Today wore me out, I'm plain flat tired. It's not that I had to get up early - I was in Brownsville this morning waiting for an empty trailer. They showed up with one at 9:45 am, amazingly enough, making it possible to not only get back to the yard today, but driving all in daylight.  I figured I would get to Houston around 3:30 and I figured right.

I didn't figure I would run into horrific, nightmarish, rush hour traffic at that hour.  I've been through Houston hundreds of times, I can only surmise that because it was Friday afternoon, people got off work early and everyone - literally everyone - was going home - all at the same time.  That kind of traffic is nerve wracking and doing it for 30 miles of stop and go even more so.  Not to mention numerous construction zones where it was also stop and go and then, a portion of highway was on fire and the firedepartment had the road shut down to put it out.  

So yes, it was a very long day.  It only got more interesting that, after I texted the dispatcher which empty trailer I had - presumably for the next driver to be assigned to for the morning - she said stay under that trailer, you can take it in the morning.  I mean, Im not going to complain about 3 Brownsville trips in a row, it's just that I'm wiped out right now.  Just a tad bit too early to go to bed, so I thought I'd catch up on my blog. 

Oh - I didn't go home.  I'm sleeping at the yard.  In the truck, it can run all night long and that's that.  See, I didn't get here to 8:36 pm and I have to go back out early am. I figured the amount of time I would have at the house - drive home, go to bed and get up at 4:15 am, it's just not worth it.  I lose time I could be sleeping.  I don't do this often, but when it needs to happen, I am fine with it.

The only problem is, there is no one home. James, Taylor and the boys headed up to Missouri early this morning to meet up with her dad at Grandma's house for a visit for the weekend.  So, the dogs are all home alone.  Maria went over there earlier to feed them and put mine in my room and the other in their room, feed the fish and presumably the cats are already fed and don't need anything.  I would have like to seen the dogs but oh well.  

I think I fully explained what was going on with the property in the last few entries, nothing is likely to change with that for a while - if at all.  But because it appears there is a chance that this deal isn't going to go through, I started looking for properties again today, online of course.

There isn't much new on there.  One property with 11 acres looked very appealing until I saw that it is within the city limits. No thanks.  Another property, 8 acres, looked interesting but way overpriced.  And not in the greatest of locations.  I'm really going to be discouraged, to be honest, if this property I have been looking at multiple times now doesn't go through.  

Yowsa! I've been checking the tax sale for my county sale to come up every day.  I checked earlier today but it wasn't up yet. Now? There are 6 pages of properties on there.  

Ohhh....myyyyy. I just looked through all of them. A large number of 1 acre or so lots with small enough price tags on them.  5 lots 8 to 10 acres at low starting prices. Other lots going much higher than they are even worth - how does the taxes get so high on property that isn't even worth the starting bid?  I've got my work cut out for me, something to keep me occupied while this property deal either goes through - or doesn't. 

The work is looking up the property ID numbers and then looking at a satellite view of the property - if it's listed on the tax appraisal site.  See what it looks like, if it's out in the county and if I can see where it's at so I can go take a look.  Find out of there is water and electricity at least on the properties.  This is exactly what I was talking about before - small, acre lots where you put on a house and sell the entire property or - see if you can rent it out. Renting would make far more money in the long run.  

I wish I were at home, I could print all of that out.  I write notes on all of the properties of interest and I also write notes of properties that have serious problems - like rotted houses or situations that would cost a lot of money to fix/upgrade.  And then, at the sale, I look to see if anyone bids on them.  People just show up to these sales and don't do any homework.  I don't say anything, not my place to, I think I"d probably get some heat for telling everyone that's bidding on a property that there is a 2 story house that is falling apart and you're going to have to raze it before you can do anything with it - or worse - properties where the city has come along and put "condemned property" signage on the front of it.

Anything condemned will have to be torn down and if you aren't doing it yourself, you are going to pay thousands of dollars for someone to do it for you. Is the property worth it? Maybe sometimes it could be if it's a nice enough property in a good area. This will really help to take my mind off the land deal.  I can focus on something else that I've been wanting to look at anyway.  There is one mobile home for sale on there, but it's listed way high. It would have to be a really nice unit to be worth bidding that high on.  It's likely no one will bid on it and it will end up at the year end sale starting out with a $30 bid.  

Oh, speaking of properties, 6 months will be up next month on the four that I bought. No one has come to redeem them.  I am going to try and get titles cleared for them and then they are going up for sale.  Or, if the title stuff is too expensive, I'll do one at a time and sit on the rest.  There is no requirement for me to do anything with any of those properties.  There are no houses on them, the city hasn't sent any notices about the condition of property, and I only have to pay property taxes.  That's in the $50 range and that's cheap.  I also found out that the city allegedly allows for a modular home on certain properties - information that dude/king at  the city planning and development office didn't bother to tell me when I was asking.  I found that out through a realtor website I was looking at. 

I am in the "teach an old dog a new trick" mode. It seems late in life to be starting on such endeavors, but hey, it's such a nice challenge!  I"m definitely going to the next sale - providing any of those acre lots are out in the county.  I would love to get just one of them - I don't want more than one - and then put something on it, probably a mobile home to keep costs down - and then see if I can rent it out.  Actually, on an acre I could put several mobile homes.  I don't want to get too far ahead with this right now, you know what my thoughts are concerning these things, I have only written about it exhaustively on here on so many occasions. 

Still, it's exciting to see all of that on that list.  The only other caveat that - isn't so nice - is that any or all of those properties could get yanked up to the last minute and not be for sale.  The nature of the beast, yes.  

Oh, and yesterday I tried to upload a Vlog entry on here.  It took a few minutes to upload it off my phone, it said it was finished and then  I posted it - and ..... nothing.  That's the last entry with nothing in it.  I'm going to try again tomorrow. If that doesn't work, I found my old YouTube channel - I haven't posted on there in years, I might try to put one up there instead.  I kind of thought Youtube would have taken that channel down by now since I haven't posted anything there in so long.  I dunno, but I'm interested in possibly firing that up again - with some of the content from my treks through the woods.

Anyway, enough of this. I want to look up a few of these properties before I go to sleep for the fun of it.