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Never Gonna Do It Without My Fez On. Happy Independence Day From Maine

July 4, 2025 No Comments

And the monkey chased the weasel ’round the flagpole.

Not really. I’d have loved to see marching bands in uniforms, desecrating some Sousa while trying to remember straw foot, hay foot, but it was not to be. No matter. It was a very Maine parade. The Augusta July 4th just passed by my window, and refreshed my opinion of my fellow man a bit, even if they couldn’t hunt up any baton twirlers.

Since we’re living the vida loca in the city, we get certain perqs to go along with the lack of peace and quiet. We were smack dab on the parade route. I got to sit on my couch and watch it roll by. I was expecting a perfunctory affair, but it took a full hour to traipse past me and my cup of coffee. It was gratifying to see the street lined with families to see the parade. Children are, after all, humanity’s opinion that life should go on. There were lots of them along the sidewalk under our windows, doing toddler things and generally wearing out their parents in amusing ways.

The parades of my youth are long gone. I think that’s because parades used to be more crypto-military. It was never one of those soviet things with missiles rolling by a bandstand filled with guys about to get airbrushed out of photos or anything, but the vague outlines of the military were always there. Uniforms, marching in step, playing martial music, and waving flags. The pennants of the various marching groups were like battalion identifiers in the army. But that was because our parents generation still had world wars and police actions on their resumes. It was familiar to anyone who had marched in step, but completely devoid of any menace. The military used to be general. Now it’s niche.

So the parade was more like a giant, charming paramecium blobbing its way down the main drag than phalanxes on the march. It consisted of quite the agglomeration of the local gentry, and a heaping helping of just plain stuff, somewhat festooned with bunting and flags, and suitable for waving from, and waving at.

I don’t keep up with the Marvel Comics scene, but even to my eye, Captain America has let himself go a bit.

It was pleasant that the parade hadn’t devolved entirely into off-topic scene-stealing by the usual suspects. Here’s a nice bunch of folks on their way to sew flags or shoot a redcoat from behind a tree or sign a document in florid cursive.

I’ve performed in Fourth of July parades, and been dragged through the streets on a giant flatbed trailer, so I won’t make any mordant remarks about marching bands that don’t march.

The various dance studios from the area made appearances, and the gaggles of young girls certainly added to the festive and un-martial air of the proceedings. Here’s one set, performing their patented synchronized handstand maneuver, which was synchronized about as well as a helicopter evacuation from a fallen ally’s roof, but much more charming.

Holy cow, Shriners! They had Shriners like Nigeria has princes. They came in drove after drove, and drove little motorcycles in figure eights like madmen. They had oversized gas-powered big wheels, and drifted in crazy loops. Then there were little NASCAR wildmen bombing around, and even spicing things up by occasionally turning right, too. I have no idea how I got tilt-shift to happen on my wife’s phone, but I did:

The Shriners had an awesome bunch of antique cars and trucks, too.

You’re officially old when cars you once rode in while new are currently antiques. Dad! He’s looking at me!

After the legions of Shriners wore us out with their frivolity, some regular old commerce reared its head a little. It’s very Maine, though, to parade things like logging trucks. The little boys wander out to the edge of the parking lane, and make the international mime motion for yanking down on a cable, and the drivers cooperate nicely and blow their air horns. And honestly, is it really an Independence Day celebration until someone cruises by towing a Japanese excavator? I think not.

The parade lasted over an hour. it finished up with every fire engine from five towns around filing majestically in a line, and sending the toddlers behind moms’ skirts with their sirens. Lots of people threw candy to the kids, and someone even had a trolley full of free children’s books they handed out as they passed along the route. I noticed them on the way back, completely wiped out of books.

And this being Maine, when it was all over, and everyone had gone home to get properly sunburned and full of hot dogs and craft beer, there wasn’t so much as a candy wrapper left along the parade route.

A Paradigm Shift

June 5, 2025 4 Comments

We live in an urban area. For most of the people who inhabit places that are not Maine, that description might elicit a snicker. Ogguster Maine is the state capital, but honestly, it’s a tiny town with slightly taller buildings than the hinterlands. Fewer than 20,000 Oggusticles inhabit the place.

Still, it feels urban compared to the far-flung western Maine podunk we recently left. We live on a street lined with turn of the (twentieth) century brick and stone buildings. The street we’re on is a mixture of shops and restaurants and apartments, with a few disreputable establishments like tattoo parlors and government offices mixed in. Mixed use, they call it.

