CrushedVamp

My wife and I still do this, but not always on Sundays. She will often say, "lets take the long way home", so we do, or go for an afternoon ride after church. It's fun, gets us out of the house and lets us explore new places we have not been before, or not been in a long time. With cars that get 35-40 miles per gallon, it really is not an expensive outing. But part of that is the different culture I think between the US and Europe. We just have limited public transport because of the size of the United States. I do not live in a state that is even considered big but yet my state and the entirety of Ireland is the exact same size. Sadly, I do live in a state that has annual car inspections, and without question that is a HUGE factor of the lifespan of a car. For now its reasonable though because we do not have smog requirements so its only mechanical in nature. The sad part is the inspections really only hurt the poor because if a car does not pass inspection, they just drive it anyway, or go to a facility where they can bribe the mechanic to get it to pass. There is actually talk about the state doing away with inspections because it is such a scam for the populace. And getting a good mechanic you can trust has been a huge reason I have pushed every car I have ever gotten past the 250,000 mile mark. I really rely on them, making sure they know I will invest money in my car as long as they think it will pass inspection for another year or more years. But even then, I have been told, "this will be the last year", but yet I have gotten two more years more after they said that. Part of that is keeping the car looking good. Taking care of any rust so it looks like a solid car. I feel your pain, but for us it is with airplane mechanics. We have a few small engine planes in the family and because of the rigorous requirements of aviation mechanics... and for obvious reasons... it is really hard to find a good airport with a reputable mechanic. We have one now but honestly have no idea how long he will stay there or even keep working before he retires. He is worth his high pay, but also making him worth his value is the airport. One of our planes has floats, one has wheels, and one has both floats and wheels both, and this airport has both a river to land on, or adjacent to it; an asphalt runway. The airport is 1-1/2 hours by car from the house but still worth it to us because some of the camps we own are 6 hours drive by car. Its actually faster to drive to the airport and take the float plane in to some of the camps then drive to them because the lakes are big enough to land and take off on. But I am sure it is the same way on the canals with your boat. You cannot just tie up anywhere so there are a lot of factors that go into your decision on where you tie up your vessel, who you have work on it, and where you take it. I fully understand how hard it can be to make everything work.

Grating just plain sucks! I am around it all the time and whether walking in high heels, kneeling on it, dropping things through it, or getting vertigo for looking down through it; the type of flooring is just a pain. I am forever replacing broken clips that bolt the crap down too, which can sometimes be dangerous when the bolts break causing the grating to be lose at height or uneven from one to the other. I guess they now make high heel proof grating but I still hate the stuff.

I hear that a lot and it just is not true, at least over here. Mechanically speaking, it always makes sense to fix a car up because the cost of repair is so cheap compared to making monthly payments. I always pay cash for my cars anyway, but in doing the math on my current car it is easy to see why I am doing so well with it. I paid $7000 for it and repairs have cost me $4800 over the 4 years I have owned it. That means the car has cost me $11,800. If I was making payments on a new car, just the payments alone would have been $24,000. In 4 years I have saved $12,200 and my car is still in excellent mechanical shape meaning I have more years left of lief on it. I could put in a new engine or transmission, extend the life of the car by several more years, and still be WAY AHEAD of what a new car would cost. But that is mechanically speaking. What kills cars where I live is rust. But here is where paying cash for older cars really pays off. My car costs me $58 dollars per week in repairs which I also put in $35 a week in gas. So for roughly putting in $100 per week, I net a paycheck of $1800 per week. That is a return on investment of 1700%!! Where the heck could I ever get that kind of return on any other investment. My stock investments average 11% most year and I am lucky to get that, and my real estate nets me 12% per year on average, so as much as people bemoan and wish they could retire, the truth is having a car and going to work will net a person the most possible money for the least outlay in cash. Without question, with those kinds of returns on investment a new car pencils out too, but like most things in life, it is not what you make that matters but how much you spend. Keep the costs down on a 1700% ROI investment and you will reap incredible savings. The price to pay for that is driving around with an old car instead of one that is all shiny and new and has all kinds of new electronic gizmos.

I hate cars as they are just a cost. With other stuff, like houses, equipment, tractors or in some cases trucks, you can make money on them, but with personal vehicles they just cost you dearly. More often than not, it's the cars in the driveway that cost most American's their secure financial life. But how could it not? The average cost of a car loan now is $40,000 borrowed.

