Cul-De-Sac Falling Out

We got back to the ATL last night, so today was spent putting things in places and remembering how much I love my house. It is such a nice yellow inside and it has all my stuff in it.

I'm terribly behind on both blogging and reading blogs. Will try to remedy both.

It was sunny and nice today so I spent a lot of time standing out front watching Hank ride his trike and mess around with chalk and such. While I was out there, my next door neighbor Mindy and her husband drove up. Mindy had to rush off right away to some appointment or other--every part of her body is maintained by a different beauty specialist--but Ron walked over to chat with me. While we were standing there, Rebel Yelling Mom drove by, and I was surprised to note that she gave us both the stinkeye. I said something neutral, like, "There goes Danica," and Ron told me that Mindy and Danica are no longer speaking.

I said, "Whoa, really?" Those two were tight, once upon a time. Ron said that Danica had been "making up stories" about Mindy and telling them at the nail salon they both go to. I briefly wondered what nail salon they both attend that I might infiltrate, 'cause I like to hear stories too, you know.

I said, "Oh, that's too bad, but I'm surprised, I thought those two were really close." Ron said, "It suits me fine, Danica is not a nice person." I "hmmm'ed" thoughtfully and looked very serious. He went on, "And the things she was saying proved that." Reader, I could not bring myself to ask, "Well what was she saying?" I just couldn't, it didn't seem ladylike or some damn thing. I waited, hoping he would enlarge upon this, but he only said, "And then when Danica dragged their hairdresser into it, that was the last straw. After Mindy had introduced Danica to him in the first place." That told me all I needed to know. I mean, ouch! Once the hairdresser is part of the story, it really is serious. Those two have had a falling out that involves their grooming professionals. I don't really see a way of coming back from this.

That was all that happened in the hood while we were away, it seems. This Saturday night, though, is a progressive dinner on our street, involving some of the characters we've come to know right here on SubMat. We start with drinks and appetizers at the house of a couple who have never been mentioned on this blog because they don't seem narratable, then we have our main course at the home of the Mystery People, and oh my lord am I eager to get inside that place, then we have dessert at Normal Neighbor's. Might be interesting. And speaking of interesting, I want to make pesto farfalle to bring as a side dish--what can I add to that to make it more interesting? I just love pesto and I love those little bowties.

Neighbors at Dusk: A Play in One Act

The scene: early evening in a suburban cul-de-sac, just as the streetlights are flickering on. Children are playing, stretching out the last outdoor minutes of an unseasonably warm day. The world is turning in its usual way, and all is calm and peaceful in the gloaming.

Mindy, my next-door neighbor, comes out of her front door looking worried. I am standing in the street with Hank wrapped around my legs.

Mindy: I need to ask you something, Rebecca. [She always calls me 'Rebecca.'] Remember last week when Percy started barking late at night?

Me: Yes, I'm so sorry about that. We let her out one last time before bed, and something made her go crazy. Matt went out with a flashlight, but he couldn't tell what she was barking at.

Mindy: Well what do you think she saw?

Me: I don't know. It sounded like a bigger deal than a rabbit. Maybe a coyote or a deer?

Mindy: You think it was a coyote?

Me: Or maybe a deer. I don't know.

Mindy: Maybe. . . .[looks troubled.]

Me: What's wrong?

Mindy: Well, something really important to me was stolen from my backyard that night, and I thought maybe Percy saw.

Me: Really?!? What?

Mindy: I had a stained-glass suncatcher with a dragonfly on it. My husband gave it to me right before he died.

Me: [I have a sinking feeling as she speaks.] Mindy, it's in my backyard. I just noticed it. I'm so sorry, maybe Laura and her friends picked it up while they were playing. [I feel terrible. My dog barks at night and my kids are thieves.]

Mindy: Oh thank goodness! I was so sad!

Me: I will speak to Laura about this. The way our yards are, I think she thinks all that space back there is her territory. I'm sorry. Let's walk back there and get it. [Our lots adjoin and are semi-wild. Laura roams all over the place, scavenging bits of things from the woods. And also our neighbor's flower bed, apparently.]

We start across her lawn to a little path that leads to our backyard. Just at this moment, Danica, aka Rebel Yelling Mom, speeds into Mindy's driveway and spills out of her car. [These two drive to each other's houses, even though it is 100 feet from Mindy's driveway to Danica's. Only Conspiracy Guy's house is between them.]

