Renting A Home Quotes

But we are alone, darling child, terribly, isolated each from the other; so fierce is the world's ridicule we cannot speak or show our tenderness; for us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.

I’m a modern man, a man for the millennium. Digital and smoke free. A diversified multi-cultural, post-modern deconstruction that is anatomically and ecologically incorrect. I’ve been up linked and downloaded, I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech low-life. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi-tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond! I’m new wave, but I’m old school and my inner child is outward bound. I’m a hot-wired, heat seeking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice activated and bio-degradable. I interface with my database, my database is in cyberspace, so I’m interactive, I’m hyperactive and from time to time I’m radioactive. Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, ridin the wave, dodgin the bullet and pushin the envelope. I’m on-point, on-task, on-message and off drugs. I’ve got no need for coke and speed. I've got no urge to binge and purge. I’m in-the-moment, on-the-edge, over-the-top and under-the-radar. A high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistic missionary. A street-wise smart bomb. A top-gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties, I tell power lies, I take power naps and run victory laps. I’m a totally ongoing big-foot, slam-dunk, rainmaker with a pro-active outreach. A raging workaholic. A working rageaholic. Out of rehab and in denial! I’ve got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant and a personal agenda. You can’t shut me up. You can’t dumb me down because I’m tireless and I’m wireless, I’m an alpha male on beta-blockers. I’m a non-believer and an over-achiever, laid-back but fashion-forward. Up-front, down-home, low-rent, high-maintenance. Super-sized, long-lasting, high-definition, fast-acting, oven-ready and built-to-last! I’m a hands-on, foot-loose, knee-jerk head case pretty maturely post-traumatic and I’ve got a love-child that sends me hate mail. But, I’m feeling, I’m caring, I’m healing, I’m sharing-- a supportive, bonding, nurturing primary care-giver. My output is down, but my income is up. I took a short position on the long bond and my revenue stream has its own cash-flow. I read junk mail, I eat junk food, I buy junk bonds and I watch trash sports! I’m gender specific, capital intensive, user-friendly and lactose intolerant. I like rough sex. I like tough love. I use the “F” word in my emails and the software on my hard-drive is hardcore--no soft porn. I bought a microwave at a mini-mall; I bought a mini-van at a mega-store. I eat fast-food in the slow lane. I’m toll-free, bite-sized, ready-to-wear and I come in all sizes. A fully-equipped, factory-authorized, hospital-tested, clinically-proven, scientifically- formulated medical miracle. I’ve been pre-wash, pre-cooked, pre-heated, pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged, post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped, vacuum-packed and, I have an unlimited broadband capacity. I’m a rude dude, but I’m the real deal. Lean and mean! Cocked, locked and ready-to-rock. Rough, tough and hard to bluff. I take it slow, I go with the flow, I ride with the tide. I’ve got glide in my stride. Drivin and movin, sailin and spinin, jiving and groovin, wailin and winnin. I don’t snooze, so I don’t lose. I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road. I party hearty and lunch time is crunch time. I’m hangin in, there ain’t no doubt and I’m hangin tough, over and out!

See? See what you can do? Never mind you can’t tell one letter from another, never mind you born a slave, never mind you lose your name, never mind your daddy dead, never mind nothing. Here, this here, is what a man can do if he puts his mind to it and his back in it. Stop sniveling,’ [the land] said. ‘Stop picking around the edges of the world. Take advantage, and if you can’t take advantage, take disadvantage. We live here. On this planet, in this nation, in this county right here. Nowhere else! We got a home in this rock, don’t you see! Nobody starving in my home; nobody crying in my home, and if I got a home you got one too! Grab it. Grab this land! Take it, hold it, my brothers, make it, my brothers, shake it, squeeze it, turn it, twist it, beat it, kick it, kiss it, whip it, stomp it, dig it, plow it, seed it, reap it, rent it, buy it, sell it, own it, build it, multiply it, and pass it on – can you hear me? Pass it on!

[F]or us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laugther; and with the garbage of liveliness stuffed down us untill our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying, in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.

The term schizoid refers to an individual the totality of whose experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relation with his world and, in the second, there is a disruption of his relation with himself. Such a person is not able to experience himself 'together with' others or 'at home in' the world, but, on the contrary, he experiences himself in despairing aloneness and isolation; moreover, he does not experience himself as a complete person but rather as 'split' in various ways, perhaps as a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body, as two or more selves, and so on.

There is a love that equals in its power the love of man for woman and reaches inwards as deeply. It is the love of a man or a woman for their world. For the world of their center where their lives burn genuinely and with a free flame. The love of the diver for his world of wavering light. His world of pearls and tendrils and his breath at his breast. Born as a plunger into the deeps he is at one with every swarm of lime-green fish, with every colored sponge. As he holds himself to the ocean's faery floor, one hand clasped to a bedded whale's rib, he is complete and infinite. Pulse, power and universe sway in his body. He is in love. The love of the painter standing alone and staring, staring at the great colored surface he is making. Standing with him in the room the rearing canvas stares back with tentative shapes halted in their growth, moving in a new rhythm from floor to ceiling. The twisted tubes, the fresh paint squeezed and smeared across the dry on his palette. The dust beneath the easel. The paint has edged along the brushes' handles. The white light in a northern sky is silent. The window gapes as he inhales his world. His world: a rented room, and turpentine. He moves towards his half-born. He is in Love. The rich soil crumbles through the yeoman's fingers. As the pearl diver murmurs, 'I am home' as he moves dimly in strange water-lights, and as the painter mutters, 'I am me' on his lone raft of floorboards, so the slow landsman on his acre'd marl - says with dark Fuchsia on her twisting staircase, 'I am home.

When we came and rented the North Perth home, my father had a little ice chest, and on top of the ice chest was a radio. And we were sitting at our lunch time on Sunday eating dinner after church, and my Mum says, ‘Look where we’ve ended up. We’ve got a table cloth on our table, we’ve got food on our plate, and we’re listening to music.’ That was a big thing for my mother. - Mrs Helen Doropoulos, Greece

My grandfather used to say ‘It is my house I am paying the bills’, my dad used to say ‘this is my house I pay the mortgage’, my generation is saying this is my house I pay the rent.

Beauvoir left their home wanting to call his wife and tell her how much he loved her, and then tell her what he believed in, and his fears and hopes and disappointments. To talk about something real and meaningful. He dialed his cell phone and got her. But the words got caught somewhere south of his throat. Instead he told her the weather had cleared, and she told him about the movie she'd rented. Then they both hung up.

Your parents were fighting machines and self-pitying machines. Your mother was programmed to bawl out your father for being a defective moneymaking machine, and your father was programmed to bawl out your mother for being a defective housekeeping machine. They were programmed to bawl each other out for being defective loving machines. Then your father was programmed to stomp out of the house and slam the door. This automatically turned your mother into a weeping machine. And your father would go down to the tavern where he would get drunk with some other drinking machines. Then all the drinking machines would go to a whorehouse and rent fucking machines. And then your father would drag himself home to become an apologizing machine. And your mother would become a very slow forgiving machine.

I was just as black as I had been the day that I was born. Therefore, when I faced a congregation, it began to take all the strength I had not to stammer, not to curse, not to tell them to throw away their Bibles and get off their knees and go home and organize, for example, a rent strike. When I watched all the children, their copper, brown, and beige faces staring up at me as I taught Sunday school, I felt that I was committing a crime in talking about the gentle Jesus, in telling them to reconcile themselves to their misery on earth in order to gain the crown of eternal life. Were only Negroes to gain this crown? Was Heaven, then, to be merely another ghetto?

I thought that if I left home, paid my own rent and made my own living, then that would make me an adult. And if I became an adult, I thought I wouldn't need to cry anymore.

Never let bitterness make a home in your heart; raise the rent and kick it out.

For I have nothing to lean on, nowhere to call my home and there is nowhere I will go for Christmas to rest my head and touch familiar walls. I have no degree to show on paper or employment to take care of my health or the reassurance that I can pay my rent. And I have no right to complain because this is the road I choose and I built it myself, not really knowing where I wanted it to lead, but I have hope in all things ahead and behind and I am learning to let myself go. Forget my own ego and believe that what I am doing is grander than my very own self.

If the Britannica has taught me anything, it's to be more careful. I don't want to turn into an unseemly noun or verb or adjective someday. I don't want to be like Charles Boycott, the landlord in Ireland who refused to lower rents during a famine, leading to the original boycott. I don't want to be like Charles Lynch, who headed an irregular court that hung loyalists during the Revolutionary War. I can't have "Jacobs" be a verb that means staying home all the time or washing your hands too frequently.

It is so hard for a queer person to become an adult. Deprived of the markers of life's passage, they lolled about in a neverland dreamworld. They didn't get married. They didn't have children. They didn't buy homes or have job-jobs. The best that could be aimed for was an academic placement and a lover who eventually tired of pansexual sport-fucking and settled down with you to raise a rescue animal in a rent-controlled apartment.

Brewster Place became especially fond of its colored daughters as they milled like determined spirits among its decay, trying to make it home. Nutmeg arms leaned over windowsills, gnarled ebony legs carried groceries up double flights of steps, and saffron hands strung out wet laundry on backyard lines. Their perspiration mingled with the steam from boiling pots of smoked pork greens, and it curled on the edges of the aroma of vinegar douches and Evening in Paris cologne that drifted through the street where they stood together - hands on hips, straight-backed, round-bellied, high-behinded women who threw their heads back when they laughed and exposed strong teeth and dark gums. They cursed, badgered, worshiped, and shared their men. Their love drove them to fling dishcloths in someone else's kitchen to help him make the rent, or to fling hot lye to help him forget that bitch behind the counter at the five-and-dime. They were hard-edged, soft-centered, brutally demanding, and easily pleased, these women of Brewster Place. They came, they went, grew up, and grew old beyond their years. Like an ebony phoenix, each in her own time and with her own season had a story.

I stretched out diagonally in my bed, across the cool sheet. I was completely alone, but I had never felt safer. It wasn’t the bricks around me that I’d somehow managed to rent or the roof over my head that I was most grateful for. It was the home I now carried on my back like a snail. The sense that I was finally in responsible and loving hands. Love was there in my empty bed.

Today the man who has the courage to build himself a house constructs a meeting place for the people who will descend upon him on foot, by car, or by telephone. Employees of the gas, the electric, and the water- works will arrive; agents from life and fire insurance companies; building inspectors, collectors of radio tax; mortgage creditors and rent assessors who tax you for living in your own home.

But in my family, playing music was still more important than the type of music you played, so when after a few months it became clear that my love for the cello was no passing crush, my parents rented me one so I could practice at home. Rusty scales and triads

You don't have to pay its rent just because it is a book.

MY BOSS SENDS me home because of all the dried blood on my pants, and I am overjoyed. The hole punched through my cheek doesn’t ever heal. I’m going to work, and my punched-out eye sockets are two swollen-up black bagels around the little piss holes I have left to see through. Until today, it really pissed me off that I’d become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed. Still, I’m doing the little FAX thing. I write little HAIKU things and FAX them around to everyone. When I pass people in the hall at work, I get totally ZEN right in everyone’s hostile little FACE. Worker bees can leave Even drones can fly away The queen is their slave You give up all your worldly possessions and your car and go live in a rented house in the toxic waste part of town where late at night, you can hear Marla and Tyler in his room, calling each other hum; butt wipe. Take it, human butt wipe. Do it, butt wipe. Choke it down. Keep it down, baby. Just by contrast, this makes me the calm little center of the world. Me, with my punched-out eyes and dried blood in big black crusty stains on my pants, I’m saying HELLO to everybody at work. HELLO! Look at me. HELLO! I am so ZEN. This is BLOOD. This is NOTHING. Hello. Everything is nothing, and it’s so cool to be ENLIGHTENED. Like me. Sigh. Look. Outside the window. A bird. My boss asked if the blood was my blood. The bird flies downwind. I’m writing a little haiku in my head. Without just one nest A bird can call the world home Life is your career I’m counting on my fingers: five, seven, five. The blood, is it mine? Yeah, I say. Some of it. This is a wrong answer.

You were in business making meth? Do you have any idea what that drug does to people?" We weren't givin' it away," Concise snaps. "If someone was fool enough to mess himself up, that was his problem." I shake my head, disgusted. "If you build it, they will come." If you build it," Concise says, "you cover your rent. If you build it, you pay off the loan sharks. If you build it, you put shoes on your kid's feet and food in his belly and maybe even show up every now and then with a toy that every other goddamn kid in the school already has." He looks up at me. "If you build it, maybe your son don't have to, when he grow up." It is amazing -- the secrets you can keep, even when you are living in close quarters. "You didn't tell me." Concise gets up and braces his hands against the upper bunk. "His mama OD'd. He lives with her sister, who can't always be bothered to take care of him. I try to send money so that I know he's eatin' breakfast and gettin' school lunch tickets. I got a little bank account for him, too. Jus' in case he don't want to be part of a street gang, you know? Jus' in case he want to be an astronaut or a football player or somethin'." He digs out a small notebook from his bunk. "I'm writin' him. A diary, like. So he know who his daddy is, by the time he learn to read." It is always easier to judge someone than to figure out what might have pushed him to the point where he might do something illegal or morally reprehensible, because he honestly believes he'll be better off. The police will dismiss Wilton Reynolds as a drug dealer and celebrate one more criminal permanently removed from society. A middle-class father who meets Concise on the street, with his tough talk and his shaved head, will steer clear of him, never guessing that he, to, has a little boy waiting for him at home. The people who read about me in the paper, stealing my daughter during a custody visit, will assume I am the worst sort of nightmare.

And in the late nineties, two women sued Hopkins, claiming that its researchers had knowingly exposed their children to lead, and hadn’t promptly informed them when blood tests revealed that their children had elevated lead levels—even when one developed lead poisoning. The research was part of a study examining lead abatement methods, and all families involved were black. The researchers had treated several homes to varying degrees, then encouraged landlords to rent those homes to families with children so they could then monitor the children’s lead levels.

[The wives of powerful noblemen] must be highly knowledgeable about government, and wise – in fact, far wiser than most other such women in power. The knowledge of a baroness must be so comprehensive that she can understand everything. Of her a philosopher might have said: "No one is wise who does not know some part of everything." Moreover, she must have the courage of a man. This means that she should not be brought up overmuch among women nor should she be indulged in extensive and feminine pampering. Why do I say that? If barons wish to be honoured as they deserve, they spend very little time in their manors and on their own lands. Going to war, attending their prince's court, and traveling are the three primary duties of such a lord. So the lady, his companion, must represent him at home during his absences. Although her husband is served by bailiffs, provosts, rent collectors, and land governors, she must govern them all. To do this according to her right she must conduct herself with such wisdom that she will be both feared and loved. As we have said before, the best possible fear comes from love. When wronged, her men must be able to turn to her for refuge. She must be so skilled and flexible that in each case she can respond suitably. Therefore, she must be knowledgeable in the mores of her locality and instructed in its usages, rights, and customs. She must be a good speaker, proud when pride is needed; circumspect with the scornful, surly, or rebellious; and charitably gentle and humble toward her good, obedient subjects. With the counsellors of her lord and with the advice of elder wise men, she ought to work directly with her people. No one should ever be able to say of her that she acts merely to have her own way. Again, she should have a man's heart. She must know the laws of arms and all things pertaining to warfare, ever prepared to command her men if there is need of it. She has to know both assault and defence tactics to insure that her fortresses are well defended, if she has any expectation of attack or believes she must initiate military action. Testing her men, she will discover their qualities of courage and determination before overly trusting them. She must know the number and strength of her men to gauge accurately her resources, so that she never will have to trust vain or feeble promises. Calculating what force she is capable of providing before her lord arrives with reinforcements, she also must know the financial resources she could call upon to sustain military action. She should avoid oppressing her men, since this is the surest way to incur their hatred. She can best cultivate their loyalty by speaking boldly and consistently to them, according to her council, not giving one reason today and another tomorrow. Speaking words of good courage to her men-at-arms as well as to her other retainers, she will urge them to loyalty and their best efforts.

There are many different things in this world to hide, but a secret is not one of them. It is difficult to hide an airplane, for instance, because you generally need to find a deep hole or an enormous haystack, and sneak the airplane inside in the middle of the night, but it is easy to hide a secret about an airplane, because you can merely write it on a tiny piece of paper and tape it to the bottom of your mattress any time you are at home. It is difficult to hide a symphony orchestra, because you usually need to rent a soundproof room and borrow as many sleeping bags as you can find, but it is easy to hide a secret about a symphony orchestra, because you can merely whisper it into the ear of a trustworthy friend or music critic. And it is difficult to hind yourself, because you sometimes need to stuff yourself into the trunk of an automobile, or concoct a disguise out of whatever you can find, but it is easy to hide a secret about yourself because you can merely type it into a book and hope it falls into the right hands. My dear sister, if you are reading things I am still alive, and heading north to try and find you.