I am the same way. My car only has 201,000 miles on it and the garage says they have seen the same model and year go to 450,000 miles. With no rust so far, there is hope it will last awhile. I hope so. I hate debt, have absolutely no debt and do not plan to get any either. It means I have no credit but that is fine by me! I always thought it was an insane financial system where you bust be in debt to have banks loan you money! A co-worker just bought another car yesterday. It is his second $20,000 car in two days. In the two years I have known him he has bought five cars, all with loans, and he wonders why he has NO money. Kind of sad because he should retire but can't. Terrible, terrible spending habits. Not my money or life, but so sad to see just the same.

As you know, I do not wear high heels, but rather like my wife wearing them, but in mud I always wore a heeled logging type of boot that had a pretty good heel to them. So, I understand what you mean. I like them at work because it was a solid place to put your foot when climbing towers as they sunk into the rungs of ladders well and when climbing out onto the cross-arms. But now I do far more sub-station work and find working in the crushed rock that is a requirement of substations, that no heeled boots work better. You need a pair of these! 🙂

I can't imagine there will be much interest in restoring some of the cars today... no matter the model they really all look the same. A case in point is a RAV4, Honda CRV, Nissan Rogue, etc... they look essentially the same in style. And I get it. When engineers have to design a car with so many of the same parameters like crash testing, and miles per gallon, the more specifics they have to design for, the more the makes will be all the same on a given model. But they are boring. Myself I drive a 2003 Honda CR-V with 200,000 miles. Mechanically it is sound and has no rust, which where I live is the biggest killer of vehicles. Mathematically it always makes sense to fix a car because what little you spend in repairs more than makes up for the replacement cost of the car. For every year extra you get out of it, the more money you save. But with rust that is not the case. Where I live where salt is on the road much of the year, rust is the biggest killer. There just is no saving a rusted out car. But knowing which cars last longer than others is where a person can get ahead. I struggled one year. My car needed fixing so I rented a car to drive while it was in the repair shop and it was a 2024 Toyota RAV4 with 3 miles on it, and my 2003 Honda was in the shop. It was hard to give that up and go back to what essentially amounted to a Model T, but I am quite frugal and the logical thing to do ultimately won out.

I feel your pain on this. I am walking on marbles might be worse, but having grown up on a farm I have walked a million miles in mud and really dislike it. Slipping back, stumbling, never assured of solid footing; it really wears you out walking in that. I can only imagine in high heels it is overly so. Good for you for keeping on in doing so.

Not laughing at you at all because they are different beasts of course, but on tugboats they do not even have electric starters. The air compressor and back-up air compressor does, but that is only because it must be fired up first, get proper compression and then use that air for the air powered starters for the main engines. Thiee by the way are two locomotive engines so about 4000 hp apiece. For electrical power they typical have 250 KW gen sets, having a back up genset as well. Everything on a tug has back up systems. I am in no way comparing a canal boat, just explaining how a tugboat is set up in case people on here care.

Good for you @mlroseplant I think it is so good to give the younger generation compliments. They get so many negative ones now, to the point where they now say a high schooler has the stress levels of a graduate student of 20 years ago. As a father of daughters I always tried to encourage them to dress nicely and at times insisted on it. And of course their mother also dresses nice which hopefully will show them that dressing nice is important in life. That is nice though that you complimented her and in a real, complementary way and one that was not creepy. I think today where encouragement is so often lacking that when it is done, it is ten times more powerful then the suggestions to dress like a slob.

To me AI only does the "fun stuff" or at least for me. I like to write and draw, picking out my word choices, structuring sentences and getting my point across, or making some picture in my mind into a nice book cover, and AI is either butchering that, or stealing from what I have written online somewhere, or God forbid, one of my many novels. I do not need a computer to regurgitate in repeated fashion what I already know, or can get information about, let AI do my dishes, clean my house, or wash my clothes; you know the drudgery of life and let me be creative. Instead, it is the other way around, doing the fun stuff in life leaving us to be more and more bored and relegated to doing miserable stuff with our time. I do think it is interesting that they claimed AI would make the blue collar worker obsolete and it is actually now the opposite. AI is taking white collar jobs while blue collar jobs are soaring in demand and pay. And nuclear power in the United States is starting up again as AI data centers are being plugged in behind-the-meter to nuclear power plants directly. 3 Mile Island is now being taken out of mothballs to fire up a AI Data Center. Who would have thought!