We’re up off the ground, with big windows that overlook the street. We sit by these windows and eat our meals. We’re treated, if that’s the word I’m looking for, to a steady stream of passersby, and car and truck and motorcycle traffic. There is a large state gummint office close by, so the majority of the foot traffic comes and goes from that direction. You can always tell who works there. They wear lanyards with their name tags depending from them. If you made them pin a name tag on their clothing, they’d all quit en masse. It’s not a name tag! It’s a lanyard! Don’t call it a name tag!. It’s one of those weird tics a certain kind of person favors these days. The same kind of people work in office parks, but will come at you with knives if you call it that. It’s a campus! I wouldn’t work in an office park! It’s a campus! At any rate, the supply of humanity on my street makes me think B. Kliban was an optimist.

Back to the gummint building. I’ve been involuntarily watching for months now, so I’m sure it’s not a small sample size, or a fluke. I have never seen such a bizarre aggregation of people enter and exit from anything short of a tent flap on the back of a carnival sideshow. I could try to describe them for you, but I’m afraid my descriptions might accidentally concatenate into some kind of incantation that summons devils from another dimension. Then again, by the look and the number of them, it appears that the incantation is already known, and widely used. My personal favorites are the legions of morbidly obese women who no doubt work in the health department, dispensing eupepsia advice to the rest of us. I have made a solemn pledge to listen to this sort of nutrition advice the moment it is offered by someone who is not the same dimension in every direction, and not a moment sooner.

Meh. The parade of porcine pedestrians isn’t nearly as interesting as their parking predilections. Parking is free and easy everywhere around here, another indicator that it’s a city in name only, and the street I live on is no exception. But you have to parallel park. And man, oh man, no one can do it.

I got curious and wondered if Maine requires you to demonstrate parallel parking technique to get your license. Indeed they do. I found a video where they go through the various steps with an examiner and a victim license candidate. I couldn’t help noticing that the parallel parking portion was performed against miles of curb with no vehicle behind the spot you’re pulling into. I also noticed that this was the only maneuver shown from a bird’s eye view. I could also tell by the color of the shirt and the shield on the sleeve that they’d thrown the driver candidate out of the driver’s seat, and the test administrator performed the maneuver. I also noticed the driving inspector casually spun the wheel with the palm of his hand, which would have got you a hard fail back in the mists of primordial time when I took a driving test. Six and nine, and hand over hand, or else.

My wife and I amuse ourselves by rooting for people when they try to parallel park on our street. Come on, you can do it! We’re looking down on them (every which way), so it’s easy to see why they’re going to come a cropper before they realize it. Pull forward! Too Shallow! Turn the wheel! Straighten it out! Throw out the gangplank, the curb’s over there! Of course our encouragements and advice fall on deaf ears. They’re in their cars with the windows up, and we’re in our apartment with the windows closed. So they’re all on their own. A solid minority leave after several failed attempts. I assume that they’re going to pick up their driving test administrator to bring him back and park it for them, but I might be wrong on that account. I don’t have the kind of attention span to wait that long.

So I remember when the majority of people who drove could parallel park a car. My mother could do it in car made with more sheet metal than a battleship, and smaller parking spaces. Hell, when I was a kid, many cars didn’t have power steering. Let’s see you spin the wheel with your palm when it’s not moving then, tough guy. So I guess the ability to parallel parking is a lost art, now. That’s a paradigm shift of a sort, but it’s not the paradigm shift I referred to in the title.

You see, because we’re up a floor, we can look down into cars as they pass by. It’s a two-way street, so we get to see 50 percent drivers and 50 percent passengers. Of course like everywhere else nowadays, it’s a very rare person, driver or passenger, that is paying any attention to their surroundings. They’re all fiddling with their phones. I’ve recently gotten used to this new normal, but as is often the case, by the time you inure yourself to the New Stupid, it’s superseded and becomes L7, daddy-o. My wife spotted the coming new normal yesterday, and I recognize a coming trend when I see one. A fellow drove by, piloting a large U-Haul truck. He was driving with his knees, while holding a huge bong in his left hand and lighting it with his right.

He drove right on by, so I have no information whether he could parallel park. But honestly, I doubt he could do any worse.

So You Can’t Afford a House: Cinco

May 3, 2025 7 Comments

Well, just to prove that yesterday’s cheap house wasn’t a one-off, here’s another house for around the same price, and with a similar look out below pricing pedigree. Currently priced at (don’t blink) $64,900, it’s a 3-bed, 2-bath ramshackle wonder in Skowhegan, Maine.

The house is smaller than yesterday’s hovel, but it does have a garage/barn thing to its credit. The denizens have worked their usual plastic magic on the exterior, and put tiny windows here and there where the big Victorian sashes used to reside, but the place isn’t falling down or anything. They’ve also embraced the Welcome to Costco, I love you ethos, and tested themselves against the how many dogs do I need to hold my own against this many cats conundrum, but the place would be habitable if they disinhabited it.

Skowhegan is a less desirable exurb than yesterday’s Gardiner example, but just. It’s bigger, with 8,600 overweight Maine starvelings roaming its streets. It has a real downtown lined with more shops than empty storefronts. You could live in Skowhegan, and say you like it, and some people might believe you.

