Category Archives: Life

The Money Pit…

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I bought a house two days after Christmas in 2007. The plan was to live there three to five years, build a little equity and then cash out and use it as a down payment on a house with a little property around it. Well, what I didn’t expect was the magical imploding workplace, a passionate desire to be almost anywhere other than Memphis, and the worst housing market since someone decided they should start keeping records on such things. That’s the short version of how I became an absentee landlord for the second time in ten years.

If you’ve been keeping up, you know all about the $500 driveway repair that bloomed into a $5000 project to repair a ruptured sewer line, and re-pouring 400 square feet of concrete. The latest turn of fate as raised the stakes on that little project. Let;s just say that the latest estimates have found their way into the low five figures… and that’s before anyone has so much as started digging. As it turns out, all 1600 square feet of concrete driveway now needs to be broken up, the sewer line trenched to a depth of 6 feet from the curb to the house (and pass a new city/county inspection), and then the giant gaping pit in the front yard has filled in so the concrete people come to lay a brand-spank-me new driveway from the garage door to the street.

If you hear an enormous sucking sound coming from the south-western tip of Tennessee, don’t worry, that’s just my house; the Money Pit, the Bane of my Existence, the Evil Soul Crushing Destroyer of Joy, also doing business as a delightful 3 bedroom, 2 bath contemporary on a well kept 1/5 of an acre that I’d burn to the ground with a smile on my lips and a song in my heart if it wouldn’t mean going to jail.

Burdens of leadership…

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There are a number of reasons I’m not likely to ever be drug kicking and screaming into a position of leadership. Aside from the fact that it just plain doesn’t interest me from anything other than an academic standpoint, I loathe putting on a jacket and tie just to sit at a desk all day, small talk and glad handing make me want to poke myself in the eye with a pointy stick, and really, the only screw ups I want to be responsible for in life are the ones I make myself. With all of that being said, should the worst ever happen and I get stuck in one of these positions, I hope that I remember the little things; like knowing how to get from Point A to Point B without six other people managing the arrangements for me, or being able to have a conversation with my contemporaries without needing hundreds of slides and a stack of memos to decide what I want to say. I’d especially want to remember that normal people tend to have interests and obligations that aren’t work related so keeping them standing around early in the morning and well after close of business should be avoided.

I’m not even going to get into how bloody obnoxious it would be to basically have no control over my own schedule. Being shuffled around from place to place and meeting to meeting with just a few notes jammed in my hand at the last minute would drive me right up to the edge of wanting to beat people with my shoe. I’m glad there are people who welcome that level of pain in the ass, but frankly I’m ecstatic that I’m not cut out to be one of them. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to stick my nose in a book about the Danish invasion of England. That’s way more interesting than a three ring binder chuck full of information about the fun things to see, do, and talk about at Fort Pignuckle, Louisiana.

Welcome to the 19th Century…

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As we prepare to celebrate Independence Day, it seems perversely fitting that million of our fellow citizens are sitting, literally, in the dark sweltering in the summer heat illuminated by the contemporary equivalent of candlelight. I mean it was good enough for the Founding Fathers, right? While I like irony as much as the next guy (maybe a little more), this should remind all of us of something we collectively never think about until it’s suddenly not working… The fact that we’re running a 21st century economy on top of 19th century infrastructure.

Overhead distribution lines probably worked well enough when all they were running was a few light bulbs in each house. When nearly every conceivable item in the modern house runs on electricity, though, thin copper cable strung on wooden poles seems like a less than ideal solution to delivering uninterrupted service to nearly every home in the country. If the way we distribute electricity isn’t hardened against falling tree limbs, I think it’s safe to assume that it would fare poorly against an actual person or group of people determined to bring the system down.

It’s probably cost prohibitive to bury every mile of every cable in the country, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give it a hard look in places where it makes sense (i.e. in areas of dense population, areas prone to severe storms, etc.). At some point, the cost of continually repairing outdated infrastructure surpasses the cost of, you know, replacing it with something better. Most people don’t drive the same car their great-grandparents bought in 1916, but we’re using the same distribution model they came up with back then. Infrastructure improvement across the board needs to be a national priority because as more people and new technology put increased demand on outdated utilities, the Great Power Outage of 2012 is probably just a preview of good times to come.

Yep, fixing the problem is going to be expensive, but just wait until your power is out for a week or two and tell me all about the cost of doing nothing.

No surprises…

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In the two and a half years that I’ve been writing here at WordPress, I’d hate to guess how many times I’ve “admitted” to being a creature of habit. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t at least once a month. Maybe that in itself has gotten to be a bit of a habit, but that’s not really the point. Because I’m a creature of habit, I like having a schedule. I like knowing that the alarm clock is going to ring at the same time every day, that lunch is going to happen at more or less the same time every morning, and that I’m going to walk out the door at more or less the same time every afternoon. When some unforeseen circumstance throws that schedule out of whack, I tend to get vicerally annoyed by it, even when it doesn’t show. I’m sure there’s some deep seated psychological reason for it, but I’ve never been curious enough to try figuring it out. Making sure things go according to plan always seemed like a better use of time to me.

