
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nancy said on July 26, 2021 at 12:29 pm
I ask because I’ve noticed a spate of these lately — adults buying parental homes. Sometimes it’s because the price is right, but sometimes it’s almost like…the parents have to leave for the usual reasons, and simply can’t abide the idea of selling what they perceive as the ancestral manor. We have neighbors who’d just finished a years-long process of making their house exactly what they wanted, when her dad decided he was done dividing his time between Michigan and Florida, and begged his daughter and her husband to buy the house here. They didn’t want it, but he was so upset about it that they did it, even though it means another years-long process of fixing it up. I think he just kept cutting the price, etc.
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Scout said on July 26, 2021 at 12:46 pm
Icarus, your home is lovely. I wish you well on your new adventure.
Talk about climate change… It has rained here in Phoenix for four days straight with the highs in the low 80s. That has set all kinds of rainfall records and temp low records. We are grateful for the rain though, maybe our wildfire season will be mitigated and our water table given some relief.
For the past six weeks my Dad has been in the hospital, then in a rehab facility and now in a group home. This has been really hard on my Mom being alone now after 60 years with her best friend. It has made my spouse and I take a long look at our end of life plans. This is not easy stuff.
I read this morning that vaccinations are the highest they’ve been in two weeks. I guess now that the Republican overlords have realized they’re killing their own voters, the sheeple will be flocking to get their jabs. At this point, I don’t really care why they do it, just that they do it. Enough of the stupidity already.
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Heather said on July 26, 2021 at 12:52 pm
I’m in Montana right now, a bit outside Bozeman. It’s amazing, although noticeably hazy from the wildfires further west, sadly. We saw a moose and a baby not too far from the cabin the other night–luckily I brought my binoculars.
Nobody is wearing masks indoors here, which is a little scary. I have to admit I’ve been a little lax about it myself but we’ve been outdoors mostly. I went on two hikes within 24 hours of my arrival, including a 4-hour hike round-trip that involved going from 5500 to 7000 feet up a mountain. I think as a lifelong midwesterner I qualify for some sort of medal now?
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Deborah said on July 26, 2021 at 1:46 pm
Heather, that sounds like a wonderful experience.
We’ll, one thing got cleared up today: there is no umbrella on the roof. Our chimney/fireplace is being cleaned and they always go up on the roof to check everything out up there. So we asked the guy to look around and see if there was a crumbled umbrella up there. There was not. It must have gone pretty far afield after that strong wind.
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Deborah said on July 26, 2021 at 1:59 pm
Suzanne, that podcast series about Jesus and John Wayne is fascinating. I’m about a third of the way through part 3. I love learning the history it makes it super clear, much easier to understand how it all could have happened. I like that about Heather Cox Richardson too, she writes about the present through the perspective of the past.
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on July 26, 2021 at 2:02 pm
Ancestral manor, heckfire: my dad tried for his last couple years to get my sister and I to purchase their winter place, aka trailer, in Pharr, Texas. And he did not try to hide his hurt that we wouldn’t have it as a gift. And the house I’m currently sitting in with four very nice roofers up over my head working hard in brutal heat is not sold only because of my father-in-law’s willful intent to die in it, leaving it to his daughter, knowing we can’t force him to sell and/or move . . . so we’re just in a grim waiting game over the fall we know is coming, and the endgame that will follow with at best hospitalization, a rehab center, and a grimmer conversation at the bedside as the 30 days in rehab end and the doctor or PT person explain to him (in a bellow, with many repetitions) what his options are.
Fortunately, my work can still be done mostly through email and Zoom on my phone, as I just wrapped up with a thudding chorus of hammers giving a rhythm to my phone camera framed presentation . . . it’s maddening, but if he died tomorrow, we’d have needed to put a new roof on, so it’s just what has to be done. Call it pre-emptive executor work.
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Mark P said on July 26, 2021 at 3:19 pm
My in-laws’ house was in pretty bad shape when it sold. The buyers did a lot of renovations and doubled the price they paid. My parents’ house sold for a so-so price. I sort of vaguely considered buying it and doing some renovation but didn’t. Now it’s pretty run down. I don’t like driving by. In fact, I don’t like living in the same town.