I have been looking around some and it seems real fur is coming back into fashion again which I think is good. I was hoping for sable but see that is well outside of my price range, she is my wife and priceless but not a $25,000 dollar fur coat priceless. I draw the line there. I was looking at some coyote fur bomber style jackets though that looked stylish and warm and in the $1400 range which is far more practical. I think I am going to pull the trigger on that for a Valentine's Day present. Maybe that will set her up for a March 14th Day present for me! 🙂 (Don't look that holiday up while at work though... NOT safe for work!

We have a similar community here, but rather than live along canals they moor to public docks. There is a monthly fee because they are plugged into shore power with their vessels, but its their home full time and year around, which here is important because the Coast Guard does not break ice in every harbor. I knew of some people that lived like that and it was its own, unique community. I was not a part of it, just invited to go see how they lived, and know they really looked out for one another just because they really had too. I was a mariner myself then, but it was much different as I lived on tugboats which is a more industrial form of how you live @shyheels . So we were always in and around those that lived in the harbors. Sometimes they needed this or that, and because we were so self-sustained, we would lend them a hand when we could. (I was an engineer aboard). Its how I got my job now which at that time was keeping powerplants and generators running, and now I do the same, but am land-based in doing it. It still has the same problem though, power generation on land or at sea is a 24/7/365 task.

The only "heels" I know of today that is accepted in footwear for men in general terms is the "Logger Boots" that have a taller heel to them. I wore those for years, and probably still would if it was not for most having steel toes and being lace-ups. I have to wear safety toes, but they have to be composite and not steel because of the high voltage I work with, and the specific grounding situations inside substations. As for laces, I have just got accustomed to Sketchers slips in for sport, casual and work wear. It is interesting about the history of heels though and how it came about. You are right though, in fashion once something is given the stigma of feminine it is hard to get back. I do have another one though: leggings. They are slowly being adopted by men and women. It is more of jock wear then general acceptance but considered "unisex" now.

Some houses depreciate too, or at least here in the USA they do. Mobile homes, also called single wides, and double-wides here not only depreciate yearly, but some lending institutions will not loan money on a single or double wide that is over 10 years old. I buy my houses with cash as I hate having debt, but I will not buy these types of houses because it would mean only cash sales would limit the number of people who could buy them. And there is no motoring up the canal to get away from crappy neighbors either. 🙂

That is too bad. I saw this very same thing with my ex-wife and her mom. No matter how she tried it just was never good enough, yet my ex-wife kept trying for the impossible, hoping. It has ruined her life. I brought her out of that saga for ten years, but then she got sucked right back into trying to please her mother. It was not just our marriage that got ruined, but several before ours, and she has a trainwreck of a life just because she tries to placate her mother. Deep down inside she knows she never will, but she keeps trying... Sad.

My view on fashion is convoluted because it is ironically so simple: who gives a flying flip about what gender it is supposed to be for if its what you want to wear? I wear leggings because they are warm and comfortable compared to sweatpants or long johns. And I think it is great that guys are wearing high heels because they were originally men's fashions. I don't care that women wear them now, but I would love to see it go back to where it is common place for men to also wear them. I really cannot define it, but I just like seeing outfits that are well thought out and coordinate well. I can't define it, but I know when I see it.

That is the beauty of houses. Twenty years ago people bought them to actually live in but now houses are how average, everyday people make an investment and cash in on that equity. Its pretty easy to do and no huge risk. Add in the need for towns to have tax revenue and there is a LOT of reluctance to let the housing market fall. Not that it can't, but it is the last thing they want. With the stock market averaging 7% per year, and the housing market averaging 17% pe year, it is easy to do the math. Myself, I love fixer-uppers.

Maybe, but I have seen the opposite as well. I once worked at a powerplant and decided since we had a locker room I was going to dress nice to the place and back. While on shift I would be in blue collar clothes but not to and from the house. Not a suit and tie kind of look, but dressed nice like my wife and I typically do while we are out and about, or going to a doctors office or something, On the second day of dressing nice, management came and asked me if I would be part of management.... TWO DAYS! I turned them down because I have no interest in that as I like what I do, but it was an interesting social experience. Granted it could be just a coincidence, but I don't think it was. When you dress nicely, you do feel better about yourself instead of feeling frumpy, but you also project a sharp image that resonates with people. I am never about being fake. My wife and I get accused of it all the time, but we are actually the opposite, while we are dressed sharply, we don't dress for attention, we dress because of how it makes us feel. But I get it, someone sees us dressed sharp and they make assumptions. That is just human nature.