Danica: Hey Rebecca! [She too always calls me that.] I need your email to invite you to my jewelry trunk show.

Me: Great! [I'm thinking, I can't believe I just blogged about this and you're inviting me to a trunk show again. I tell her my email address.]

Danica: Can you spell that?

Me: [spelling]

Danica: What about the last part?

Me: Gmail.com?

Danica: Yeah.

Me: It's G-M-A-I-L dot C-O-M.

Danica: I'll just have to call you and get it.

Me: Okay.

Danica: [holding up a little plastic cup] Mindy, can I borrow. . .

Mindy: Do you need cooking oil again?

Danica: [grins]

Mindy: Go on, it's in the pantry.

Danica leaves and Mindy, Hank and I walk to my backyard and retrieve her suncatcher. I apologize some more, and we walk down the hill into her yard and put the suncatcher back where it goes. I apologize some more and she is very gracious.

Mindy: Well, I better get in the house, because my supper is all ready in the kitchen, and if Danica's alone with it, she might take some of it.

Me: [laughing] Oh really?

Mindy: Yes, really. One time she took a whole dish of twice-baked potatoes. She snuck them to her car and took them home.

Me: !!!

Mindy: But you know, it's no big deal. At least she's not making herself throw up all the time anymore.

[CURTAIN]

A New Neighbor for Your Consideration

Here are all the salient facts that I can gather about Danica, a neighbor of mine who I've been meaning to bring to your attention. What finally told me it was time to blog about her is that last week (and all the time we've lived here), Danica had golden hair and a black car, and this week, she has black hair and a gold car. I saw that and thought, "Yes, it is time." As I've said before, it can be hard to contruct a coherent narrative about people we see intermittently, who aren't our close friends. This list represents my best attempt to get a fix on Danica. She lives with her husband and three kids in a ginormous place a few houses down from us. A little semi-private lane leads off from our cul-de-sac, and Danica and family are down there.

• Danica has a gold and diamond ring that looks like the Confederate flag. Because of this, I think of her as The World's Oldest Living Confederate Widow. Though she isn't a widow and she's not old. She's not even Southern. She grew up in, like, Ohio.
• Danica has the raspy voice of a longtime smoker. She's very trendy and is forever in the process of opening a boutique with a friend of hers, and telling me that I have to come to her trunk show. Speaking of trunk, she is prone to wearing things that have writing on the butt. She is petite, and prettyish.
• Also speaking of trunk, Danica frequently tries to sell me things out of her car. Not drugs, usually clothes. The first time this happened, I was in the street watching the kids ride their bikes, and she careened to a stop next to me. Her van's side door opened and she hollered, "What size is Laura? I just got all this stuff on clearance at The Children's Place but none of it will fit my kids." Her van was JAMMED with clothes. So I thought, "Fun!" and gamely took a tunic top for Laura, giving Danica four dollars that I had in my pocket. Later I realized that Danica smokes all the time, and in her car too, and that everything that goes in that car smells like it. So that was the first and last thing I bought out of Danica's car.
• Danica is a registered nurse at a children's hospital. She works only on the weekends, long shifts, while her real estate investor husband keeps the kids. So she is not dumb, but many of the things that come out of her mouth do not make sense. Like. . .
• Danica told me, right in front of her then four year-old daughter, that her daughter "is terrified of black men, especially black cops, but really any black men. She has nightmares about them." I said, "Huh, I wonder where she gets that?" And Danica said, "I know!" Good grief. She will go on and on, saying the craziest, or nastiest, or most innapropriate things you can think of, barely letting you get a word in, while you think, "Are you on cocaine?" I am omitting many terrible or merely surprising things she has said to me, because it all starts to blur.
• Danica is a party girl. She likes to go out with her girlfriends and get cray-zay. Matt and I once went to a party at Mindy's house, next door, and heard from the assembled company that Danica likes to make out with her girlfriends in bars "to get attention." Mindy is sort of in the same party orbit as Danica, and I often see Danica dropping Mindy off late at night.
• When Mindy's husband died suddenly a few years ago, before we lived here, Danica practically adopted her and did everything for her. Mindy told me that she had never even written a check before, had never done anything for herself, and that Danica would come over and get her out of bed every day. It sounds like Danica basically kept her alive during that time.
• Danica's oldest son, who is Laura's age, has Down Syndrome, and though he is a sweet kid, he is a handful. He likes to try to escape from their house. She spends a lot of time taking him to different therapies, and I have sometimes thought that a lot of her somewhat-abrasive personality could be because she is operating at the limit--the limit of what a mom can do. Or, I feel a lot of compassion for her, because of all that she's got on her plate. And now she has a one year-old. That said, her parenting method, with all her kids, is screaming. Sometimes mixed with yelling.
• She drives though our neighborhood too fast. It scares me. You can hear her yelling before you see her car, and the car is long gone before the sound dies away.