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Sherri said on July 26, 2021 at 3:20 pm
The only thing my parents want is for my brother and I not to fight over their estate. My brother and I were summoned two years ago to go over everything and make sure we knew where everything was. They know that my brother and I will sell when they are gone, and that the house might even be torn down. (The house sits on 30 acres.)
My grandmother cut one of my uncles out of her will, for good reason, and after her death, that uncle sued his brother and sisters over the will, so that’s my mother’s main motivation. She doesn’t care if we keep a thing, as long as we don’t fight over it.
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Deborah said on July 26, 2021 at 4:42 pm
When my dad died, his wife (my step mother) was still alive and she got everything as it should have been, they had a house in FL, not the one I grew up in. The only thing that burned me up is that she immediately gave my dad’s car to her granddaughter when my sister had 3 daughters, driving age, who really could have used that car. Then when my stepmother died a decade later, I’m sure there was nothing left, and that was fine with me. I didn’t care much for her, she married my dad after I was already married and LB was 2. She was so different from my mom, it was hard for me to understand how my dad could have been attracted to such different people, but I guess that’s normal. She always encouraged my dad to eat desserts after he had been diagnosed with diabetes, which I thought was evil. He died from a stroke when he was 80, after having a series of smaller strokes for a few years before that. She had been married twice before she married my dad, and all of her husband’s died before her. She had one daughter who was married to a wealthy guy and they had 12 (!) kids. I have no idea if she married again after my dad died, probably not, she was a few years older than him. I didn’t keep in touch with her, my sister did a bit.
Icarus, nice house. I’m still hoping to host a NN.C get together in Chicago at our place this fall, we are trying to get some work done on the place which has been very hard to schedule. We finally had to go with a different guy to do the work because our normal guy has been crazy busy. The new guy comes with good recommendations but we haven’t gotten his estimate yet.
Jeff tmmo, I feel for your predicament but your descriptions of it make me giggle, sorry. It’s a gift to be able to describe unfortunate circumstances in an entertaining way. Some of you other commenters here have that gift and of course, Nancy does too.
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Julie Robinson said on July 26, 2021 at 5:52 pm
Praying to the moving gods for smooth transitions for Icarus and Connie, and I’ll be interested to know how you like or dislike your new situations. Icarus is to be congratulated for not placing large block letter signs in each room proclaiming the room’s name, as I just saw in another house. KITCHEN. BATHROOM. RICK’S ROOM. Ack.
Apparently D and I are not welcome in Florida with our evil liberal ways. A new PAC called SOSS: Save Our Sunshine State formed by a Palm Beach County resident says we are bringing “increased violence and property crime rates, inflation, higher taxes, lower standards of living, mediocre or failing schools, infringements upon guaranteed freedoms and hostility to small business owners”. Funny, our property taxes here are five times higher than they were in Indiana.
SOSS wants to scare people into registering and voting. D and I have been voting since we were 18 not because we were scared, but because it’s part of our civic responsibility. No one needed to scare us.
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Bruce Fields said on July 26, 2021 at 6:20 pm
Another possible factor: Michigan and California, for example, both cap increases to taxable value. So if you’ve owned a house for a long time, your property tax can be dramatically lower than your new neighbors’.
Normally, taxable value pops up to the market value when you sell the house, but sales within families are often an exception. So you could potentially maintain the cap for multiple generations.
I suspect that will have some unfortunate consequences.
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alex said on July 26, 2021 at 6:20 pm
I always wanted my parents’ house because it’s a cool house. Alas, it was always a money pit, and it’s even more of one now that it has suffered a few decades of benign neglect. But more than ever my dad wants me to have it, even though I’m never going to have the funds to do what really needs done there.
It’s a 1950s California modern in Indiana, which means it has large expanses of glass that will eventually lose their seals and turn cloudy. It has amazing outdoor terraces overlooking a reflecting pond that’s now quite mucky and has a leaky dam. And the whole three acres of property is overgrown with vegetation and dead ash trees. Other than that, it would be a splendid place to retire.
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Dave said on July 26, 2021 at 7:26 pm
My parents home sat empty for seven years before we were finally able to sell it. None of us wanted it, there was talk of one granddaughter buying it but all of that fell through, mostly due to lack of funds and a realization of what it was going to take to make it residence-worthy again. We didn’t get nearly what I thought we deserved, mostly because of location but now it’s been remodeled and valued at nearly three times what we sold it for.