Do I call? Do I text? Do I send a Facebook message? Do I send up a smoke signal? How does one do that? Will I set my rented house on fire? How embarrassed will I be when I have to tell the home’s owner, actor James Earl Jones, that I burned his house down trying to send a smoke signal?

I'm sure someone would say it's my own damn fault. That it was my responsibility to build an emergency fund. At least three months' salary, the experts say. I would love to backhand whoever came up with that number. They clearly never had a job with take-home pay that barely covers rent, food, and utilities. Because here's the thing about being poor-most people don't understand it unless they've been there themselves.

Grief is by nature the most violent of them all. The ancients tore their hair and rent their clothing to express it. Now we keep the dead body in our homes, shaking people’s hands as they pass by to view it and trying to stop ourselves from crying because it’s not socially acceptable. Tell me—which of these mourning practices is least sane?

Therefore, when I faced a congregation, it began to take all the strength I had not to stammer, not to curse, not to tell them to throw away their Bibles and get off their knees and go home and organize, for example, a rent strike.

In an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world means, this ideology inevitably has a certain hypnotic charm. To wandering humankind it offers an immediately available home: all one has to do is accept it, and suddenly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneliness vanish. Of course, one pays dearly for this low-rent home: the price is abdication of one’ s own reason, conscience, and responsibility, for an essential aspect of this ideology is the consignment of reason and conscience to a higher authority. The principle involved here is that the center of power is identical with the center of truth.

Goddess Rising This is for the women Who have walked with hidden shame Stirring like all is well Though weighted down in pain. This is for her Inner Child Who longs to forget Her innocence stolen Body, soul and spirit rent into pieces- fragments-broken-bent This is for the Maiden Longing to belong -To another - In hopes to make right the darkened wrongs Not realizing-blinded by oozing wounds Her own innate delicious power Thick within her womb This is for the Mother Breaking eons of fettered chains For the children she has birthed Through blood and breaths of change She calls them Redemption Regardless of their names This is for the Crone Who called her shattered pieces Home To herself- To all her luminous bodies Where she never dared to feel Making strong her bones Crushing~ oppressors With the swaying of her hips Her hands soaring like doves Honey dripping from her lips This is for the Wild Woman Who traversed the Underground Leaving her footprints While taming the Hellhounds. Like a seed breaking fallow ground Emerging fruitful garden No longer bound By the nightmare of the past Awakened from the Dream- Of Separation SHE. IS.- merging realms between. This is for the woman, for the Goddess For me For you Rising from our ashes Making ALL things new~

home, it’s different. I mean yes, you want money and a job, but there’s a hundred other things you do for getting by, especially older people and farmers with the crops, tomato gardens and such. Hunting and fishing, plus all the woman things, making quilts and clothes. Whether big or small, you’ve always got the place you’re living on. I’ve known people to raise a beef in the yard behind their rented trailer. I was getting the picture now on why June’s doom castle had freaked me out. Having some ground to stand on, that’s our whole basis. It’s the bags of summer squash and shelly beans everybody gives you from their gardens, and on from there. The porch rockers where the mammaws get together and knit baby clothes for the pregnant high school girls. Sandwiches the church ladies pack for the hungrier kids to take home on weekends.

Irresponsibility. Maria’s never been irresponsible. When she was little, she was responsible for protecting everybody else from her own shit around her gender—responsible for making sure her parents didn’t have to have a weird kid. Of course, then they had a weird, sad kid anyway, right? Whatever. That’s when responsibility at the expense of self became a habit: she did not care about school, but she knew her parents would be sad if she didn’t go to college, since certain things are expected from you when you do well on standardized tests, so she scraped by and paid attention. Then, with drugs, it’s like, she took them all, but always in such moderation that it wasn’t really dangerous. Even when she was throwing up or incoherent, it was in a controlled situation. She never went to jail, never had the police bring her home, never got caught breaking curfew or went to the hospital or anything. And then she came to New York, paid her rent, had a job, kept her head down, had relationships with people where making the relationship run smoothly was more important than being present in it. Which did not work. It’s clear that being responsible has not been a positive force in her life. It has been fucking everything up.

Single parents were expected to work full time yet stay home with our kids, be educated yet not abuse federal assistance, and somehow afford rent, bills, food, clothes, and gas by ourselves. And heaven forbid we ever need to hold up a register line to pull out a WIC check.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, people wanted to rent homes due to social distancing and were avoiding renting in socially cramped apartment complexes.

What are you so angry about?" my mother had asked me the last time I had gone home to visit. Why aren't you more angry, I had wanted to ask her. But I couldn't talk to my mother that way. She understood that I did not want to live her life, to work as a waitress, until my toes curled in and my feet hurt all the time, to marry a man who would beat my children and treat me as if I had no right to object to object to anything he chose to do. She didn't want that life for me either. She wanted me happy and successful, to live unafraid among people who loved me, and to do things she had never been able to do and tell her all about them. So I told her, about the shelter, the magazine, readings and discussion groups. I told her about trying to write stories, though I hesitated to send send her all that I wrote. And there were far too many times when I would sit down to write my mama and stare at the paper unable to puzzle out how to explain how urgent and unimportant it was to change how women's lives were shaped. Not only that we should be paid equal money for equally difficult work, but that we should genuinely begin to think about what word we might choose to undertake, how we might live our daily lives. Why should I have to marry at all? Or explain myself if I chose to love a woman? Why could I not spend my hours writing stories instead of raising children or keeping house or working some deadly boring job just to cover the rent of an apartments where I was not safe anyway.

All things considered, the third best investment I ever made was the purchase of my home, though I would have made far more money had I instead rented and used the purchase money to buy stocks.

ATTENTION ANTI-RENTERS! AWAKE! AROUSE! . . . Strike till the last armed foe expires, Strike for your altars and your fires- Strike for the green graves of your sires, God and your happy homes!

Knowing that there was such a thing as outdoors bred in us a hunger for property, for ownership. The firm possession of a yard, a porch, a grape arbor. Propertied black people spent all their energies, all their love, on their nests. Like frenzied, desperate birds, they overdecorated everything; fussed and fidgeted over their hard-won homes; canned, jellied, and preserved all summer to fill the cupboards and shelves; they painted, picked, and poked at every corner of their houses. And these houses loomed like hothouse sunflowers among the rows of weeds that were the rented houses.

our persistent isolation became an integral part of the sect of Sinclair, and one that warped my value in traditional friendships, which I once saw as disposable as the rented homes we left behind

On the day Mike finally moved out of our home, John presented him with the savings account into which he had deposited the cost of the Philmont trip, and his college text books, and his rent for two years.

Generally speaking, Americans cussed, smoke, and drank, and the Shamys had it on good authority that a fair number of them used drugs. Americans dated and fornicated and committed adultery. They had broken families and lots of divorces. Americans were not generous or hospitable like Uncle Abdulla and Aunt Fatma; they invited people to their houses only a few at a times, and didn't even let them bring their children, and only fed them little tiny portions of food they called courses on big empty plates they called good china. Plus, Americans ate out wastefully often... Americans believed the individual was more important than the family, and money was more important than anything. Khadra's dad said Americans threw out their sons and daughters when they turned eighteen unless they could pay rent--to their own parents! And, at the other end, they threw their parents into nursing homes when they got old. This, although they took slavish care of mere dogs. All in all, Americans led shallow, wasteful, materialistic lives.

Fear of living, fear of falling, fear of losing your job, your car, your home, your possessions, fear of never having what you ought to have in order to be. In the widespread clamor for public security, imperiled by lurking criminal monsters, the members of the middle class shout loudest. They defend order as if they owned it, even though they’re only tenants overwhelmed by high rents and the threat of eviction.

Returning home to the postwar housing shortage, Weinstein took out a $600,000 loan, built an apartment complex in Atlanta, and offered the 140 family units to veterans at rents averaging less than $50 per month. “Priorities: 1) Ex-POWs; 2) Purple Heart Vets; 3) Overseas Vets; 4) Vets; 5) Civilians,” read his ad. “… We prefer Ex-GI’s, and Marines and enlisted personnel of the Navy. Ex–Air Corps men may apply if they quit telling us how they won the war.” His rule banning KKK members drew threatening phone calls. “I gave them my office and my home address,” Weinstein said, “and told them I still had the .45 I used to shoot carabau [water buffalo] with.

I took a part-time editing job to pay the rent. It was work I could do at home, but when suddenly I was expected to spend two days a week in the office, I quit, bought an ice cream cone, and walked the sunny streets of Manhattan.

Here’s a two-week alternative, which could include a few car days in southern Spain near the end of your trip: Start in Barcelona (two days); train to Madrid (five days total, with two days in Madrid and three for side-trips to Toledo, El Escorial, and Segovia or Ávila); train to Granada (two days); bus to Nerja (one day, could rent car here); both Ronda and Arcos for drivers, or just Ronda by train (two days); to Sevilla (drop off car, two days); and then train to Madrid and fly home.

But the history of Hopkins Hospital certainly isn’t pristine when it comes to black patients. In 1969, a Hopkins researcher used blood samples from more than 7,000 neighborhood children—most of them from poor black families—to look for a genetic predisposition to criminal behavior. The researcher didn’t get consent. The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit claiming the study violated the boys’ civil rights and breached confidentiality of doctor-patient relationships by releasing results to state and juvenile courts. The study was halted, then resumed a few months later using consent forms. And in the late nineties, two women sued Hopkins, claiming that its researchers had knowingly exposed their children to lead, and hadn’t promptly informed them when blood tests revealed that their children had elevated lead levels—even when one developed lead poisoning. The research was part of a study examining lead abatement methods, and all families involved were black. The researchers had treated several homes to varying degrees, then encouraged landlords to rent those homes to families with children so they could then monitor the children’s lead levels. Initially, the case was dismissed. On appeal, one judge compared the study to Southam’s HeLa injections, the Tuskegee study, and Nazi research, and the case eventually settled out of court. The Department of Health and Human Services launched an investigation and concluded that the study’s consent forms “failed to provide an adequate description” of the different levels of lead abatement in the homes.

The farmers, who rent out their house so they can stay afloat, and sleep all together in a studio, but spend their days off outside on a picnic blanket, living the lives they want to live. Drew and Melanie, with their two homes and their horses and their love story. And Rene, traveling across the world, painting temporary masterpieces. Even my uncle Pete has something good worked out with Melinda and his day trips and his best friend, my dad, who has a small nice house in San Francisco and a dozen neighborhood vendors who know him by name. All of these different ways of living. Even Sophie, with her baby in that apartment, with her record store job and her record collection. I imagine her twirling with her baby across her red carpet with Diana Ross crooning, the baby laughing, the two of them getting older in that apartment, eating meals on red vinyl chairs. Walt, too, as pathetic as his situation is, seems happy in his basement, providing entertainment to Fort Bragg's inner circle. All of them, in their own ways, manage to make their lives work.

Guthrie is best known for “This Land Is Your Land,” his ballad about the Dust Bowl, which gave farmers in his native Oklahoma an extra kick in the pants during the Great Depression. He set his thoughts about Trump’s rental policies to a song he titled “Old Man Trump.” The lyrics continue with this: Beach Haven ain’t my home! No, I just can’t pay this rent! My money’s down the drain, And my soul is badly bent! Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower Where no black folks come to roam, No, no, Old Man Trump! Old Beach Haven ain’t my home! More

If you have thirty dollars and rent is eighty, there’s no point in saving any of it. Drink till you’re drunk and pay for a ride home. You might as well enjoy your trip to the bottom. It’s when you’ve got eighty-seven dollars and the rent’s eighty that you need to save.

Why then I do but dream on sovereignty, Like one that stands upon a promontory And spies a far-off shore where he would tread, Wishing his foot were equal with his eye, And chides the sea that sunders him from thence, Saying, he'll lade it dry to have his way: So do I wish the crown, being so far off, And so I chide the means that keeps me from it, And so, I say, I'll cut the causes off, Flattering me with impossibilities, My eye's too quick, my hear o'erweens too much, Unless my hand and strength could equal them. Well, say there is no kingdom then for Richard; What other pleasure can the world afford? I'll make my heaven in a lady's lap, And deck my body in gay ornaments, And witch sweet ladies with my words and looks. O miserable thought! and more unlikely Than to accomplish twenty golden crowns! Why, love forswore me in my mother's womb; And for I should not deal in her soft laws, She did corrupt frail nature with some bribe, To shrink mine arm up like a wither'd shrub, To make an envious mountain on my back, Where sits deformity to mock my body; To shape my legs of an unequal size, To disproportion me in every part, Like to a chaos, or an unlick'd bear-whelp That carries no impression like the dam. And am I then a man to be belov'd? O monstrous fault, to harbor such a thought! Then since this earth affords no joy to me But to command, to check, to o'erbear such As are of better person than myself, I'll make my heaven to dream upon the crown, And whiles I live, t' account this world but hell, Until my misshap'd trunk that bears this head Be round impaled with a glorious crown. And yet I know not how to get the crown, For many lives stand between me and home; And I - like one lost in a thorny wood, That rents the thorns, and is rent with the thorns, Seeking a way, and straying from the way, Not knowing how to find the open air, But toiling desperately to find it out - Torment myself to catch the English crown; And from that torment I will free myself, Or hew my way out with a bloody axe. Why, I can smile, and murther whiles I smile, And cry "Content" to that which grieves my heart, And wet my cheeks with artificial tears, And frame my face to all occasions. I'll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall, I'll slay more gazers than the basilisk, I'll play the orator as well as Nestor, Deceive more slily than Ulysses could, And like a Simon, take another Troy. I can add colors to the chameleon, Change shapes with Proteus for advantages, And set the murtherous Machevil to school. Can I do this, and cannot get a crown? Tut, were it farther off, I'll pluck it down.

The saints are little pieces of mystical Christ, sick of love for union. The wife of youth, that wants her husband some years, and expects he shall return to her from oversea lands, is often on the shore; every ship coming near shore is her new joy; her heart loves the wind that shall bring him home. She asks at every passenger news: "Oh! saw ye my husband? What is he doing? When shall he come? Is he shipped for a return?" Every ship that carrieth not her husband, is the breaking of her heart. What desires hath the Spirit and Bride to hear, when the husband Christ shall say to the mighty angels, "Make you ready for the journey; let us go down and divide the skies, and bow the heaven: I will gather my prisoners of hope unto me; I can want my Rachel and her weeping children no longer. Behold, I come quickly to judge the nations." The bride, the Lamb's wife, blesseth the feet of the messengers that preach such tidings, "Rejoice, O Zion, put on thy beautiful garments; thy King is coming." Yea, she loveth that quarter of the sky, that being rent asunder and cloven, shall yield to her Husband, when he shall put through his glorious hand, and shall come riding on the rainbow and clouds to receive her to himself.

There's one big difference between the poor and the rich,' Kite says, taking a drag from his cigarette. We are in a pub, at lunch-time. John Kite is always, unless stated otherwise, smoking a fag, in a pub, at lunch-time. 'The rich aren't evil, as so many of my brothers would tell you. I've known rich people -- I have played on their yachts -- and they are not unkind, or malign, and they do not hate the poor, as many would tell you. And they are not stupid -- or at least, not any more than the poor are. Much as I find amusing the idea of a ruling class of honking toffs, unable to put their socks on without Nanny helping them, it is not true. They build banks, and broker deals, and formulate policy, all with perfect competency. 'No -- the big difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich are blithe. They believe nothing can ever really be so bad, They are born with the lovely, velvety coating of blitheness -- like lanugo, on a baby -- and it is never rubbed off by a bill that can't be paid; a child that can't be educated; a home that must be left for a hostel, when the rent becomes too much. 'Their lives are the same for generations. There is no social upheaval that will really affect them. If you're comfortably middle-class, what's the worst a government policy could do? Ever? Tax you at 90 per cent and leave your bins, unemptied, on the pavement. But you and everyone you know will continue to drink wine -- but maybe cheaper -- go on holiday -- but somewhere nearer -- and pay off your mortgage -- although maybe later. 'Consider, now, then, the poor. What's the worst a government policy can do to them? It can cancel their operation, with no recourse to private care. It can run down their school -- with no escape route to a prep. It can have you out of your house and into a B&B by the end of the year. When the middle-classes get passionate about politics, they're arguing about their treats -- their tax breaks and their investments. When the poor get passionate about politics, they're fighting for their lives. 'Politics will always mean more to the poor. Always. That's why we strike and march, and despair when our young say they won't vote. That's why the poor are seen as more vital, and animalistic. No classical music for us -- no walking around National Trust properties, or buying reclaimed flooring. We don't have nostalgia. We don't do yesterday. We can't bear it. We don't want to be reminded of our past, because it was awful; dying in mines, and slums, without literacy, or the vote. Without dignity. It was all so desperate, then. That's why the present and the future is for the poor -- that's the place in time for us: surviving now, hoping for better, later. We live now -- for our instant, hot, fast treats, to prep us up: sugar, a cigarette, a new fast song on the radio. 'You must never, never forget, when you talk to someone poor, that it takes ten times the effort to get anywhere from a bad postcode, It's a miracle when someone from a bad postcode gets anywhere, son. A miracle they do anything at all.

