Sheryl, that sucks!
Scrappy, my two have similar behaviors.
As for real estate, I can't get upset about it because I am lucky enough to have bought the house I was renting (I paid a little bit over market at the time I bought it) and the Bay Area has gone nuts again. Sure I could sell mine and make a tidy profit, but then I'd have to move 3+ hours away to afford anything else. And I love Oakland. I do know someone who bought in East Palo Alto in the 1990s (when it had more homicides per capita than Oakland) and since Facebook is less than a mile away from her house, she's selling it for 6 times more than she paid for it and moving out of state to buy a house in cash. She's retiring. That's sort of what my plan is, too. Except I am a long way from retirement and my plan changes every 10 minutes.
Oh! And I meant to say, thanks for the move~ma for my folks. They are now settled in Texas safely, albeit not without some drama at the end, and the movers dropped their stuff off at their rental house yesterday. Their old house is sold, and they won't close on the new one until later this winter. Then they'll start on renovations for it, so they won't be settled settled for more than a year. But the hard part is done.
I'm really happy for them. I think both they and my sis are going to find it more of an adjustment than they'd anticipated, but after two years in the making, I think everyone involved was really ready for this to happen. And it's going to be so much better for them both in the long run. It was really the perfect time to make the move; his Parkinson's is so much improved with his new meds. What seemed like it would be a Herculean task getting them down there turned out to be just fine.
I don't want to be the responsible, dependable go-to person! I want to sit and read fic while work is dead!
And a friend posted a townhouse for sale a block away from her...for $72k. It's in Baltimore. A $275/month mortgage is nearly reason enough to move there. Damn.
Do you know what neighborhood? Regardless, you should totally move to Baltimore!!! We have beautiful weather, too, (this week).
Bob has essentially been commuting to his job in Chicago while living here since 2009. It works pretty well, mostly, once we were able to sell his condo anyway.
CB was totally quiet for the first few months we had her but it turns out she has a Very Loud bark for a dog her size. She barks at dogs walking by and people on the porch and, when she's out walking, she'll bark at other dogs. Not all other dogs, though. She really hates fluffy white dogs and she yells her fool head off at them. I hope she'd bark ferociously if someone broke into the house while we were in the bedroom at night but she sleeps pretty deeply!
Leaving only an hour late...
My cats come running to me then hide. I don't know that it is helpful.
Pumpkin is all over me in this weather. Applying eyeliner this morning was hard because she kept trying to redirect my hand for pets. She's kneading my knee right now. Loki, otoh, likes lying in the evening sunbeams upstairs in the spare and hasn't wandered downstairs since I got back from the pool(!)
Beat last night's swim time. 56.6s. This is just wild. It was fast night for me back when my paces were regularly in the 57s range. My slowest lap was 58.7. A week ago, I was just aiming for sub 59
averages.
At least I'm getting something together right now.
There was an article recently about how it's cheaper to live in Spain and commute than live in London.
That's interesting. I have cousins (second cousins, I guess, my dad's generation and I'm not exactly sure how I am related to them, honestly) who came to the US after WWII and decided pretty quickly that they'd rather live in Spain where it was cheaper. Eventually ended up in Florida overlapping the time we lived in Louisiana, which is when we actually met. Which is all entirely tangential, but I guess i have that Spain-is-an-inexpensive-place-to-live association from that and you just confirmed my bias.
Were we looking into buying a village in Spain?
OMG, I have to complain a little bit. My biggest headache today was caused by my backup making a mistake, which I do not blame her for, exactly, mistakes happen and this was an easy one to make, but it happened yesterday and if she had been just a little lazier and said to herself "-t can take care of this when she gets back tomorrow, I'm gonna leave it alone" it all would have been fine. WHY CAN'T PEOPLE BE LAZY LIKE ME?!?
