Wet 'N Wild Day!

Well - I hope it's going to be as fun as I believe it is! I LOVE waterparks, especially big ones with all kinds of stuff to get all haywired out in.

The place opens at 10:00 am and doesn't close until 10:30 pm! Guaranteed a few things: won't be there at opening time and won't be there at closing. Lol. I figure a good 6 to 8 hours of it and I'll have had enough to last me a long time, really.

Totally spaced that today is a payday for Ken, one of my tenants. If nothing else, the man pays me the rent religiously. I'll be blowing a good chunk of that money today at the waterpark - the place isn't exactly cheap. Discount entrance tickets are $32 with tax; a locker is something like $12 and I'm pretty sure they'll be charging ballpark style prices of food (though I am going to encourage the boys to eat something before we leave).

Why am I blowing money right now? I'm going to have my version of a vacation, however pathetic it may be - my thoughts would have me going to Italy or London, a trip to France or some of the more exotic places (though I have to wonder how safe it is to travel in the middle east right now). I have not had a vacation in over 2 years and this year is going to be no different.

They (the so-called experts that can't seem to identify whether the sun is up or down at any given moment), at least some of them, are claiming the recession is over.
Well, friends, neighbors and folks, from my view of it - there is some recovery. I'm only talking anecdotally from the position of my employment. Last month was the best we had had in a long time. It was still dismally low, but not near as low as the 3 months running before that.

Also, housing sales here for existing houses went way up last month. Investors are picking up properties at prices they'll never see again after this recession is over. As I have said several times, if I had the money, I would be shelling out money all over the place to buy these cheap properties, fix them up and rent them out. Obviously, there are people that DO have money and doing just that. People complain that that really isn't helping anything since the properties are being sold at great loss. Well, I feel for the people that used to live there and were foreclosed upon - I really do - but at the same time, the only way a REAL recovery is going to happen is to get the glut of existing homes OFF the market so that there will begin to be a demand for new home and therefore, new home construction again.

So - maybe we're at the bottom of this? I dunno, but until new housing construction starts up again, I'm not calling it a wash. If new housing construction were to take off again, this economy would recover quickly. There are so many industries involved with supplying products for building new homes - it covers a vast amount of industry. Lumber; electrical; appliances; drywall; screws,nails,bolts, fasteners; roofing material; insulation; heating and cooling; paint; glass; doors; plumbing and waterworks (my industry); block; and then all the related expert labor needed to install all of that.

That is the only thing that irks me about that list. The "expert" labor around here comes highly from illegal aliens. Though, I have continued to read about the mass exodus of them going back to their homelands. Good riddance. Let them come over here LEGALLY or let them NOT come AT ALL.

I'll sit back and watch to see if this recession really is over - but even if it IS, it's going to be a long time before all these people that have been let go are going to find jobs again.

Now - as for KCL. I figure I have readers here that don't go to my blog over there. I wrote an entry over there yesterday bidding the place goodbye. There are some GREAT people over there, don't get me wrong. But - I read alot of crap stuff that I just can't deal with. It's all over the home page frequently. I mean, I was looking at the home page earlier and saw an avatar from a woman with very large breasts - totally exposed and a beer wedged in between them - an ode for someone named Steve (no clue who Steve is) who birthday is today. So the breasts look good, nice - freakin' post that junk on a porno site for God's sake. But - some good folks wrote comments on the bottom of that entry so now I'm weighing whether to stick around there or not. Probably - if I do - I'll just be copying and pasting posts from here over to there.

I suppose my biggest problem is that my plate is quite full right now with personal issues - which isn't anyone else's problem obviously - but I can get annoyed easily when I see stuff like that and I'm already in a not-so-great mood. I'm pretty weighted down with attempting to deal with all of this stuff going on, the latest blow being the loss of fully 2 tenants in the next week or so. I would LOVE to be able to just leave those rooms OPEN and not have anyone taking their place - but financial pressures are too great. It's fill the rooms or lose the home - losing the home is not much of an option.

The ONLY thing that has really been nice about financial junk lately is that the loan mod is approved, they are sending the paperwork and I am getting a 2 month reprieve from paying the mortgage. I had hoped to get ahead - which I will a little bit - but if I don't get those rooms filled quickly, that idea goes out the window. Mimi shorted me on the rent - albeit only $25. She gave me that check before she landed the crap on my son.

After I read and re-read her emails, I realized that she had already planned this leave and really just using my son as a scapegoat to get out of here. Well, she could have just LET ME KNOWN - AT THE TIME SHE MADE THESE PLANS - that she wanted to leave and I would have had more time to post ads and try to get someone in her place. If a person wants to leave, I'm not going to try and stand in there way and start begging them to stay - I ALWAYS make that clear: if you don't like living here, please don't hesitate to find a new place to live, I certainly won't hold it against you.

Pete's employer dropping the relocation bomb on him is far more understandable to me than a person that just doesn't want to be here, waits until what amounts to the last minute to let me know, and leaves me HANGING. By state law, I could demand a full month's rent from her - she pays bi-monthly. As it stands, I'm going to be dropping a bomb back on her: a portion of her security deposit is going to go to clean the carpets in the house where her dog has pee'd and pooped all over the place. I will have to have a service do it so that I can have a receipt for the work done in case she tries to take me to court over this issue. I don't put it past her, but - it's a place she doesn't want to go. I will countersue if I have to and demand the rest of the month's rent. As it stands, she can go without the full month's rent and I will leave it at that.

These are the things that are occupying my mind - it may stand for those that see me as being a little testy to consider the pressure I am under and why I might not be acting quite like the normal Ben. If I survive this economic disaster we call an economy at work and they don't lay me off, then I look forward to the days of getting my hours back and getting rid of at least one tenant's worth.

All of this stuff hasn't quite over-loaded me, but certainly the scale is teetering. If a day at a waterpark breaks me, then so beit. At least I'll have had some sort of fun that I haven't seen - in ages. Oh, and for me personally - after reading this jobless report - when my hours go back to a minimum of 40 per week, I'll take that as a sign on top of everything else that the recession is departing.

The day is getting late and I'm going to start getting ready to get out of here - go pick up Caleb and Kyle and start heading to the park. It's not exactly close - like a 30 plus mile drive.

Peace

ben