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My Profile
Retro-retrospection - 2008-10-06
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9:57 p.m. - 2005-08-23
Am I really that shallow? You betcha. Okay, maybe I'm not shallow shallow, but I do like fashion. I like clothes and making outfits and knowing why princess seaming is the busty chick's best cut. Clothes are my NASCAR. The biggest non-essential involvement of my mind, body and wallet. Some people get all het up about watching advert riddled cars go counter-clockwise on a big dirt oval. I get het up about hemlines. It amounts to the same thing. And let me defend my shallow hobby a bit by saying that at least my titivating is to some purpose, I look good when I'm all done up. The same cannot be said of NASCAR fans after a race. They are sunburnt. They are gassy from a day of overpriced beer and hot dogs. They are half-deaf and covered in track grit. So there. Nyah. Alex went back to school today. This is good and bad. He had a good summer, but was very much longing to get back. Campus is his home. I knew this would happen. Especially so in Alex's case because we moved into the Hobbit House after he'd started his freshman year at Oswego. If he still came 'home' to the old house, school might just be where he 'goes' rather than where he 'lives'. You people whose parents retired and moved away, maybe to Florida, you guys understand what I'm talking about. That condo in St Petersburg isn't your 'home', it's where your parents live. Your home is back in Minnesota somewhere. A ghost house. A memory place. Alex hasn't made a complete transition, aside from the dorm he doesn't have a place of his own. I dread the coming apartment when he goes to grad school. Once he has a place with his own toilet, his own stove, a place filled with HIS stuff, well then the Hobbit House will officially become the place where his parents live. And yes, for the near future it will be were his parents (emphasis on the plural) live. I do not wish to discuss what's going on and what may happen down the road. Not right now, anyway. We're all cool about that, yes? Thanks. Happy news for Wolf, Maureen's kid and best buddy, JJ, is in his class again. A fair few of last year's classmates are in room 207 this year. YAY! Happy for Wolf, glad for me. The kids and the moms from last year were a nice bunch. Hope having his best pal and some of the other friendlier kids around helps Wolf make a smooth transition to the intermediate school. I do know there is a huge scheduling problem in the district right now. Many, many of the houses which had been stalled by Podunkville's building moratorium are complete and occupied now. The moratorium lapsed 14 months ago and something over 150 new houses have gotten COs. There's 63 new kids in Wolf's school alone! More than two classroom's worth! Podunkville school district is projected to double in size within 5 years. Where they're going to put these kids, nobody knows. 2 of the schools are landlocked, they have no more room to expand. Besides, even if they started building additions tomorrow the schools will split their seams long before anything could be finished. And was there even a bond package offered this last school election? Heh. Not a chance. As evidenced by the Bush Administration on the large scale so goes the lower echelons. The local GOP old boys who run this county are simply wonderful at long range planning. They've allowed massive residential construction to run rampant and have done exactly ZERO about community infrastructure. Traffic is a horror. Water is in short supply. The landfill is full. The schools are bulging. There are whole towns without grocery stores. There is no industry. Nothing to provide any revenue at all. Every local burg has 2+ acre lot zoning. Whopping huge houses on gaudy landscaped lawns that simply soak up municipal services, going deep into the negatives on what property tax comes in. For every dollar of property tax collected on these McMansions, the owners within use $2.30 worth of services. Police, schools, libraries, DPW, sewers, landfill, the whole enchilada. The local hospitals are tiny and outmoded. There's a big new one supposed to go up by 2010. The deal had to wait until the county's second largest robber baron…ahem…real estate developer and GOP poster boy could extort a multi-million dollar contract for his own personal acreage in a no-bid scheme cooked up between him and the county executive. Acreage which, I might add, is nearly inaccessible to most of the county residents. It's on a narrow 2-lane, land which was the last working dairy co-operative in Malltown. The nearest highway entrance and exit is 2 miles away and is one of the most poorly designed accesses in the history of road building. Hellooo Halliburton- Hudson Valley style. But the insurgents are in their death throes, there is no global warming, and large lot building is the way to go. Excuse me while I bang my head on the edge of my desk and pray I knock myself unconscious. It's the only way I'll be able to get some sleep. ~LA
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