That's Danica in all her complexity. So reader, how should I refer to her on this blog? Labels can be so handy--in fact, I now refer to Frenemy Neighbor, Conspiracy Guy, the Mystery People, Normal Neighbor, and Pretty Neighbor by those labels IN REAL LIFE. And of course, these titles remind you guys who these people are. World's Oldest Living Confederate Widow might be a little long. Maybe Juicy Neighbor? Raspy Neighbor? I need ideas. And moreover, what do we make of this person? She doesn't fit easily into any one category. And I do love to sort people. But you know that.

And I am piggybacking on Keely's Random Tuesdays, to try and justify the haphazard nature of these tidbits. Go check it out.

Hard Times in the Cul-de-Sac

I checked in with my next-door neighbors, Mindy and Conspiracy Guy, yesterday for the first time in a while, and the tenor of the two conversations was very similar--that their budgets are stretched, and they're finding it hard to make ends meet. Both of them brought this up in response to my "Hey, how's it going" query. It was interesting to me, because their circumstances are very different. They live right next door to each other in roughly the same kind of house. I thought how you can't really assume anything about people's financial situation based on where they live. A neighborhood that looks pretty homogenous can house a lot of different economic stories.

Mindy was bummed out because Ron, her new husband, has come out of retirement to go back to work. They're in their upper fifties, and neither of them had been working. Mindy was living on the annuities and such left behind by her late husband, and I think Ron had just made enough money to retire at a relatively young age. He is a civil engineer, so for him, work means traveling out of town to various building projects. He is gone a lot now, and Mindy is not happy on her own. (We were thrilled when those two started shacking up last year, because Mindy goes a little kooky when left to herself.) Anyway, both their investment portfolios have tanked, so off to work he goes.

And I understand why, because those two spend money like sailors on leave. I say that with no judgment at all--I just mean that their kids are grown and gone, and they are living their version of the good life. They have a lot of toys--they were a two Humvee household, his and hers, until Mindy traded her Hummer in for a Jaguar convertible. (I say no judgment, but the two Humvees seemed crazy to me.) Ron had a fancy motorcycle that he wrecked and replaced over the summer, and they have boats and a couple of other houses, Ron's house from before their marriage and Mindy's cabin in the mountains. And, they run with a fairly hard-partying crowd of people their age who go out every night, dressed to the nines. Matt and I went to a little party they had at their house to announce their engagement. I dressed in a manner that I thought was appropriate for a casual get-together in the summer--like capri pants and a cute top. All the other ladies were in cocktail dresses with Swarovski crystals on their boobs. So Mindy and Ron, not surprisingly, are finding it hard to keep up with all that.
Conspiracy Guy and Mrs. Conspiracy Guy are having it rough. Yesterday I saw CG outside while the kids were playing together, and I said, "Hey, what have y'all been up to?" He said, "Trying to survive. Just trying to figure out how to survive." He is a stay-at-home dad to their 4 and 3 year-olds. Mrs. CG works, but I gather it's not a super high-powered career. What they want, he says, is to downsize to a smaller house with a bigger yard. They don't want to sell in this market, though, so they settled for refinancing their mortgage from an adjustable-rate to a 30 year fixed. (Before that, they'd had their house on the market for months with no nibbles. I think they were asking too much, but what do I know?)

They have a way different "lifestyle" from Mindy and Ron's. No toys, no extras, living pretty light, from what I can tell. I heard through the grapevine that right after we moved in in 2006, Mr. and Mrs. CG tried to start a business where you make millions in real-estate with no money down. I remember CG telling me that they'd gone to a seminar that taught them how. I remember having a sinking feeling as he told me this. So the grapevine part was that they lost all the money they put into it, and some of their family's money as well. That was when they put their house up for sale. So I feel sympathy for them--they seem kind of stuck. I feel bad even if CG is a quasi-Libertarian, paranoid, tax-evading fruit loop, as you will see if you take a moment to peruse that link. Tax evasion may be a strong word, but he explained to me how his plan between now and the end of the year is to take their belongings to Goodwill, one bag at a time, and get the receipt they give you where you fill in the value yourself. He says the max per donation is $599, so every garbage bag of old toys and clothes they donate is worth a $599 tax deduction, in his calculation.

