My Friday

Hmmm, it just dawned on me that I still have 3 full days left of this time off from work. I will not be going back until Tuesday. Very nice.

I would address the waterpark first, but my amazement at the rift that I started - quite unintentionally I might add - on all sorts of blogs on KCL got my attention.

Let me say here for the record: I did NOT go all over KCL and start trash talking the place. I have NOT written to everyone I know in PM's about my disgust for it. I ONLY wrote a SMALL blip about my departure from the site, those that found out about it and talked trash about me - had to come to MY journal to find out what I said, go to their or other journals, write the trash and be done with it.

But - my feelings about KCL aren't nearly that intense. I don't HATE the place, I just don't like a good deal of what I am reading over there. Don't go to this blog, don't go to that blog. Whatever. People read into something I didn't say, made HUGE assumptions and flew with it in assaulting my character.

Big deal. I'm 45 years old, I've been around the block a dozen times ten times, been trash talked for years as president of a homeowner's association and as a prominent board member on a Little League. The people that do the trash talking - you probably don't even know who they are, they don't do it to your face but always behind your back, and you end up hearing about it from someone else who was there.

If you have something to say about me and you're going to do it on an open, public journal, then you might as well just come to my journal and have your say. BUT - don't expect me to be a doormat - I gave up that title long ago. I am usually a very open person, but I can be VERY blunt and I will speak my mind.

Oh, and you want to hear someone cussing you out? Go out on the streets and start talking about the Lord Jesus Christ - and all that entails - you will hear some stuff being puked on you that you have never heard anywhere before. I have done that for decades, I am well-acquainted with human nature and the way people seem to have to feel to vindicate themselves for something - that was never said.

And that's the point: I NEVER spoke any names - go to my blog, read the entry - take offense if you want, being offensive was not the intent. Just as YOU are free to speak your mind, so I am NOT free to speak my mind on MY OWN BLOG? The site might be owned by KCL and it's administrators - all well and fine - but the blog is MINE. If it is not, then the administrators can tell me that and I will DEFINITELY delete the thing.

Will I leave KCL? I haven't made that decision yet after reading some of the comments that people posted on that entry. It isn't against one, single person. I am just not a fan of F this and F that and all the rest of what I consider to be petty arguments, in-fighting and other things that I need not go into. If I don't like it - LEAVE, right? That's the worldly saying. I don't subscribe to worldly beliefs, as the Bible says, I am a citizen not of this earth, but of the Kingdom of Heaven. Our stay here is temporal - VERY temporal - one day you're here, the next you're gone. If you think about the average life span of a person, it is infinitesimal in comparison - to anything. We are mortals that have a purpose to be here - it is God's purpose for each individual life.

Onto other things. The trip to the waterpark - was quite nice. There are some awesome rides at that place. I had hoped that on a Friday - school has started in many places around the valley - that it wouldn't be so crowded. Wrongo, yack-breath. It was crowded. Lines and waits were long at the rides. We did the wait game and went on all of them - excepting the shorter, smaller rides that looked like they weren't worth a 30 to 60 minute wait to actually get to go down the slide.

We spent a lot of time in the wave pool. Their version of waves are pretty - small - but I was loving being at the deep end of the pool in 8 foot deep water - almost no-one ventured out that far, so I was swimming around and getting some excellent exercise. I messed with Caleb and Kyle in interims in dunking and splashing fights. Kyle actually thought he could get on top of me and dunk me - so he came up from behind, climbed up on my back. I just stood there. lol

The time there took me totally out of reality - if only for a 6-hour glimpse of a moment - I was in another world. It's one of those things where the pressures and cares of this life disappear and you can just take in the moment, enjoy the moment and have a reprieve from the prison of - stuff going on. Freedom is in the Lord, I tell myself.

We actually could still be there - but as I figured beforehand - a period of 6 to 8 hours would be plenty. I didn't leave before the boys wanted to leave - Kyle went home and crashed, Caleb is zonked out in his bedroom - I went to work watering plants.

That's it for this day. Tomorrow - I intend on getting out there and getting with this drip system install. I have sorta been a little fearful in thinking about cutting into a line with a hacksaw and not being able to get my assembly back together again - and then - the water is off to the house.

As for KCL - I will think about it - decide what I want to do with my account there - and I will voice it - over there, on my blog - when I have decided that. I mostly figured people wouldn't care one way or the other whether I stayed or left - but the replies on that entry definitely got me to re-thinking that decision.

Have a great evening.
C'ya tomorrow.
ben

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