We pass the apartment we rented five years ago, when I swore off Florence. In summer, wads of tourists clog the city as if it's a Renaissance theme park. Everyone seems to be eating. That year, a garbage strike persisted for over a week and I began to have thoughts of plague when I passed heaps of rot spilling out of bins. I was amazed that long July when waiters and shopkeepers remained as nice as they did, given what they had to put up with. Everywhere I stepped I was in the way. Humanity seemed ugly—the international young in torn T-shirts and backpacks lounging on steps, bewildered bus tourists dropping ice cream napkins in the street and asking, “How much is that in dollars?” Germans in too-short shorts letting their children terrorize restaurants. The English mother and daughter ordering lasagne verdi and Coke, then complaining because the spinach pasta was green. My own reflection in the window, carrying home all my shoe purchases, the sundress not so flattering. Bad wonderland. Henry James in Florence referred to “one's detested fellow-pilgrim.” Yes, indeed, and it's definitely time to leave when one's own reflection is included. Sad that our century has added no glory to Florence—only mobs and lead hanging in the air.

If tenants resisted excessive rent hikes or unwarranted evictions, it was because they invested in their homes and neighborhoods. They felt they belonged there. In the trailer park, that sentiment was almost dead. For most residents, Scott among them, the goal was to leave, not to plant roots and change things.

A month ago, Gavin had given his employer four weeks' notice. "I'll get a job around here," he'd told her. "Something low-stress, part-time, maybe. We're not paying rent, and Dad's left us plenty. You should quit, too." A year earlier this news would have filled her with delicious, full fat, chocolate-coated joy. But now, after a grueling routine of shitty work, shitty- weird home life in a house where the shadow of a dead boy walked more solidly than the grownups, shitty headaches, shitty worry about a husband who couldn't keep his dick out of other women, the golden offer just weirded Laine out. She didn't trust it.

All that time I was giving to others instead of staying at home reading or drawing or simply looking at the ceiling, half naked, observing the cracks. I couldn’t stand the idea of being forced to live that office pantomime in perpetuity just to pay for things like rent or food or a book or a weekend at the beach. I broke down every morning when the alarm beeped because life, lived this way, seemed like a badly written tragedy, boring and sterile, devoid of fun and, even worse, devoid of content, and so, on my way to work, I felt like grabbing strangers by the shoulders and asking them why they weren’t feeling like me.

Saying good-bye to Ben is Sarina's least favorite activity. So sad the number of times she's had to do it. Ball games, recitals, the homes of friends, rented shore houses, through car windows after dropping off some forgotten camera to Annie. Goodbye. See you later. Nice seeing you. She has mastered it: A dismissive peck on the cheek. A hug like an afterthought. Telling herself, Do not watch him walk away. Watching him walk away. Watching him drive away. Watching him descend the stairs to the subway. How many times have they said goodbye to each other? Already tonight, twice. He interrupts her before she can get the second goodbye out. "How would you feel," he says, "about missing your train?" Once at the beach, Sarina watched a crane bathing in a gully at dusk. It used its wings to funnel the water over its back, then shook out the excess in a firework of droplets. After several minutes it took off, arcing out over the fretless sea. That felt like this.

As a student of Tony Robbins, Matt had been using affirmations and incantations for years to create extraordinary levels of success. Owning five homes and one of the top network engineers in the country (all by age 25), I should have figured Matt knew what he was doing. After all, I was the one renting a room in his house.

Up till then, I'd dated people by default, because I either needed help paying rent or was afraid of what would happen if I rejected them-but Luke was different. I chose him. I ended up going home with him after a party a few nights Inter and woke up so deeply in love that there aren't enough poems or songs or words to ever explain it.

With contradict’ry aim I stand, Rent in twain between two lands. One is lit with flowers bright, The other by sublime starlight. “A searing fire is one way felt. The sting of ice that does not melt Upon the other path is found. To both I am forever bound. “My mind is called to what I’ve known, And mem’ries of what once was home. Yet calls the road that leads to where I breathe now more familiar air. “In her is found the now and then, The song of hope, the sighed amen, Both fire and ice, both flow’rs and stars, The future, past, the near and far. “Where e’er the path that guides her feet, In what far clime her heart doth beat, Howe’er oft I depart or bide, Home is where my love resides.

Gross rental income (including utilities fee) –  Mortgage payment (including principal, interest, taxes, and insurance) – Cost of utilities –  Vacancy allowance (10 percent of gross rents) –  Maintenance and CapEx (estimated at 1 percent of the property’s value, divided by 12 for monthly cost) –  Property management (10 percent of gross rents) Cash flow

The quicker you settle the debt,the quicker you can move forward with your life. Actions are bigger than words and get rid of that nasty debt". "When you are able to buy your home versus renting. The sky is the limit on how much you can and will prosper in years to come. "Good luck and start a budgeting today. Do not wait as no time will ever be the right time.

The Hinkstons expected more of their landlord for the money they were paying her. Rent was their biggest expense by far, and they wanted a decent and functional home in return. They wanted things to be fixed when they broke. But if Sherrena wasn’t going to repair her own property, neither were they. The house failed the tenants, and the tenants failed the house.

From claims of Twitter’s racist trolling that drives people from its platform to charges that Airbnb’s owners openly discriminate against African Americans who rent their homes to racial profiling at Apple stores in Australia and Snapchat’s racist filters, there is no shortage of projects to take on in sophisticated ways by people far more qualified than untrained computer engineers, whom, through no fault of their own, are underexposed to the critical thinking and learning about history and culture afforded by the social sciences and humanities in most colleges of engineering nationwide. The lack of a diverse and critically minded workforce on issues of race and gender in Silicon Valley impacts its intellectual output.

Dad wakes up mad early to get to the store, and Mom joins him around an hour later,” she continues. “They work all day, almost every day, and for what? We might own the place, but we don’t live there, so we also pay rent on our house—rent that just won’t stop going up because of who knows why. Bigger chains or newer stores with money buying up property ten feet away from them, or whatever.

Far from being a national crisis of affordable housing, outrageous rents and astronomical home prices are largely confined to a relatively few places along the east and west coasts. Rent per square foot of apartment space in San Francisco is more than double what it is in Denver, Dallas, or Kansas City, and nearly three times as high as in Memphis. Home prices show even greater disparities.

For almost a century, there has been broad consensus in America that families should spend no more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Until recently, most renting families met this goal. But times have changed—in Milwaukee and across America. Every year in this country, people are evicted from their homes not by the tens of thousands or even the hundreds of thousands but by the millions.

For some people, the transition to adulthood happens almost overnight. It certainly did with me. I’ve met other orphans. We are kids who can’t even pinpoint when this change happened. We have felt like old people since our fathers died. Our mothers looked to us for big decisions. They relied on us. Before we ever went out on our first date, we were already acting like a retired father of four. All our paychecks went toward rent. All our spare time went toward helping to keep a home fire burning. We got so good at pretending we were older than our age that we started to believe it. We begin to hate our own reflections because they betray how we see ourselves. The mirror portrays us too young. We are not children; we are ancient. We’re fifty years old thirty-five years before our fiftieth birthday.

The road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph. They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest -- until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men's souls will be shaken with the violences of war. For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and goodwill among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home. Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.

In summary, a policy intended to make housing more affordable for the poor has resulted in resources being redirected to the construction of houses that are only affordable for the rich or wealthy, since generally , luxury homes are not subject to rent control, and neither are office buildings and other commercial properties. This illustrates, among other things, the crucial importance of making a distinction between intentions and consequences

The wave of pure outrage blindsided me. I shouldn't be here, I thought. This is utterly fucked up. I should have been sitting in a garden down the road, barefoot with a drink in my hand, swapping the day's work stories with Peter and Jamie. I had never thought about this before, and it almost knocked me over: all the things we should have had. We should have stayed up all night together studying and stressing out before exams, Peter and I should have argued over who got to bring Jamie to our first dance and slagged her about how she looked in her dress. We should have come weaving home together, singing and laughing and inconsiderate, after drunken college nights. We could have shared a flat, taken off Interrailing around Europe, gone arm-in-arm through dodgy fashion phases and low-rent gigs and high-drama love affairs. Two of us might have been married by now, given the other one a godchild. I had been robbed blind.

Arleen’s children did not always have a home. They did not always have food. Arleen was not always able to offer them stability; stability cost too much. She was not always able to protect them from dangerous streets; those streets were her streets. Arleen sacrificed for her boys, fed them as best she could, clothed them with what she had. But when they wanted more than she could give, she had ways, some subtle, others not, of telling them they didn’t deserve it.

The Pretender" I'm going to rent myself a house In the shade of the freeway I'm going to pack my lunch in the morning And go to work each day And when the evening rolls around I'll go on home and lay my body down And when the morning light comes streaming in I'll get up and do it again Amen Say it again Amen I want to know what became of the changes We waited for love to bring Were they only the fitful dreams Of some greater awakening I've been aware of the time going by They say in the end it's the wink of an eye And when the morning light comes streaming in You'll get up and do it again Amen Caught between the longing for love And the struggle for the legal tender Where the sirens sing and the church bells ring And the junk man pounds his fender Where the veterans dream of the fight Fast asleep at the traffic light And the children solemnly wait For the ice cream vendor Out into the cool of the evening Strolls the Pretender He knows that all his hopes and dreams Begin and end there Ah the laughter of the lovers As they run through the night Leaving nothing for the others But to choose off and fight And tear at the world with all their might While the ships bearing their dreams Sail out of sight I'm going to find myself a girl Who can show me what laughter means And we'll fill in the missing colors In each other's paint-by-number dreams And then we'll put our dark glasses on And we'll make love until our strength is gone And when the morning light comes streaming in We'll get up and do it again Get it up again I'm going to be a happy idiot And struggle for the legal tender Where the ads take aim and lay their claim To the heart and the soul of the spender And believe in whatever may lie In those things that money can buy Though true love could have been a contender Are you there? Say a prayer for the Pretender Who started out so young and strong Only to surrender Jackson Browne, The Pretender (1976)

CHAPTER ONE A Boy at the Window FOR A LONG TIME AFTER THAT SUMMER, the four Penderwick sisters still talked of Arundel. Fate drove us there, Jane would say. No, it was the greedy landlord who sold our vacation house on Cape Cod, someone else would say, probably Skye. Who knew which was right? But it was true that the beach house they usually rented had been sold at the last minute, and the Penderwicks were suddenly without summer plans. Mr. Penderwick called everywhere, but Cape Cod was booked solid, and his daughters were starting to think they would be spending their whole vacation at home in Cameron, Massachusetts. Not that they didn’t love Cameron, but what is summer without a trip to somewhere special? Then, out of the blue, Mr. Penderwick heard through a friend of a friend about a cottage in the Berkshire Mountains. It had plenty of bedrooms and a big fenced-in pen for a dog—perfect for big, black, clumsy, lovable Hound Penderwick—and it was available to be rented for three weeks in August. Mr. Penderwick snatched it up, sight unseen. He didn’t know what he was getting us into, Batty would say. Rosalind always said, It’s too bad Mommy never saw Arundel—she would have loved the gardens. And Jane would say, There are much better gardens in heaven. And Mommy will never have to bump into Mrs. Tifton in heaven, Skye added to make her sisters laugh. And laugh they would, and the talk would move on to other things, until the next time someone remembered Arundel.

He couldn’t have known it, but among the original run of The History of Love, at least one copy was destined to change a life. This particular book was one of the last of the two thousand to be printed, and sat for longer than the rest in a warehouse in the outskirts of Santiago, absorbing the humidity. From there it was finally sent to a bookstore in Buenos Aires. The careless owner hardly noticed it, and for some years it languished on the shelves, acquiring a pattern of mildew across the cover. It was a slim volume, and its position on the shelf wasn’t exactly prime: crowded on the left by an overweight biography of a minor actress, and on the right by the once-bestselling novel of an author that everyone had since forgotten, it hardly left its spine visible to even the most rigorous browser. When the store changed owners it fell victim to a massive clearance, and was trucked off to another warehouse, foul, dingy, crawling with daddy longlegs, where it remained in the dark and damp before finally being sent to a small secondhand bookstore not far from the home of the writer Jorge Luis Borges. The owner took her time unpacking the books she’d bought cheaply and in bulk from the warehouse. One morning, going through the boxes, she discovered the mildewed copy of The History of Love. She’d never heard of it, but the title caught her eye. She put it aside, and during a slow hour in the shop she read the opening chapter, called 'The Age of Silence.' The owner of the secondhand bookstore lowered the volume of the radio. She flipped to the back flap of the book to find out more about the author, but all it said was that Zvi Litvinoff had been born in Poland and moved to Chile in 1941, where he still lived today. There was no photograph. That day, in between helping customers, she finished the book. Before locking up the shop that evening, she placed it in the window, a little wistful about having to part with it. The next morning, the first rays of the rising sun fell across the cover of The History of Love. The first of many flies alighted on its jacket. Its mildewed pages began to dry out in the heat as the blue-gray Persian cat who lorded over the shop brushed past it to lay claim to a pool of sunlight. A few hours later, the first of many passersby gave it a cursory glance as they went by the window. The shop owner did not try to push the book on any of her customers. She knew that in the wrong hands such a book could easily be dismissed or, worse, go unread. Instead she let it sit where it was in the hope that the right reader might discover it. And that’s what happened. One afternoon a tall young man saw the book in the window. He came into the shop, picked it up, read a few pages, and brought it to the register. When he spoke to the owner, she couldn’t place his accent. She asked where he was from, curious about the person who was taking the book away. Israel, he told her, explaining that he’d recently finished his time in the army and was traveling around South America for a few months. The owner was about to put the book in a bag, but the young man said he didn’t need one, and slipped it into his backpack. The door chimes were still tinkling as she watched him disappear, his sandals slapping against the hot, bright street. That night, shirtless in his rented room, under a fan lazily pushing around the hot air, the young man opened the book and, in a flourish he had been fine-tuning for years, signed his name: David Singer. Filled with restlessness and longing, he began to read.

That was our first home. Before I felt like an island in an ocean, before Calcutta, before everything that followed. You know it wasn’t a home at first but just a shell. Nothing ostentatious but just a rented two-room affair, an unneeded corridor that ran alongside them, second hand cane furniture, cheap crockery, two leaking faucets, a dysfunctional doorbell, and a flight of stairs that led to, but ended just before the roof (one of the many idiosyncrasies of the house), secured by a sixteen garrison lock, and a balcony into which a mango tree’s branch had strayed. The house was in a building at least a hundred years old and looked out on a street and a tenement block across it. The colony, if you were to call it a colony, had no name. The house itself was seedy, decrepit, as though a safe-keeper of secrets and scandals. It had many entries and exits and it was possible to get lost in it. And in a particularly inspired stroke of whimsy architectural genius, it was almost invisible from the main road like H.G. Wells’ ‘Magic Shop’. As a result, we had great difficulty when we had to explain our address to people back home. It went somewhat like this, ‘... take the second one from the main road….and then right after turning left from Dhakeshwari, you will see a bird shop (unspecific like that, for it had no name either)… walk straight in and take the stairs at the end to go to the first floor, that’s where we dwell… but don’t press the bell, knock… and don't walk too close to the cages unless you want bird-hickeys…’’ ('Left from Dhakeshwari')

One Autumn night, in Sudbury town, Across the meadows bare and brown, The windows of the wayside inn Gleamed red with fire-light through the leaves Of woodbine, hanging from the eaves Their crimson curtains rent and thin.” “As ancient is this hostelry As any in the land may be, Built in the old Colonial day, When men lived in a grander way, With ampler hospitality; A kind of old Hobgoblin Hall, Now somewhat fallen to decay, With weather-stains upon the wall, And stairways worn, and crazy doors, And creaking and uneven floors, And chimneys huge, and tiled and tall. A region of repose it seems, A place of slumber and of dreams, Remote among the wooded hills! For there no noisy railway speeds, Its torch-race scattering smoke and gleeds; But noon and night, the panting teams Stop under the great oaks, that throw Tangles of light and shade below, On roofs and doors and window-sills. Across the road the barns display Their lines of stalls, their mows of hay, Through the wide doors the breezes blow, The wattled cocks strut to and fro, And, half effaced by rain and shine, The Red Horse prances on the sign. Round this old-fashioned, quaint abode Deep silence reigned, save when a gust Went rushing down the county road, And skeletons of leaves, and dust, A moment quickened by its breath, Shuddered and danced their dance of death, And through the ancient oaks o'erhead Mysterious voices moaned and fled. These are the tales those merry guests Told to each other, well or ill; Like summer birds that lift their crests Above the borders of their nests And twitter, and again are still. These are the tales, or new or old, In idle moments idly told; Flowers of the field with petals thin, Lilies that neither toil nor spin, And tufts of wayside weeds and gorse Hung in the parlor of the inn Beneath the sign of the Red Horse. Uprose the sun; and every guest, Uprisen, was soon equipped and dressed For journeying home and city-ward; The old stage-coach was at the door, With horses harnessed, long before The sunshine reached the withered sward Beneath the oaks, whose branches hoar Murmured: "Farewell forevermore. Where are they now? What lands and skies Paint pictures in their friendly eyes? What hope deludes, what promise cheers, What pleasant voices fill their ears? Two are beyond the salt sea waves, And three already in their graves. Perchance the living still may look Into the pages of this book, And see the days of long ago Floating and fleeting to and fro, As in the well-remembered brook They saw the inverted landscape gleam, And their own faces like a dream Look up upon them from below.

