This one creeped me out. Some Russian's motorcycle tour of the Chernobyl area.

[link]

For financial planning, P-C, you want a fee-only financial planner [link]. They don't sell investments; they just help you figure out how to invest for a fee.

How much do they cost?

vw's brother crunched the numbers and gave me some estimates for monthly payments. They're higher than I would have liked. Oops. I don't relish the prospect of paying close to triple what I'm paying in rent.

I'm with Daisy on the creeps getting.

Is he picking up panda poop, Sparky? I guess that actual job might get boring, but so fun to mention at cocktail parties!

It's been around 5 years for me, askye. From what I recall, I was getting minimum wage plus a few dollars and hour, and management got a bit more than that.

Of course, the minimum wage hasn't gone up in a while.

It's hard to take a paycut, especially if they value yo that much. Any chance of negotiating your job into part-time, maybe you wouldn't hate it so much if you didn't do it all day every day, and thatwould give you more time for classes. And then pick up some evening and weekend hours in retail. That can give you a lot of variety, which can be satisfying, but it can also balloon into far too much work during, say, Christmas shopping season.

I think the creepiest place I've ever been is Gettysburg.

I have heard that it is very freaky to take a metal detector out to certain parts of France because the trees and fields are so riddled with bullets from WWI and WWII. Verdun, Ardennes, Somme, Passchendaele.

Did I tell you I have a weird phobia of old places/things?

I'm the Anti-Daisy in this respect. I love old stuff - old buildings, old ruins, old abandoned airplanes, old cars.

Anyone here been to Angel Island in San Francisco Bay? They have old army barracks from the Civil War era, old gun emplacements from the late 1800s, a WWII prisoner of war camp, an abandoned Nike anti-missile-missile site... I spent a whole day there, almost missed the last ferry back and I still wanted to stay a lot longer....

This one creeped me out. Some Russian's motorcycle tour of the Chernobyl area.

That kinda creeped me out, but I was fascinated by the images more than creeped out.

Our farm used to have a lot of old rusted junk farm machinery. I used to play with the machinery and pretend they were old crashed military airplanes....

There are a lot of little parks scattered throughout Europe that were once mass graves. I find that both creepy and beautiful.

Kind of like how the town of Hercules has a lot of green space because no one could build too close to the dynamite works. On the one hand, yay green space, but on the other...it's just odd.

Eta: Angel Island is one of my favoritest places. My great great grandfather was the resident mechanic (for the Navy? I don't remember who) for a while and my great-grandmother would row all the way around it on pretty much a daily basis. And I think that's where my father was processed when the immigrated.

I like old places, but I can't go into old asylums or jails or places where people (or animals) were... well, tortured. I'm happy in old churches and libraries and halls and villages, places where generations have met and talked and thought. It's nice, to feel that continuity.

Earlier today I was looking at pictures of the wreck of the USS Yorktown (a Navy carrier that was sunk at the battle of Midway.) The guy who found the Titanic (Ballard?) found it. It's in remarkably good condition for its age (except for all the torpedo damage it suffered). It has none of the weird rustcicles the Titanic has and is all in one piece. It's eerie - its anti-aircraft guns still point skyward from the last air attack it suffered....

Gettysburg is one of many places for me, some with violent histories, others not, where the ground almost thrums with the past. I feel like I if I concentrate hard enough I should be able to part the veil of time and step through. My rational mind knows that's just my history buff's imagination at work, but it's creepy-in-a-good-way for me to get that sense of communion with the dead.