Then I think Conspiracy Guy asked me out on a date. Or, he told me how his wife is gone from today through the weekend and he'll have the girls on his own, and then he said, "You could come over one night and watch a movie." So I'm going to assume that what he meant was, "You could bring the kids over to watch a movie with my kids." But I don't know, ew. Where was I again? Oh yes, hard times. That is my neighborhood report for today. Have a good one!

Four Conversations with My Neighbors

1) I was over in Fancy Land taking Laura to a friend's house, and I stayed to have a drink with the hostess and another mom who was delivering her kid. In the course of the visit, talk turned to housework, specifically laundry, and how I think it needs to be abolished in favor of just going naked all the time, because the laundry is seriously killing me. Our hostess said that her cleaning lady does the family's laundry, and I was like, "Exsqueeze me? How does that work?" "It works great," she said. I bet it does. I don't have my cleaning lady anymore, but even when I did, she didn't do laundry.

Then the other mom piped up and said that she pays her mother to come over and do their laundry. I had an ambivalent response to this. My mom and my mother-in-law do things around my house every time they come to town--I'm certainly not opposed to accepting their help. I love it. But the notion of taking one's mother on as paid household help seemed strange to me. Or it at least took me a moment to process the idea. While I was thinking about this, the other mom went on, "She likes to sit on the couch and fold clothes and watch TV. And since it's kind of mindless work, I just tell her, 'Take all the time you need, Mom. You're not bothering anyone.'"

2) My friend Normal Neighbor will just not pick up her dog's poop. It really bugs me about her. When she's out walking her little dog, and it drops a deuce in someone's yard, she just looks around to see if anyone has noticed. A few days ago, we were both on the way to the bus stop with our dogs, and her dog stopped to make a deposit. I pulled out a plastic bag and pointedly held it out to her. "Here," I said. "Nah, it's okay," she said, "They're not home."

3) Mindy, next door, is having her basement redone. She told me she'd gotten all new paint, floors, and furniture down there, and I told her I'd like to see it when she gets everything set up. She said that she just had to get the bear skin hung on the wall. I was like, "You have a bear skin?" And she said yes, that her late husband had shot it. (Her husband died a few years ago, and she just remarried.) I said, "Wow," because I was thinking that a bear skin didn't really accord with my ideas of Mindy's taste in decorating. That is to say, while a bear skin isn't exactly my thing either, I was actually going to be impressed that Mindy was taking that kind of decorating risk. I've been in her house, and her taste, like that of a lot of my neighbors, runs to extreme matching, a reverence for a quasi-Tuscan look, and safe, idea-free interiors. Think burgundy and hotel art. Then I remembered that she'd said she was having the basement made into a "man space" for her new husband, Ron, and that one of the rooms is Harley-Davidson themed. It made me realize that she didn't see the bear skin rug ironically, or as an aesthetic object, the way I might. She saw it as a trophy, duh. We were coming at this bear skin thing from totally different angles.

When I said, "Wow," Mindy apparently thought I was expressing disapproval, because she hastened to say, "Well, we had history with that bear," which made me laugh. This black bear was stalking all around their cabin in the mountains, and even came into their house one time. They were afraid for their little dog, so her husband shot it. And now, she's using the skin of the bear that her dead husband shot to adorn the walls of her new husband's man cave. Isn't that weird? Or not weird, but striking. As Matt said, "Ron has taken on the Mantle of the Bear."

4) My crazy Frenemy Neighbor told me that as soon as Halloween is over, she's getting her Christmas trees out. She has three or four artificial trees that she puts up. I said, "You're getting an early start!" She said that she has so many ornaments that if she doesn't start in early November, she'll never get them all hung by Christmas. She went on to say that she collects ornaments, and if I'm ever bored, she offered, she'll tell me "the story of every one of them." I blacked out for a minute and then told her that I was going to make it my life's work to never be that bored.

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Have a nice day!