Why do Mexicans park their cars on the front lawn? MIGHT EVEN NEED SOME OAXACANS Dear MENSO: Where do you want us to park them, MENSO? The garage we rent out to a family of five? The backyard where we put up our recently immigrated cousins in tool-shacks-cum-homes? The street with the red curbs recently approved by city planners? The driveway covered with construction materials for the latest expansion of la casa? The nearby school parking lot frequented by cholos on the prowl for a new radio? MENSO, the lawn is the only spot

Our faces are neither paler nor more flushed than usual; they are not more tense nor more flabby—and yet they are changed. We feel that in our blood a contact has shot home. That is no figure of speech; it is fact. It is the front, the consciousness of the front, that makes this contact. The moment that the first shells whistle over and the air is rent with the explosions there is suddenly in our veins, in our hands, in our eyes a tense waiting, a watching, a heightening alertness, a strange sharpening of the senses. The body with one bound is in full readiness.

Our faces are neither paler nor more flushed than usual; they are not more tense nor more flabby - and yet they are changed. We feel that in our blood a contact has shot home. That is no figure of speech; it is fact. It is the front, the consciousness of the front, that makes this contact. The moment that the first shells whistle over and the air is rent with the explosions there is suddenly in our veins, in our hands, in our eyes a tense waiting, a watching, a heightening alertness, a strange sharpening of the senses. the body with one bound is in full readiness.

A. M. Fyodorov stopped by. He was very pleasant, though he kept complaining about his poverty. In reality he has lost his last asset—who will rent his summer cottage now? But then it is not his to rent out anymore since it is now the “property of the people.” He has worked his entire life and somehow managed to buy a truly valuable piece of land. Then he built a small house on it (and went into debt along the way)—but now it turns out that this home “belongs to the folk,” and that some “workers” will live there together with their families for the rest of their lives.

...it reveals the legacy of an environmental catastrophe, its human tolls and triumphs, its corporate greed and indifference, its governmental lapses and neglect. In its historic sweep, it stands as a cautionary tale -- timeless and time-bound -- in a country divided by class and religion, buffeted by corporate misconduct, and dismantling its environmental protection laws. This is the story of a dying coal town ensnared in the Reagan Revolution's afterbirth, of a small community rent by one of the mining industry's worst disasters, and of the irreplaceable bond of home.

I would be happy just about anywhere, as long as I can be surrounded by tall trees and maybe a lake or river with majestic mountains in the background. I always admired how they lived during the frontier times. You could find yourself a nice spot and build your dream home without worrying about paying rent or a mortgage. Simpler times. I think what’s happening now could possibly lead to something like that happening, again. We’re already experiencing a breakdown in government, as far as New York City goes. If more cities become infected elsewhere, who knows how things will turn out?

Whatever your motivation for downsizing, you're going to love the benefits that come with this change. Let me highlight a few: 1. More money... in general a smaller home costs less to buy or rent and less to maintain. 2. Less time and energy spent cleaning and maintaining... 3. Better family bonding... A smaller home naturally brings family members into proximity, leading to their having more conversations and doing more things together. 4. Less environmental impact... using less energy and fewer natural resources. 5. Easier perpetuation of your minimalism... 6. Wider market to sell.

You have to ask what the end game is here — when 25 percent of Palo Alto homes are sold to overseas buyers as investments while the mainland Chinese property market tanks, when Palo Alto schools are known for their suicide rates as much as their academics, when the city that gave birth to the technology industry now can’t even house startups because of its sky-high commercial rents, when Latino and black communities are being wiped from the Western side of the San Francisco Bay Area and Oakland out into the exurbs of the East only to be called back by smartphone to deliver laundry or drive people around.

There was a man in Florence, a friar, Fra Savonarola, he induced all the people to think beauty was a sin. Some people think he was a magician and they fell under his spell for a season, they made fires in the streets and they threw in everything they liked, everything they had made or worked to buy, bolts of silk, and linen their mothers had embroidered for their marriage beds, books of poems written in the poet's hand, bonds and wills, rent-rolls, title deeds, dogs and cats, the shirts from their backs, the rings from their fingers, women their veils, and do you know what was worst, Johane – they threw in their mirrors. So then they couldn't see their faces and know how they were different from the beasts in the field and the creatures screaming on the pyre. And when they had melted their mirrors they went home to their empty houses, and lay on the floor because they had burned their beds, and when they got up next day they were aching from the hard floor and there was no table for their breakfast because they'd used the table to feed the bonfire, and no stool to sit on because they'd chopped it into splinters, and there was no bread to eat because the bakers had thrown into the flames the basins and the yeast and the flour and the scales. And you know the worst of it? They were sober. Last night they took their wine-skins …’ He turns his arm, in a mime of a man lobbing something into a fire. ‘So they were sober and their heads were clear, but they looked around and they had nothing to eat, nothing to drink and nothing to sit on.’ ‘But that wasn't the worst. You said the mirrors were the worst. Not to be able to look at yourself.’ ‘Yes. Well, so I think. I hope I can always look myself in the face. And you, Johane, you should always have a fine glass to see yourself. As you're a woman worth looking at.’ You

What neither that doctor nor the therapist understood was that the stress was caused not by what I did at my job but, as I’d tried to explain to him, by having to go to work. Spending eight hours from Monday to Friday on alienating and unsatisfying tasks, surrounded by people with whom I was forced to have futile and boring conversations full of absurd platitudes about mortgages or parking spaces or the words their children said wrong or the last series they’d watched on Netflix. All that time I was giving to others instead of staying at home reading or drawing or simply looking at the ceiling, half naked, observing the cracks. I couldn’t stand the idea of being forced to live that office pantomime in perpetuity just to pay for things like rent or food or a book or a weekend at the beach. I broke down every morning when the alarm beeped because life, lived this way, seemed like a badly written tragedy, boring and sterile, devoid of fun and, even worse, devoid of content, and so, on my way to work, I felt like grabbing strangers by the shoulders and asking them why they weren’t feeling like me. What was their secret, how did they manage to maintain their composure, why didn’t they cry every time their alarms beeped?

As he surveyed the world being remade by Silicon Valley, and especially what was once called the sharing economy, he began to see through the fantasy-speak. Here were a handful of companies thriving by serving as middlemen between people who wanted rides and people who offered them, people who wanted their Ikea furniture assembled and people who came over to install it, people who defrayed their costs by renting out a room and people who stayed there. It was no accident, Scholz believed, that these services had taken off at the historical moment that they had. An epic meltdown of the world financial system had cost millions of people their homes, jobs, and health insurance. And as the fallout from the crash spread, many of those cut loose had been drafted into joining a new American servant class. The precariousness at the bottom, which had shown few signs of improving several years after the meltdown, had become the fodder for a bounty of services for the affluent—and, Scholz noted, for the “channeling of wealth in fewer and fewer hands.” Somehow, the technologies celebrated by the Valley as leveling playing fields and emancipating people had fostered a slick new digitally enabled upstairs-downstairs line in American social life.

One Autumn night, in Sudbury town, Across the meadows bare and brown, The windows of the wayside inn Gleamed red with fire-light through the leaves Of woodbine, hanging from the eaves Their crimson curtains rent and thin. As ancient is this hostelry As any in the land may be, Built in the old Colonial day, When men lived in a grander way, With ampler hospitality; A kind of old Hobgoblin Hall, Now somewhat fallen to decay, With weather-stains upon the wall, And stairways worn, and crazy doors, And creaking and uneven floors, And chimneys huge, and tiled and tall. A region of repose it seems, A place of slumber and of dreams, Remote among the wooded hills! For there no noisy railway speeds, Its torch-race scattering smoke and gleeds; But noon and night, the panting teams Stop under the great oaks, that throw Tangles of light and shade below, On roofs and doors and window-sills. Across the road the barns display Their lines of stalls, their mows of hay, Through the wide doors the breezes blow, The wattled cocks strut to and fro, And, half effaced by rain and shine, The Red Horse prances on the sign. Round this old-fashioned, quaint abode Deep silence reigned, save when a gust Went rushing down the county road, And skeletons of leaves, and dust, A moment quickened by its breath, Shuddered and danced their dance of death, And through the ancient oaks o'erhead Mysterious voices moaned and fled. These are the tales those merry guests Told to each other, well or ill; Like summer birds that lift their crests Above the borders of their nests And twitter, and again are still. These are the tales, or new or old, In idle moments idly told; Flowers of the field with petals thin, Lilies that neither toil nor spin, And tufts of wayside weeds and gorse Hung in the parlor of the inn Beneath the sign of the Red Horse. Uprose the sun; and every guest, Uprisen, was soon equipped and dressed For journeying home and city-ward; The old stage-coach was at the door, With horses harnessed,long before The sunshine reached the withered sward Beneath the oaks, whose branches hoar Murmured: "Farewell forevermore. Where are they now? What lands and skies Paint pictures in their friendly eyes? What hope deludes, what promise cheers, What pleasant voices fill their ears? Two are beyond the salt sea waves, And three already in their graves. Perchance the living still may look Into the pages of this book, And see the days of long ago Floating and fleeting to and fro, As in the well-remembered brook They saw the inverted landscape gleam, And their own faces like a dream Look up upon them from below.

I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn't fight. He hadn't fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age. He was speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down. While his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen —the frightening gills, fresh and crisp with blood, that can cut so badly— I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones, the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails, and the pink swim-bladder like a big peony. I looked into his eyes which were far larger than mine but shallower, and yellowed, the irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass. They shifted a little, but not to return my stare. —It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light. I admired his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw, and then I saw that from his lower lip —if you could call it a lip— grim, wet, and weaponlike, hung five old pieces of fish-line, or four and a wire leader with the swivel still attached, with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth. A green line, frayed at the end where he broke it, two heavier lines, and a fine black thread still crimped from the strain and snap when it broke and he got away. Like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering, a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw. I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat, from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts, the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels—until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go.

When you rent yourself to some concentration of capital in the private sector—that’s what taking a job is—you’re giving your life over to a dictatorship, in fact, an extreme form of dictatorship that reaches far beyond political dictatorships. The tyranny to which you are handing yourself over to has almost total control over you. It controls every minute of your working day: what you wear and are allowed to say, when you’re allowed to get a bathroom break, how your hands and legs move, whether you smoke cigarettes at home. Just about everything in your life is controlled by this extreme dictatorship, which goes far beyond any totalitarian dictatorship in the degree of control it exercises.

I do not now have the slightest understanding of the events which got us out of one big white house which we rented into another, bigger white house which we own, at least in part. That is, I know we moved, and I think I know why, and I know we spent three pleasant months in a friend’s summer home, and I am pretty sure we got most of our own furniture back. What really puzzles me, I suppose, is how a series of events like that gets itself started. One day I went to clean out the hall closet and the next thing I knew we were trying to decide whether to have all four phones put on one line, or leave them all different numbers and list ourselves four times in the phone book. We decided wrong, by the way.

We are fighting for a better land, we are fighting for freedom. We wish only to have hope again in our lives, to have a safe place for our mothers, our children. We wish for justice. We wish for holidays. We wish to go walking in the sea and eat ice cream. We wish for antibiotics when our brothers are sick. We wish for a job that finishes at six o’clock in the afternoon. We wish to pay rent, to cook food with our own hands, good food, to taste cinnamon again. We wish to decorate our homes, and smell fresh paint, and be proud of the lives we have built. We wish to practise our beliefs, piously and in peace. We wish to know our neighbours, and play simple games, and read books, and watch TV. Is this so much? Is this more than any man desires? Do you understand?

the streets. So now everyone is afraid of it. Petr GINZ Today it’s clear to everyone who is a Jew and who’s an Aryan, because you’ll know Jews near and far by their black and yellow star. And Jews who are so demarcated must live according to the rules dictated: Always, after eight o’clock, be at home and click the lock; work only labouring with pick or hoe, and do not listen to the radio. You’re not allowed to own a mutt; barbers can’t give your hair a cut; a female Jew who once was rich can’t have a dog, even a bitch, she cannot send her kids to school must shop from three to five since that’s the rule. She can’t have bracelets, garlic, wine, or go to the theatre, out to dine; she can’t have cars or a gramophone, fur coats or skis or a telephone; she can’t eat onions, pork, or cheese, have instruments, or matrices; she cannot own a clarinet or keep a canary for a pet, rent bicycles or barometers, have woollen socks or warm sweaters. And especially the outcast Jew must give up all habits he knew: he can’t buy clothes, can’t buy a shoe, since dressing well is not his due; he can’t have poultry, shaving soap, or jam or anything to smoke; can’t get a license, buy some gin, read magazines, a news bulletin, buy sweets or a machine to sew; to fields or shops he cannot go even to buy a single pair of winter woollen underwear, or a sardine or a ripe pear. And if this list is not complete there’s more, so you should be discreet; don’t buy a thing; accept defeat. Walk everywhere you want to go in rain or sleet or hail or snow. Don’t leave your house, don’t push a pram, don’t take a bus or train or tram; you’re not allowed on a fast train; don’t hail a taxi, or complain; no matter how thirsty you are you must not enter any bar; the riverbank is not for you, or a museum or park or zoo or swimming pool or stadium or post office or department store, or church, casino, or cathedral or any public urinal. And you be careful not to use main streets, and keep off avenues! And if you want to breathe some air go to God’s garden and walk there among the graves in the cemetery because no park to you is free. And if you are a clever Jew you’ll close off bank accounts and you will give up other habits too like meeting Aryans you knew. He used to be allowed a swag, suitcase, rucksack, or carpetbag. Now he has lost even those rights but every Jew lowers his sights and follows all the rules he’s got and doesn’t care one little jot.

Again I heard the cry, and I approached, circling the tree until I was looking at it from the opposite side. From gnarled roots to blasted top, the large trunk was split open, a dark wound where a bolt of lightning had rent it apart and fire had burned its center out, leaving it hollow. A mesh of thick vines grew upward from the base, crawling along the withered trunk, sutures trying to close the gaping wound where the sides lay back like flaps of charred flesh. The wind streamed through the gap, tugging the cuffs of my wet pants, brushing at the grass, tearing at the leaves of the new growth around the tree. Then I heard the cry again, and once more I froze, for I discovered the thing that voiced it, almost hidden behind the moving greenery. I was looking at a human skull, and it was from behind the parted jaws that the screams came.

If we had flown Victoria to New Zealand, she would have been at a funeral home, with private viewings in an atmosphere of stilted, muffled unquiet. I would have had little opportunity to sit with the body and pour out my lament. The Singaporeans would not have been there with their reassuring ease in the ritual of mourning. My family might have come bristling with disrespect, and rent the air with accusations and blame. Some mourners would have been embarrassed by my tears. They and others would have wanted the whole thing done and dusted quickly. The funeral director or an assistant might well have been the ones dressing the body. I would have not realised the normality of death so quickly, and more importantly at this point, the absolute necessity to go briefly mad with grief, to cover yourself— metaphorically—in the dowdy burlap of mourning.