We just had a rare earthquake earlier in the week. It was a 3.8, which was the 5th largest we have ever had. Sorry to hear about your termites though. That really sucks. We do not have termites here, or any poisonous snakes either, but as I type this it is snowing and -7 below zero (f) with high winds. Summers are nice here, it's just they only last from July 3rd to July 5th! 🙂

Can you lift it up? I had a desk that I loved but it was just not the right height. Since I am a writer, it HAS to be the right height, so I lifted it up on four bricks. It is ideal now. But I understand there may be others in your home or apartment where height changes may not be agreeable with them. Glad to have you back. I have not been on here for years either.

Thank you for typing all that as I learned something. It makes absolutely perfect sense though I did not consider it before: a basement is a livable area and a cellar is not. I therefore have a cellar. I do have outside and inside access via stairs, but its height is too low. I would put it at 7 feet, but its the wastewater lines that mess things up. Some are five feet high. It really is too bad as the masonry work with the locally found slate and granite being superb and actually nice looking. I do not drink but always thought a wine cellar would look good down there. I would either have to reroute the plumbing lines, dig down the earthern floor, or both to make it livable. I do not see it anytime soon as we have an unfinished 3rd floor that we seldom go into now, and its just me and my wife here. Property taxes are kind of bad though. A house on the river but with only 1 acre of land, surrounded by conservation land, and a 3300 sq ft house with 24 x 24 two story woodworking shop costs me $2200 in property taxes per year in US dollars. Aside from that though, the part that is nice about living here is that we have NO BUILDING CODES. None. We have some state laws we have to abide by, like having a septic system so we don't pollute the river, and can't build within 50 feet of the main road, but other than that, they figure here, you have to live in whatever you build and ultimately sell it, so that is on you how you build it. The permit cost to put an addition on your house will set you back by $20 USD, and to buy raw land and build a new house will cost you $50 USD. Our lack of building codes stems from so many people having sawmills. Because US Building Code Standards means you cannot saw your own lumber, most towns voted down building codes. One year one woman wanted to force every house in town to have smoke detectors and we all rallied together and got that defeated. Needless to say that lady no longer lives here.

I am a mans-man through and through so I never thought I would post publicly on this topic, but here I am. In any case with an ingrown toenail a few years ago a doctor told me they did not do that at the clinic, but a nail saloon would easily take care of the problem. She also told my wife that if she had never been before that she should go. For medical reasons I did, and I was hooked. I do not color my toenails, just clear, but have now for two years, going monthly. It was awkward at first but nowhere near as unheard of as you would think, lots of men go. I don't even consider it a gender thing anymore but a medical necessity, kind of like going to a massage therapist every few weeks. Sure, that can be a foo-foo massage for sure, but the kind i get are deep tissue to keep me going. Climbing up those high-tension towers is havoc on my calves and there are no second chances with falling from height or getting lifted at elevated voltages. I need to stay limbered up.

I watched a 1980’s show yesterday where in trying to show how she was a materialistic woman of sorts, she wore a mink coat. That got me to thinking, everything old is new again, so is it acceptable to wear real fur again. I was thinking of buying my wife a fur coat. I know for many years the wearing of real fur has been declared wrong, although my own ideas on that are a little different. I had a farm and let people trap animals, but after awhile they stopped because without a market, there was no money in the furs. This was too bad as the wildlife on my farm got really out of whack. I looked up some coats the other day and the prices are now reasonable but was curious as to how that coat might be approached by others?

I think a lot of it is personality, and that is whether a person is buying things or talking to a woman about woman's fashions. For me, I raised six daughters and been married for thirty years, I have gone alone to the store and bought tampons and yeast infection medication; NOTHING gender specific bothers me. NOTHING! Most of the time I employed a trick in the literary writing world called "Lampshading" which is where you cover what some would consider a misdeed with an over the top admission. I might start the conversation by saying, "I can't believe I am buying this stuff as a guy but here I am". We would all laugh and the awkwardness was over. But that was me. My mother in law on the other hand, she had a senior moment once and ordered "Donut Balls" when really she wanted what we call Donut Holes or Munchkins here. That was twenty years ago and she still is embarrassed by what she said.