Lordy Lordy, Look Who's Gourdy

Several satisfying things happened this weekend. We needed to increase our pumpkin quotient, and get a jump on some fall décor. The leaves are changing all around us, and Mindy, she of the spotless yard, has a little autumn tableau set up in front of her place, with a veiled bride scarecrow and a groom scarecrow, surrounded by mums, pumpkins, and tin jack o' lanterns. Mindy got married not long ago, and her scarecrows are standing by a little sign that says "The Newlyweds." So, clearly, we needed to up our game. On Sunday we drove up to Burt's Farm, near Dawsonville, a pumpkin mecca.

That bluish-gray pumpkin is called a Jarrahdale, a variety originally from Australia. The little sign at the farm identified it as a "Jerraddle." I tried to google "jerraddle," and nothing came up. With more sleuthing, I found the proper name, and I wonder if when an Australian pronounces "Jarrahdale," it sounds, to a Georgia pumpkin farmer, like "jerraddle," with the emphasis on the second syllable. Amy, my Australian native-informant, what do you think?

Anyway, it's pretty. The pumpkins I've been seeing at the grocery stores just weren't looking too good so far, though we'll probably get a few from there to carve. The big orange one is just the size I wanted--the $14 size. (You could spend a lot of money on a pumpkin at that place. Mindy has one that's the size of an end-table. It is hulking.) Also, Laura and I made a feather Halloween wreath, which I'm sure you'll be seeing in a future post. It is prettier than it sounds, even if Matt says it looks like a Muppet.

Another pressing outdoor goal was achieved Saturday when Matt and I trimmed the bushes out front. Or "trimmed" is really too mild a word. "Went medieval on" is more like it. You may recall that they sorely needed it. I am sure it was a spectacle, the way Matt and I both had to wrestle with the huge hydrangea bush. I mean, we got around, behind, and on top of that thing. We were merciless, and that bush gave as good as it got. At one point, Matt was standing on a stepladder between the bush and the house, wielding the heavy-duty loppers and reaching as high as he could, while I stood on the front side and pushed parts of the bush towards him with a rake. To do that, I had to get really intimate with the laurel hedge in front of the hydrangea, and it was covered in laurel pollen. As you will recall from the post linked above, the terrain makes this a challenging spot. Every time he would reposition the ladder, Matt would tell me his "exit strategy," or where he was going to hurl himself if he fell off, so I could avoid that location. At another moment, I stood on the porch with Matt holding on to the back of my jeans, and leaned out as far as a could with the clippers. We should have sold tickets--it was a slick operation, people. Sometimes we said ugly words. And there were spiders. But we got the chains back on Frankenstein.

In other news, I took a break from heavy-duty grocery shopping. I didn't get anything at CVS except a newspaper and bag of Snickers, for medicinal use. There just isn't anything at CVS that grabs me right now. I might go back in for the bogo All detergent--I've been hoarding coups.

My Publix trip had a brevity and a purity that was actually pleasurable. I didn't have a sheaf of coupons, and I didn't buy a lot of stuff. Bananas, bogo Kozy Shack rice pudding (I've long since used up those printable coupons), two loaves of bread, and two liters of diet pepsi. The Mystery One Cent item was Peter Pan PB--score. And I had the coupon from Sunday's inserts for a free bag of Good Bites doggie treats. Spent $10.66, "saved" $9.83. I'll go back sometime in the next day or so for all the Kahiki and Barber chicken craziness. Check out Fiddledeedee to see what the more creative shoppers are doing this week.

I had some things to say on the subject of fashion at the pumpkin farm, and about my unwillingness to participate in the scarecrow contest this year, but it can wait. I hope y'all had a lovely weekend!

Our Front Yard: 3 Landscaping and/or Personality Problems

Today I was standing out in the street talking to my next-door neighbor Mindy. I am not kidding when I say that every time I run into her outside, the first words out of her mouth after “Hi” are an apology for her front yard. Usually she begins with, “My yard looks so terrible,” or “My poor roses! I haven’t been taking good care of them.” Like, this is her conversational opener, I guess the same way that some people complain about the weather. What is weird about this is that her front yard always looks tidy and beautiful.

