D-bag Driver

This lady attempted to cut me off and almost caused an accident.  

Get your kids and babies here

I'm in exciting and exotic Schaumburg for the next couple of days at the extremely friendly Learning Tree training center picking up some additional marketable skills.  Unlike many of the courses I've taken at various learning centers -- most of which seem to be near the Woodfield Shopping Mall -- this course is actually quite intense and I cannot allow my usual level of ADD to kick in.



Toddlers and Teenagers sold separately

The long awaited Tale of our Flood

It was the Wednesday morning before Memorial Day weekend and Nightingale went down to the laundry room to toss her dress in the dryer to remove some wrinkles.  She noticed a large pool of water around the drain.  We usually get a little rain that seeps in through our Wizard of Oz doors and it goes straight to the drain, but this was more than usual.  We assumed the drain was somehow backed up.  I tried unclogging it with the wet dry vac but all that did was fill up the vac with water and more gushed in.  This should have told me something but we were in a rush.

On this particular day we had to be downtown for an appointment we couldn't afford to miss or reschedule.  On top of that I had some meetings at the office that I had to attend in person.  This combination along with the water not being so much made us decide to deal with the water when we got home.  Bad mistake.

When I got home the water had quadrupled and was beyond the laundry room and into the family room portion of the basement.  I just did get home in time to move all the furniture to one end of the room to save the new sofa, loveseat and ottoman I had just bought two months before. 

One of the problems with this type of situation is that you don't really have time to Google and shop around.  We called our Home Warranty Insurance company and they were less than helpful.  They said it probably wasn't covered but would gladly send out one of their vendors to take a look.  We also called State Farm, our home insurance company and they also said it wasn't covered but would gladly send out an investigator at some point.  I'm not really sure what she said because she was rambling.So we called a service that advertised that it handled this sort of thing.  Only they just do the cleanup,they don't fix the problem.  Their website didn't make that clear but we figured it out in time to call Pete's Plumbing service. 

The long and short is that our sump pump was in a locked position, burnt out.  It needed to be replaced.  My theory is that it was overworked from all the rain we got in April so that it simple said screw it, i give up.  We also had a crack in our drain pipe from our sewer to the city sewer and because it was on our property line, Pete said we had to fix it, not the city.  He said that even if it extends to the city part the city would only fix their part.

The bottom line is that I got hit with a $6500 bill to fix this at a time when my credit card had a bigger balance than I prefer to carry because of some other life events.  (Furniture and Financial Planning fees).  So it took some juggling to get everything aligned and I am still paying that bill.

Lovely autumn leaves

My hood is so pretty with the fallen leaves.  Of course the time has come to rake them up. 

Slightly Damaged Goods

I wrote a post about the wisdom of using Amazon Ship and Save.  It certainly saved me effort when we lived at the condo because if I didn't get rock star parking, I'd have to carry kitty litter around the block.  It's helped at the new house too in that it's one less thing to worry about remembering to pick up at the store. 

I was fortunate enough to be home once when the UPS driver delived a batch and I told him he could simply bring it around back each month rather than schlep it up the front porch.  It's easier on him because he just has to wheel his cart around back and it makes life easier for me because I just bring it down the Wizard of Oz doors into the basement laundry room where it lives until needed.

Apparently we have different UPS driver now because the last shipment or two was left on our front porch and not in the best of conditions either.  I believe one or two bags of kitty litter were damaged in the process.  Not worth the effort to do a refund or replacement shipment, especially since we can still use the litter but annoying nonetheless.

Family and Condo Woes

Next Holiday Please:  Now that Halloween is over, we are trying to figure out the plan for Thanksgiving.  We are hosting this year and Nightingale's parents (Cartwrights) will visit and stay with us.  We are also trying to talk the Adamas into coming down for a 2nd Thanksgiving that Saturday.  And if flights are cheap enough, perhaps SIL#2 can fly in that Friday as well.

When this family is more functional than yours

So the only issue then is my side of the family.  I want to invite them over because they haven't seen the new house yet.  There just wasn't a good weekend all summer to try and fit it in and I figure this is as good a time as any since we are driving to Michigan for Christmas.  The only catch?  Most of the family doesn't want to be around my mom.

She certainly has earned their wrath with her attitude and toxic behavior.  Still, I'd think they could suck it up for a few hours and come hang out with us in the name of "family" during the holidays.  It's kinda a shame that my family is this way, though I know we aren't the only family like this.  I have two cousins from another branch who I never see because they live out of state.  I suspect they did their best to get as far away from their parents as possible.

*******
Meanwhile, back at the Condo:  Last winter we would get emails from Kesha, the poor lady who does all the hard work of running the CA Condo Association President asking people to pitch in with snow removal.  Like most of the chores of a self-managed association, a small subset of owners actually pitch in while the others -- mostly the ones who no longer live in the building -- skirt their obligations to help out.  I will go on the record here that in my decade plus of living there I'm probably just slightly above average for pitching in.  It should be noted that not a lot of effort was organized until Kesha took over.

