Been busy trying to keep the ship afloat and haven’t really done much more than work-stuff in a while now… It happens.
There have been a few noteworthy events though, for example my experiment with “Factor” only lasted two weeks before I cancelled it. It’s good food, but $600+ a month for lunch and dinner during the work week would still leave another $400 a month for the occasional breakfast and weekends – and a thousand dollars a month for food is simply too much right now.
Monday I had to drive down to Walsenburg and back – 300-ish miles – which was the furthest I’ve driven the car since I bought it. The car did great though; nice ride, really quiet inside even at 80+ so the stereo was a real treat, and having 500 horsepower on tap made the whole event effortless. And I was pleasantly surprised that the car got about 28mpg even with dodging closed sections of highway in Pueblo, rush hour traffic through Colorado Springs, and boosting around the perpetual octogenarian going 55 on a 75mph highway.
I figure the car would get close to 30mpg if I made the drive at night / early morning while the dregs are asleep. Which may become important information given the way things are going.
Anyway, the reason for the Walsenburg trip was to sell my property down in Gardner back to the friend I bought it from…
Back in 2016 things were looking pretty good for me so I started a “ten year plan” to acquire a place in southern Colorado to fix up / build and then retire to when the time comes. I chose Huerfano county as the place to do this because the Spanish Peaks area is beautiful country and it’s cheap to live there – and when I retire I expect to have almost nothing to my name.
I acquired the property back in 2018 as payment for helping out a friend with some emergency funding, and then fixing up a few things around the property such as burring an old trailer and installing new fencing. All told I spent a little over $10000 on the project, and almost a year later the bureaucracy was finally over and I actually owned the land…
But that was all back in the good old days before pandemics and regime change, and since 2020 my income has simply not kept pace with how much things cost… For example, the last estimate I got to run utilities 30 yards and pour a slab of concrete was a quarter million dollars.
Back to the point though, the friend I bought the property from had right of first refusal if I wanted to sell the property as he’s not really interested in neighbors if it’s not me. So last week he agreed to buy it back from me for what I spent, and Monday afternoon we arrived at the title office in Walsenburg to do the deed.
Unfortunately everything takes longer and is more expensive these days, so our spit and a handshake will actually take a week and about a thousand dollars to complete – for legal reasons.
Listening to "Los Angeles" by FM-84