Here is my 1SE for the month of January.
Archive for January 2019
1 Second Everyday – January
January 31, 2019Green Book
January 24, 2019
Last night was “Date Night” again. This time we went to see “Green Book” at the AMC theater in Torrance. What a great film! This time we didn’t even have to pay for a sitter for Mary because our friend Roberta was visiting us and offered to watch Mary for the evening. We have been try to catch up on seeing all of the Oscar-nominated films this year. We never get to see all of the films, especially since the academy expanded the Best Picture nominees to 10 films.
Green Book stars Virgo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali. Also, the actual green book was the star of the film. It is the story of a booklet called the “Negro Motorists Green Book” that was used by black people traveling in the South during the “Jim Crow” era. The book was published from 1936 until 1966 by Victor Green, a mailman in the NYC area. [Click here for more information from Wikipedia.] The book was intended to help Black motorists find lodging and accommodations while traveling.
So back to the movie. Mahershala plays the part of a black classical pianist (Dr Don Shirley) who hires Mortensen (Tony Lip) to be driver for a concert tour through the Deep South. The movie details their journey.
Tony Lip was an Italian-American who worked as a bouncer at the Copa-Cobana Club in NYC. So Tony had lost his job at the Copa when the club had closed for renovations. Then, Dr Don Shirley hires Tony Lip as his driver and assistant. Tony would be constantly getting Dr Don out of trouble.
So they started their tour through the south in this a beautiful baby blue 1962 Cadillac Sedan DeVilles. What a beautiful car.
Also, I loved the music from the film. Dr Don Shirley leads a trio with a piano, cello and bass fiddle. When we got home I logged in to iTunes and bought the sound track album right away. [Click here for iTunes and here for Amazon.]
So finally, we stopped for dinner on the way home. A lot of times we feel we need to get home right away since we are paying for our sitter by the hour. Most of the time we will get take-out food. (Perhaps, KFC, burgers, Chinese, etc.) This time we decided to stop at Taxco Mexican restaurant around the corner from our condo. Paula and I both had a delicious margarita and some Mexican food. Very tasty. [Click here for the Yelp entry]
Christmas Cards
January 9, 2019I declare that the Christmas card season is about over. Yesterday, I received what I expect to be the last card for the season. So it is time to review what happened.
This year I sent out 130 Christmas letters to friends and family spread out across the country. About half are in the Los Angeles area and the other half in the Boston area. Then add a few odd letters to people in North Carolina and Florida.
In 2017, I sent out about 175 letters. This year I spent a great deal of effort trimming the list down to 130. So how many did we receive? Well as best I can count we received a little over 30 cards, letters and holiday pictures. My goal has been to reach out to the people that we have known over the many years.
I don’t understand why the cards received is so much lower than the number sent. We love to hear how people are doing. As you can see in the pictures above, we love to post the cards in any available space around out kitchen and dining room.
So my question for my readers. Do you send out holiday/Christmas cards/letters? If not, why not? If yes, why? Perhaps $.50 each for postage might be one answer.
End of an Era
January 1, 2019Saturday, December 31 marks an end of an era for Paula and I. On this day we closed on the selling of our Condo in Plymouth, NH.
We had bought the condo back in 1997. We would spend weekends and vacations there. Our boys would snow ski in the winter and we would all go out on our boat in the summer on Newfound Lake. Or we would just sit out one the deck and watch the sun go down over Tenney Mountain. Overall, we had a great time at the condo. Every time that we headed south on rte 3, we looked forward to the time we would be coming back.
The last time that we spent any time at the condo was the summer of 2012. We lived there for a short period after we sold our house in Billerica, MA.
We would have preferred to sell the condo back in 2012 but that wasn’t possible. We were underwater on our mortgage and the market for vacation homes hadn’t recovered from the economic woes of 2008.
So instead of selling, we put the condo on the rental market. We had a great real estate agent (Diane Masessa) at Old Mill Properties in Bristol, NH.
At best, renting it was a break-even proposition. The rent would about cover our mortgage payment, but not condo assoc. fees. I had to chase the tenants for the propane usage because Dead River Propane wouldn’t give them their own accounts.
So rent it we did. First, to a pair of grad students at Plymouth State (PSU). Then, to a pair of Saudi’s doing graduate work at PSU. And finally, to another Saudi grad student from PSU.
The last renters were the ones that broke the camel’s back. They moved out 1.5 month early this past August. They left the place a mess. Needless to say they didn’t get their security deposit back. So in September, we decided to try our luck at selling the place.
So we got it cleaned up, got rid of a lot of junk and added a coat of paint here and there. Then, declared it ready for the sales market.
The sales situation had changed for the better. We had paid down our mortgage principal to about $90K and the vacation real estate market had recovered somewhat.
So we put it on the market in November with an asking price of $119,900. So we had two offers within the first few days on the market at full asking price. WOOT!!!
Selling a property from 3000 miles away can be a real challenge. We have been lucky to have a great real estate agent. We have been working with Diane over the past 6 years in managing the property. Most documents that needed to be signed (leases, purchase & sales, etc.) have been executed using an app called “DocuSign“.
The only documents that we could not use DocuSign were the closing paperwork which had to have live signatures that had been notarized. The document package had been emailed to me last Wednesday. Printed them out and called in our Notary Public, Patrick Sullivan in San Pedro. Patrick witnessed all of our signatures then we put them in an envelope and Fedex’d the package back to the closing attorney in Mass.
I expect to get the final closing doc’s back via FedEx on Jan. 2, 2019
Next steps will be to figure out how much capital gains taxes we will have to pay this Spring.
Happy New Year,
Joe
calherewecome 