patrick.net

Astrid, forget about the perfect house, let's open a gourmet laboratory!

Sure! :)

Pine forest for pine nuts and Matsutake mushrooms
an ocean going fishing boat for crabs and tuna
an oyster bed
a clear running stream to grow wasabi and water cress

Other ingredients will come to me, with time...

Matsutake mushrooms

It is not autumn yet... I really want some now. :(

If I ever get married and have kids I would like to buy a place like this (and a condo on Russian Hill and a place on the West Shore)...

http://www.forbes.com/2002/05/10/0510how.html

It would be nice to have something like this:

http://www.craigslist.org/sby/rfs/164000478.html

How much? 615K?

It is amazing what you can get in Texas for 615K!

FAB,

Very nice! Though that's a LOT of money. For me, $10M+ would be run for my private Caribbean Island kind of money.

Very nice! Though that’s a LOT of money. For me, $10M+ would be run for my private Caribbean Island kind of money.

10M will not buy a nice penthouse condo in Manhattan though.

But $10M will buy a very nice place in Westchester County and a pretty decent place in Greenwich, CT. I think those would be the East Coast equivalent of Hillsborough.

I would like something boxy with lots of concrete and glass, and minimal furnish.

This totally runs counter to my gardening instinct, which calls for English garden lushness and cramming in as many different varieties of plants as possible.

Ah ... My dream house is actually a super sized Condo very high in a decent city neighborhood. But in this earthquake zone, I have no desire to live anywhere but on ground floor, wityh no floor above me. Yes, this may be illogical, given that many high rise buildings are actually very safe construction. But sometimes fear wins, logic losses.

I want one of those "Red Whine" inspired Magic Boomer Condos that spawns money. That way all my conversations can center around how many Ha Has my MBC is worth, as I ignore the mass exodus of working class families with children leaving the state. My conversion to the Dark Side will be complete when I metamorphose into a shallow, self-absorbed NIMBYist, who staunchly defends my property's value against any Bolshevik agitators seeking to overthrow Prop. 13 or UBL laws.

Peter P,

I heard that the TX property tax is around 3.25%, so you pretty much pay the same annual maintenance cost for the same home in CA.

My perfect house is situated atop a rolling hill somewhere spanning around 5+ acres, studded with oak and fruit trees. Sunshine all year round, with occasional clouds hanging over the mountain range in sight. My piece of land will not look on to the urban center directly, it will steal a small peek of the city lights from behind the knolls and woods.

Oh, and the house has at least one toilet.

@Red Whine,

Absolutely brilliant rant! You are giving Mr. X (long in a class by himself) some genuine competition!

Garage Company Says:

> So Red Whine you are saying that S.B. is the
> Aspen of California. Correct?

Then Red Whine Says:

> You are correct. You wouldn’t need to talk to very
> many residents to correctly conclude that it is the
> Ass Pen of California.

I’ve spent a lot of time in both Aspen and SB over the past 30 years (One of my best friends got shipped off to Cate at 14 and another friend has a family ranch just outside Aspen) and I don’t think that they have much in common other than then homeowners have more money than average…

I think I would like to create an environment like one of those hotels you used to be able to go to for about $14 a night in Baja like Rosarito or maybe Ensenada? My wife and I have talked about doing an "assisted living facility" for years, but I've always hoped to insert a little twist. The End of the Line. All guys (sorry girls). When I've fully explained trust me, you won't want any part of it. A lot of older males get really alienated from their families, former employers/employees, the community, each other and in the end, themselves. Think of it as Surfer X's "aging boomer hangout" only with no boomers, no "male enhancement", no "da kine". No nothing really. It's a place where we blatantly disregard the considered opinions of medically trained professionals and do exactly as we please. Primarily our "tenants" would work on their "beaters" in whatever shade they can find, the clerk at the front desk doesn't know anything and the maid may clean your room and maybe she won't. I'd like to have a coin operated pool table that periodically keeps your money and a vending machine that gives you Pepsi no matter how hard you push the button for Coke. Here, death is not feared and perhaps welcome, thus rooms are paid for a week in advance and check out is at noon.

My ideal house? hmmm... first and foremost, it would be one that was affordable. Secondly, I really dig log cabins. I'd have one that had 2 ft thick logs as the soul construction of the walls, oak roof shingles, and redwood shutters. The inside would have a massive fireplace, a kitchen with stone or brick flooring, a classic oven and the bathroom would have a clawfoot tub. That's the house. More importantly to me anyway is the workshop. I would have a two story roughsawn shop with a workshop for my wife upstairs complete with a place for her to paint, draw, and work on all her small projects. Downstairs I would have a full compliment of tools.The nice stuff, like an up to date diagnostic set, two large chests full of snap-on tools, and several old cars. The first car would be a 1929 Dusenburg Model J with a 2-tone black and grey paint job, and the other would be my ole' reliable mercury Monterey because she's been a good car and deserves it. Outside under a large shed would be a John Deere tractor complete with a brush cutting attachment, plow, and cart. I would also have an assortment of lawn mowers and garden equipment. There would be around 20-30 acres of land on which I would have 2 gardens- one for corn, potatoes, green beans, and cabbage while garden two would be my Wife's garden for planting flowers and stuff. There would be a ridge behind the property that we could hike up in and pick blackberries. I'd say that this property would reside in somewhere like North Carolina. Oh well.. guess one can dream.

