Downstairs is the parlor, a massive (33 feet by 18 feet) ballroom, a dining room with the original trim mostly in place, and what may have been the kitchen.
There's a full basement that would make a fantastic machine shop now that I've got the drainage to the point that it's all dry.
The carriage house in back had an upstairs apartment installed in the 1940's that we are actually living in while restoring the main house.
I got the whole thing on a foreclosure sale for $8000. No, I didn't forget any zeroes. I had read that the market had crashed in 2009, did some poking around in my old home town (well, kinda - Richmond is where we went to the library and piano lessons - but my mother lives here now) and found this beauty, and instead of stopping there, I damn well bought it.
The neighborhood is pretty horrible these days and my wife loathes it here, so it's been a short run, but I'm really happy I took the chance; we've essentially lived here for free for two years.
]]>All through my adolescence I watched and wanted a particular chronometer, out of reach until I had a proper job.
It was a wonderful thing that could, with a couple of spins of the slide-rule bezel calculate rates of climb of the jet you were piloting or the rate of dive of your submarine. It was bigger than the one Burt Reynolds wore for his Playgirl set too. Can you say "manly"?
The year I got a proper job (it took a while because the month I graduated Perkin Elmer put a microprocessor into its infra-red spectrometers and my chosen skills were largely obsolete) everyone fell in love with Casio and chronometers and all the specialist watch sellers including Watches of Switzerland stopped carrying clunky analogue watches.
In 1984, jut before I emigrated to the US, I went in and asked to see watches with hands, that needed winding up - and not by shaking the wrist back and forth either but using the knob on the side - and I was ordered out of the store by a manager for "troublemaking".
You can get the old type chronometers again, now, but they are collector's items rather than workhorse watches and command silly money, even sillier than that watch sitting in the window of Watches of Switzerland in 1974 is priced at, the one being ogled by that spotty yoof.
Christ, look at that hair, those trousers, those boots!
]]>For the next 20 years or so Intel stock followed Moore's Law by doubling in value every 18 to 24 months (it had split twice in the time I held mine). By the late 90's, when the growth started to flatten out, my stock would have been worth several hundred thousand dollars, perhaps as much as a million. Oh, well, I really didn't get into the business in order to get rich.
]]>I never have gotten to see her in person.
On the other hand, just today I was walking down the street (a few blocks from the previously mentioned theater, as it happens) and on a display rack outside a bookstore spotted Asimov Laughs Again, in hardback, for a dollar. So, score.
]]>For a long time, I used generic Moleskine notebooks—until this happened, which sent me on a quest to find a better notebook. Design.Y's might be the ultimate in notebooks, but they're dependent on a single guy and his inclination to make them. There's no guarantee that he won't wake up tomorrow and decide to go do something else. Which means that the notebooks he makes could become the one that got away very, very quickly.
]]>Either that, or her work ethic, the one where she planned a few months in advance
"Finish copy edits for $story" "Have baby"
]]>In this case, I assume you mean David-Scott-who-walked-on-the-moon and Charlie-Brown-the-Apollo-command-module.
]]>Wikipedia entry for Anish Kapoor. Key sentence, for non-art-loving philistines: "Kapoor made a $27 million profit in 2008, taking the fortune he has made from his art to an estimated $62.7 million. His record auction price is 1.94 million pounds, set in July 2008."
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