The milk is long since out of date, the bread all has mold and I think you could start a bacterial plague with what’s in the crisper here…” “Order a pizza,” he suggested. “There’s a place down on the corner that still owes me ten pizzas, paid for in advance.” “You can’t eat pizza for breakfast!” “Why can’t I? I’ve been doing it for a week.” “You can cook,” she said accusingly. “When I’m sober,” he agreed. She glowered at him and went back to her chore. “Well, the eggs are still edible, barely, and there’s an unopened pound of bacon. I’ll make an omelet.” He collapsed into the chair at the kitchen table while she made a fresh pot of coffee and set about breaking eggs. “You look very domesticated like that,” he pointed out with a faint smile. “After we have breakfast, why don’t you come to bed with me?” She gave him a shocked glance. “I’m pregnant,” she reminded him. He nodded and laughed softly. “Yes, I know. It’s an incredible turn-on.” Her hand stopped, poised in midair with a spoon in it. “Wh…What?” “The eggs are burning,” he said pleasantly. She stirred them quickly and turned the bacon, which was frying in another pan. He thought her condition was sexy? She couldn’t believe he was serious. But apparently he was, because he watched her so intently over breakfast that she doubted if he knew what he was eating. “Mr. Hutton told the curator of the museum in Tennessee that I wasn’t coming back, and he paid off the rent on my house there,” she said. “I don’t even have a home to go to…” “Yes, you do,” he said quietly. “I’m your home. I always have been.” She averted her eyes to her plate and hated the quick tears that her condition prompted. Her fists clenched. “And here we are again,” she said huskily. “Where?” he asked. She drew in a harsh breath. “You’re taking responsibility for me, out of duty.” He leaned back in his chair. The robe came away from his broad, bronzed chest as he stared at her. “Not this time,” he replied with a voice so tender that it made ripples right through her heart. “This time, it’s out of love, Cecily.” Cecily doubted her own ears. She couldn’t have heard Tate saying that he wanted to take care of her because he loved her. He wasn’t teasing. His face was almost grim. “I know,” he said. “You don’t believe it. But it’s true, just the same.” He searched her soft, shocked green eyes. “I loved you when you were seventeen, Cecily, but I thought I had nothing to offer you except an affair.” He sighed heavily. “It was never completely for the reasons I told you, that I didn’t want to get married. It was my mother’s marriage. It warped me. It’s taken this whole scandal to make me realize that a good marriage is nothing like the one I grew up watching. I had to see my mother and Matt together before I understood what marriage could be.

Johan had been away working for several weeks and home only at the weekends. Sigge missed him and I missed him and we were walking through the park on our way to daycare, two tired and sad souls. Sigge was sitting quietly in the buggy. He usually asks about everything we see along the way, why the air is so transparent, where the sun actually lives and if I like ice cream with pears and whipped cream. But today he was just sitting there quiet and tired, and I wanted to stop and hold him but instead I walked even faster. And then in the middle of the silence his questions started to come. ‘Mommy, why does Daddy have to work in Växjö?’ I gave him a tired, noncommittal answer. ‘He just has to. That’s where his job is right now.’ ‘But why?’ Sigge continued. ‘To earn money so we can buy food and pay the rent.’ ‘Why?’ Sigge said again, and I realized that he really did not understand and then I started wondering whether I really understood. ‘People have to work,’ I said and heard how hollow it sounded.

Section four people who don’t under stand homophones If ewe due naught no watt a homophone is, eye well X plane. Homophones R words, that win herd, sound the same, butt R naught spelt the same and mien differ rent things. Watt eye yam saying hear is that the English language ran out of words and had two reuse a phew. If some one is reading this too ewe rite now than it mite seam grate, butt just no that the purse son who reeds this is half-ing a reel pane full thyme. If ewe half know clew how two spell some thing and you’re teacher tells ewe two spell it buy “sounding it out,” ask hymn ab out home a phones, cause if the “sound ding it out” method was a hole lot moor ack U rate oar bet her than guess sing, wood home F owns X cyst? Ewe sea, hoe Moe phones own Lee X cyst sew you’re tea chair has a ree sun too mark down you’re pay purse. All so sew ewe sound like ewe half Ben drink king when ewe send text mess ages you sing voice two text. Two bee fare, English spell ling never maid much scents too beg in with.

Welfare was taking away the very thing that people needed most—the initiative to provide for themselves. At the same time it was undermining the family: Teenagers from the inner cities, who for various reasons decided they didn’t want to live at home anymore, discovered that by getting pregnant—they didn’t even have to wait for their baby to be born—they got a welfare check that allowed them to rent their own apartment, and they discovered they could increase their monthly welfare check any time they chose simply by getting pregnant again. Meanwhile, the father of the child might have a good job and want to live with his family. But he was told his family was better off financially if he walked out on them; if he stayed, they wouldn’t get a welfare check. Not only was the welfare program a tax-financed incentive for immorality that was destroying the family, it was responsible for an endless and malignant cycle of despair in which generation after generation went on the dole and never had any incentive to leave it.

Kim was twenty-three, single, on her own, and at a job making $27,000 per year. She had recently started her Total Money Makeover. She was behind on credit cards, not on a budget, and barely making her rent because her spending was out of control. She let her car insurance drop because she “couldn’t afford it.” She did her first budget and two days later was in a car wreck. Since it wasn’t bad, the damage to the other guy’s car was only about $550. As Kim looked at me through panicked tears, that $550 might as well have been $55,000. She hadn’t even started Baby Step One. She was trying to get current, and now she had one more hurdle to clear before she even started. This was a huge emergency. Seven years ago George and Sally were in the same place. They were broke with new babies, and George’s career was sputtering. George and Sally fought and scraped through a Total Money Makeover. Today they are debt-free, even their $85,000 home. They have a $12,000 emergency fund, retirement in Roth IRAs, and even the kids’ college is funded. George has grown personally, his career has blossomed, and he now makes $75,000 per year while Sally stays home with the kids. One day a piece of trash flew out of the back of George’s pickup and hit a car behind him on the interstate. The damage was about $550. I think you can see that George and Sally probably adjusted one month’s budget and paid the repairs, while Kim dealt with her wreck for months. The point is that as you get in better shape, it takes a lot more to rock your world. When the accidents occurred, George’s heart rate didn’t even change, but Kim needed a Valium sandwich to calm down. Those true stories illustrate the fact that as you progress through your Total Money Makeover, the definition of an emergency that is worthy to be covered by the emergency fund changes. As you have better health insurance, disability insurance, more room in your budget, and better cars, you will have fewer things that qualify as emergency-fund emergencies. What used to be a huge, life-altering event will become a mere inconvenience.

He’d worked for his bread, been hounded, hounded and oppressed by people and by necessity, just like everyone else. He’d worked nights; in Amsterdam he came home from the office at one or two in the morning, then sat up, brooded, scribbled, written whole novels and burned them. What could he do? What did they accomplish with all that? . . . The world was still turning, turning exactly the way it always had, and it would keep on turning without him. He let it get to him. Now he was more sensible. He washed his hands of it. There were enough salesmen and writers and talkers and people who let it get to them — more than enough. And they were always afraid of something and sad about something. Always scared to be late somewhere or get a scolding from someone, or they couldn’t make ends meet, or the toilet was stopped up, or they had an ulcer or their Sunday suit was starting to wear thin, or the rent was due; they couldn’t do this because of that and couldn’t possibly do that because of this. When he was young he was never that stupid.

So long as the income continues the employee is prone to quell what desires he may have for rural life and to tolerate the disadvantages of urban surroundings rather than to drop a certainty for an uncertainty; but when hard times arrive and his savings steadily melt away he begins to appreciate the advantages of a home which does not gobble up his hard-earned money but produces much of its up-keep, especially in the way of food for the family. More than this, however! He realizes at the end of each year in the city that he has only 12 slips of paper to show for his perhaps chief expenditure—rent; that he and his family are “cliff dwellers” who probably do not know or want to know others housed under the same roof; that his children “have no place to go but out and no place to come but in”; in short, that he and they are ekeing out a narrowing, uneducative, imitative, more or less selfish and purposeless existence; and that his and their “expectation of life” is shortened by tainted air, restricted sunshine and lack of exercise, to say nothing of exposure to disease.

It is unlikely that those who provide housing, food, medicine or a host of other goods and services, can continue to provide us with the same quantity and quality of these when the costs involved in providing that quantity and quality of goods and services cannot be recovered. . This may not be immediately obvious, a reason why price controls are popular, but the consequences are long-lasting and usually get even worse over time. Homes do not disappear immediately when there is rent control, but they deteriorate over time without being replaced by newer and more suitable ones. Currently available medicines do not disappear when price controls are implemented, but new medicines for the treatment of cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's and others will probably not continue to be developed at the same speed, when the money to pay for their development is no longer there. Present. But everything takes time to be noticed and the memory of most people may be very short-term and they cannot connect the bad consequences they suffer with the popular policies they supported a few years ago.

Our first stop was London, where there were a few competitions leading up to Blackpool. I had never seen this level of competition before. I was so excited by the energy and the feeling of being around all these amazing dancers. I wasn’t overwhelmed, just a little embarrassed. Everyone looked so polished, and they all smelled like fancy cologne. Comparatively, I looked and felt like the poor kid on the block. I didn’t own the proper costume (white tie, black jacket, and black trousers), so I’d rented one from a wedding store before we left home. It was baggy in all the wrong places, and I didn’t have the right shoes. Watching the dancers get ready backstage, we realized we were also completely unprepared. They’d put water or castor oil on the floor and rub the soles of their shoes in it. Then they’d scratch the soles with a wire brush, roughening up the suede to prevent slipping. As we stepped out for the first round, Autumn spit in the middle of the dance floor and rubbed her feet in it. She encouraged me to do the same, so I did--hoping that not too many people were watching. I remember thinking, Yeah, we are definitely from out of town.

Myles P. doesn’t resist, he sinks down and down, letting the sound of Willard’s lisp close over him light as a foaming wave and he drifts gently down, without a gurgle, past the floating beds of giant kelp and the abalone-eating otters, the unschooled senoritas and egg-filled cabezon, he thinks he might touch his toes to the bottom when he gets there and wonders if it will be mud or just more cement. 'Meaning other animals, shoot, soon as the young’s able to hunt or run, mother takes off and dad’s eyeing the offsprung for dinner. But we can’t let ours be, colic to college, we’re constantly wiping their little booger’d noses, dolling out free dough and freer advice, thinking they’ll powder our own asses later in the home. But a baby’s just a for-instance, fact is, others never tender the way you do. Species’d peter, rent’d come due.' Willard goes to Hiro, 'The punchline, my friend, is giving without wanting’s the trick once you’ve managed that, you’ve partly pierced heaven a bunghole, but it’s a pure penniless instigation that you ain’t got ‘n ain’t gonna get got, ‘n ain’t gonna get it, not on no roadfuckingtrip.' 'Meaning?' says Hiro 'Meaning love’s all true.

I asked Carl to go to the event with me, and he agreed. We rented him a tuxedo, and he looked very handsome in it, if a little uncomfortable. The tuxedo was only the beginning of a miserable evening for Carl. Everywhere we went there were crowds of people, including photographers, and everybody made a big fuss over us. Carl sat through the ceremony and patiently waited afterward while I shook hands and accepted congratulations from a throng of music-industry people. I thought he was really handsome in his tux, but you could tell by the look on his face it suited him like a sock on a rooster. He didn’t say much all evening long, but on the way home, he took off his tuxedo jacket and tie and then even his shirt. I’ll never forget the way he looked sitting there in the car with his suspenders across his bare chest. Finally, he turned to me and said calmly, “Honey, I love you and I will support you in your career any way that I can. I know it’s a big part of you and you wouldn’t be the same person if you didn’t do it. But the limelight’s just not for me. I’ll be there at home waiting for you, but I am not going to any more of these wingdings.” He has been a wingdingless man of his word ever since.

New Rule: Conservatives have to stop complaining about Hollywood values. It's Oscar time again, which means two things: (1) I've got to get waxed, and (2) talk-radio hosts and conservative columnists will trot out their annual complaints about Hollywood: We're too liberal; we're out of touch with the Heartland; our facial muscles have been deadened with chicken botulism; and we make them feel fat. To these people, I say: Shut up and eat your popcorn. And stop bitching about one of the few American products--movies---that people all over the world still want to buy. Last year, Hollywood set a new box-office record: $16 billion worldwide. Not bad for a bunch of socialists. You never see Hollywood begging Washington for a handout, like corn farmers, or the auto industry, or the entire state of Alaska. What makes it even more inappropriate for conservatives to slam Hollywood is that they more than anybody lose their shit over any D-lister who leans right to the point that they actually run them for office. Sony Bono? Fred Thompson? And let'snot forget that the modern conservative messiah is a guy who costarred with a chimp. That's right, Dick Cheney. I'm not trying to say that when celebrities are conservative they're almost always lame, but if Stephen Baldwin killed himself and Bo Derrick with a car bomb, the headline the next day would be "Two Die in Car Bombing." The truth is that the vast majority of Hollywood talent is liberal, because most stars adhere to an ideology that jibes with their core principles of taking drugs and getting laid. The liebral stars that the right is always demonizing--Sean Penn and Michael Moore, Barbra Streisand and Alec Baldwin and Tim Robbins, and all the other members of my biweekly cocaine orgy--they're just people with opinions. None of them hold elective office, and liberals aren't begging them to run. Because we live in the real world, where actors do acting, and politicians do...nothing. We progressives love our stars, but we know better than to elect them. We make the movies here, so we know a well-kept trade secret: The people on that screen are only pretending to be geniuses, astronauts, and cowboys. So please don't hat eon us. And please don't ruin the Oscars. Because honestly, we're just like you: We work hard all year long, and the Oscars are really just our prom night. The tuxedos are scratchy, the limousines are rented, and we go home with eighteen-year-old girls.

Around the glade this pair of woodland nymphs danced. He swept her in a waltz to a duet that was sometimes off tune, sometimes rent with giggling and laughter as they made their own music. A breathless Erienne fell to a sun-dappled hummock of deep, soft moss, and laughing for the pure thrill of the day, she spread her arms, creating a comely yellow-hued flower on the dark green sward while seeming every bit as fragile as a blossom to the man who watched her. With bliss-bedazzled eyes, she gazed through the treetops overhead where swaying branches, bedecked in the first bright green of spring, caressed the underbellies of the freshlet zephyrs, and the fleecy white clouds raced like frolicking sheep across an azure lea. Small birds played courting games, and the earlier ones tended nests with single-minded perseverance. A sprightly squirrel leapt across the spaces, and a larger one followed, bemused at the sudden coyness of his mate. Christopher came to Erienne and sank to his knees on the thick, soft carpet, then bracing his hands on either side of her, slowly lowered himself until his chest touched her bosom. For a long moment he kissed those blushing lips that opened to him and welcomed him with an eagerness that belied the once-cool maid. Then he lifted her arm and lay beside her, keeping her hand in his as he shared her viewpoint of the day. They whispered sweet inanities, talked of dreams, hopes, and other things, as lovers are wont to do. Erienne turned on her side and taking care to keep her hand in the warm nest, ran her other fingers through his tousled hair. “You need a shearing, milord,” she teased. He rolled his head until he could look up into those amethyst eyes. “And does my lady see me as an innocent lamb ready to be clipped?” At her doubtful gaze, he questioned further. “Or rather a lusting, long-maned beast? A zealous suitor come to seduce you?” Erienne’s eyes brightened, and she nodded quickly to his inquiry. “A love-smitten swain? A silver-armored knight upon a white horse charging down to rescue you?” “Aye, all of that,” she agreed through a giggle. She came to her knees and grasped his shirt front with both hands. “All of that and more.” She bent to place a honeyed kiss upon his lips, then sitting back, spoke huskily. “I see you as my husband, as the father of my child, as my succor against the storm, protector of my home, and lord of yonder manse. But most of all, I see you as the love of my life.” -Erienne & Christopher

Twenty-three One day you wake up and you’re twenty-three and you can’t remember what it feels like to be seventeen but you still cry to your mother after a bad day and you look a little older but you don’t really feel it. One day you’re twenty-three and your great-aunt is telling you how mature you look and how you grew a little taller but inside you still remember sitting under the oak tree reading with no meetings tomorrow and no rent to pay and the only thing you can think about is how at seventeen you thought at twenty-three you would know everything and now you can’t remember how you got from there to here. But seventeen-year-old you was wrong because you know only some things and not everything. You know that coffee tastes better in the mornings and your home isn’t your home anymore; it’s “Mum and Dad’s.” You know your car needs servicing every six months and groceries are harder to do after breakups. She liked cookie dough and walnuts and strawberry-flavored milk and now every time you go to the store you can’t buy spaghetti without remembering it was a Friday night and she kissed you for the first time and the heat from her skin could have set your entire place on fire. One day you’re twenty-three and you’re trying to explain to a seventeen-year-old all the mistakes you made so they won’t make them too, when all you really want is for someone to realize you still don’t have the first clue.

