Tag: dodging a bullet

To Our Readers Our Absence Explained

I would like to apologize to our faithful readers for the vanishing act. I’m aware that we here at f-yourblog.com were committed to doing our best to increase new content, and we still are. I know it seems ridiculous that once we here at f-yourblog.com started to ramp up content all of a sudden everything came to s sudden halt. I feel that I owe our reader’s an explanation for this counter productive seeming behavior.

I have almost completed an out of state move (and as we all know moving is a bitch from beginning to end), but it was overdue and utterly necessary. I set down roots in the Great Souther Swamp for the past 13 plus years, and shit is getting way to far fucking outta hand. The quite blue collar family oriented town I moved to 6 years ago (which I made because I was already in The Great Southern Swamp and moved farther north to avoid an increase in chaos.)

Now unfortunately the small family town I grew to love has as of recently been falling the fuck apart. The cops used to be bored as hell driving aimlessly up and down the main road. Things have definitely changed for the fucked. People are getting stabbed to death and cannibalized in their own fucking homes, Uber drivers are raping their fares, and there shoot outs infant of Home Depot and Walmart (both a 5 minute drive from my house.)

So Heres a run down of events of the move:

  1. Obviously for number one was my wife and I deciding it was time, but weren’t being pro active (this went on for 18 months)
  2. My wife was tooling around on reality sites and stumbled across an interesting possibility.
  3. My Wife found a house listed for $70,000, BUT it needed approximately $60,000 of work to bring it to a proper house.
  4. The house had been sitting on the market for 1 year already before we came across it.
  5. NOW the plan for the move my wife and I formulated was A) to buy a house for cash so the banks can fuck off and take their mortgages with them. B) NO HOA’s I’ve had more than enough of the extortion which is an HOA.
  6. So my wife and I made an impromptu trip to the Palmetto state to look at the house.
  7. We decided our strategy was to low ball the shit out of the owner, and were willing to go up to $60,000 cash but not a fucking penny more.
  8. We met the seller’s reality agent who struck me as a bit ditzy and quite incompetent. ( in all do favor this house was located outside of her territory so to speak.)
  9. The house was about what we expected and mad an shitty offer of $50,000 to try and exploit the seller’s problems (see and her family moved 2 towns over BUT she still had to pay taxes on the property, and the house had been sitting on the market a year without a single offer.)
  10. The seller responded with a so called counter reducing the sale price $1,000 to $69,000
  11. The counter was as shitty as our offer so we came up to $51,500 because I’m wasn’t coming up significantly because it would compromise my position.
  12. This bullshit tit-for-tat  game went on for 10 days before my wife and I walked. The house has since had several price reductions and no interest. The house is currently off the market as of now.)
  13. My wife and I went home and started scouring the reality sites and compiled a hefty list of 20 different properties . We also hired a realtor.
  14. The realtor was a lazy and moronic ineffectual asshole so we let that useless son of a bitch go, and hired the biggest and best realtor in the area we were looking.
  15. The new realtor informed us that the house we were initially considering was in a SHITTY neighborhood. Apparently there was a white trash family that liked to get sloppy drunk and proceed to have knock down drag out fist fights. We also learned the small apartment building at the end of the street were constantly frequented by the police combating drug dealing/drug addicts.
  16. I was enraged, why the hell didn’t the seller’s reality agent tell us about the shit we were about to move to. Thank God we dodged that bullet. My wife believes the agent was just ignorant of the situation being out of her regular territory. I believe she was desperate to sell the house as the owner was an irrational and demanding lady whom she had been working for a year straight.
  17. My wife and I then took another trip to the Palmetto state with our list and met up with our reality agent.
  18. The reality agent warned us that the end of 2016 was different from the regular market at this time of year. Thats to say from November through December the housing market usually is slow because people are saving their cash for the holidays. This year though people were still actively and aggressively buying properties. Not only that but large reality corporations were also snatching up as many properties as fast as they possibly could.
  19. This unusual trend in the reality market was attributed to the simple fact with Trump taking office and no one having a clue what he would do were buying properties to be grandfathered into the 2016 criteria.
  20. To prove point #18 we would see a property on or off our list, and half the time by the time we showed up a day or less later the house would be under contract.
  21. Finally my wife and I decided on the purchase of a Lake House, and started negotiations.
  22. Now the house was a bank foreclosure which meant the bank owned it so we would be negotiating with the Bank (an institution) not a private seller (a person or persons).
  23. At first I was thrilled by this fact. I HATE negotiating with sellers because they think their family history in the house has monetary value. It does not as I’m buying your house and you take the memories with you.
  24. Unfortunately a Bank is the exact opposite. They have NO emotional attachment so they treat it only as a business deal. They don’t give a shit about the buyer they are there to make the Bank money.
  25. After a month or more of negotiating (and I use that term loosely as possible) the Bank had sat back without countering and shot down every offer we made.
  26. Then after the month of so called negotiations the Bank suddenly gave a real shit about the deal. The sale was done in 1/2 an hour.
  27. In spite of getting one hell of a good deal on the Lake House we knew there were repairs to be done before we could move in. Examples include replacing the A/C unit, replace the hot water heater, get appliances (there was no stove, kitchen sink or refrigerator) take a wall out, landscape the neglected yard etc.

