stx today,comments

Morning everyone....

trw-just to answer your question, I am in North Carolina the Asheville area to be exact.

Alexandra-Good to see you back on the boards. How was the ski trip?

Tamara

lol nothing is ever simple, went looking for oven cleaner,none,got in the vehicle to go to the corner store,they had none and then i noticed i needed gas to get to work in the am,so into town i go,had to stop at the bank of stx atm for cash and then to plaza for oven cleaner then to the gas station,because i can never remember which gas stations will take plastic,thats why i had to hit the bank, so on the way home i stopped at gentle winds to raid their bookshelves because now that i only have one job i need to find "free"stuff for entertainment and they have 4 bookshelves so i bring some and take some, while i was there i watched the waves crashing and wow they were BIG BIG BIG that was cool to see. I often wonder how different life would have been for us here had we bought the condo we looked at there instead of the house,probally alot fewer stories to tell i'm sure, but the place just looks so peacefull and after all these years it still just awes me to drive in there and down to the pool area it's just so beautiful.

Tamara when are you moving here?

Hey trw,
As soon as our house sells, hopefully! We just listed it on the MLS last week and are really excited about step #1. We'll be down for a PMV as soon as it sells and will of course try out island life as an islander, not as a tourist, and see what we think. I hope to meet some of my new cyber friends while there and that will make us feel more a part of the place and not like a tourist.

I'll be keeping everyone posted on the details!

Tamara

bought a 2pack of country hearth at the old plaza this am and went to make a sandwich awhile ago and both loaves were moldy,sigh

I buy bread at Food Town, even if I do a big shop at Plaza. FT's bread section is so small, they are always running out of the 100% whole wheat, so it never sits there too long. Same for some dairy products. They are more expensive, but not if you wind up throwing it away.

I'm about to lose power. WAPA is FINALLY here to fix a problem from the pole to the meter!

But I've found the milk at FT turns sour really fast, and won't buy it there any more---last time was last month. I try to just get it at the dairy, but it's not what it used to be, tastewise.

i've found that Island Daries milk goes sour the fastest, i can open a carton a times and it's already sour so i swithched over to soy

Tamara - the trip was great. Awesome conditions for spring skiing this year. The last time we went two years ago it was 20 below with the wind chill and the 100 degree swing from being here in the island warmth nearly killed me when we stepped out into the wind. My eyeballs froze. This trip was much more pleasant and the snow conditions were amazingly perfect. Very glad to be back in the warm weather, though!

The first couple days back after a trip are always hectic with a million errands to complete so I make rounds through the post office, two banks, my broker's office, my husband's business, a couple places to get things notarized, get some keys made, stop in to meet new tenants who arrived while I was away, touch bases with paralegals about closings in progress for this week and next week, make amends to my dog and kitten for being gone so long (although from their perspective it's a long time if I'm gone even a couple hours), Also am setting up a new HOA for the neighborhood I live in, so that's extra paperwork. Now have to run pick up a Seaborne exec at the airport and give him a ride to town as he's stranded and calling for help. Then stop and get a contract signed off and delivered before stopping in to meet with two sets of tenants after they get home from work. Gonna be a long night.

trw, I lived at Gentle Winds for my 5 month PMV. It was absolutely beautiful. Landscaping was done every day, and because it was 60 acres they would mow every day for about an hour. I would take to the beach everyday for a couple of hours and every night at sunset we would fix a glass of wine and go down and watch the most beautiful sunsets. Later at night, around ten we would lay on the lounge chairs and look at the stars and constantly see shooting stars. There was always a breeze at night and no bugs, or mosquitoes, etc....The snorkeling there was some of the best on island. It was a little tough going over the coral when the tide was low but you could see octopus, peacock flounder, blue tang, etc...like a small buck island experience.... sure do miss those days... and talking to Bobby at the Beach Shack... what a trip he was....If you and T had bought that condo it now would have been at least $425,000 but OH those condo fees are unreal, running $1025 a month and they were being assessed $10,000 per unit while I was there in '06. Yikes!!!!!

