Month: December 2022

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Quote of the Day

Marjorie Taylor Green said she would have brought guns to the Capitol on January 6. She is now the face of the Republican Party. Donald Trump has unearthed and given voice to the ugliest part of America." ~ Rob Reiner

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It Looks Like We're Moving Again

We've been in this condo for two years now. It's not perfect, but it fulfills most of our needs. To be honest, we're both getting tired of the stairs and pretty much every part of the kitchen, but it's still become home. Our lease expires on January 1st, and we've been waiting for an updated rental agreement from our landlord.

Yesterday we received an email from the landlord pointing out that he had to review our last lease and the HOA rules and regulations before issuing a new agreement, because during the last set of repairs, he noticed that there was a new dog on the premises that wasn't on the lease and looked to be over the 40 lb. weight limit of the rules. (Raffi is hovering at 50 lbs.) He didn't say he wouldn't renew the lease, but if we stayed it would be taking a risk if the HOA ever got wind of the violation.

(Ben is friends with someone on the board and he asked her about it; she said they'd never gone after a resident because of a dog's weight.)

A few hours later he sent a followup email and offered us the choice of renewing the lease (increasing it about $100/month and keeping the risk of violating the HOA rules in mind), moving out at the end of January (since he'd been tardy in notifying us 30 days before the end of our current agreement), or going month-to-month until we find a new place.

This came out of left field and left us both reeling. On a whim, I reached out to our former landlord and asked her if the repairs on our old place were complete (six months ago they still weren't) and if the house had already been spoken for.

To sum up, no the repairs aren't complete, but she estimated the house would be ready by February—especially since she knew we wanted to move back. When we asked about the rent, she quoted a figure only $200 more a month than we were paying in 2020. (The figure she gave us is about $1000 less than the going rate for a three-bedroom house in Phoenix right now, and about $600 less than we're currently paying.)

Okay, we'd be losing the enclosed garage, but we'd be gaining a yard and once again living on a single floor.

We're meeting with her and her husband on Saturday to see what's been done and discuss the situation further.

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Don't Shit in the Swimming Pool

From Greg Fallis:

Okay, here's an analogy. Twitter is a swimming pool. A large pool, an Olympic-sized pool. It's privately owned, but open to the public.

People come. Some just want to splash around, some want to swim laps, some just want to hang out poolside, some want to train for a swim meet, some want to cannonball into the pool and make a big splash, some want to practice diving. It's a big pool, so even if some jackass is playing Nickleback on a bluetooth speaker instead of using headphones, you can move to the other end where it's less annoying. It's far from perfect, but you still come because it's the biggest pool around and all your friends hang out there.

The pool has a few loose rules. You break the rules, you can get your ass booted out of the pool. One of the fundamental rules: Keep Litter Out of the Pool. Nobody wants to swim in a pool that has old candy wrappers and cigarette butts floating around in it.

That's Old Twitter. New Twitter is different.

New Twitter is owned by a rich, arrogant, bone-ignorant narcissist who thought it would be fun to own his own swimming pool. To save money, he's fired the concession stand workers, the maintenance workers, and the lifeguards. He also feels some folks who've been evicted for littering were treated unfairly. He feels they contribute to the swimming pool community, that perhaps the litter makes swimming more challenging and immediately vital.

So he's re-invited them back.

Now, feeling vindicated for littering, they're gleefully shitting in the pool.

And the new owner suggests folks who are reluctant to swim in the pool now aren't really committed to swimming.

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More Strangeness From the Surface of Mars

There's just something…off…about the pictures that are coming back from the Mars rovers. I can't put my finger on it. It's definitely not that they're fake—most definitely the opposite—and that's what I find the most unnerving.

If there was once advanced life on Mars, after all these billions of years, how would we even recognize what's remains of it? If man were to disappear from the face of the Earth tomorrow, nearly all remnants of his time here would be completely erased within only a few thousand years (the Hoover dam and similar structures being the exceptions). But after millions of years? There would be no trace we were ever here.

I'm not saying that Mars has life or intelligence now, but there was plenty of time when it was hospitable for it to have arisen and then been wiped out by some incomprehensible cosmic tragedy.