That brings us to the bottomline:

Currently for the past 3 months every 2 weeks my wife and I have rented a Uhaul trailer and moved our belongings our selves. Why you might ask? Well we decided to move our selves because A) We wanted to save money B) I’m far too paranoid to turn over all my possessions to a complete stranger, I don’t have the faith. C) It allowed us the time to pack/ prep our current house and repair/fix up the new Lake House without rushing in an anxious panic.

Thusly I’ve been ping ponging between the 2 states every couple of weeks for as I said earlier several months. As you may suspect we have been battling Murphy’s Law the entire way as unsuspected issues/problems occurred. An example returning home from our last trip to the Lake House found our A/C wasn’t working, and in the end (considering resale value) we replaced the entire A/C, and got a decent deal at $4,500.

In all the chaos of the move I fully admit I have neglected f-yourblog.com, and believe me I’m not happy about that in the least. Yet I can only do so much in a day, and with the on going move I’ve been stretched thinner and thinner.

I here by promise our reader’s that by July 15th things here at f-yourblog.com will not only resume active

How I Crashed My Dad’s New Car And Got Away With It Scott Free.

Just like every high school student since the dawn of the high school I took Drivers Ed when I was a junior. Now by the time I took Drivers Ed. the training equipment had surpassed old into ancient, and was now teetering on being completely antiquated. Back in those days the internet was in its infancy so I’m sure today Drivers Ed. must be like going to a fucking theme park, but I digress. Anyway when I was taking Drivers Ed. you sat in a “driving simulator” which sounds way fucking cooler than it was, remember again this was before the Internet and its technological spawn. The “Driving Simulator” was just an uncomfortable seat in front of a mock dashboard (Speedometer, Wheel, Ignition, Review mirrors, fake break/gas peddle basically everything but a shitty mock radio.) and stared at a crappy worn out movie screen. As you stared at the screen a variety of driving scenarios played out like driving in a residential neighborhood when all of a sudden a kid’s ball bounces into the road, and you act accordingly by using the fake brake. Now the fake peddles on the simulator required a good bit of leg strength to operate due to the fact the peddles where rusting most likely do to poor maintenance (the gym teacher and substitution for a real driving instructor must not of known about WD-40). In the end of all of this fantastical automotive madness passed the class and along with it earning my drivers permit.

IMPORTANT NOTE: There was a small part at the end of the class you, the driving instructor (Gym teacher) and a fellow student would get in and take turns driving an actual car . There was a secondary break for the instructor to use incase shit got out of control. With that said my high school’s Drivers Ed. interpreted this part as tooling around the school’s parking lot practicing K turns and parallel parking. The rare time I did drive on an actual street all I was instructed to do is drive down the small town’s main street (who’s speed limit was a whopping 25mph) 10-11 blocks down to the tiny strip mall and directly back to the school.

