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Take a walk on the mild side.
July 2008 - Posts
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In my new house there is wall-to-wall carpeting. It is all off-white and you know it shows the dirt. It is a nice carpet but it is seven years old and it has seen some living by the people who owned the house previously. (They must have had a pet that was not overly concerned with going outside to do its business.) There are some stains and other blotchy areas. I wanted to rip it out and buy new carpet; my husband wanted to clean it. Since money is tight these days (when isn’t it?) we decided to go ahead and buy a rug cleaning machine. It is a shampoo machine, not a steam cleaner.
We have been cleaning one room at a time each week to see how it would look. It looks pretty good. The machine took out almost all the stains and the carpet really is in good shape. It was a wise, and frugal, decision to clean instead of buying new.
Each week we have to shuffle all the furniture and other stuff from room to room. The strategy of doing only one room a week is working well because the carpet can be exposed to the air for seven days so that it will be completely dry before we put the furniture back. We have only one more room to do and then we are finished. It is good to know that the machine does such a nice job; I know we will have to clean the carpeting from time to time. The rug cleaning machine is the same size as my vacuum cleaner so it doesn’t take up too much room in the closet.
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Finally I have my scooter back. It has been so long, over four weeks, that my scooter has been in the “shop” awaiting repair. All I got was excuses every time I called to ask about the progress on what was supposed to be warranty work. I called the general manager and she took charge of the situation and, in two days, I had the scooter back.
Not everything is fixed but at least now I have a working brake light. I think that the brake light being on all the time was draining the battery. They had to replace the battery too. Now, if I can get them to fix the switch on the high beam/low beam (they are backwards) that will be another triumph. The lights work but the switch is wired backwards; the low beam position on the switch makes the high beam go on, and vice versa. No big deal but it should be made right. The gas gauge doesn’t work properly either. I never know how much gas I have in the tank. They said I could bring it back at any time but I want to ride it. I didn’t buy the scooter to have it sit in the shop all the time.
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My husband predicts that the economy will keep losing ground for the foreseeable future and that the job market will dry up. According to him, with taxes going up, jobs going down, and all the outsourcing that we are doing to other countries, together with gas prices continuing to rise, we should be in for another 1930’s depression.
He’s been around a lot longer than I have and he keeps talking about the “old days”. Things, he says, were much better years ago. I guess he’s talking about gas prices (they were about twenty-five cents a gallon), the housing market, (houses sold in one or two months), and life, which was a lot simpler. People were not anywhere near as paranoid as they are now, and jobs were plentiful. He told me that when a person back in the 1950’s and 1960’s needed a job, they just picked up the newspaper, went to the job section – which was sometimes twenty pages in length – and picked the job they wanted. One phone call, maybe one resume (when you made up a resume back then, you typed a single copy on a typewriter. Today, of course, we need to produce several hundred copies just to get one job.) and you went to work the next day.
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I hope I’m not being premature, but, Yay. We finally got a contract on our house. We still have to go through all the hurdles that will follow, but at least we can see some progress. It has been seven months with people coming to see the place and then not making an offer. The housing market is the worst that it has ever been in my lifetime so I understand why we have not had any offers before now.
Now that we have an offer, I just know that we will get a lot more people calling to see the house. When it rains, it pours. This is the worst time to sell a house, but it’s a great time to buy one. Only thing is, we want to get rid of a bunch of stuff, not accumulate more. This is just bad timing on our part. A few years ago it was a seller’s market and anyone selling could get whatever price they wanted and you could sell a house in twenty-four hours. Today it’s a buyer’s market and a seller is lucky to get half the asking price in twenty-four months. It’s interesting to see all the things people are trying to sell their homes.
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Every once
in a while it is good to count our blessings, especially when things seem to be
all bad. Right now it seems that everything in our crazy society is turning
rotten. The economy gets worse every day, banks are going under, land is
becoming devalued, crime is up, and it seems to be nothing but idiots working at every store or restaurant. So I think it is a good idea to look at the positive
side of things to try to balance the dark side.
On the good side,
I am in good health, no major complaints to speak of. The worst thing I can
think of is the pollen count on some days that makes me sneeze. I have a great
job at a great company working with people that I really enjoy. I have a home
and a husband and three wonderful dogs and about twenty wonderful cats. All
these dogs and cats really make life a blessing; they are always there for me
and I don't know how I would do without them. I have my parents and my siblings
and lots of nieces and nephews that I am in contact with frequently. I have a
plan for the future and my husband and I are working toward the realization of
that overall plan. I guess when I look at the bright side, my life doesn't seem
so bad after all.