Julie, Florida sucks in a lot of ways that you’ll find out as you live here. One party rule for twenty years is no good for any state and I think of Florida sometimes as a fiefdom. There are a lot of reprehensible politicians that go to Tallahassee and do as they please.
Icarus, forgive me but I never expected to see better school district and Mississippi in the same paragraph.
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Julie Robinson said on July 26, 2021 at 9:46 pm
Indiana has been ruled by one party pretty much since I moved there in 1979, with the exception of a few governors early on. Fort Wayne, same, just mayors from the D’s.
Story in the paper about Florida insurance companies making homeowners replace their roofs at 15 years or dropping coverage. We already went through that, right after we bought the house. It was 18 years old, passed all the inspections, but they didn’t care. It took months to find a roofer, who told us the roof was great, but too bad. We had to go on the state minimum insurance, minimum in coverage, maximum in price.
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on July 27, 2021 at 12:21 am
Somehow the Democrats seemed have a bit more of a profile in Indiana as I recall (1970s through 1989) than they’ve had in Ohio since I arrived in 1989. On both our local/county level and statewide, the Democratic Party has a remarkable gift for firing through both feet with the same bullet. Which is doubly interesting to me growing up in the northwest tip of Indiana with most of my youthful political awareness being entirely Chicago media-centric, so it was all about Cook County and the Daley Machine, and the GOP being a sort of Washington Generals to the usual primary focused electoral process. One could argue the Machine was not well served by having no competition at the polls; likewise Ohio really needs a strong Democratic Party if only to keep the ruling Republicans healthy. The complete cave-in to Householder in the last Ohio House Speaker campaign has left Statehouse Dems in even more disarray than usual — and many of us want something better for Tim Ryan than a valiant futile effort to replace Portman. It’s great having Sherrod Brown as a Senator, but if he’s paired with almost any of the GOP candidates, talk about feeling canceled out . . .
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Dexter Friend said on July 27, 2021 at 1:55 am
We married in 1977 and bought a nice two story home w/basement, which I thought I’d live in at least 25 years until retirement. Then 2 years later my FIL passed, and my invalid MIL was left needing a caretaker. Carla Lee was working so other siblings attempted to work it out, but it did not. So…Carla Lee told me we had to sell our house and move in with her mother so she could become the full-time caretaker, which she did for 8 years, lovingly. Now I am the last man standing , here in this old house. When MIL passed 33 years ago, she willed the place to Carla Lee. Honestly, repairs and replacing everything over the years was just like a house payment. A half mile away, a house like mine was levelled, shoved in, crushed, payloaded into dump trucks and carted away, all in 3 days time. As they cart me away to “The Home”, I want to stay a little and watch this place suffer the same fate. The fucking place is 101 years old and deserves a good crushing.
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Suzanne said on July 27, 2021 at 9:11 am
My mom really needs to move out of her house but she won’t. She’s got very little wrong with her health wise but is not very independent and requires a lot of attention. She doesn’t drive any more although she claims she will in the future (unlikely) and would benefit from being in a senior apartment or something but won’t budge. Our son suggested we offer to buy the house but a) it’s got a lot of property with it and we can’t afford all that and b) I don’t like the house. It’s only about 15 years old but it’s arranged oddly, has only 2 bedrooms, and the kitchen, while large enough, is also arranged oddly and isn’t easy to work in. It’s always been fine for my mom who is a lousy cook and has never really liked to cook, but it would make me crazy. Watching my parents and in-laws in their last years makes me very afraid of hitting my sunset years.
The GOP has created a monster that they can’t control:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/gop-governor-gets-booed-for-telling-truth-about-vaccine/vi-AAMAS69
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JodiP said on July 27, 2021 at 9:40 am
Icarus, what a beautiful home! I hope the move goes well.
We are getting bids for a bathroom remodel. I hope that process goes smoothly as can be expected. We are going to replace some of the original, 100+ old year pipes to the main stack, so that will add cost, but better now when things are ripped up than years down the line if something goes really bad. Contractors are insanely busy–only one of 3 have returned my call or email, but he’s coming tomorrow and did a friend’s remodel last year.