The next step in the learning to drive process was to bug the shit out of my parents until (inevitably I wore one of them down) they agreed to teach me to drive. In my case it was my it was my mother who gave in and agreed to teach me whatever I needed to know. Now the conditions around my first actual driving lesson with my mother should have made for enough sufficient foreshadowing to have called it off immediately. You see just a few mere months before the lesson my father had finally bought the sports car he had always wanted ,(and of course my brother and I were not allowed anywhere near it under penalty of…well we never found out because obviously it be bad.) My mother made the decision that it was time for lesson when my father was out of the country in Ireland ,AND that it would be quite a good thing I learn how to drive a stick shift which makes sense on paper. I say that because my mother owned a manual minivan so if I was to learn how to drive stick it have to be in my father’s new sports car.

Much like my high school driving class the first place we went was to a large and completely empty parking lot by a bunch of innocuous office buildings. Now this parking lot had a particular architectural design difference then the parking lot of my high school, and that would be the systematically placed islands with a bit of grass, small buses/scrubs and a sampling tree smack in the middle of them. The islands were surrounded by a massive cement curb that must have been at least 5-6″ high. My mom parked the car at one end of the lot, and I eagerly jumped into the drivers seat with building excitement. After adjusting the mirrors and buckling my seat belts it was time to get on with the real driving, and thats when all hell broke loose going from bad to worse to worst in a matter of split seconds.

Remember the aforementioned Driving Simulators with their corroded peddles that made then difficult to push down well heres where they came into play. The peddles in my father’s prized new sports car were the exact OPPOSITE of the Driving Simulator’s (they were sensitive and required little more then just placing you foot on the gas) and just the weight of your foot would get the car going. So needles to say the car engine roared as it revved up and took off like a Cheetah with its ass was on fire. I’m not going to say I had the wherewithal to shift gears, but I did manage (by shear coincidence) to get the car into second gear when I pulled back, jammed even further on to the gas peddle, and stomped on the clutch violently. I remember hearing my mother’s voice yet to this day I don’t have a goddamn clue what she said not a single word. I did upon hearing her voice look up and saw the end on the parking lot which we were hurdling towards as the asphalt of the parking lot disappeared beneath the wheels as if in fact the tires were feeding upon it. In this case I did the most natural thing one can do and I banked a almost 90 degree right hand turn to avoid crashing head on into the thick woods that lined the perimeter of said parking lot, but thats not all. When I whipped the car wildly to the right to avoiding crashing into the woods I accidentally clipped the corner of one of the aesthetic islands I mentioned earlier. The curb being so abnormally high turned the car instantly into a vehicular bucking bronco as it jumped the curb. The car came careening off the curb and landed with a devastating thud back onto the asphalt where the shocks seriously earned their money , and sent the hubcap flying off like a fucking frisbee. Finally at last at that point I managed to get my shit together enough to stop the car by jamming on the breaks.  Frantically my mother jumped into the driver’s seat, I ran about 100 feet off to retrieve the lost hubcap, and then we sped off as fast as we could still suffering from a shell shock of sorts and embarrassed as all hell.

My mother managed somehow to get my fathers now defunct sports car to her mechanic who reported the front axle was cracked severely along with some other pricey problems due to the crashing into curbzilla. As I stated earlier my father was out of the country in Ireland at the time, BUT he was returning in a matter of days after the accident. Now as my fathers return crept closer and closer my mother started to panic a bit and was calling her mechanic frantically waiting for the car to be repaired. The bitch and bane of the repair was the mechanic had to order a certain part and was simply waiting for it to arrive so he could finish fixing my father’s car. It was a waiting game (strait out of a sappy family comedy movie) as my mother anxiously awaited the car part’s arrival at the mechanics while simultaneously she was growing much more worried about my father’s arrival home to find his car missing. It came down to the last day as my father’s trip as he was flying  home the vital part finally arrived at the mechanic’s shop. My father’s flight had landed and he was  well on its way home in a taxi when my mother picked up his car from the shop now literally racing the clock. My Mother maniacally managed to get my father’s beloved sports car fixed and back in the garage by the skin of her teeth with him being none the wiser.

ENDING NOTE: Since then my father has passed and as far as I’m aware he never knew a single thing about my disastrous first driving lesson in his prized sports car or what really happened to it while he was away.