Charlotte

just watched a movie called "the making of an american quilt" was pretty good, it's on cable and i just finished 2 more trash books "double cross" by patterson and "book of the dead" by preston and child lol those 2 took me a day and a half to read and now i'm halfway through 1876 by vidal, that one is slower because it's history so you have to pay attention, and so to counteract the serious i'm also halfway through some more trash called seven up by evanovich, so thats like 4 books in 2.5 days, well it rained all day so i could'nt do anything outside and my bread was moldy so i could'nt eat so i just read books.

back when we looked charlotte the fees were 500 a month and that was the reason we went with the house instead, and our house has tripled in value or so the real estate people tell me, i have not found out yet what my taxes are going to be but right now they are under 800 a year,off to work.

Hey trw,

Is the 7 up book about the female bounty hunter? My neighbor turned me onto that series as a good "filler" books between the more serious reads. They are funny!

Alexandra-Glad to hear the ski trip was so awesome!! When do you leave for Italy?

Tamara

So nice to have some good rain to help fill my empty cistern. Maybe it will help green up the east end of STX, it's been so dry and windy.

The rain is great! I can't stand buying water. Also, doesn't it feel like an autumn day somewhere north? I have on long pants and a sweatshirt, but still have flip flops, so my feet are cold. It's nice for a while,.... knowing soon it will be warm and sunny.

home from work and rain all day, Alexandra this is your fault. Do not ever go to the upper west coast again!!!!! and yes Tamara it is about the bounty hunter, very quick read, of that whole crime genre my favorite is john connolly, he's an irish guy and his writing is very gritty and dark and it just seems more real than alot of the other crime writers. Since i've left my night job the offers from other places have started to trickle in but i just can't right now, i really need to concentrate on home right now or i'll end up stressed out,burnt out, drunk and bitter LOL. Stressed,burnt and bitter are all fine and well but drunk is not.

trw - now hold on a minute! I didn't bring rain back with me from Washington. Snow perhaps, but not rain! I do admit that after the ski trip when I spent the next few days at my mother's house where the weather had been 50 degrees that the morning after I got there it snowed. Has to be a coincidence. They almost never get snow there as they are at just 200 feet elevation and snow so late in March was shocking. If I were a weather magnet then I should have taken sunshine with me when I went to the PNW. Although we did have sunny days on the ski slope... so... ok, it's probably my fault.

Woke up on the boat today, went by Cadastral to get a plat map for a property a guy called me about this morning wanting me to list for sale. Quarter acre+ with ocean view in Peter's Rest for somewhere in the $30K-$35K bracket is what he said he wants to list it for and that's pretty cheap for ocean view land. Took photos of that property and also a house on the market by another agent that someone wanted some photos of since there weren't any on the listing. Realized I didn't have my digital camera with me so took photos with my cell phone and they came out pretty good, fortunately. Came home and cleaned the cat box and made the kitten much happier. Was relieved to find that not too much rain had come into the house through a couple of windows that were cracked open despite the rain blowing sideways today. Now updating my Houses magazine ads for the May issue. I have a couple listings in negotiations so I am trying to decide whether to have them marked as Pending in the next issue or not since it's not a done deal yet. Decisions, decisions. Probably should do some laundry and pull out something to thaw for dinner. Have to head back out in the rain in a bit to show a couple of rentals. My Outlook is acting up, so I guess I need to reboot so the emails I'm trying to send will be able to exit my outbox and head on their way. Outlook has never worked right with Vista since I got this computer last spring. It's very annoying and wastes a lot of time on reboots.

you know over the years with all versions of windows, i've never had good long term luck with outlook so i've always just stuck with yahoo and hotmail

TRW--have you read Steve Martini? If you like Connolly, I think you may enjoy Martini. I am a mystery novel junkie, myself. I think I've read every Robert Parker out there, which actually is a lot. I really like it when I find an author who has written a ton of books in the series. John Sanford and the "prey" series is like that. I also enjoy these female detectives: Alexandra Cooper series by Linda Fairstein; Irene Kelly series by Jan Burke; Barbara Holloway series by Kate Wilhelm and V.I. Warshawski by Sara Paretsky. I don't know if any of those would appeal to you, but they are definitely my go to books for reading on a rainy day. KJ