How to Apologize Ellen Bass Cook a large fish—choose one with many bones, a skeleton you will need skill to expose, maybe the flying silver carp that's invaded the Great Lakes, tumbling the others into oblivion. If you don't live near a lake, you'll have to travel. Walking is best and shows you mean it, but you could take a train and let yourself be soothed by the rocking on the rails. It's permitted to receive solace for whatever you did or didn't do, pitiful, beautiful human. When my mother was in the hospital, my daughter and I had to clear out the home she wouldn't return to. Then she recovered and asked, incredulous, How could you have thrown out all my shoes? So you'll need a boat. You could rent or buy, but, for the sake of repairing the world, build your own. Thin strips of Western red cedar are perfect, but don't cut a tree. There'll be a demolished barn or downed trunk if you venture further. And someone will have a mill. And someone will loan you tools. The perfume of sawdust and the curls that fall from your plane will sweeten the hours. Each night we dream thirty-six billion dreams. In one night we could dream back everything lost. So grill the pale flesh. Unharness yourself from your weary stories. Then carry the oily, succulent fish to the one you hurt. There is much to fear as a creature caught in time, but this is safe. You need no defense. This is just another way to know you are alive. “How to Apologize” originally appeared in The New Yorker (March 15, 2021).

Beware, and be on your guard against every form of greed; for not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions. -LUKE 12:15 One of our universal problems is the overcrowding of our homes. Whether we have an apartment or a six bedroom home, every closet, cupboard, refrigerator, and garage are all crammed with abundance. Some of us have so much that we go out and rent additional storage spaces for our possessions. Bob and I are no different than you. We buy new clothes and cram them into our wardrobes. A new antique goes in the corner, a new quilt hangs over the bed, a new potted plant gathers sunlight by the window. On and on it goes. Pretty soon we feel as though we are closed in with no room to breathe. We continually struggle to keep a balance in our attitudes regarding possessions. It is simpler to manage if you are single and live alone-it's just you. Life becomes more complicated with a spouse and children. You soon get that "bunched in" feeling. This creates more stress, and you can lose your cool and blow relationships when your calm is broken. We have made a rule in our home about abundance. Simply stated, it says, "One comes in and one goes out." After every purchase we give away or sell a like item. (We have an annual garage sale.) With a new blouse, out goes an older blouse; with a new table, out goes a table; and so on. Naturally if you're a newlywed this rule is not for you because you probably don't have an abundance of possessions. There's another strategy that's very effective. We have informed our loved ones that we don't want any more gifts that take up space or that have to be dusted; we prefer receiving consumable items. Remember-your life is not based on your possessions. Share with others what you aren't using.

In addition to the Catholic Church’s ban on contraception, a ban which had added force because of the religious cohesion of the ethnic neighborhood, one of the main things which fueled this demographic increase in Philadelphia was the rowhouse. It was cheap enough for a worker to own. It was more spacious than an apartment, and instead of paying rent and being at the mercy of landlords, a man could own his home free and clear in the time it took him to pay off his mortgage. Since it was located in the city near public transportation, the rowhouse did not require the expense of owning a car. Since it was surrounded on both sides by other houses, it was cheap to heat. As a result, it allowed the working-class Catholic family to have a large family, and over a period of time, it allowed him to benefit from the political power which followed demographic increase, which is precisely what was causing Blanshard and the Phillips crowd concern. The attack on the rowhouse which the Better Philadelphia Exhibition orchestrated meant an attack on all of the cultural attributes that went with the rowhouse, a building which symbolized the cultural independence of the ethnic neighborhood based on religious cohesion and the economic independence of immigrant workers who could own their own homes. The attack on the rowhouse in Philadelphia was a covert attack on the Catholics who lived in them, orchestrated by a ruling class that knew, as good Darwinians, that demography was destiny and that they, because of their all but universal adoption of contraception, were on the losing end of the demographic equation. Urban renewal, like the sexual revolution which followed it eighteen years later, was the WASP ruling class’s attempt to keep “the United States from becoming a Catholic country by default.

Mental Accounting Alarm clocks and Christmas clubs are external devices people use to solve their self-control problems. Another way to approach these problems is to adopt internal control systems, otherwise known as mental accounting. Mental accounting is the system (sometimes implicit) that households use to evaluate, regulate, and process their home budget. Almost all of us use mental accounts, even if we’re not aware that we’re doing so. The concept is beautifully illustrated by an exchange between the actors Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman in one of those extra features offered on DVDs. Hackman and Hoffman were friends back in their starving artist days, and Hackman tells the story of visiting Hoffman’s apartment and having his host ask him for a loan. Hackman agreed to the loan, but then they went into Hoffman’s kitchen, where several mason jars were lined up on the counter, each containing money. One jar was labeled “rent,” another “utilities,” and so forth. Hackman asked why, if Hoffman had so much money in jars, he could possibly need a loan, whereupon Hoffman pointed to the food jar, which was empty. According to economic theory (and simple logic), money is “fungible,” meaning that it doesn’t come with labels. Twenty dollars in the rent jar can buy just as much food as the same amount in the food jar. But households adopt mental accounting schemes that violate fungibility for the same reasons that organizations do: to control spending. Most organizations have budgets for various activities, and anyone who has ever worked in such an organization has experienced the frustration of not being able to make an important purchase because the relevant account is already depleted. The fact that there is unspent money in another account is considered no more relevant than the money sitting in the rent jar on Dustin Hoffman’s kitchen counter.

Meanwhile, Trucker and I, through all of this, had been renting that cottage together, on a country estate six miles outside of Bristol. We were paying a tiny rent, as the place was so rundown, with no heating or modern conveniences. But I loved it. The cottage overlooked a huge green valley on one side and had beautiful woodland on the other. We had friends around most nights, held live music parties, and burned wood from the dilapidated shed as heating for the solid-fuel stove. Our newly found army pay was spent on a bar tab in the local pub. We were probably the tenants from hell, as we let the garden fall into disrepair, and burned our way steadily through the wood of the various rotting sheds in the garden. But heh, the landlord was a miserable old sod with a terrible reputation, anyway! When the grass got too long we tried trimming it--but broke both our string trimmers. Instead we torched the garden. This worked a little too well, and we narrowly avoided burning down the whole cottage as the fire spread wildly. What was great about the place was that we could get in and out of Bristol on our 100 cc motorbikes, riding almost all the way on little footpaths through the woods--without ever having to go on any roads. I remember one night, after a fun evening out in town, Trucker and I were riding our motorbikes back home. My exhaust started to malfunction--glowing red, then white hot--before letting out one massive backfire and grinding to a halt. We found some old fence wire in the dark and Trucker towed me all the way home, both of us crying with laughter. From then on my bike would only start by rolling it down the farm track that ran down the steep valley next to our house. If the motorbike hadn’t jump-started by the bottom I would have to push the damn thing two hundred yards up the hill and try again. It was ridiculous, but kept me fit--and Trucker amused. Fun days.

I continued my explorations in a cobbled yard overlooked by broken doors and cracked windows. Pushing open a swollen door into a storeroom, I found a stream running across paving stones and a carpet of slippery green moss. My explorations took me beneath a gateway surmounted by a clock face, standing with hands fixed permanently at eleven o'clock. Beyond stood derelict stables; then the park opened up in an undulating vista, reaching all the way to a swathe of deep forest on the horizon. In the distance was the twinkle of the river that I realized must border my own land at Whitelow. The grass was knee-high and speckled with late buttercups, but I was transported by that first sight of the Delafosse estate. In its situation alone, the Croxons had chosen our new home well. I dreamed for a moment of myself and Michael making a great fortune, and no longer renting Delafosse Hall but owning every inch of it, my inheritance spinning gold from cotton. Turning back to view the Hall I took a sharp breath; it was as massive and ancient as a child's dream of a castle, the bulk of its walls carpeted in greenery, the diamond-leaded windows sparkling in picturesque stone mullions. True, the barley-twist chimneys leaned askew, and the roofs sagged beneath the weight of years, but the shell of it was magnificent. It cast a strange possessive mood upon me. I remembered Michael's irritation at the house the previous night, and his eagerness to leave. Somehow I had to entice Michael into this shared dream of a happy life here, beside me. Determined to explore the park, I followed the nearest path. After walking through a deep wood for a good while I emerged into the sunlight by a round hill surmounted by a two-story tower. A hunting lodge, Mrs. Croxon had called it, but I thought it more a folly. It had a fantastical quality, with four miniature turrets, each topped with a verdigris-tarnished dome. Above the doorway stood a sundial drawn upon a disc representing a blazing sun. It was embellished with a script I thought might be Latin: FERREA VIRGA EST, UMBRATILIS MOTUS. I wondered whether Michael might know the meaning, or Anne's husband perhaps. As for the sundial's accuracy, the morning light was too weak to cast a line of shadow.

In the shock of the moment, I gave some thought to renting a convertible and driving the twenty-seven hundred miles back alone. But then I realized I was neither single nor crazy. The acting director decided that, given the FBI’s continuing responsibility for my safety, the best course was to take me back on the plane I came on, with a security detail and a flight crew who had to return to Washington anyway. We got in the vehicle to head for the airport. News helicopters tracked our journey from the L.A. FBI office to the airport. As we rolled slowly in L.A. traffic, I looked to my right. In the car next to us, a man was driving while watching an aerial news feed of us on his mobile device. He turned, smiled at me through his open window, and gave me a thumbs-up. I’m not sure how he was holding the wheel. As we always did, we pulled onto the airport tarmac with a police escort and stopped at the stairs of the FBI plane. My usual practice was to go thank the officers who had escorted us, but I was so numb and distracted that I almost forgot to do it. My special assistant, Josh Campbell, as he often did, saw what I couldn’t. He nudged me and told me to go thank the cops. I did, shaking each hand, and then bounded up the airplane stairs. I couldn’t look at the pilots or my security team for fear that I might get emotional. They were quiet. The helicopters then broadcast our plane’s taxi and takeoff. Those images were all over the news. President Trump, who apparently watches quite a bit of TV at the White House, saw those images of me thanking the cops and flying away. They infuriated him. Early the next morning, he called McCabe and told him he wanted an investigation into how I had been allowed to use the FBI plane to return from California. McCabe replied that he could look into how I had been allowed to fly back to Washington, but that he didn’t need to. He had authorized it, McCabe told the president. The plane had to come back, the security detail had to come back, and the FBI was obligated to return me safely. The president exploded. He ordered that I was not to be allowed back on FBI property again, ever. My former staff boxed up my belongings as if I had died and delivered them to my home. The order kept me from seeing and offering some measure of closure to the people of the FBI, with whom I had become very close. Trump had done a lot of yelling during the campaign about McCabe and his former candidate wife. He had been fixated on it ever since. Still in a fury at McCabe, Trump then asked him, “Your wife lost her election in Virginia, didn’t she?” “Yes, she did,” Andy replied. The president of the United States then said to the acting director of the FBI, “Ask her how it feels to be a loser” and hung up the phone.

extent, Polly Lear took Fanny Washington’s place: she was a pretty, sociable young woman who became Martha’s closest female companion during the first term, at home or out and about, helping plan her official functions. The Washingtons were delighted with the arrival of Thomas Jefferson, a southern planter of similar background to themselves, albeit a decade younger; if not a close friend, he was someone George had felt an affinity for during the years since the Revolution, writing to him frequently for advice. The tall, lanky redhead rented lodgings on Maiden Lane, close to the other members of the government, and called on the president on Sunday afternoon, March 21. One of Jefferson’s like-minded friends in New York was the Virginian James Madison, so wizened that he looked elderly at forty. Madison was a brilliant parliamentary and political strategist who had been Washington’s closest adviser and confidant in the early days of the presidency, helping design the machinery of government and guiding measures through the House, where he served as a representative. Another of Madison’s friends had been Alexander Hamilton, with whom he had worked so valiantly on The Federalist Papers. But the two had become estranged over the question of the national debt. As secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton was charged with devising a plan to place the nation’s credit on a solid basis at home and abroad. When Hamilton presented his Report on the Public Credit to Congress in January, there was an instant split, roughly geographic, north vs. south. His report called for the assumption of state debts by the nation, the sale of government securities to fund this debt, and the creation of a national bank. Washington had become convinced that Hamilton’s plan would provide a strong economic foundation for the nation, particularly when he thought of the weak, impoverished Congress during the war, many times unable to pay or supply its troops. Madison led the opposition, incensed because he believed that dishonest financiers and city slickers would be the only ones to benefit from the proposal, while poor veterans and farmers would lose out. Throughout the spring, the debate continued. Virtually no other government business got done as Hamilton and his supporters lobbied fiercely for the plan’s passage and Madison and his followers outfoxed them time and again in Congress. Although pretending to be neutral, Jefferson was philosophically and personally in sympathy with Madison. By April, Hamilton’s plan was voted down and seemed to be dead, just as a new debate broke out over the placement of the national capital. Power, prestige, and a huge economic boost would come to the city named as capital. Hamilton and the bulk of New Yorkers and New Englanders

The Ten Ways to Evaluate a Market provide a back-of-the-napkin method you can use to identify the attractiveness of any potential market. Rate each of the ten factors below on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is terrible and 10 fantastic. When in doubt, be conservative in your estimate: Urgency. How badly do people want or need this right now? (Renting an old movie is low urgency; seeing the first showing of a new movie on opening night is high urgency, since it only happens once.) Market Size. How many people are purchasing things like this? (The market for underwater basket-weaving courses is very small; the market for cancer cures is massive.) Pricing Potential. What is the highest price a typical purchaser would be willing to spend for a solution? (Lollipops sell for $0.05; aircraft carriers sell for billions.) Cost of Customer Acquisition. How easy is it to acquire a new customer? On average, how much will it cost to generate a sale, in both money and effort? (Restaurants built on high-traffic interstate highways spend little to bring in new customers. Government contractors can spend millions landing major procurement deals.) Cost of Value Delivery. How much will it cost to create and deliver the value offered, in both money and effort? (Delivering files via the internet is almost free; inventing a product and building a factory costs millions.) Uniqueness of Offer. How unique is your offer versus competing offerings in the market, and how easy is it for potential competitors to copy you? (There are many hair salons but very few companies that offer private space travel.) Speed to Market. How soon can you create something to sell? (You can offer to mow a neighbor’s lawn in minutes; opening a bank can take years.) Up-front Investment. How much will you have to invest before you’re ready to sell? (To be a housekeeper, all you need is a set of inexpensive cleaning products. To mine for gold, you need millions to purchase land and excavating equipment.) Upsell Potential. Are there related secondary offers that you could also present to purchasing customers? (Customers who purchase razors need shaving cream and extra blades as well; buy a Frisbee and you won’t need another unless you lose it.) Evergreen Potential. Once the initial offer has been created, how much additional work will you have to put in in order to continue selling? (Business consulting requires ongoing work to get paid; a book can be produced once and then sold over and over as is.) When you’re done with your assessment, add up the score. If the score is 50 or below, move on to another idea—there are better places to invest your energy and resources. If the score is 75 or above, you have a very promising idea—full speed ahead. Anything between 50 and 75 has the potential to pay the bills but won’t be a home run without a huge investment of energy and resources.

In Door County, the “thumb” of Wisconsin, I heard a similar thing from a woman taking part in a conversation after a church service: Having been raised and grown up here, it has gotten to the point that I think Door County is becoming very elitist. Thank God I have a home. I was lucky enough that my husband and I had worked for it and paid for it before he died. On my wages, I could not have bought a home by myself. The cost of all of the surrounding land has become so expensive because of all the people who don’t live here more than six weeks out of the year, and build three-quarter-million-dollar homes, million-dollar homes, and basically visit, and so they’ve driven the property values so high that those people who have lived in a home their whole lives and were able to afford, can no longer afford because the tax rate has gone up so high. The wage scale is not that great in Door County. People say, “Well, you know, you make a good living.” No. And they somehow get the impression that we go to the gas station and we pay less for our gas, and pay less for our food because we live here. Ah, wrong! We pay the same price [laughter], but we don’t make the wages, and we’re paying for what has been driven up, and it’s—I see it as a real hardship. I’m fortunate, but I look at my children and my grandchildren and I wonder will they be able to live here and own a home? Maybe they’ll be able to rent, but to live here and own a home and take pride in that? That’s scary. Really is scary.