We are hoping to retire somewhere in Europe, so will eventually be selling our home. I have always wanted to remodel the kitchen. It’s functional but dated. But geez the hassle, then living in it for maybe 4 years before selling makes me think nope.
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Dave said on July 27, 2021 at 1:02 pm
Julie, I lived in Fort Wayne just short of thirty years and was regularly disgusted by Indiana and their backward ways, for a long time I thought they were stuck in the 19th century. Of course, coming from that progressive state of Ohio (trust me, I’m being silly), how could I ever think otherwise.
Get back to me in a year or two, other than smooth roads because of no potholes, I don’t find Florida all that great to live in. OTOH, I have very mixed feelings about moving away from here, as we’re doing and if it weren’t for family, I’d probably never leave.
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Bob (not Greene) said on July 27, 2021 at 1:44 pm
This photo from the Cub Creek 2 wildfire in Washington was posted to Twitter yesterday, and because it showed a line of firefighters at night I texted it to my son, who is working night shifts on that fire right now.
https://twitter.com/NWCCInfo/status/1419810035614425089
There are more then 500 people working that fire, so I was amazed his answer to me today was:
“That is our crew: I’m not in it because I was lighting the fire at that time.”
I guess they set fires to create breaks. Not sure, but they are trying to direct the wildfire north, away from towns and other buildings.
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Julie Robinson said on July 27, 2021 at 3:54 pm
Well, I’m having trouble keeping track of everyone’s comings and goings; where is it that you’re headed to, Dave? I guess I’m not sure there are any great places to live anymore, what with people and government and all. Once we get settled in here I’m sure I’ll be very happy, surrounded by my loved ones and no damn winter. I do love swimming every day and oh the sunsets have been incredible.
But the contractor has made it rough. We need both bathrooms and the kitchen redone, and I really don’t want to deal with any more like this guy.
Has anyone watched any of the Olympics? I didn’t think they should have held them, but then I relented, only to learn we apparently can’t tune in the NBC station here. (Funny it’s taken me seven years to discover this.) I guess I don’t care enough to seek alternatives.
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Deborah said on July 27, 2021 at 5:38 pm
Once my dad died in 1990, I never had any desire to ever set foot in Florida again. I did however have to make a number of trips back to Miami for business after that. One project was a collaboration with the architecture firm that designed a lot of the houses they used on Miami Vice, and another project was with Bacardi, for a headquarters building in Coral Gables. The trips I had to make there in summer were miserable but the ones during the winter were, of course, delightful.
I always enjoyed breakfasts on the beach with friends when I was a teen, sunrises were spectacular. And just from our modest neighborhood looking west up the street in North Miami, going out and watching the sunsets was a ritual, even when I was a little kid.
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Sherri said on July 27, 2021 at 8:06 pm
The joys of being a planning commissioner. Just got an email from someone who wants to speak at our meeting tomorrow night, complete with his 239 page manifesto about the evils of private companies owning multifamly housing, in particular one company, which has refused his hardship application for rent forgiveness during the pandemic.
The kicker? He doesn’t live in Redmond. He lives in unincorporated King County, with a Redmond mailing address. But, in the name of “equity”, he wants us to overthrow capitalism in the housing market. No biggie.
I’ll give him his three minutes, then suggest he contact his county council member. Fortunately, we’re low profile enough to attract relatively few nutcases like this.
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Connie said on July 28, 2021 at 2:45 pm
We were just talking about several older appliances that work that we do not want to move: A 30some year old Maytag washer that works like the day it was new, a 40some year old smallish upright freezer that needs defrosting, an 11 year old glass top electric range, works fine, 11 yr old freezer with handle held on by duct tape, works fine. Rather than offer them up to a scrapper, surely someone needs them. All of them. How do I get rid of them in a meaningful way?
Meanwhile the sewing table went for the asked $200. The card catalog on facebook marketplace got a lot of interest but no actual shoppers. I posted it on a librarian buysell page and generated a lot of excited comments and almost 300 likes, but no sales. Price reduction comes next.
New living room furniture comes tomorrow, new mattress on Saturday. All old mattresses and old couch will go out in the trash. Everything left to move will go in a couple trips in the Traverse.
We kept saying that we couldn ‘t set a final move date until we had a new mattress, so I guess it is time.
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