General Musings

Electric is out, near and far here in Milford PA since last night when some storms blew through.  Something serious happened cause it’s out for like 5 miles in all PA directions.  That’s unusual.  Lucas and his friend Cameron spent the day without Tech which I think was eye opening for them as they built stuff, hit stuff, explored stuff, lifted stuff, crushed stuff, etc…

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Lots of seasons starting up - pool season, lavender and black eyed Susans season, garden season, and even HS football season is kicking back into gear with nightly strength training and drills.  I’ve harvest lettuce from my 1st year garden this year, and soon tomatoes, cauliflower, corn, mint and basil.  The bumblebees are right on the heels of the lavender blooming.

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I have solar here, and I also have a stack of 5 batteries, so in essence I have a working generator which is a pretty cool way to live off grid.  As long we get a little sun here and there, I’m literally off the grid here in the burbs, spinning the meter backwards.

As I have noted, less blogging means less stress at work, having to work things out through the process of writing and thinking it out.  Still a ton going on and going wrong and going right, but it feels like we’ve exited the true transition phase and now are pretty close to figuring out how the company will best operate going forward.  What is true is that it will operate better.

I don’t know why I’m always being tested, but I don’t know of another company that has as many black swan instances of employee or employee-family illnesses that rock the boat like we’ve experienced over the last 3 years.  For a company that is heavily dependent on our employees, and each one that sticks around is filling some vital role, we’ve had 3 or 4 employees that had no intention of going any where else for employee, be impacted by a health incident that caused them to quit our employ.  Really strange and odd and it really pisses me off - since it’s just black swan wholly unpredictable, highly unlikely events, that set us back and make us scramble.  Just this week we had our part time book-keeper helper have an emergency appendix operation and we haven’t heard from him since.  It gets old, and feels unwarranted and undeserved.

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A trip to Kansas City got me thinking.  Interesting city, really nearly dead center in the USA.  As far (or as close) from the East as to the West.  While I was away on this 36 hr jaunt, it seems the Hudson Valley got crushed with a pretty significant flooding event with lots of roads, train tracks, and bridged impacted.  Hoping NOT for chaos on my way home from the airport this morning - (this was cut and pasted from last Monday and all went well, at for me).

In terms of KC, and maybe this is true for most of the US, it’s just not the pressure cooker of the coasts, not the rushedy rush rush, not the pushing and shoving.  There’s something really to be said about the cost of living.

We got a ton going on, but it’s different than it was.  It’s mostly ‘for hire’ work - either our homes on your land or custom designs brought to us - or spec homes.  That’s different because in the past we would also have quite a few homes that have buyers signed up for, that we are building, that they will buy at the end - customizing and personalizing as we go along.  This last one has always been our bread and butter, but takes a lot of office skills and time that we scaled back on.   So we will see how the spec homes sell, and we’ve sort of pivoted a little and are better defining what is and what is not on the table in terms of personalization.

Our Ashokan Acres project is taking off.  Roads in, 3 or 4 building permits.  Driveways in.  Building lots cleared.  Open house/Land tours scheduled for the 23rd.

The Student Loan thing to me continues to amaze. I kept hearing about these people who would pay year after year and end up with more of a balance then when they started and I didn't see how that was possible, being a digging out of debt veteran myself. Turns out, they opted into a payment plan based on a math formula of their cost of living, income-based, so they ended up paying less than the interest each month, or the same as the interest or just a little more - so DUH, if you aren't touching the principle, how would your debt go down? Financial illiteracy is just so dangerous. But the idea that such an option is even possible is crazy. And now there has been a pause FOR 3 YEARS. I just want to get this straight - the gov't offers loans and supports private loans to young, unqualified buyers far in access of what they will conceivably be able to pay based on a ton of data. Make these loans non-forgivable and non-bankruptable. Offer no limit to what you can borrow and what you can use it for. When you get out of school, and can't pay back, offer payment plans that actually increase the size of the loan. Bemoan the problem while making more loans everyday. Get colleges and high schools in our the scheme, characterizing people who don't go to college as 2nd tier.

I used debt heavily to get my life rolling. I bought my first house in Sullivan County in 2002 with a credit card check that came in the mail. By 2004 I was really swimming in the dark waters of debt. But as soon as I had a dollar i started paying it down, aggressively. and continued to do so. Rack it up, pay it down, rinse and repeat. And eventually my shovel (my income) outpaced my debt (hole) and the habit of paying it down gained steam and turned the corner. But as the Dave Ramsey critic says, college in my day cost $6k, came out of school with $10k of debt, loans weren't offered to pay for 4 years of elevated lifestyle - so that was a plus, though, I think I would have plowed through it anyways. Insane, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out as the Biden administration pulls out every trick in the book to continue to delay repayment, I think the latest being no default of credit blemish for the first 12 months after repayment kicks in - Hello Joe, it's just delaying the inevitable pain for these folks.

Been taking Lucas my son along with me. He got his first paycheck the other day. We got him a bank account, a brokerage account, a retirement account, a quick books account, he's been snapping some drone shots, going to work with me, going through the 7 stages of grieving each morning on the way to work but all in all, going pretty well. I think it's good for him to see what I've doing everyday for 20 years in order to make his life and lifestyle possible. He's old enough now to at least on some level observe and appreciate the effort I'm making, and have been making.

and finally, take that GOLDSTEIN!!

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