Over the course of forty-five months from July 1917 to March 1921, white citizens and neighborhood associations bombed fifty-eight homes — all of them belonging to black people moving to white areas, or to people who had rented to or brokered such deals for blacks.

Even if you intend to rent the property out, I would still advise you to find a property close to where you live/work because it will make it easier for you to be a hands-on landlord. Within the 5-20 mile radius of your home or workplace, you will likely have at least one county, and multiple cities, to research.

The Federal Government government's policy of racial exclusion had roots earlier in the twentieth century. The Wilson administration took the initial steps. Terrified by the 917 Russian revolution, government officials came to believe that communism could be defeated in the United states by getting as many white Americans as possible to become homeowners-the idea being that those who owned property would be invested in the capitalist system. So in 1917 the federal Department of Labor promoted an 'Own-Your-Own-Home' campaign, handing out 'We Own Our Own Home' buttons to schoolchildren and distributing pamphlets saying that it was a 'patriotic duty' to cease renting and to build a single-family unit. the department printed more than two million posters to be hung in factories and other businesses and published newspaper advertisements throughout the country promoting single-family ownership-each one had an image of a white couple or family.

The saying goes that if you’re paid by the hour and you rent your home, then you’re working class, and if you’re paid monthly and you own your home, you’re middle class.

Understand that these early Christians did not meet in churches and sit apart from one another in pews, and then when the music ended get in their chariots and go home. No, their churches were small, and they met in homes or house churches. A recent study by a British scholar has concluded that if the apostle Paul’s house churches were composed of about thirty people, this would have been their approximate make-up:1 • a craftworker in whose home they meet, along with his wife, children, a couple of male slaves, a female domestic slave, and a dependent relative • some tenants, with families and slaves and dependents, also living in the same home in rented rooms • some family members of a householder who himself does not participate in the house church • a couple of slaves whose owners do not attend • some freed slaves who do not participate in the church • a couple homeless people • a few migrant workers renting small rooms in the home Add to this mix some Jewish folks and a perhaps an enslaved prostitute and we see how many “different tastes” were in a typical house church in Rome: men and women, citizens and freed slaves and slaves (who had no legal rights), Jews and Gentiles, people from all moral walks of life, and perhaps, most notably, people from elite classes all the way down the social scale to homeless people.

coffee shop, the corner store, a tiny one-room, freestanding library, and the adorable little cabin in the woods that would be hers, rent-free, for the year of her contract. The town backed up to the amazing sequoia redwoods and national forests that spanned hundreds of miles of wilderness over the Trinity and Shasta mountain ranges. The Virgin River, after which the town was named, was deep, wide, long, and home to huge salmon, sturgeon, steel fish and trout. She’d looked on the internet at pictures of that part of the world and was easily convinced no more beautiful land existed. Of course, she could see nothing now except rain, mud and darkness. Ready to get out of Los Angeles, she had put her résumé with the Nurses’ Registry and one of the recruiters brought Virgin River to her attention. The town doctor, she said, was getting old and needed help. A woman from the town, Hope McCrea, was donating the cabin and the first year’s salary. The county was picking up the tab for liability insurance for at least a year to get a practitioner and midwife in this remote, rural part of the world. “I faxed Mrs. McCrea your résumé and letters of recommendation,” the recruiter had said, “and she

First, there were the are-we-going-to-have-enough-money-to-pay-the-rent arguments. Then came the health problems that sidelined her father from work. Then Anita had to move in because they couldn’t afford a nursing home anymore. Miranda juggled three jobs to make ends meet, barely seeing Jasmine and Ruby.

Then I got the idea of the portable diathermy machine. I rented one, took it on the bus going home that night. There sat all the tired commuters with their wrist radios, talking to their wives, saying, 'Now I'm at Forty-third, now I'm at Forty-fourth, here I am at Forty-ninth, now turning at Sixty-first.' One husband cursing, 'Well, get out of that bar, damn it, and get home and get dinner started, I'm at Seventieth!' And the transit-system radio playing 'Tales from the Vienna Woods,' a canary singing words about a first-rate wheat cereal. Then—I switched on my diathermy! Static! Interference! All wives cut off from husbands grousing about a hard day at the office. All husbands cut off from wives who had just seen their children break a window! The 'Vienna Woods' chopped down, the canary mangled! Silence! A terrible, unexpected silence. The bus inhabitants faced with having to converse with each other. Panic! Sheer, animal panic!" "The police seized you?" "The bus had to stop. After all, the music was being scrambled, husbands and wives were out of touch with reality. Pandemonium, riot, and chaos. Squirrels chattering in cages! A trouble unit arrived, triangulated on me instantly, had me reprimanded, fined, and home, minus my diathermy machine, in jig time.

Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India by J. S. Furnivall Quoting page 85-87: Lower Burma when first occupied … was a vast deltaic plain of swamp and jungle, with a secure rainfall; when the opening of the canal created a market for rice, this wide expanse of land was rapidly reclaimed by small cultivators … Formerly, the villager in Lower Burma, like peasants in general, cultivated primarily for home consumption, and it has always been the express policy of the Government to encourage peasant proprietorship. Land in the delta was abundant … The opening of the canal provided a certain and profitable market for as much rice as people could grow. … men from Upper Burma crowded down to join in the scramble for land. In two or three years a labourer could save out of his wages enough money to buy cattle and make a start on a modest scale as a landowner. … The land had to be cleared rapidly and hired labour was needed to fell the heavy jungle. In these circumstances newly reclaimed land did not pay the cost of cultivation, and there was a general demand for capital. Burmans, however, lacked the necessary funds, and had no access to capital. They did not know English or English banking methods, and English bankers knew nothing of Burmans or cultivation. … in the ports there were Indian moneylenders of the chettyar caste, amply provided with capital and long accustomed to dealing with European banks in India. About 1880 they began to send out agents into the villages, and supplied the people with all the necessary capital, usually at reasonable rates and, with some qualifications, on sound business principles. … now the chettyars readily supplied the cultivators with all the money that they needed, and with more than all they needed. On business principles the money lender preferred large transactions, and would advance not merely what the cultivator might require but as much as the security would stand. Naturally, the cultivator took all that he could get, and spent the surplus on imported goods. The working of economic forces pressed money on the cultivator; to his own discomfiture, but to the profit of the moneylenders, of European exporters who could ensure supplies by giving out advances, of European importers whose cotton goods and other wares the cultivator could purchase with the surplus of his borrowings, and of the banks which financed the whole economic structure. But at the first reverse, with any failure of the crop, the death of cattle, the illness of the cultivator, or a fall of prices, due either to fluctuations in world prices or to manipulation of the market by the merchants, the cultivator was sold up, and the land passed to the moneylender, who found some other thrifty labourer to take it, leaving part of the purchase price on mortgage, and with two or three years the process was repeated. … As time went on, the purchasers came more and more to be men who looked to making a livelihood from rent, or who wished to make certain of supplies of paddy for their business. … Others also, merchants and shopkeepers, bought land, because they had no other investment for their profits. These trading classes were mainly townsfolk, and for the most part Indians or Chinese. Thus, there was a steady growth of absentee ownership, with the land passing into the hands of foreigners. Usually, however, as soon as one cultivator went bankrupt, his land was taken over by another cultivator, who in turn lost with two or three years his land and cattle and all that he had saved. [By the 1930s] it appeared that practically half the land in Lower Burma was owned by absentees, and in the chief rice-producing districts from two-thirds to nearly three-quarters. … The policy of conserving a peasant proprietary was of no avail against the hard reality of economic forces…

People think renting a dumpster in Orlando is difficult but with Dumpster Direct Services we offer a wide range of options that meet your needs and budget in Orlando FL. After all, you need proper waste disposal because it is the last step of your cleaning. So whether you are working on a large construction project or simply renovating your homes, we provide painless, quick, and affordable services. If you live in Orlando Florida and nearby areas, give us a call and let's talk.

I was completely alone, but I had never felt safer. It wasn’t the bricks around me that I’d somehow managed to rent or the roof over my head that I was most grateful for. It was the home I now carried on my back like a snail. The sense that I was finally in responsible and loving hands. Love was there in my empty bed. It was piled up in the records Lauren bought me when we were teenagers. It was in the smudged recipe cards from my mum in between the pages of cookbooks in my kitchen cabin. Love was in the bottle of gin tied with a ribbon that India had packed me off with; in the smeary photo-strips with curled corners that would end up stuck to my fridge. It was in the note that lay on the pillow next to me, the one I would fold up and keep in the shoebox of all the other notes she had written before. I woke up safe in my one-woman boat. I was gliding into a new horizon; floating in a sea of love. There it was. Who knew? It had been there all along.

The new owners of the South Valley Street house, who described themselves online as people who "love dancing, practicing selfrealization, meditation, freedom, and investing," turned the Kardonsky-Cook home into an Airbnb. They named it "A Creek Runs Through It Olympic Mountain Retreat." It was one of the four properties they had purchased to rent around the Olympic Peninsula. The listing described the house as a "historic luxury two-story farmhouse" and charged guests $190 a night to sleep in the rooms where my family once lived. A big selling point for their property was the creek that my grandmother and her siblings played in, that my mother explored before picking salmonberries from the bushes on its bank. They marketed the home as being close to the waterfront that my great-grandfather walked to every day for work. He was a longshoreman and worked at the docks the entire time he lived there. His cat met him halfway home after every shift. One review read, "It doesn't feel like someone fixed up a house and is renting it, it feels like someone's home.

We are hopping into strangers’ cars (Lyft, Sidecar, Uber), welcoming them into our spare rooms (Airbnb), dropping our dogs off at their houses (DogVacay, Rover), and eating food in their dining rooms (Feastly). We are letting them rent our cars (RelayRides, Getaround), our boats (Boatbound), our houses (HomeAway), and our power tools (Zilok). We are entrusting complete strangers with our most valuable possessions, our personal experiences—and our very lives. In the process, we are entering a new era of Internet-enabled intimacy.9

For a protest movement to arise out of [the] traumas of daily life,” the sociologists Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward have observed, “the social arrangements that are ordinarily perceived as just and immutable must come to seem both unjust and mutable.”4 This usually happened during extraordinary times, when large-scale social transformations or economic disturbances—the postwar housing shortage, say—profoundly upset the status quo. But it was not enough simply to perceive injustice. Mass resistance was possible only when people believed they had the collective capacity to change things. For poor people, this required identifying with the oppressed, and counting yourself among them—which was something most trailer park residents were absolutely unwilling to do. During rent strikes, tenants believed they had a moral obligation to one another.5 If tenants resisted excessive rent hikes or unwarranted evictions, it was because they invested in their homes and neighborhoods. They felt they belonged there. In the trailer park, that sentiment was almost dead. For most residents, Scott among them, the goal was to leave, not to plant roots and change things. Some residents described themselves as “just passing through,” even if they had been passing through nearly all their life.

paid for with a coin-operated meter. When the officials came round, the money was tipped out on to the kitchen table, counted and piled into pound stacks. Mum watched the counting process like a hawk, hoping there was more money than the bill required – meters were viewed as bonus moneyboxes. Every Friday night, Dad brought home his wages, and Mum dived in first. She put some aside in a teapot for the rent, then Dad would go to the fish-and-chip shop and queue for an hour: fish and chips was every family’s end-of-week treat. We often ran out of cash in our household so Mum had a slate at the corner shop and an account at the Co-op, which rewarded her with

Traveling became not just travel but a choice of living a new way. I learned to see a place from the inside out rather than as a visitor passing through. Renting houses, apartments, even a boat, turned into a way of asking: What is home here? Who are these people and how has here caused them to be who they are?

Santiago was down to earth, funny, kind, tender-hearted and had all the qualities that Annabella admired and loved in a man. Tragically, Santiago was very poor financially. Living in a rented room, not a home of his own and being that he was 55 years old and time had passed him by for making something of his life, it was truly a recipe for more broken dreams and no hope of a future with security and happiness in place

I’m not leaving you or Gigi, Dove. I’m here to stay. Wherever my girls are, I’ll be. Port Washington is my home now. That’s why I left the hotel, and I’m renting an apartment.

A 2012 survey of investors revealed that 79 percent purchase within thirty miles of home.

That’s how they pay you at DSS. Old Baggy has been at it so long she’s got no more reason to live, working two shifts a day, going home to her crap duplex in Duffield owned by her cousin that gives her a break on the rent. If you are the kid sitting across from her in your caseworker meeting, wearing your two black eyes and the hoodie reeking of cat piss, sorry dude but she’s thinking about what TV show she’ll watch that night. Any human person with gumption would have moved on to something else by now, the military or selling insurance or being a cop or even a teacher. Because DSS pay is basically the fuck-you peanut butter sandwich type of paycheck. That’s what the big world thinks it’s worth, to save the white-trash orphans.

As in most Northern cities fielding black migrants, housing remained a pernicious obstacle in the 1950s. Suburban tracts constructed on a vast scale for soldiers returning from World War II—and backed by Federal Housing Administration (FHA) grants—were generally closed to Negro veterans. “Restrictive covenants” limited ownership to whites only, including recent immigrants from Europe. In developments like the 17,000 tract houses of Levittown, built on Long Island between 1947 and 1951, federally subsidized housing generated equity wealth and spawned a new generation of white middle-class Americans. Shut out of Levittown—the prototype for postwar suburbia—and other such developments for decades, Negro veterans were belatedly granted lesser subsidies for scatter-site housing in generally depressed areas. Moreover, the government subsidized public housing for Negroes that were not owner-occupied—like the homes for whites in suburbia—but rented to low-income families in inner-city areas. These federally backed housing projects capped family earning for eligibility at little more than minimum wage. The U.S. government essentially ran a two-tier program, encouraging a permanent Negro underclass of renters while operating the FHA-backed suburban home ownership program to stimulate a dramatic growth of the white middle class.

Here were a handful of companies thriving by serving as middlemen between people who wanted rides and people who offered them, people who wanted their Ikea furniture assembled and people who came over to install it, people who defrayed their costs by renting out a room and people who stayed there. It was no accident, Scholz believed, that these services had taken off at the historical moment that they had. An epic meltdown of the world financial system had cost millions of people their homes, jobs, and health insurance. And as the fallout from the crash spread, many of those cut loose had been drafted into joining a new American servant class. The precariousness at the bottom, which had shown few signs of improving several years after the meltdown, had become the fodder for a bounty of services for the affluent—and, Scholz noted, for the “channeling of wealth in fewer and fewer hands.” Somehow, the technologies celebrated by the Valley as leveling playing fields and emancipating people had fostered a slick new digitally enabled upstairs-downstairs line in American social life.

Have you ever noticed how people who own their own homes tend to take better care of them than those who live in government housing or even those who rent their homes?

Choose Norwoods Survey as your independent Chartered Surveyors. We carry out residential and commercial valuations for private individuals, buy to let investors and the legal profession. We also provide RICS condition reports, home buyer reports and building survey reports for private clients. In addition to condition reports and building surveys, we can provide valuations for residential and commercial buildings. We also offer a rent review and lease renewal service.

Word of exactly what the L.A. authorities had on the Stalker quickly passed up the chain of command in San Francisco to Mayor Dianne Feinstein (now Senator Feinstein). She ordered a news conference at City Hall, boldly took the podium, and, tight-lipped and stern-faced, told the press about the evidence they had linking the Night Stalker to San Francisco, focusing on the Avia sneakers and ballistics. She assured the public that everything possible was being done to capture him and described the large task force which she had ordered put together. She added $10,000 to the reward money being offered, saying, “Somewhere in the Bay Area, someone is renting a room, an apartment, or a home to this vicious killer. If you know who he is or have seen him, if you know anything, please contact the task force. We’ll have him, and we’ll have him soon.

Meanwhile, Comique’s productions had moved from Long Beach to a studio in Edendale, next door to Keystone. Arbuckle was in need of a home nearer his workplace, and Joe Schenck encouraged him to live in a house worthy of a millionaire celebrity. He moved in to the West Adams house, also renting from the Miners.