some of the crime authors i read are Tanenbaum,james lee burke,grafton,evanovich,both kellermans,patterson,connelly,connolly,jd robb(lol),harris,baldacci,vince flynn,cornwell(lol) and living here i have not bought a book for years, but my all time favorites are connolly,burke,tanenbaum and carol o'connell, everything is starting to green up and we had happy tourists today

so i think i've covered the first 6 renters, the white crack guy, the drunk tai-chi guy and his irish-turkish girlfriend, the DJ, the the boston irish guy and his friend, nope thats 5, ok well dead Phil was number 6, i honestly never knew someone could watch sports on 4 different channels all day and night, he stayed with us for free while he was looking for a place to live and work and he kept telling everyone he was dying but we had heard it for years now and so we just figured he was a hypo, because he had so many different things going on but he never took meds for anything, so who knew, so he was with us for a couple of months and then moved into the place he died at for 4 years, but while he was with us he hooked up with that crazy russian woman that owned the waves at cane bay, he worked for her thats it, she was already working her way through all the local guys by then, this was the woman whose husband had to go back to the states because he had a tumour inside him the size of a softball or something,lol so much for "vows", so then she sold the place and disappeared(good riddance). So after Phil we had one of the local chef owners staying here and the toothless locksmith, well i kept trying to kill the toothless locksmith in my own way by getting him to drink shot after shot, he was drunk one night and made the mistake of telling me that he had 4 kids and did not pay child support because he hated his ex wife, really big mistake,i'm sorry but you don't treat your kids that way because you hate their mother, my birth father did that to me and well i don't appreciate it, so i kept trying to get him drunk in the hopes his liver would explode, but now that i'm sane and sober i'm not supposed to do stuff like that anymore, well the chef owner was the first to go because of all the drama going on here at the house i was at the height of my own mess as was the other half and well he left, and then the toothless locksmith discovered hard drugs and ended up over the hill with an hiv positive crack w***e and the last i heard his mother had to ship him back to the states because he was on his way to the graveyard (STX really does have a way of eating people) so that was renters 6,7 and 8.

i had to go to the states for a "tuneup" as Lizard calls it you know the doctor,dentist,lawyer stuff so i was gone for a few months and while i was gone the other half met this woman over at cane bay beach bar and well of course she needed a place to stay, oh don't they all., so she moves in and we slowly start to find out tht this woman is a complete and total wacko drunk, lol i'd call and the other half would tell me about her and we'd laugh and i'd just think" thank god i don't have to deal with her, so i flew down for a week and surprised the other half over at cane bay beach bar and there was an empty chair next to him so i sat down and started talking to him and well he was a little surprised because i never told him i was coming and so we're talking and this drunk woman comes over and starts talking to me and telling me what a wonderful guy my other half was and at this point she had no idea that we already knew each other lol and i just looked at her and said" we've been together for 13 years, go away, now and so she did and i asked the other half where the milk was because this woman was so flakey and i figured she needed some milk poured over her head and he just laughed and said well thats "debbie" our renter and all i could say was "get rid of her and blame it on me, just lie and tell her i'm coming home and i don't want anyone in the house, well of course he did'nt listen and i went back up to the states to finish my tune up and her problems just got worse and she ended up dealing with the womens coalition and trying to get the other half arrested for harrasment but since they know the other half it just never happened, so she went away wacked out problems and all.So that was number 9

number 10 was a guy i never met, he was a guy from the states down here working at hess for 6 months and got tired of hotel living, he met the other half at bogeys one night and moved in a few days later, i was still getting tuned up while he was here so i never met him, he was here for 3 months and then back to the states, the other half liked him cause he worked 6 days a week 12 hours a day got off went out for dinner and drinks and then to sleep and then got up the next day to do it all over again, lol when he went back to the states he took his cash and left all of his extra stuff with us, coolers,tv,books, anything that would not fit into his suitcase he left. So number 10 and the chef owner so far have been the best renters, but i still have 4-5 left

Your house sounds like a sit-com, trw but I don't think a TV company would buy it because they wouldn't think it was believable. 🙂

I started feeling so homesick for the island today that I started reading the entire stx today comments. I managed to get to page 13 all the while laughing and crying. Please keep the island stories coming.

Tammy