She has seasonal plantings, with flowers blooming for a lot of the year, and she has a yard service come every week and mow, edge, and clean up. So her yard is by any definition, just great. This picture was taken in early spring, when the azaleas were blooming. Right now in the same area, she has rosebushes. The little patch of pinestraw by her driveway turns into a huge Lantana bush in the summer. Her grass is like a carpet. And up by her front door, her boxwoods are trimmed into little topiary bubbles--you can see if you enlarge the pic. Looks nice.

Now, we’ve had our own yard issues, sometimes involving a letter from the Home Owners' Association, so depending on my paranoia level when I’m talking to her, I am prone to think, “Is she saying our place looks terrible? Is she trying to give me a gentle hint?" I was getting a complex about it. We have some pretty stuff growing in our yard, but unlike Mindy, we don't pay to have it professionally maintained, AND we're not much into yardwork. Matt keeps the grass mowed pretty well, and edged, and in the late spring growing season, I pulled a lot of weeds from around the things I wanted to cultivate. But hedge trimming and shaping, and mulching, not so much. The whole thing looks a little overgrown now, and it's weighing on my mind in a sort of low-grade way.

All of this was on my conscience when I was talking to Mindy. Then she told me that she had gotten at least three letters from the HOA in the last month. I was like, huh? She said that one of them was because they left their garbage can within sight for more than 24 hours. Okay. One was a complaint that her Lantana bush needed to be trimmed. And another was about an empty concrete urn up by her garage. (If you have a planter out, it's supposed to have something growing in it. But this thing is completely unnoticeable.) I was amazed that she had gotten all that flack while we have gotten one letter in the last several months. Our yard presents so, SO many more opportunities for a "friendly reminder" from the Garden Committee. So the poor woman is always apologizing for her yard, I guess, because she's always getting castigated for it. The HOA has given her an inferiority complex, while letting us, in my opinion, skate.

There are three theories for why this is so. One is Matt's, one is mine, and one is Mindy's:

Matt's: our house is set farther back from the street, and when the garden cops do their monthly driveby, they just don't notice much.

Mine: they don't send us a letter for every "violation," because their expectations for our yard are very low. In the last two years, we've taught them what level to hold us to.

Mindy's: the Garden Committee has a grudge against her personally, because for years, she was on that committee, and she was one of the garden cops. So now it's payback time.

Mindy is prone to craziness in other aspects of her life (that's a story for another day), so Matt thinks her theory is overly paranoid. I'm not sure what to think. But we are facing some challenges of our own in the yard right now.

1)The first thing that needs to happen is that our shrubs need trimming. This is daunting to me.

That hydrangea bush has now reached the top of the window, and the laurel could use some cutting. I'm not sure really what size the laurel should be, though. How much can you prune a shrub without killing it? The topography is tough here. This side of the sidewalk slopes off to a retaining wall, with about an 8-10 foot drop below it. I can't figure out where to put a ladder to cut this monster. But it really needs it. And do we need a fancy gas-powered or electric trimmer? We have old-fashioned loppers, like big scissors.

2) Also, and this hurts my soul, something is slowly killing the azaleas. Like one side of the bush will be blooming and the other side is dead. Likewise the boxwood on the other side of the driveway. I think it might be spider mites, but we've nixed the idea of putting some kind of major pesticide out in the yard. So I need to do some research or consult an expert.

3) The planted, treed area to the right of the driveway has pinestraw on the ground, pinestraw that needs to be renewed a couple of times a year. This was the planted area that the spelling geniuses at the Garden Committee said needed to be "redifined." So we need some more straw to "redifine" it, I guess. Two dudes with a truckload of pinestraw appear every now and again in the neighborhood, and I've paid them twice to clean up that area and spread straw, but I think they charge too much, so I want some new dudes.

So angst, people. I've got yard angst. There are several tons of biomass around this place that are all under my custodianship. Underlying all of this, if you haven't figured this out, is that we are CHEAP when it comes to the yard. Matt, especially, doesn't want to pay anyone to do anything because he thinks he should do it. (Remind me to tell you about when he got up on the roof to try to clean a rust stain off the chimney cap. The roof slopes at a 45 degree angle. He was wearing kitchen gloves and sneakers, and toting the garden hose and a bottle of CLR. He did not get far, but he was up there long enough for me to decide that a money market account was the best idea for the life insurance settlement in the short term, and that I shouldn't use some of it to pay off the house. I decided I would wait six months before making any major financial decisions. Then he made it down alive.)

If you are still reading, thank you. This was therapeutic for me. Same time next week?

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