June Musings
(note, this was written a few days ago, never finished, and sort of rambling)
The immigration crackdown is fascinating. I use the word fascinating, which one could object to, since it neither relays rage or whole-hearted approval, the two most common responses these days to anything political.
The raids hit close to home the other day with an ICE action in Honesdale, a town neighboring ours. I wonder how and why they chose a little pizzeria in the middle of nowhere to police. The organizational effort being applied to these actions is impressive, or maybe not - take 20 heavily armed masked para-military in war machines and go surround a pizzeria located on a small main street.
On the job fronts, I haven’t heard from any of my subcontractors any noise about raids, men not showing up, etc… and I haven’t heard any news about any of this in the mid-Hudson Valley. I do see on my social media a lot of ‘raids’ and irate community members, but when your feed starts to flood on a topic, that’s when you need to be most aware of the nature of social media - that they feed you what interests you, and the correlation between your perception of what’s going on (based on the frequent feed stories) and what is really going on can quickly diverge.
I’m not surprised the local cops and the state police are helping out - these guys love to get the juices flowing with some over-the-top policing - more fun than pulling over teenagers coasting through a stop sign.
If Trump wouldn’t be his own worst enemy, he could be riding his successful border shutdown program to elite presidential status - it’s impressive and shows how easily a serious-minded person on the subject can achieve results. I get how we are sending a message - if you aren’t here legally, don’t come - that makes sense. That there is a potential cost to coming here illegally, and it’s not a fun price to pay. On the other hand, the individual cases of families being separated, of people who have lived here a long time being deported to who knows where, that’s hard to feel some empathy for. But wishy washy policy makes for wishy washy results.
On the other hand, the alternative reality is these people do a lot of work in this country, so like tariffs, there is going to be a lag before the true cost of the effort is known. I don’t know enough about the tariffs to understand if what we are doing is long overdue and fair, but I do know it sure seems hard not to believe it’s going to raise costs a lot (and add uncertainty and delay into a lot of planning). But on the immigration front, I really don’t know how you replace hundreds of thousands of hard-working, reasonably paid people - less workers, higher rates of pay, higher cost to produce, higher cost to consumer.
I’m sure you all have seen the story of the mid-50’s guy in Nambia on a safari who went outside his tent to take a squirt and got eaten by a lion. Not cool. I’m sure it doesn’t happen much, but still - it’s like a shark attack, doesn’t have to happen a lot in order for it to resonate on a deep level, far outpacing the likelihood of it happening.
We are building 3 homes right now - 2 in Sullivan County and one in New Paltz. I have zero spec homes under construction. This is the lowest risk positioning my company has ever seen. It’s a natural denouement of sorts, an unplanned slowdown, that seems necessary and overdue in retrospect. A slowdown caused by me being tired of the hamster wheel of buy, build, sell, rinse, repeat: of not having the qualified staff to get it done: of land being expensive and hard to find, though I am seeing a slowdown in the liquidity of land, which should naturally bring down the price a bit.
It’s the last day of school in PA, perhaps the earliest ever release from school year. Not sure why, but it is. It’s a sunny perfect warm day after weeks if not months of shitty weather, so that’s fun. Lucas has around 25 kids over - I said ‘how many people are coming over?’ and he said ‘not many’ but then in the next utterance said, ‘hey, you mind ordering 6 large pizzas?’ Reminds me of how clueless I was when my front lobe was undeveloped.
My pickleball court construction is sitting there as a large concrete pad, curing, and waiting on the court painter who of course is behind like everyone cause of all the rain in May. Saturdays have been a mess in general - it’s been months since we had a nice, seasonally appropriate weather environment on a Saturday. At least it’s not 50 degrees anymore. After a long cold winter, the long cold wet ‘spring’ was dispiriting. I think the JV baseball team had 2 rainouts for every game played.
High school graduation is today, and then Sunday if today’s weather looks iffy. They like to do it outside so have to be flexible with the scheduling.
I’ve been exercising regularly now that the weather has changed, walking and biking and lifting lightly. What’s been good is I’ve avoided any injuries which kept occurring because I’m used to continuing to push my limits and gain strength, leading to over-done-it syndrome and some lagging injury, but now I’m more careful to grow any strength training very slowly and aim as much for maintenance as to quick strength building. For 55, I’m doing pretty good - it’s getting close to the age where it really starts to show who’s been taking care of themselves and had an eye towards fitness and health, and those who don’t. At 55+, you can really look worn out, overweight, and over-aged and there is a definite divergence of men at this age as to how they look, act and feel. You can’t discount genetics in this whole scheme of things, but that’s only best leveraged with an accompanying scheme of eye on the ball healthy eating and living.
I put away the bottle of beer and booze almost two years ago now after a lifetime of low-simmering daily beer or drink, and some serious binging. I think it had on-the-margins ‘too much’ over the years, but not really, in the whole scheme of things. A lot of it was just out of habit, - order that instead of this out of habit - so a lot of the drinking was just being mindful and intentional, sort of like how you should behave with money - anything done without thought or awareness can overtime work against you. I think I commented a few times how I felt pretty cheated when the pounds didn’t just fall off after cutting out all those empty calories but it turns out substituting cookies and tastycakes for a beer is a one step forward one step back type of dance.
I handed out 10 $1250 scholarships the other day to 10 Delaware Valley High School seniors the other night, for a financial literacy seminar and scholarship I developed through a small non-profit I fund and run. Stay out of debt, don’t buy shit you can’t afford, have a budget and watch out for student loans. I reviewed 21 applications and got a lot of insight into high school kids these days. By any measure, I’m generous: with my time, insights, money and attention. I think any real generous person never really feels that way, because by positioning yourself as a giver, you always get a lot more requests than you can possible grant.
