Free firewood! Come with your chainsaw and take as much as you like!
Saturday night, three of the four big trees on the back, left corner of my property blew down in the hellacious Nor’easter.
We didn’t notice it until the morning. In fact, I had to work on Sunday and I didn’t learn about it until Debra called me. She woke up that morning, looked out the window and had a bit of a freakout seeing giant trees lying across our backyard.
I can’t complain too much. The trees fell almost straight across the fence line and didn’t land on anything important. I know that some fellow Babylonians had trees fall on or into their house. The only real damage from this little incident was to my back neighbor’s fence, which got bent up from the tree roots.
I’m not quite sure what to do at this point. As you might expect, local tree guys are going to be pretty busy for the next few weeks and I’m not real confident in my ability to handle a chainsaw sell enough to slice up a three 75 foot trees. Plus the one remaining tree needs to come down as well.
All kidding aside, I’m glad that no people and very little property was harmed.
Slipping back into jester mode — Don’t just think of the the free firewood: Now you don’t have to pay for tree removal OR get official town approval forms in triplicate to have them taken down!
Home Depot tool rental catalog has chainsaws, brush chippers AND log splitters. Conveniently, you should be able to find some trabajadores there as well. Selling firewood and mulch, you might clear a profit for your trouble (or at least offset the cost of what you’d have to spend on cleanup anyway).
BTW, how are you liking homeownership so far? 😉
We’re still getting settled in, but I’m loving it so far. Right now I’m sitting in my new office, working and looking out the window at my backyard.
Another couple months and we should have the majority of the work done on the house, painting, set up, organizing, etc. Then I’ll buy a new, gas grill and enjoy the summer.
As long as I can keep making the mortgage payments, things will be fine. 😉
Getting back to old business, I’m compelled to say that it’s tough being so right so often. The tax credit is not going away on April 30. All government cheese is forever on the installment plan.
Spurt of Home Buying as End of Tax Credit Looms
Real estate agents say buyers and sellers are hurrying to take advantage of the tax credit, which is worth up to $8,000 for home buyers. But the last-minute rush is also prompting some foreboding about what will happen to the market on April 30 when the credit ends — and whether it is too risky to let it end at all.
James M. Poterba, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calls this “the exit strategy problem.”
“If you have a short-run program to stimulate demand, it’s always tricky to figure out how you gently remove it without going off a precipice,” he said.
Arguments for extending the tax credit a second time are just beginning. Robert Shiller, a professor of economics at Yale and co-developer of the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller housing price index, is an early advocate. He thinks the credit was a bad idea that nevertheless the market cannot do without.
“You don’t make drug addicts go cold turkey,” Mr. Shiller said. “The credit interferes with the market in an arbitrary way, but ending it now would be psychologically powerful. People will be in a bad mood about buying a house.” He advocates phasing it out gradually.
I’ll send you an address by E-mail where you can send the check.
Holy Goodness – wow.
Gary – that’s crazy.
How’s things?