My kids had a lot to do with Skowhegan when they were younger. The town punches above its weight class for civic functions. Our boys performed at the Opera House, and for the River Fest, and at the Pickup Cafe, and at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. There are plenty of nice people in Skowhegan. You could add or subtract from the total if you bought this house.

The house has also descended into the unmortgageable world, and it shows in the price history:

I can smell it on the breeze. Enter the downscale housing market now, or wait forever for first-rate stuff to plunge in price. Good luck with that.

So You Can’t Afford a House, Quatro Continued

May 2, 2025 No Comments

[If you just tuned in, we’re continuing a diatribe from yesterday on why you could buy and live in a cheap house in Gardiner, Maine]

So what are we looking at here?

I can tell all sorts of things just by looking at the pictures. Someone who hates me, and themselves a bit, have disfigured this house with vinyl siding. Ho hum. If you really cared, you could yank it all off and find perfectly good wood siding underneath it. It would just need a coat of paint. In a way, vinyl siding is like suspended animation for the siding underneath it. The house itself is sorta like Ted Williams head. It’s frozen in there somewhere. Frozen from October to May, anyway. Whatever. It’s not important.

The rooflines are about as straight as any house built in 1870 has any right to be. Back then, houses were built with framing in odd sizes and spacings. They were plenty strong enough, but prone to creep. They’d deflect over time, and get deformed into permanent sags. I don’t notice anything structurally wrong enough to make give me the willies.

They’ve done the usual stupid things. The back porch was enclosed. It was probably once a nice spot to stand in out of the rain while you fumbled for your keys. Now it’s a plastic elevator car that doesn’t move. The big satellite dish is a distinguishing mark of the breed of people who rent these sorts of places.

There’s a little fascia damage. That’s because imbeciles put up a plastic rain gutter. This collects rain and snow, freezes hard in November, and causes ice dams to crawl up the roof. Luckily they were so flimsy that the spring thaw took the middle section out. Rainwater should be handled on the ground level in Maine. The back of this house looks like a later addition. It will be less interesting than the front, and harder to remodel.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The house has a power line strung to it, and still has meters. It has town water, and town sewer. A couple of phone calls and you could conceivably live in it. People completely underestimate the value of these conditions. I’ve built new houses. You can’t believe what it takes to get a power pole, or get a septic system approved, or how chancy and expensive it is to drill a well, or pay to have a new structure added to the water service in the street. This house is time and money saved just sitting there.

Let’s look at a downstairs room:

Hmm. The floors are wide plank pine. There’s still some carpet pad stuck on them. Carpeting over floors is like vinyl siding. In a lot of cases, it shields the floor from you, not you from the floor. They’ve probably never been refinished and would look great.

The ceiling strapping is a tell. Horsehair plaster over wood lath loses its grip after decades of people bouncing on the floors above it. It starts to sag and crumble. People do silly things to avoid actually fixing the problem. The strapping was nailed up to make a grid to staple cardboard tiles over. That’s why it’s spaced on 1-foot intervals. I fixed the same problem in my last house: The lasagna of layers. I counsel you, if you attempt to pull down the strapping (called firring, or furring, in some places), you’ll pull down the whole ceiling. Those things were nailed hard back in the day. Just leave it and drywall right over the strapping.

You can run electricity in the gaps between the strapping, if you need to, or smash holes in the ceiling above to run stuff. You will have to. That light fixture’s backing screams knob and tube wiring to me. You’re going to want to run a lot of electricity in this place. Just plan on smashing it in and fixing the walls and ceilings. It’s not that hard.

Note the grating on the floor. There’s forced hot air run all over this house. Awesome. Even if the furnace is junk (it is), the ducts are in place already. I had to run all the ducts in my last house. Doubles the HVAC work.

Let’s look at another room:

Maybe oak, probably maple strip flooring in good condition. Refinishing floors is hard work, but ultimately not complicated. You can see plan B for dealing with the ceiling falling down: drop ceilings. You’d have to get adept at stripping off wallpaper after it’s painted over, putting up a drywall ceiling, punching in some electricity and patching up after, sanding floors, and painting some trim. All easy stuff that won’t cost a lot in the scheme of things. Simple effort is the cheapest part of home remodeling, and the scarcest in my experience.

There are bathrooms in the place already:

That’s a cast-iron tub you can’t afford to buy, but you can afford to clean, can’t you? There’s another one in another bathroom, too. There’s a plywood floor aching for tile. Rip out the tub surround and tile that while you’re at it. It’s not that hard. If I can do it, you can do it.

There’s no usable kitchen in the house, but there are two kitchen rooms. The place was a two-family at one time (two meters is a tell, too). This place will probably get wrecked (flipped) for a two-family. You could have one big house, or two crappy ones. You’d have to dump a lot more money into it as a two-family. The rules and headaches for having tenants are way bigger than fixing a place for yourself.

