Life

College barely makes sense these days. In particular, Private colleges are utterly preposterous. This isn’t about “marketable degress” or pedagogy or woke/MAGA or any such crap. I’m talking about MONEY. Those decades of cost-of-college outpacing inflation have come home to roost, and combined with the demographics crash of the post-2008 cohort going to college, I’m seeing a death spiral. A Worked Example My daughter went Early Action at several colleges starting in August, getting a jump on the enrollment process and working to function as a “driver” not a “passenger” in her collegiate journey. She’s been incredibly active since her Sophomore year, and we’ve visited most colleges in Texas that might even be of interest. See some of those details in college search. ...

“Huh. Looks like rain.” Indeed. We had a catastrophic flood this summer, and as we sit we’re still at about 40" of rain for the year. Average annual is about 35", and most years we’ve lived here, it’s been more like 25-28". Any way you slice it, it’s been a good year for rain. So off-and-on today, it looked like low clouds, bright sunshine, thunderstorms, and everything in between. Book: Embers of War So after I couldn’t retain the will to live (see next review), I switched over to Gareth J. Powell’s excellent “Embers of War” book, the first of a trilogy ...

You really don’t appreciate how attached you are to spending money until you can’t. We’ve been on a financial diet at my house since February. Last year, between salary and stock, I made X amount of money. I paid nearly 30% of X in taxes, which I found funny, since it was more than I was making before I took a job here in 2016. In any case, this year I’m on track to make about 60% of X. While that will make filing my 1040 easier, it’s made living a skosh harder from a Cash Flow perspective. On top of that add: ...

Many pithy sayings exist about possessions: “A Boat is a hole in the water you throw money in” “Boat is an acronym that stands for Break Out Another Thousand” “If it has wheels or wings, it’s trouble” (There’s another variant, but this is polite company) To this I’d suppose to add: “A House is a mechanism to kill you, but at least you get to sleep there. That’s why it’s called a ‘mortgage’.” ...

In many ways, water frames my life. It’s an obsession of mine. The Weather Obsessive Goes Soft The winter of 1977-1978 dumped feet of snow on Kentucky. One notable blizzard led to my birth 9 months later. As a child, the floods throughout eastern Kentucky were just a fact of life: It rained too hard, and the rivers backed-up, usually in the community of Wolverine. People who lived there would get flooded at least once a year for days. Then in 1991, former governor Bert T. Combs died when he tried to drive home. People would drown. ...

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” - 1 Corinthians 13:11 (KVJ) I’ve had a subscription to some sort of car magazine, blog, etc. since I was ten years old. I used to covet and read car magazines like more well-adjusted boys used to secret Playboy magazines. (November 1994 was a classic of that particular tome, but I digress.) ...

Today (well, tomorrow) makes it a year. On 3/13 last year I left my office, picked up my kids from Grace Academy for Spring Break…and the great upside down world of CoViD 2020 happened. Example: WFH Day 2 I was a reliable journalist for awhile, then in June I just…stopped. Overwhelmed didn’t really cut it; I was paralyzed by how much the world was changing. The 2015-era computer I wrote those blogs on is gone, replaced by another coporate laptop from my employer after the battery decided to die. The house I wrote those in is gone, replaced by a 10.11 acre rance property with cows, rabbits, a tractor, and a new (LEASED!) Toyota tundra. ...