Of course when you’re a simple cog in the machine, most of your schedule ends up really being decided by someone or something well beyond your own sphere of control. When that happens, there’s really not much more to to but grin and bear it no matter how much you’re seething in the inside. Not that I would ever seethe over some minor detail like that, of course. I’m a pretty simple guy to motivate. Keep me fed, watered, and on schedule and all is right with the world. Start dinking with any one of the three and I can get downright surly. I should be enjoying what’s left of this Sunday afternoon, but in the back of my mind I’m already vaguely annoyed by tomorrow’s schedule being shot to hell before I ever leave the house. Around 4:00 tomorrow afternoon, I’m going to need someone to remind me that snarky comments and senior staff rarely go well together. I should probably just consider myself lucky that this kind of blown schedule is a rarity… but I’ll leave that for the glass-half-full types. Putting things in perspective seems to make them feel better. Strangely enough, bitching about it online seems to have the same effect on me.

Observations…

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I was driving to lunch this afternoon and some jackwagon in a hybrid-crossover-semi-SUV wannabe kind of vehicle pulled out in front of me. Aside from the usual string of strongly worded invectives, when we pulled up to a stop sign I noticed he had a handicapped parking permit hanging from the rear view mirror. I only mention this because there was what I’m fairly certain was at least a several hundred dollar mountain bike mounted to the roof rack of this vehicle.

I don’t ask for much, but if you’re going to drive like a moron and haul around a mountain bike, something tells me you just might be able to walk the extra twenty feet from the parking lot to the front door. Sure, I’m working under the assumption that he wasn’t, uhh, just holding the bike for someone else, but it seems like a reasonable assumption. Look, I know the world is full of asshats, but maybe you could stick your parking pass under the visor and slightly reduce my desire to drive over you to make sure you’ve got a good reason to use it.

Thoughts on being a slum lord…

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Sometimes I think the slum lords get it right. They buy the buildings cheap, pack in the tenants, collect as much rent as possible, and let the building fall apart until its time to abandon it and move on. Landlording is easy if you don’t bother to reinvest in the property. Sink not draining? Tough. Water heater acting “funny”? Who cares. Driveway collapsing? So what. By the time someone gets around to making them fix it, the building will be too far gone to save anyway and they’ll be on to the next deal. Yeah, sometimes I think the ones who just let the place fall in on itself have the right idea. Buying the property is the easy part. It’s the maintenance that’s going to kill you in the long run.

Some day, almost anyone who’s ever owned a home ponders the thought of being a landlord. Someone else is paying you to live in your place. Sounds like a license to make money, right? Well, let me disabuse anyone out there thinking about doing it of that notion. A rental property is pretty much a black hole into which you’re going to throw a never-ending stream of money. It’s like having a boat without the perk of, you know, actually having a boat. It’s going to start with an easy sounding $500 repair to the driveway, which will morph into needing to remove half of the driveway, which then becomes digging up the a trench across driveway and replacing a section of sewer pipe, and ultimately becomes a project remove the entire driveway, trenching deep enough to meet code (since the original builder didn’t bother with that), replace the entire sewer line from the house to the street, and then lay down an entirely new driveway over the freshly fixed and sparkling new swear line. By the time it’s done, your $500 “it’ll only take a few days” repair job will turn into a month long $7000 fiasco involving two city inspections, several pieces of heavy equipment, and a squad of bonded and insured union tradesmen. And you’ll get the joy of watching it all happen from 1000 miles away and hoping that someone down there actually has half an effing clue what’s going on.

So yeah, when you’re seized by the idea of being a landlord, save yourself the time and trouble and just go to the bank, take out a couple of thousand dollars, and set it on fire right there in the parking lot. You’ll have just as much to show for your troubles.

Brain fry…

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Fifty or a hundred years ago, an average man came home from work physically exhausted and filthy. There are days I almost envy that kind of work. At the end of the shift, you can point out a stack of steel beams or twenty truckloads of coal and see that you actually did something with your day. By contrast, I got home tonight exhausted, but only from the neck up. Jumping from one thing to another, answering phone calls and questions, and occasionally making things up as I went along just plain wore me out today. If I bothered to starch my collar, though, you wouldn’t know I spent the day at work. I’m trying not to remind myself that it’s only Monday, because my brain is well and truly fried. That doesn’t bode particularly well for the rest of the week.

Still, the part of me whose grandfathers dug coal, stamped tires, and spent their lives doing hard physical labor doesn’t feel quite right complaining about how mentally draining it is to sit in front of a computer screen, answer the phone, and beg, cajole, and threaten people to get the job done is. It seems somewhat less daunting when laid against the kind of physically demanding jobs that they had. Knowing that doesn’t make my gray matter any less shot on days like this, though.