What good would a usable kitchen be, anyway? I see women on the shelter shows tearing out ten year old kitchens to “update” them. Get a stove and a fridge delivered and make the sink faucet work, and you’ll be in business on day 1. I did it, so can you. You can remodel the place at your leisure.

I’m getting too far into the weeds here. You could probably make an offer on this house below where it’s listed, and they’d jump. They’ll probably lower it again anyway. If you dumped a total of maybe $100,000 into the place, including the sales price, and put a lot of sweat into it, it would be worth triple what you paid for it. Crummy condo-houses as big as this joint are selling for $450,000 across town. And if you live in a house for at least two years while you fix it, there’s no capital gains tax on the money you get from selling it.

So, you want a house.  Gardiner is right over there. It’s only a matter of going.

 

So You Can’t Afford a House, Quatro

May 1, 2025 6 Comments

Everyone says they want to buy a house, but can’t. Then again, everyone says a lot of things.

What they really mean is they won’t. They’re demanding that they be allowed to purchase a very elaborate, large, new or newly re-minted, plastic palace in exactly the high-rent metropolitan area they prefer, and at a rock bottom price at that. Yes, we get it. You’d like to live in San Francisco and pay 1970s prices. Good luck waiting for that. You’ll get 1970s crime and squalor, and like it.

Things are changing somewhat, though. We’re entering familiar territory for yours truly. I warned people during the Great Recession that the real estate market would bifurcate. Regular houses would keep selling for regular money to regular buyers, if slowly. Oddball stuff would get gobbled up by real estate Legrees and disreputable flippers and would eventually be sold for regular money to regular buyers again. You’ll end up with nothing if you wait for prices on regular houses to implode.

Well, that all happened. It’s probably happening again now. Interest rates are considered high again. That is, if you weren’t alive in 1980 and don’t have a library card. Sales are down, and the market doesn’t totally consist of Shirk Brothers Realty telling you to write them a check for $5,000 before they change their mind and wait ten minutes to get offers 20% over list. You’re going to wait until a ranch house in Boston is $150,000 again, and then pounce, right?

Wrong. Here’s the National Association of Realtors telling you like it is:

The National Association of Realtors reported a sales price uptick of 2.9 percent nationally last month to $408,000, while sales eased 2.2 percent compared to March of 2024. Regionally, sales figures in the Northeast for March 2025 remained unchanged from March a year ago while the MSP jumped 7.7 percent to $468,000.

So waiting isn’t helping. What to do?

No worries. Staying out of hot real estate markets is the smart play, anyway. If you want a house, go to overlooked places and buy one for cheap, renovate it yourself, and live in it. And maybe sell it later, and move where you want to with your ill-gotten gains.

Here’s where the burgeoning bifurcation I mentioned will help you. There is always a market for houses that have dropped out of the mortgage world. You’ll find out what a structure is really worth when no bank will write a 30-year-fixed for it. The short, cash only answer is: Not Much. Fifteen years ago, repairable wrecks were everywhere in Maine. I bought one. Then the rest slowly disappeared down the flipper rathole. But I can smell it on the breeze again. Houses are appearing on the realty pages again that you could afford, and you could live in while you fixed them.

How about this one in Gardiner, Maine?

I live really close to Gardiner. It’s part of a pleasant strip of towns named the Augusta Micropolitan something or other. There’s about four or five towns in a row along the Kennebec river that sane people wouldn’t mind living in. Gardiner has a small population, maybe 6,000 souls. It punches above its weight class, though. There’s a real downtown lined with handsome brick buildings with twee shops and restaurants in ’em. There are major retailers of all kinds nearby. The state capital is a ten-minute drive. There is no crime in Gardiner to speak of, even by Maine standards, which is about the lowest in the nation.

It’s a 3-bed, 2-bath vinyl-sided mess, but it’s currently only $66,900. If you wait a few minutes, it will disappear, or be even lower. That’s what happens when a house isn’t mortgageable anymore. Let’s take a look at the Price History, a wonderful place to discover properties like this one:

Hmm. Bit of a gap there between 1870 and 2025. But six price drops since it was listed on March 25th? They can’t get rid of it, and they know it. In my (recent) experience, right around 100 grand is the cut-off point for regular mortgages. People will buy houses with borrowed money, but there are precious few who will buy it with money in their hand. The realtor took a shot at around 100 large, and gave up pretty quick. They’ll keep hacking at the number until somebody jumps. The house has to be sold, and it shows.

I’ve never been to this house, and I’m not interested in going. But I’ll offer my ill-considered but somehow dispositive opinions on why you could buy this place, and make a go of it, based on the info in the listing. So come back tomorrow. Wear sturdy footwear.

[To be continued]

Tag: Maine

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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