In order to help relieve the stress of commuting, there’s a playground near my local railway station. Rides include:
The Magic Roundabout
Getting off won’t be a problem.
Career Climb
with convenient hand holds. Opening theme song from Mission: Impossible optional.
Suspension of Disbelief
Individual cable car ferries you across the Yawning Void of Ambition.
Swings
Good for team-building exercises.
Hamster Wheel of Life
Somebody’s got to keep it going.
This is a picture from the early 90s when we lived in Jersey City. It’s been photoshopped to look staticky because that was the effect I wanted for some project, and that’s the only copy I could find.
The World Trade Center used to be a constant presence in my life. I’d see it whenever walking out our front door.
The couch was just sitting there one day at the edge of the city and needed to have its picture taken. Nothing profound. Just something found.
Not having a vegetable garden, we like rabbits around here. We’re not sure why our patch has suddenly become so popular though. It could be they’re regrouping from the trauma inflicted the next patch over, where our neighbours, who do have a garden into which they pour much of their time, have been known to police it with a shotgun.
Although the concept of a ‘starter home’ exists in the US, it is not drummed into Americans that a ‘forever home’ must eventually be attained, only after working your way through a list of greater fools. The housing situation here is easily my biggest complaint, and yes, I realise the UK could fit inside Texas with room to spare. Still, it’s a kind of madness which it may take a non-native to truly appreciate.
Don’t thank me, I’m an estate agent. It’s my job to fuck everybody.
As my DW put it, “What’s intriguing is how people’s minds work.”
I have a bit of a nuts idea, I’d just like some advice about whether or not it could be done. We are looking to move house and have found a property on the market for £700,000 our current house is worth roughly £340k we’d make about £120k so we’d need a mortgage of £600k. We do not have a big income at all, I’m a SAHM and DH is a teacher. The thing is the property we’re looking at has a swimming pool which the current owners hire out to swim/dive schools apparently making £3000 a month. They also say that they often turn people down, so it could be possible to make even more income from the pool. This income could therefore cover the mortgage payments.
Do you think any bank would lend us the money to buy this house? Or am I being completely stupid?
Thanks for any opinions.
Opinions are well and good, but here’s a man with a plan:
I’ve a solution for this SAHM, that would completely solve her dilemma – get her the house and pay for the upkeep of the swimming pool. It’s delightfully straightforward and the strategy is as good as foolproof.
All that’s required is a carefully baked batch of cup-cakes, and a trip to Libya… then feed a bad cup-cake to Gadhafi… and, while he’s choking on the crumbs… claim the $1.7m reward. This currently equates to £1,037,914 – which is sufficient both to buy the new place (with swimming pool); to pay off the mortgage on the old house (which can be let out to cover pool cleaning costs) and plops £100K in the bank to pay for incidentals.
It’s a no-brainer, go-go-cup-cake-baking-for-Gadhafi-capture!
The snark is warranted, because once upon a time a bank would probably have quite happily lent them the money, and as we seem hellbent on ignoring moral hazard, we all would have contributed to the bailout made necessary by schemes like this spread across a population encouraged to climb at any cost. In any case, the OP has but to reread her own post, bracketed with appropriate warnings.
Even if it’s just a daydream or wind-up, we’ve gotten ourselves into such a state that it’s entirely believable someone would give this serious consideration.
Image credit: DW. (Crummy captioning job, six-years-ago-sam.) That’s me in my neighbour’s pool, before maintenance became a casualty of their shrinking pool of discretionary income and it started blooming algae.