I’ve heard that some extroverts thrive on fast paced, loud, raucous environments. Unfortunately, I’m not an extrovert by nature. To make good decisions I need time to think, reflect, and process and time was the one thing in short supply today. Sure, I’ll keep making decisions, under those conditions, but they won’t be my best. I suppose they don’t always need to be. All I really need now is a nice quiet room, a good book, and possibly a dog or two and I should be back in fighting trim before the sun comes up tomorrow. How it goes after that is still way, way up in the air.

Azimuth check…

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Tomorrow I’m going to a class titled something like “Mid-Career Retirement Planning Seminar.” Aside from the less than creative naming, it took a while for what that really means to sink in to my thick skull. This coming January, I’ll have ten years on the job. Admittedly, that’s on the low side of the “mid-career” range, but it still doesn’t quite seem possible that I’ve been hanging out with Uncle Sam long enough for a decade to slip past more or less unnoticed. Apparently I have. As a reward, Uncle wants me to find out what it’s going to take to retire to something other than an old age of dining on cat food and choosing between paying my electric bill and buying my medication.

I’ve got my own theory on how to do that, of course, and a guy who makes good money to give me advice and keep an eye on my retirement nest egg, but I’m an open minded kind of guy (stop snickering). I’m open to hearing whatever brilliant ideas this bunch of contractors came up with. I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt until someone mentions Social Security being the “third leg of the retirement stool”, or working past 70 to offset potential market losses and as a hedge against accidentally living long enough to hit the century mark. Since I’m under no delusion of Social Security being anything more than a happy memory by 2040 and the prospect of dropping dead at my desk isn’t particularly appealing, I think I’ll plan for the more traditional route.

Either way, tomorrow could be anything from passingly informative to mildly amusing. That’s mostly going to depend on the performance of whoever is giving the pitch. In any case, I’ll keep my snark at the ready in case it’s needed on short notice.

June 4th…

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At just about this time last year I was standing in a house stacked literally to the ceiling with boxes, furniture, and the general ephemera of life. If I’m remembering correctly the first couple of days of June were some ridiculous combination of a sprint and a marathon. June 1st was a 900 mile drive. June 2nd was my first look at the rental house and signing the lease. On the 3rd I finally took possession of the house while the property manager was still (badly) trying to paint over a particularly hideous colored wall in the basement . On the 4th I checked in at the new job and watched as every shred of personal property I owned was hand carried into the house by a truck driver and his nephew from Arkansas. To say there was a lot going on might be a bit of an understatement. The things you can do when you’re fueled almost exclusively by coffee and adrenalin are simply amazing.

With that little trip down memory lane wrapped up, it begs the larger question – Where did the last year go? It feels like I just sat down for a minute and suddenly it’s June again. I vaguely remember a few cold days in there somewhere that must have been winter, or at least what passed for winter last year. I dimly recall raking leaves at a point that feels fairly recent, so I’m almost sure there was a fall in there somewhere, too. Honestly, though, most of it has been a blur.

Perspective is a funny thing. When I was a kid, the summer seems to stretch out forever into the distance. Now I’m half afraid I’ll wake up one morning and find snow on the ground and Christmas coming on fast. I’d love to slow up a little and take it all in, but I don’t dare take my hand off the throttle. I’m not sure I know who I am if I’m not going in three or four directions at once.

Three days…

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As the second three-day weekend in a row meanders towards a close, it occurs to me that three days is not nearly sufficient. It’s not that I have major plans or a enormous list of things to do. Everyone around here knows that nine times in ten I’m just as happy not leaving the house. The hermit tendency is strong in this one. The point is, I like I’m not on anyone’s schedule but my own (duh, who doesn’t). I like not getting sucked into meetings or repeating myself by email for the third time about something that the person on the receiving end may or may not care about. I enjoy not driving for forty minutes to go sit in a cube when I’d much rather drive 40 minutes in the opposite direction and be halfway to the beach.

I’m a year older now, but don’t seem to be any closer to really accepting the idea that I’m built for work in any traditional sense. It’s not that work sucks particularly, just that there are a million other things I’d rather be dong (again, duh, who doesn’t). Look, I’m perfectly happy to have a job that pays the bills. I recognize how incredibly fortunate I am in that respect. Even so, it’s hard to think of myself as passionate about PowerPoint, memos, and meetings. It’s one thing to do it and be good at it, it’s another thing to love it in its own right. Maybe I’ve just missed the point somewhere.

Until I’ve found some way to monitize being snarky and dispensing smartassed comments, it’s a good bet that I won’t be giving up my day job. Still, in a perfect world, it seems to me that there should be a way to sit on the deck with my nose in a book and somehow scrape up enough scratch to get by. Then again, just “getting by” has never been a strong suit for me either so I guess I’d better suck it up and get my head back in the game for the week ahead.