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a serious ongoing financial failure
Sunday, December 22 2024
This morning Gretchen couldn't really participate in our usual weekend morning ritual because Ken & Laura, our neighbors from Lorenz Road, would be walking their dog Rosie with Gretchen and our dogs (yes, including Neville). It was a brutally cold morning, but even if it wasn't I probably wouldn't've joined them. Instead I stayed back at the house feeding the woodstove until our house became reasonably comfortable inside. Towards the end of their walk, I started tracking Charlotte. I saw her spending a lot of time near Georges' farm at the end of the Farm Road, so I figured they were all chatting with Georges, which later turned out to have been the case.
Eventually Charlotte, Gretchen, Laura, and Neville got back to our house. Rosie, who was traumatized by a pit bull a month or two ago in Brooklyn, has been occasionally mean towards other dogs since then, and she'd been mean to Charlotte today. So Ken drove her home before he could join us. Meanwhile Laura was telling me about an unpleasant alcoholic who had just inherited land next to their place. He apparently has big plans to develop it, but, from the sound of things, he didn't sound like the kind of guy who successfully brings projects to fruition. But he also didn't sound like anyone's idea of a good neighbor.
Gretchen had made a salad and that delicious asparagus & orzo soup she'd made the other day, and that was what we had for lunch. Topics discussed during that meal included our real estate empire and its occasional headaches.
Our entertaining came to an end when Gretchen had to do a landlord-related activity: showing the 1L apartment at the our Downs Street rental property. Gretchen had recently managed to collect the back rent from the tenant there and then, once that was in the bank, gave her notice that she was to vacate the premises by February 1st. She'd then relented slightly and said the tenant could stay an additional month if she paid her January rent on time. This is the kind of hard-ass one has to be with some tenants, particularly the kind who like to play games like ignoring communications and ghosting their landlord. Gretchen had new prospective tenants referred to her by Carrie, our former friend who is now back to being friends once more. That showing went well, and by the end of the day the lease had been signed. Hopefully we won't have any trouble with the problematic existing tenant vacating the property in a timely manner.
I should point out here that, when it comes to allocating funds, paying for the roof over your head is the absolutely most critical use of funds. After that, food and utilities are a close second and third. Transportation is next, and everything else lies below those. To not pay your rent in a timely fashion demonstrates disordered priorities. I've been pretty marginal at various times in my life, but no matter how broke I've been, I always managed to have the money to pay rent. We should've known there was something amiss with the tenant in 1L when we saw her driving a late-model Lexus. Anyone who is renting their home while driving an expensive car is living out a serious ongoing financial failure, and constitute a threat to anyone having any financial relationship to them.
This evening I made several passes over my SolArk Co-pilot code, hopefully successfully integrating new features from the ESP8266 Remote code (though I won't know until I can test it at the cabin). I'd been unable to obtain the voltage levels from the SolArk's two solar strings in digital form, so I also added provisions to support two INA219s so I can measure the analog values from the solar strings directly.
When I checked Wunderground.com for the outside temperatures before going to sleep tonight, I found that it was -4 Fahrenheit in Gloversville, 2 Fahrenheit in Hurley, and, according to interpolated weather data for the cabin, -7 Fahrenheit there. (My only working weather sensor there right now is in the cabin upstairs, where temperatures are in the low 20s.)
Today I made a few slight edits to the painting of Charlotte I'd started yesterday.
Click to enlarge.
A reminder of how it looked yesterday.
Click to enlarge.
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