Anywho, to avoid the surprise guilt trip emails this year, I sent out an email to the group suggesting that we do something very crazy, like be proactive about snow removal.  Snow, I reasoned, usually comes every winter here in the Midwest City of  Chicago.  I pitched two options:

1. Engage a snow removal service and pay for it with a temporary increase in association fees, or if costs are tight...
2. We take the 13 weeks between Dec and March and every condo owner pick a week.  If it snows during your week, you are responsible for removing the snow.  If it doesn't snow, you won the winter lottery.

Pretty straight forward.  Now I know you probably think everyone jumped on the brilliance of these ideas and wanted to get started right away.  Au contraire mon ami.  There was the typical resistance with a twist of WTF.  One owner actually wrote:

"I think it's a great idea but I don't live there either and will be hard with a bad snow fall for me to make it over in time to clear.. I hope we can work it out without raising the assessment.. Let me know what I can do.."

Hmm, let's see.  You don't want to pay more money but you don't want to figure out how to get to the condo 1 week out of 13 for your turn to shovel.  Maybe magical bunnies can come over and shovel for you.  What can you do?  Maybe adjust  your outlook on life to realize that everything has a cost associated with it whether it's an actual cash disbursement to a Snow Removal Service or your time and effort to shelp over to the condo you own and shovel the snow.

What do you mean bad snow?

I did send a second email answering questions and asking if anyone had a better idea to please speak up.  I suspect yahoo, gmail and all the other ISP must have gone offline because of the responses since no one has said boo since.  After all,  as Nightingale pointed out, I called everyone out on being negligent and uninvolved and put them on the spot by suggesting we plan in advance. 

The problem in our Lord of the Flies run Shangri-La is that owners are at different places in their life.  When you live in the building you have a more vested interest in taking care of it.  When you don't, it's hard to make the effort to get over there.  But it’s more than that. 

I'd say half the people want to pay for services like lawn care, common area cleaning and snow removal.  Or I should say they feel their assessment should cover that because it did when they first bought into the place.  The problems with that is that 1) it was over 10 years ago and guess what kiddos, prices do go up over time, and 2) I'm not quite certain that our costs were budgeted correctly in those early days.

FWIW I’m not one of the Originals that bought in the building, rather I'm the second owner of my unit, like the majority of the other owners.  Among the First Ones, only two still reside in the building.   The rest have moved out and are renting  their places until that long lost friend The Market returns.  I think there are one or two Originals who specifically bought as an investment property and either never lived here at all or moved out after the first year because you could easily buy more property during the boom years.

Alas, the mentality is pretty interesting.  The same people who don't want to increase the assessment also want to wait until the market returns such that they can make back every penny they spent on the place.  The ones who bought before I  did got in on the ground floor and after a decade, really out to be able to sell their place today.  They won't get the asking price they paid, but it really ought to be enough to cover whatever they owe the bank.  But their thinking is along the lines of "I bought Sears stock at $50 a share that's now $25.  If I just wait long enough it will come back to $50."

I will really be surprised to see how this works out.  Kesha and I are soliciting quotes from Snow Removal Services but I suspect that we'll end up just like last year with people suddenly being out of town when the call for shoveling comes.  Because collectively, our association has all the foresight of Ray Charles in a snow storm.

Post Halloween write up

Since the Bears don't play until tonight -- and in fact haven't played in a couple of weeks because of their bye -- this Sunday and last Sunday were excellent yard work days.  We put away our deck furniture, and laid down some mulch.  I know it's not the end, I'll still probably have to check the gutters and do some other little things before the weather gets too difficult to work outside.

We got our water barrel from the water company a few weeks ago but it doesn't make any sense to put it in right now.  So I'll probably wait until Spring to put it up.  though I did install a hose rack that was more difficult than it should have been.  I also managed to get the garage better organized so this winter I hope to start on some simple woodworking projects.

In spite of the weather, we got a couple dozen trick-or-treaters.  We probably got more in one evening than I ever did in the decade I lived at the condo.  B brought over her kid, her husband and her pseudo-nanny Hannah.  Hannah is a bit of a drama princess in that she doesn't own a car, cannot afford the $25 taxi ride to our house and refuses to take the El.  Therefore, she kinda forced B to wait until she got off work to give her a lift, thus forcing B to endure traffic that she could have avoided by coming a little earlier. 

Not sure what the one in the middle is

She actually asked Nightingale to pick her up, not realizing, understanding or considering someone else besides herself caring that traffic from Streetville to South Loop is intense at rush hour and would take longer than if she just sucked it up and got on the El.  I get that the El can be scary late at night.  But during rush hour it's not a big deal. 

We think next year we might open it up to any parents who have kids but live in a building instead of a home and cannot easily Trick-O-Treat.  This will of course morph into a Halloween Party though. 

They were all too quite willing to pose for pictures

Over the weekend, we did a double visit to the Loop, West and South.  First we had brunch with Na who was in town for the Hot Chocolate run.  Then we went home to finish a few things up and then went to the South Loop to watch the Michigan v Michigan state game at B's.  The B and Na cold war is still on in that Na is past the point of caring and it isn't in B's programming to make the requisite move to bring about reconciliation.