1st Snow of the season
Our first big snow storm of the year, and it was a picture perfect one at that. And the timing was fantastic too, starting mid-afternoon Saturday, ending by Early Sunday. Plenty of time to enjoy, cleanup and get back to work with minimal disruption for such a large snowstorm. Here in NE PA we got 12” of pure light white powder, and throughout the Catskills that much or more. That’s a significant storm.
And it turns out, now that it is Tuesday morning, we didn’t miss a beat. Monday morning full steam ahead with nary a delayed delivery or logistical
Finished Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, and enjoyed it thoroughly. Set pretty much current, taking place in Applachia, it tracks and storytells everything from the opioid epidemic’s impacts on the youth of these parts, to the general and commonplace depiction and caricature of these folks, to foster homes, HS football stardom, to extended families to broken families. It’s an American tale, with a nod to Dicken’s and his concern for the underserved children of society’s underbelly. Pics of my high school play below.
It occurred to me I had a successful Christmas season with a litany of activities with family and friends that came off pretty good. Starting with my annual NYC trip with my son and his brahs, a super fun dinner party where even my mom and brother made the trip up, a trip to the Biltmore in Asheville NC for the whole Christmas holiday and then a quietly productive pre-New Years’ week when all the other mice were sleeping.
2024 is shaping up to be a year of finely honed execution - the sales are in place, the team is in place and experienced, most permitting or municipal interactions are behind me - so it’s just a day by day task by task exercise of execution and supervision. At this point, if we didn’t sell another house all year we’d be ok, and the chances of that are nearly zero.
Sometimes it hard to remember some effort or task that didn’t have any immediate impacts, and the results are harder to see because the efforts were preventative rather than triage, and last week was a good test and example of that - our main finance woman was unexpectedly out of the office the whole week, but we didn’t miss a step because we now have a part-time back-up book-keeper who could keep the whole thing moving forward, get our bills in, pay our vendors. That redundancy was what I was seeking to insert into the organization so we weren’t thrown into chaos everytime life happened to someone in our employ - and it was tested and worked perfectly. That’s progress of the most professional and important nature.
An amazing thing happened in Highland NY (Sullivan County) with the election of John P as supervisor. I started the effort to oust an 'old boys club' member back in 2015 and got roundly pummeled for my efforts, but it opened the eyes of people better qualified (from a disposition standpoint) and similarly concerned individuals and 9 yrs later, we got it done. Lead from the front - you don't always get the cheers, but you do some of the hardest and most important work laying the groundwork for change or action.
The real and only question is - am I the only one in the world with an updated blog?
Insurance rates have skyrocketed, with home insurance really catching my eye. At first you think ‘wow, price gouging’, but then after a little bit of education you realize that all the things you read about and know about firsthand (construction costs, weather damage) impact the cost of home repair after an insurance claim, and then it becomes more clear that the rates increases, while hard on the pocketbook, are just a micro example of the big picture impacting the individual picture.
Did two more deals this week. Yeah, that’s right, we rock.