When life seems
to dip below the surface, remembering some of these good things really helps.
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All of you know
that we are trying to sell our house so we can move closer to the water. Well,
selling any house these days is a nightmare; we've tried everything we can
think of. We have listed it with a realtor as well as placing it on all of the "For Sale By Owner" websites we can find (well, only the free websites). Our realtor told my husband not to improve the house at all. He said
to just leave it as is and he would sell it when the price matched what someone
was willing to pay for it. Okay, so we followed his instructions and we are
still sitting here. Each time someone came to look at the house we tried to
find the reason why that person didn't want to buy it, and my husband has been
fixing and trimming to try to remedy some of these things. Over the course of
the last six months we have moved most of our furniture out and we have cleaned
everywhere. The place is really looking very good. It is an older house, so no
one expects it to look brand new, but for what it is, it is a great buy. The
price has been reduced below its true value, everything in the house works
well, the water heater is brand new as is the hot water piping throughout the
house. The roof is only four years old, and the house is truly in "turnkey"
condition. Someone wanting a good house can move in without doing anything;
there is nothing to fix. All buyers are welcome; all you need is your
checkbook.
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I have been buying and selling homes for 12 years, just as an average home-owner. I have searched many MLS listings and worked with quite a few different realtors. I have shopped for homes in several areas of the country. I considered myself fairly knowledgeable about the whole home buying/selling experience. Imagine my surprise when I went to a homes-for-sale website and found entries in a "Quarter Bath" field. What the heck is a quarter bath? A full bath is a toilet, a sink, and a shower and/or bathtub. (Sometimes a toilet, sink, and shower only is called a three-quarter bath.) A half bath is a toilet and a sink. So what is a quarter bath? Just a sink? That wouldn't make sense. Just a toilet? Who would have a toilet without a sink to wash their hands? I did some internet searching. Some searches returned results that said a quarter bath is just a toilet. Most people that commented on such a thing were grossed out, the same as I was. Are you supposed to spread your germs around the house until you can find a sink to wash in? Possibly a kitchen sink -- again yuck! A few other searches returned results that said a quarter bath would be just a sink, usually located outside of a full bath, such as in hotels. You have a room with a toilet, a sink, and a shower bathtub combination, and you will often have a vanity counter with sink(s) outside of the full bath. This would qualify as a 1.25 bath. Whether a quarter bath is just a toilet or just a sink, it doesn't seem practical at all.
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I have a credit card with Citibank. They have an early warning fraud alert system. That means that whenever I buy large items from places I've never bought anything from before, or if I travel somewhere and I'm charging gas and restaurants as I go, it will by flagged by the system and they will try to call me to verify these charges. If they don't reach me and if I don't call them back quickly enough (usually within a day or two), they will start denying charges on my card. This has happened often enough that I thought it was a pain. However, today I fully appreciate this service. Citibank called to ask about a $7.26 charge. That seems a very small amount to send up a red flag, but they said the charge came from somewhere in the Czech Republic. I looked over some charges from previous days and I found one I didn't recognize for $15.57. The notation on it was for a PayPal service and it, too, came from the Czech Republic. The Citibank representative closed that account immediately and will be sending me new cards along with an affidavit for me to declare which are the bogus charges for which they will remove the charges. Thank you Citibank!
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I had an interesting lunch on Saturday. I met my grandchildren (well, sort of) for the first time. This is not easy to do, having grandkids, because I haven’t even had a child. It really is easy to explain, though, because my husband has a daughter who has four kids. We have been e-mailing for some time, and sending pictures, but I had never met these people in person.
His daughter is a dance instructor and her students (including her three sons) are competing for the National Dance championships in Orlando this week. She suggested that we meet them for lunch so that we could all meet each other. We decided on a restaurant in Gainesville. The meeting went very well and we all had a good meal and a good time. The kids range in age from six to fifteen years. I talked to these kids and they made some interesting conversations. Since they all dance, music is a big part of their lives. They all play instruments. Their mother started them all on the piano when they were very young and they have branched out now to choosing different instruments. One plays the drums, another, the guitar, the third boy hasn’t chosen his instrument yet but I think he will eventually. The youngest child is still making pictures with crayons. She made three colorings for my husband and me and we have them proudly displayed on the refrigerator.
It was a long ride to get to lunch, about two hours, twenty minutes, each way, but I think it was worth it. I drove there and my husband drove on the way back home. It was nice to meet well behaved kids who were relaxed and natural; they didn’t act moody and disruptive like many teenagers do. The little one was very animated and affectionately demonstrative. It took a big load off my mind that I didn’t have to deal with unruly people.
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