SP,

"Wah wah, wakuh wakuh wakuh"

Ad lib solo with liberal use of harmonic distortion and feedback*

A van down by the river.

Newsflash!
Phase one of: Operation escape California is now complete!
My devious plan; create a massive agency-esque web site that'll either A: serve as a telecomuting business generating freelance site, or perhaps impress a few agencies or design firms of which I can possibly procure work.Nevertheless, the desire is to be mobile and independent. The site is chock full of bugs, but I'm working on it. For now, here she is!

http://tinyurl.com/l7n2y

Thanks lil!

Red Whine,

Your best work ever.

BillF,

Yes, that home would be around ~$900k in Sacramento, so your property tax would be about $10k/yr. Much more in the Bay Area though.

Those big Texas homes are kind of generic looking though.

Red Whine and DinOR,

Excellent!

All this talk of workshop space make me see a market there. Maybe high end condos should take out some of their useless conference space and make it into a workshop for guys.

Astrid,
Indeed I've noticed a lot of those Big TX homes are super-generic. Looking around Austin, Dallas and Houston, there are scads of these 2 story homes. On the other hand, most are in the 100-150k range. I'd be perfectly ok with a house at that price even if it was hideous. It would be a good starter home.

HaHa,

Did those scary clowns take some of your HaHas away?

WWII,

Yeah, my mom keep saying that she wants to retire to Dallas and I keep trying to convince her the superiority of a Northern AZ condo, once those start going for $50K instead of $250K.

Wow. Looks like we've found something Ha Ha and Surfer-X can completely agree on.

Let's not forget. They will be free till the appeal also looses. But it's a great start.

Ebbers - down
Kozlowski - down
Lay and Skilling - down
Quattrone - pending retrial

There is no perfect country in the world. US is as good as it gets. The justice system here works. This was a GOOD news.

HARM,

How about that? Never thought I'd live long enough to see the day!

Who cares about Enron. Who's getting prosecuted in the FNM debaucle?

DinOR,

I hope your retirement idea come true. A roach motel (and proud of it) that allow ordinary guys to live it up will be an infinitely more useful service than all those boomer operated middle-of-nowhere bed-n-breakfasts.

astrid,

Thank you so much for seeing that there just might be SOME value to this "business model". My oldest daughter works at a hospice for the "good sisters" and it will toughen you up in a big hurry. But somewhere between raising children, paying taxes and jumping through hoops for the man there has to be SOMETHING else? Our rinky dinky town of 7,500 must have (and I'm not kidding) 15 to 20 B&B's! It's just silly. Most are horrifically expensive, ridiculously over decorated (and promoted) and as far as I can see yield ZERO fun! I'm just being truthful here and I can say I wouldn't want my WAKE to be held there! I'm serious! Think of my retirement home as a citadel for guys that STILL like to squirt plastic army men with lighter fluid. Now we're talking!

Seriously though, the "model" would involve having able bodied seniors in a "shop and board" environment where they could be "1099" sub-contractors performing warranty work for various mfrs. It would likely be "piece work" and the shop expenses (starting with a roof) would be shared by the "residents" where it would be cost prohibitive for them as individuals. Any older building with shop space on the first floor and rooms on the second floor would likely do. Just for a goof!

Enron -- what a joke. Didn't they sell tulip bulbs? Mere months before it unravelled, Time magazine was shouting Enron's accolades from the mountaintops. At the time, I remember thinking "I will never ever buy a company whose core business cannot be understood by ANYONE." Their financial statements looked like a Rorschach test made from an investment banker's afterbirth. If Americans weren't degenerate gamblers always hoping to speculate on the latest thing rather than [gasp] SAVE anything, a stock like Enron would have had no buyers.

Justice? Hardly. True justice would look something like Alan Greenspan doing the perp walk.

"Think of my retirement home as a citadel for guys that STILL like to squirt plastic army men with lighter fluid"

:P Just remember to have them sign a waiver before they move in. Given the amount of destruction you guys did in your pre-teen years, I'd hate to think about the potential destruction possible with a working credit card and tens of years of real life engineering type experience.

That's one way to reclaim America's manufacturing superiority (I know according to Randy H, that never left, but it sure feels like it)

That retirement sure beats being greeters at Wal-mart or playing the same 18 holes over and over again in mosquito infested Florida.

That’s one way to reclaim America’s manufacturing superiority (I know according to Randy H, that never left, but it sure feels like it)

Just for clarification, I demonstrated that the US produces by far the largest amount of global manufacturing output, as measured by currency neutral value.

This does not mean that we are not losing manufacturing jobs. In fact, what has been occurring is a rapid (and ever increasing) rise in productivity as enabled by technology. Put simply, it takes ever less people to produce ever greater output value. "The man running the robots" if you will. The same thing has been happening in agriculture. This complexity is why meaningful macroeconomic statements are difficult to formulate, and seldom reported by the mainstream press or uttered by impotent, cynical politicians.

What this means for US labor markets is an altogether different issue, and one which isn't being dealt with all that well by our "leaders'. I suggest a read of "Player Piano" as a nice accessible way to conceptualize the manner in which these two problems interrelate.