I’m one of the parents in this arrangement and we wouldn’t have it any other way. We raised three kids, a son and two daughters. None of us are rich by any means, but we’re all currently self-sufficient. The one’s that live here don’t do it out of need, but because they’d be crazy not to. We own a decent-sized ranch style house, plenty of room for two couples, on 2.6 acres with a largish pool, and it’s conveniently located to everything one wants to be convenient to. At this stage in our lives, if it were just my wife and I here we’d go crazy. This place has been the central family gathering spot for our local extended family for decades now. Pretty much every month at least one big gathering is happening here. Anywho… We’ve paid it off and deeded it to a trust, with the three kids being successor trustees. Once we’re gone, the property transfers automatically. They can live here forever, or they can sell it and split the proceeds three ways, but I seriously doubt they’ll ever do that. Our oldest lives nearby quite affordably with his girlfriend (both child-free by choice), and our middle daughter and her husband own their own place with our two grand-daughters just outside of town. Our youngest daughter and her husband (no kids yet) live here with us. This son-in-law races street-stocks on dirt and was able to build a big 30’ x 60’ shop in the back, so this place is like heaven to him. He’s 28 going on 12 and has a pretty good job, so he gets to buy whatever toys he wants, and with the investment of his shop into the property, he’s actually got some skin in the game. They are both hugely helpful, and it’s a great arrangement for all of us. We’re currently kicking around some ideas for my son and his girlfriend to move back onto the property, but into their own space…

“trusted bank”

lol

or in other words…

“fake it 'til you make it”

One day a couple of years ago, we had some meatloaf and some baked mac&cheese leftovers that my wife had made. The next day I got a loaf of homemade sourdough from the farmers market that pops up every Saturday. I sliced off about a half-inch thick slice of the meatloaf and the baked mac&cheese with that fresh sourdough and grilled a sandwich that I really hope to be able to replicate at least once more before I die…

it seems to me, and I could be wrong, that they don’t accent syllables the same way, if at all. Years ago I had a database teacher in community college who was from India and it took me a couple of classes to tune in to her, but after that it wasn’t hard to follow her at all. I’m often in Zoom meetings with a software engineer who immigrated from Vietnam and he was a bit of a challenge to understand at first, too.

Oh yeah… and my cancer doc is from Sri Lanka. That was doubly fun. His heavy accent pronouncing four-dollar medical terms took some serious getting used to. Listening to him dictate into his little recorder for the transcriptionists at the end of our visits is an added treat I always enjoy…

I had a good friend who worked LP for wal-mart back in the '90’s. He loved that shit. He’d burn CD copies of the surveillance videos of his latest escapades fighting with and tackling shoplifters and bring them home for us to see. He was a master of “redirecting” someone running away from him into whatever nearby solid object he had available. I know those big red bollards that keep cars from driving thru the front doors claimed more than a couple of victims at his, um… urging. Entertaining stuff for sure.

My favorite channel would have to be Destination Adventure with Dustin Porter. Why this guy doesn’t have 10,000,000 subscribers is beyond me. Not only does he go to some amazing places, but he’s a really gifted videographer. Everything about them is top-notch, and he does it all by himself. The amount of B-roll stuff he gets must be a tremendous amount of work. He picks great music too…

Elvira - The Oakridge Boys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGKatCAQed0

I know this from experience because when this song was fairly new, we were eating in a Pizza Hut and a kids Little League team came in after their game and proceeded to occupy a good portion of the restaurant. I swear every damn one of those kids had a quarter for the jukebox and every one of them picked that song. And if that wasn’t bad enough, they all just had to frickin’ sing along with it on top of that! I remember a couple of those little turds waving their arms like conductors…

I worked in an office that had a water fountain that everyone stopped using after we got a filtered dispenser installed in the kitchen. Every couple of weeks or so we’d walk in the door first thing in the morning and get a nice little aromatic reminder to run a little bit of water through it…

We came home one evening and discovered our 10lb wiener-pinscher had eaten a whole dish of Dove dark Chocolates while we were away. Easily a couple of dozen pieces… All that was left were little bits of foil wrappers all over the floor where he attempted to peel each one open. I’da really liked to have seen how he was doing that. We just knew he was fixin’ to die. Aside from looking guilty as hell, he showed zero signs of any ill effects. There’s no telling how much of the foil wrappers he ate either…

Just yesterday we were at my wife’s sister’s house. They live in a brand-new house in a brand-new neighborhood. Some dingus was going around to every single house leaving flyers advertising a tree trimming service and reminding everyone that it’s hurricane season. The thing is, their wasn’t a single tree in the entire neighborhood that was bigger than a year-old sapling.

They taste just like those little wooden spoons we’d get with our ice cream cups

That one has to be my favorite death scene of the whole series. That show was sooo good…

😂 No but thanks for sharing that!! 😂

My german sherherd won’t drink out of the big water jug bowl thing the other dogs use because she’s afraid of the “glug-glug” noise it may or may not make while she’s using it. Instead, she chooses to drink out of the toilet. Fortunately, we were able to convince her that drinking from a semi-clean bowl of water beside the toilet would be a, um… classier choice.

Here lately I’ve been watching Camping With Steve. He’s a really likeable Canadian guy who does all sorts of camping videos, and a lot of them are stealth camping, where he camps in some pretty crazy places in all sorts of imaginative and inexpensive ways. I’ve always liked to daydream about camping out in various wooded areas that I would see while driving by them in the car, and this guy actually goes and does it. Along highway on-ramps, in the middle of a round-about, behind billboards, in the wooded lot behind a police station… you name it. I’m too old and comfortable to go do something like that now, so it’s fun living vicariously through him.

As a white guy growing up along the redneck riviera, I can only look back in dismay at the casual racism and homophobia I took part in with my other fellow white boys under the guise of “humor”. Not a single person who knows me would ever accuse me of being a racist or a homophobe, as I reserve all of my hatred for the haters, but it took me growing up quite a bit to realize how terrible a lot of those jokes were.