REAL WORLD

Am back in Oklahoma after a week in paradise where there is no cell signal and our television picks up one CBS station out of Cape Girardeau when the sky is clear, the Weather channel, also out of Cape and MeTV, out of Carbondale Illinois.

I returned to Oklahoma to stage the house, list it and then pack when it sold. It sold the first day I listed it.

So, I’m packing.

I think this picture is profound. I am not sticking around here today, but wanted to pipe up and say I’ve found the real world and it is teeming with deer, coyotes for my big Pyrenes dogs to chase and kill, and a guy up the road who makes the best mulberry wine I’ve tasted. And, I’ve tasted wines all over the world.

In an aside? I was in the little house on our land we fixed up for the Mennonite log home builders and now use as a temporary home with my cousin last Monday morning. She’d come to see our land and bow hunt for a deer. A car pulled into the normally gated drive… I SHOULD HAVE CLOSED AND LOCKED IT even with her there.

It was the county tax assessor, come to see when the log house was going to be inhabited, because, sadly… he couldn’t add it as a residence to the tax rolls until it was lived in. He asked, hopefully, “Have you or your husband every taken sleeping bags up there and stayed in it overnight? Cause, then, I could classify it as a temporary residence.” I just stared at him and said “No… that is what this little place is for. It may be another year before the log home is liveable.”

After he left, my cousin and I just stared at his truck, leaving, then I told her that when she left, please put the chain and lock on my gate. Good grief… our first local community “visitor” was some SOB wanting to know when he can start charging us rent on our lifetime of hard work. If my husband had been with me, the tax man might not have made it off the property.

@Ghost, they hate us for our freedoms!

The first Monday we were in our new home, I awoke (at 6:30 am) to a noise at the front door.

Nobody was there, but a little yellow sticky note was sticking to my door window.

It was a WARNING from the city about the work truck being in the driveway. Our last load wasn’t offloaded until after midnight the night before, we didn’t think a truck parked completely within our own driveway/property was some kind of issue.

It is illegal to have a company branded vehicle OF ANY SIZE, on your own private residential property in the city limits. Nah, the government isn’t actively curtailing business growth.

Turns out a city-council member lives down the block and turned us in when she saw the truck during her early morning drive to take her fat ass to the doughnut shop while they are still hot – I’m not kidding about that either.

My first instinct was to put the For Sale back up and get the freak out. The house is my hubs, and it has been 10 years and still here, so you can see who won that one.

Fascist and sociopaths. Sadly, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

“No Trespassing – Violators Will Be Considered An Imminent Threat To Personal Safety And SHOT ON SIGHT”. BC-LR to all

TE, the No Commercial Vehicles in the Driveway rule is very typical of snotty aspirational suburbs whose overriding obsession is maintaining property values. These rules are as old as the hills and back in the 50s and 60s, most of the residents of these places supported them and lobbied for them, the better to convey the impression that they were of the Upper Crust.

And you can’t appear “upper bracket” when there are too many plumbers and cab drivers and construction jobbers living in the area, can you?

Just about every invasive, stupid “quality of life” of “feel-good” rule in this country was promulgated by upper middle income snobs who feel that their ownership of a large, expensive house entitles them to dictate the terms of life for everyone around them. I mean, I can see basic rules that protect everyone’s safety and health, such as preventing your garbage dumpsters from spilling over, keeping your animals confined, and maintaining your property so it isn’t a sanitation hazard. But there are objective standards for health and safety, while most “quality of life” rules and aesthetic dictates (such as what color you will paint your house and what you can grow on your front lawn) are entirely subjective and vary greatly from one subset of the population to the next….. and do not meet minimal standards of what constitutes “provable harm”.

So the other night I’m on the shuttle bus from the airport terminal to the parking garage, it is late at night and there is only one other person of the bus with me besides the driver. The other person is attractive, well put together, middle aged woman, obviously returning from a business trip. For the entire time we were in the bus she constantly took her phone out of her opened purse to check it for messages, after seeing there were no messages she would put the phone back in her purse wait 15 or 20 seconds and pull it out to check it again, over and over again she went through this process. She was desperate to have somebody send her a message. Finally before arriving at the garage I politely asked her for her number so I could send her a message. She was taken aback that I was being forward until I explained that it was painful for me to watch a woman of her obvious class and stature being reduced to the equivalent of a 14 year old girl who was dying for somebody to text with. I was just trying to help I told her. She was not impressed, but she was a bit humiliated that I called her on her insipid actions. Social media is fucking people up I tell you.

6 minutes per month, Gabby? My trakfone costs $19.99 for 3 months service, I keep buying minutes that I don’t need just to have the service. Only once gave in to peer pressure and pulled out my phone to do some math calculations on it, just to blend in with the other guys waiting for their wives.