I’m one of the parents in this arrangement and we wouldn’t have it any other way. We raised three kids, a son and two daughters. None of us are rich by any means, but we’re all currently self-sufficient. The one’s that live here don’t do it out of need, but because they’d be crazy not to. We own a decent-sized ranch style house, plenty of room for two couples, on 2.6 acres with a largish pool, and it’s conveniently located to everything one wants to be convenient to. At this stage in our lives, if it were just my wife and I here we’d go crazy. This place has been the central family gathering spot for our local extended family for decades now. Pretty much every month at least one big gathering is happening here. Anywho… We’ve paid it off and deeded it to a trust, with the three kids being successor trustees. Once we’re gone, the property transfers automatically. They can live here forever, or they can sell it and split the proceeds three ways, but I seriously doubt they’ll ever do that. Our oldest lives nearby quite affordably with his girlfriend (both child-free by choice), and our middle daughter and her husband own their own place with our two grand-daughters just outside of town. Our youngest daughter and her husband (no kids yet) live here with us. This son-in-law races street-stocks on dirt and was able to build a big 30’ x 60’ shop in the back, so this place is like heaven to him. He’s 28 going on 12 and has a pretty good job, so he gets to buy whatever toys he wants, and with the investment of his shop into the property, he’s actually got some skin in the game. They are both hugely helpful, and it’s a great arrangement for all of us. We’re currently kicking around some ideas for my son and his girlfriend to move back onto the property, but into their own space…

am I the only one who likes to fantasize about doing something like this? I was 60 years old before I discovered stealth camping was so popular on youtube…

I had a love-hate relationship with Sears for a long, long time. We’d always shop around for larger purchases, and quite often Sears would end up getting the sale, and then I’d have to put up with the salesperson bugging me about opening a Sears card and buying an extended warranty, and then being obstinate about taking NO for an answer. Of course, this was back when Craftsman Tools and Kenmore Appliances tended to be better than average. Hell, about 6 months ago we finally replaced a Kenmore refrigerator that we bought in '99. It’s currently cooling beer in my bro-in-laws garage. I’m still using Craftsman tools I bought 30+ years ago.

One day a couple of years ago, we had some meatloaf and some baked mac&cheese leftovers that my wife had made. The next day I got a loaf of homemade sourdough from the farmers market that pops up every Saturday. I sliced off about a half-inch thick slice of the meatloaf and the baked mac&cheese with that fresh sourdough and grilled a sandwich that I really hope to be able to replicate at least once more before I die…

Fuck homeowners insurance. I live in Florida. I’ve had State Farm for several years now, and it always felt like I was paying them extortion payments. Last year, we got a letter from them informing us that they had sent an inspector by our property, and listed off several things that we needed to do, and show them proof that we did them, within the next year or they were dropping our coverage. Some of these things were understandable, but others just seemed ridiculous. Like re-roofing or tearing down my shop in the back, when there is absolutely nothing wrong with it (I just built it seven years ago). It’s already pretty well-known that SF is no longer writing new policies in Florida, so I could see the writing on the wall. Even if we complied and got all that done, their premiums were going to go way up, and switching to another company would certainly cost us even more. The wife and I discussed it and said fuck it and fuck them and took the money out of my 401k and paid the place off. State Farm will not renew us here in about a month and a half when it expires, and we’ll carry on without. This house has been through every hurricane that’s hit the NW corner of Florida since 1958 and has so-far only lost some shingles. We’re on high enough ground that flooding isn’t a worry either, so fuck it… off we go, fingers crossed! I feel really fortunate that we were able to do that, because this place is so much more than just a house, and I’ll be DAMNED if we’re losing it because some bureaucratic requirement that I can no longer afford allows it to be repossessed.

it seems to me, and I could be wrong, that they don’t accent syllables the same way, if at all. Years ago I had a database teacher in community college who was from India and it took me a couple of classes to tune in to her, but after that it wasn’t hard to follow her at all. I’m often in Zoom meetings with a software engineer who immigrated from Vietnam and he was a bit of a challenge to understand at first, too.

Oh yeah… and my cancer doc is from Sri Lanka. That was doubly fun. His heavy accent pronouncing four-dollar medical terms took some serious getting used to. Listening to him dictate into his little recorder for the transcriptionists at the end of our visits is an added treat I always enjoy…

My favorite channel would have to be Destination Adventure with Dustin Porter. Why this guy doesn’t have 10,000,000 subscribers is beyond me. Not only does he go to some amazing places, but he’s a really gifted videographer. Everything about them is top-notch, and he does it all by himself. The amount of B-roll stuff he gets must be a tremendous amount of work. He picks great music too…

An LG C1300. I carried that thing for several years. Never had to replace the battery and it would still go 3 days on a charge when I finally switched to an iPhone 3

I knew some folks that used to own a “dented can” grocery store named Dirt Cheap Grocery. They would find all sorts of deals on entire lots of nearly expired canned and frozen goods and what ever various other things they could find through their various connections. There would always be something different, and they would have some pretty incredible deals sometimes. I remember buying an entire case of frozen hash brown patties for $5. There were six 5 lb bags in there. we split it up with my wife’s sisters families. Another time they had those Michelina’s frozen pasta dishes that had just expired for 10 for $1. My favorite deodorant scent had been recently discontinued and they just so happened to get a hold of a big display bin full of hundreds of them and sold them for $1 a piece. It took me several years before I finally ran out…

Elvira - The Oakridge Boys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGKatCAQed0

I know this from experience because when this song was fairly new, we were eating in a Pizza Hut and a kids Little League team came in after their game and proceeded to occupy a good portion of the restaurant. I swear every damn one of those kids had a quarter for the jukebox and every one of them picked that song. And if that wasn’t bad enough, they all just had to frickin’ sing along with it on top of that! I remember a couple of those little turds waving their arms like conductors…

I worked in an office that had a water fountain that everyone stopped using after we got a filtered dispenser installed in the kitchen. Every couple of weeks or so we’d walk in the door first thing in the morning and get a nice little aromatic reminder to run a little bit of water through it…

Just yesterday we were at my wife’s sister’s house. They live in a brand-new house in a brand-new neighborhood. Some dingus was going around to every single house leaving flyers advertising a tree trimming service and reminding everyone that it’s hurricane season. The thing is, their wasn’t a single tree in the entire neighborhood that was bigger than a year-old sapling.

Here lately I’ve been watching Camping With Steve. He’s a really likeable Canadian guy who does all sorts of camping videos, and a lot of them are stealth camping, where he camps in some pretty crazy places in all sorts of imaginative and inexpensive ways. I’ve always liked to daydream about camping out in various wooded areas that I would see while driving by them in the car, and this guy actually goes and does it. Along highway on-ramps, in the middle of a round-about, behind billboards, in the wooded lot behind a police station… you name it. I’m too old and comfortable to go do something like that now, so it’s fun living vicariously through him.

As a white guy growing up along the redneck riviera, I can only look back in dismay at the casual racism and homophobia I took part in with my other fellow white boys under the guise of “humor”. Not a single person who knows me would ever accuse me of being a racist or a homophobe, as I reserve all of my hatred for the haters, but it took me growing up quite a bit to realize how terrible a lot of those jokes were.