JUSTIFYING OPPRESSION While history has proven Malthusianism empirically false, however, it provides the ideal foundation for justifying human oppression and tyranny. The theory holds that there isn’t enough to go around, and can never be. Therefore human aspirations and liberties must be constrained, and authorities must be empowered to enforce the constraining. During Malthus’s own time, his theory was used to justify regressive legislation directed against England’s lower classes, most notably the Poor Law Act of 1834, which forced hundreds of thousands of poor Britons into virtual slavery. 11 However, a far more horrifying example of the impact of Malthusianism was to occur a few years later, when the doctrine motivated the British government’s refusal to provide relief during the great Irish famine of 1846. In a letter to economist David Ricardo, Malthus laid out the basis for this policy: “The land in Ireland is infinitely more peopled than in England; and to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.” 12 For the last century and a half, the Irish famine has been cited by Malthusians as proof of their theory of overpopulation, so a few words are in order here to set the record straight. 13 Ireland was certainly not overpopulated in 1846. In fact, based on census data from 1841 and 1851, the Emerald Isle boasted a mere 7.5 million people in 1846, less than half of England’s 15.8 million, living on a land mass about two-thirds that of England and of similar quality. So compared to England, Ireland before the famine was if anything somewhat underpopulated. 14 Nor, as is sometimes said, was the famine caused by a foolish decision of the Irish to confine their diet to potatoes, thereby exposing themselves to starvation when a blight destroyed their only crop. In fact, in 1846 alone, at the height of the famine, Ireland exported over 730,000 cattle and other livestock, and over 3 million quarts of corn and grain flour to Great Britain. 15 The Irish diet was confined to potatoes because—having had their land expropriated, having been forced to endure merciless rack-rents and taxes, and having been denied any opportunity to acquire income through manufactures or other means—tubers were the only food the Irish could afford. So when the potato crop failed, there was nothing for the Irish themselves to eat, despite the fact that throughout the famine, their homeland continued to export massive amounts of grain, butter, cheese, and meat for foreign consumption. As English reformer William Cobbett noted in his Political Register: Hundreds of thousands of living hogs, thousands upon thousands of sheep and oxen alive; thousands upon thousands of barrels of beef, pork, and butter; thousands upon thousands of sides of bacon; and thousands and thousands of hams; shiploads and boats coming daily and hourly from Ireland to feed the west of Scotland; to feed a million and a half people in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and in Lancashire; to feed London and its vicinity; and to fill the country shops in the southern counties of England; we beheld all this, while famine raged in Ireland amongst the raisers of this very food. 16 “The population should be swept from the soil.” Evicted from their homes, millions of Irish men, women, and children starved to death or died of exposure. (Contemporary drawings from Illustrated London News.)

In New York City and San Francisco, for example, rents increased from about a quarter of median incomes in 2000 to almost half (42% and 46% respectively) by 2016.6 Meanwhile, 51% of renter households in the nation’s nine largest metropolitan areas pay more than 30% of their income – the standard maximum ratio for affordability – on housing.7 Saving for a deposit to buy a home becomes virtually impossible under such conditions.

It was the season Ching Ming--clearness and brightness—when spirits returned from the netherworld, essences of all sorts abounded and filial sons journeyed home to their ancestral shrines to pay homage. The Wang widow, Siao lan, whose husband died on their wedding night, was on her third and final year of mourning. Her weeping-singing rent asunder the twilight calm, "O master, thou are cruel. O father, curse the day of my birth. Fate is a playful warlock. One day the fresh young bride, tomorrow, an empty-bowl widow.

Everything inside me tenses. While it’s true that Briar and I do have an extra room above the garage—equipped with its own bathroom and kitchenette—and it is true that we have considered putting it up for rent for extra income, letting a sex worker from my brother’s girlfriend’s sex club live there doesn’t sound exactly like a great idea. Okay, so maybe I am being judgmental.

Besides,” he starts quietly. “This is Isaac’s friend.” “Low blow,” I reply. “I know, I know,” he mumbles. The line grows quiet once again and thick with tension. There’s a moment in our silence when I wonder if Adam is thinking the exact same thing I’m thinking—a tie to Isaac’s past is a tie to Isaac. My brother has no idea that I see Isaac’s face on a phone screen every single day. But I have my suspicions that Adam is looking for him, too, although we’ve never really spoken about it. And yet, here we are, eating up crumbs our brother left behind. Renting that room to Dean Sheridan is not going to bring Isaac back into my life. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel like, in some small way, I’d have a piece of him.

Like all hard labor, picking cotton broke the body but freed the mind for dreams of vengeance, images of illegal pleasure—even ambitious schemes of escape. Cutting into these big thoughts were the little ones. Another kind of medicine for the baby? What to do about an uncle’s foot swollen so large he can’t put it in a shoe? Will the landlord be satisfied with half the rent this time?

Deke smiled at the long, straight highway ahead of him. “Then again, I’d give it all up if I could have what Fiona and Jud have. Or Allie and Blake or Toby and Lizzy. All of them make my heart hurt to have someone to go home at night to like they do,” he said. “I should have listened to Granny Irene when she kept telling me that I couldn’t find a woman to settle down with in the bars.” Cheyenne, Wyoming, was bitter cold that night when he stopped at a small motel with a neon sign that said truckers were welcome. That usually meant they wouldn’t fuss about a dog, and besides it was past nine o’clock. The manager was most likely eager to rent out whatever rooms he could at that point. “Help you, sir?” An older lady looked up from the check-in desk. “Just need a room. Be out early in the morning, but I do have a dog. He’s housebroken and old, so he won’t cause any damage.” “Ten-dollar fee for any animals. It’s not one of those yippy little dogs, is it? I only got one room left and it’s right next door to an elderly couple. Wouldn’t want them calling me because your dog barked

What is all that stuff in your home, anyway? Imagine that I said you could buy as many new clothes as you wanted, but you could never, ever take off anything you'd already purchased. In no time you'd be wearing so much clothing that it would be hard to walk. You'd feel hot and irritable, and be unable to do anything well. That's what the stuff in our homes can be like. If we shop and collect, but never decrease or declutter, the accumulation of stuff is a burden. Every item rents a space in your heart and in your brain. If there is too much stuff, then you have little room for new fun, new love, or new anything. So let's take a look at what is really in your home. Where did all that furniture, decor, and stuff come from? Why is it in your life, and what purpose does it serve? What feeling are associated with each object? (Happy Starts at Home: Getting the Life You Want by Changing the Space You've Got, Rebecca West)

Investment firms are buying up more vacation homes, aiming to cash in on growing demand from tourists and remote workers. Most vacation rental homes are owned by small-time owners who list their properties on websites such as Airbnb Inc., but the number of financial firms investing in the sector is growing. New York-based investment firm Saluda Grade is launching a venture with short-term- rental operator AvantStay Inc. to buy about $500 million of homes, the companies said Tuesday. Saluda Grade said it is also looking to raise debt by selling mortgage bonds backed by its homes to investors, the first vacation-rental mortgage securitization, according to the company. Andes STR, a startup that buys and manages short-term rental homes on behalf of investors, also recently signed a deal with Chilean investment firm WEG Capital to buy roughly $80 million of properties in the U.S., Andes said. These investors are betting they can get higher returns if they rent out homes by the night instead of by the year. Low-interest rates have made it more attractive to borrow and Buy Traditional Rental Homes, inflating property prices and making it harder for new buyers to turn a profit. That has prompted some institutions and wealthy families to look in more obscure corners of the property market where competition is smaller, investment advisers say. Some are turning to investments in vacation homes, where demand has surged in many places during the pandemic as more people choose to work from remote locations and leisure travel heated up last year. “There’s a lot more yield available in the short-term market,” said Saluda Grade’s chief executive, Ryan Craft. It is the latest sign of how the pandemic is changing the way people work and live, and how real-estate investors are angling to find new ways to profit from these shifts. Saluda Grade is targeting homes within driving distance of major population centers, Mr. Craft said. His company will buy the homes and AvantStay will manage them for a fee. But while vacation-rental homes can offer higher returns, they also pose challenges to investors. Mortgages are usually more expensive and harder to get for short-term rentals than for owner-occupied homes, said Giri Devanur, CEO of reAlpha Tech Corp., a startup that wants to pool money from small-time investors to buy short-term-rental homes.

We're Titus and Sons Mini Dumpster Service, whether you need a dumpster for cleanout, renovation or construction – we can help! Our goal is to make sure that we are always as cost effective and efficient as possible. You've got a lot of junk and we're here to help! Whether you're planning a home cleanout project or renovation, or you need to rent a dumpster for a construction or commercial project, our dumpsters will make sure that your junk is removed in an efficient way. We have several sizes available so that you can choose the right one for your needs. Call today to get started!

If a tenant moves in during the middle of the month, I don’t pro-rate the amount they pay upon first moving in. Instead, I pro-rate the second month to match the first. In other words – every tenant pays a full month’s rent when they move in, but when it comes time to pay the rent on the 1st of the next month, they will only pay for the amount of days they lived at the home in the previous month. For

The house and all its problems had taken its toll on your mother and me. We could feel ourselves drifting apart a little more each day. The spark had gone out of our marriage, and we desperately needed to get it back. To do this, we decided to have a "date night", which is a polite way of saying we rented a room at the Two Pines with the intention of fucking like teenagers.

Have had a bad experience with a previous landlord •  Fear they will be charged for the damages •  May not like having people in their home •  May not want the landlord to see the condition in which they keep the rental •  May fear that reporting a problem would “rock the boat” and trigger a rent-raise letter

What if you got a divorce and lived alone with your daughter?” I asked. Rie eyed me momentarily before returning to her fingers. “No way. How could I afford to pay rent? Go back to working part-time at a bookstore?” “It would be tough, but you should really think about it.” “It’s literally impossible.” Rie looked at me. “Things were hard enough when both of us were working. There’s no way I could do it on my own, no way.” “It’d be really hard, but you could get help. Child support and all that. Plenty of people—” “Those people have jobs,” she interrupted. “Real jobs. If you have a career, you have some degree of security. But you need to have a jobs, or family money, or someplace you can always run back home to. I’ve got none of that. I don’t have any qualifications or skills . . . I quit my job. And good riddance. Working that hard for 1000 yen an hour. They’d rather give those shifts to some eighteen-year-old kid anyway. There’s nothing out there for a good-for-nothing single mother, going on forty, with no real work experience. You can’t raise a child like that. It isn’t possible.

tenants to fill out that asks specific questions like: •  How would you rate the service you received from us? •  How would you rate the quality of service you received while renting your home in regard to handymen and contractors? •  How would you rate your overall experience with us? •  What is your overall impression of the home you rented? •  What did you like most about the home you rented from us? •  What did you like least about the home you rented from us? •  Do you have any suggestions for improvements we could make to the home? •  Would you rent from us again or refer others to us in the future?

The house in Bristol belonged to a family who were traveling the world on our combined rent.

In 1917, the Chicago Urban League found that real estate agents had so constricted the supply of homes for African Americans that on one day alone, only fifty houses were available for 664 black applicants. Given the basic economics of supply (limited) and demand (great), rents skyrocketed up to 50 percent higher for this decaying housing stock.

We are hopping into strangers’ cars (Lyft, Sidecar, Uber), welcoming them into our spare rooms (Airbnb), dropping our dogs off at their houses (DogVacay, Rover), and eating food in their dining rooms (Feastly). We are letting them rent our cars (RelayRides, Getaround), our boats (Boatbound), our houses (HomeAway), and our power tools (Zilok). We are entrusting complete strangers with our most valuable possessions, our personal experiences—and our very lives. In the process, we are entering a new era of Internet-enabled intimacy. ~ Jason Tanz Not so long ago, activities like these would have been viewed as weird, if not downright dangerous. Today, they are familiar to millions, thanks to the trust-building mechanisms established by platform businesses.

We found that landlords in poor neighborhoods earn roughly $300 a month per apartment unit after regular expenses are deducted from rent. Landlords in middle-class neighborhoods take home $225 a month per apartment unit, and landlords in rich neighborhoods take home $250 a month per unit after regular expenses.

They ran academies for boys preparing for college, and for boys “preparing for mercantile professions who may want education superior to common schools,” as one school’s prospectus read. They offered special classes, mainly for boys, in drawing, music, languages, writing, and dancing. Women, by contrast, taught small classes of girls, or sometimes groups of young children of both sexes, in their homes or rented rooms. In 1822, there were more than fifty such “schoolmistresses” listing their services in the Boston directory, and probably just as many women teaching school without bothering to register their addresses. Girls in these “primary schools” learned little more than the basics of reading, writing, geography, arithmetic, and needlepoint.

My experience of life always includes losing the things that are mine or having them forcibly taken away and being thrown away myself. I wasn’t wanted as a child, I skipped from foster home to foster home, never staying long enough to get settled, and then I aged out of the system into homelessness. I’ve never gotten to keep anything for long—not even friends or family; death has taken all of those types of people away from me—and the worry that I’m about to lose everything I’ve gained since meeting Fox has been hanging out in the back of my head, taking up space, living rent-free.

Don't build your home on rented properties

There’s more!! In addition to your $400,000/year salary, you also get: • A no-questions-asked $50,000 expense account—in other words, you’re not required to provide receipts to get reimbursed. But if you don’t spend it all, you have to give what’s left back to the Treasury Department every year. • To live rent-free in a nice big house that includes a bowling alley, putting green, jogging track, billiard room, tennis courts, swimming pool, and movie theater (with various contacts in Hollywood providing all first-run movies for free). • Five full-time chefs who are standing by to prepare the food you paid for (see above). A nice, secluded, 180-acre vacation home in Maryland called Camp David that includes numerous cabins for the president and guests, a heated pool, tennis, horseshoes, bowling, a three-hole golf course, an archery range, and a trout stream. • The presidential version of “public” transportation: limos, helicopters, and your own personal jets. • Up to one million dollars you can spend every year for “unanticipated needs,” in case you ever go over budget somewhere else.

As Amelia explained it to me, because the landlords knew that the coloured folk couldn’t get lodgings in the white neighbourhoods, they could charge more than twice the normal rent. Since coloured folk mostly got paid half of what a white worker got, people in Harlem were nearly always short on the rent. To bridge the gap, the good citizens of Harlem had taken to holding rent parties in which private homes were turned into temporary nightclubs, at 25 cents per guest. Cram enough people in, sell enough hooch and enough food and, even after expenses and paying the entertainment, you could clear a month’s rent, maybe two.

The rent on our oceanfront condo was $3,500 a month. We agreed to break our lease, stay in a cheap hotel, and save the remainder of our money to pay for our wedding and our first home.

Her face bruised and her lip swollen, Rosa Parks, the mother of the civil rights movement, seemed more sad than angry today as she quietly described being robbed and beaten in her bedroom here on Tuesday night. ‘I regret very much that some of our people are in such a mental state that they would hurt and rob an older person,’ Mrs. Parks said as she sat in living room of her modest, rented home, five blocks from the boulevard named in her honor.

Miami Real Estate - Search Real Estate in Miami for homes for sale or rent, including luxury condos and other luxury real estate. Call 305-331-7922 to search for your Miami Real Estate today.Click here to view:http://bogatovrealty.com/miami/.

this art wasn’t exactly a novelty for him, and he shyly observed that, having nowhere to go and nothing to do, nor friends to visit, nor any interest in reading books, he usually spent his nights at home, in his rented room, likewise writing.

I have a complicated spiritual history. Here's the short version: I was born into a Mass-going Roman Catholic family, but my parents left the church when I was in the fifth grade and joined a Southern Baptist church—yes, in Connecticut. I am an alumnus of Wheaton College—Billy Graham's alma mater in Illinois, not the Seven Sisters school in Massachusetts—and the summer between my junior and senior year of (Christian) high school, I spent a couple of months on a missions trip performing in whiteface as a mime-for-the-Lord on the streets of London's West End. Once I left home for Wheaton, I ended up worshiping variously (and when I could haul my lazy tuckus out of bed) at the nondenominational Bible church next to the college, a Christian hippie commune in inner-city Chicago left over from the Jesus Freak movement of the 1960s, and an artsy-fartsy suburban Episcopal parish that ended up splitting over same-sex issues. My husband of more than a decade likes to describe himself as a “collapsed Catholic,” and for more than twenty-five years, I have been a born-again Christian. Groan, I know. But there's really no better term in the current popular lexicon to describe my seminal spiritual experience. It happened in the summer of 1980 when I was about to turn ten years old. My parents had both had born-again experiences themselves about six months earlier, shortly before our family left the Catholic church—much to the shock and dismay of the rest of our extended Irish and/or Italian Catholic family—and started worshiping in a rented public grade school gymnasium with the Southern Baptists. My mother had told me all about what she'd experienced with God and how I needed to give my heart to Jesus so I could spend eternity with him in heaven and not frying in hell. I was an intellectually stubborn and precocious child, so I didn't just kneel down with her and pray the first time she told me about what was going on with her and Daddy and Jesus. If something similar was going to happen to me, it was going to happen in my own sweet time. A few months into our family's new spiritual adventure, after hearing many lectures from Mom and sitting through any number of sermons at the Baptist church—each ending with an altar call and an invitation to make Jesus the Lord of my life—I got up from bed late one Sunday night and went downstairs to the den where my mother was watching television. I couldn't sleep, which was unusual for me as a child. I was a champion snoozer. In hindsight I realize something must have been troubling my spirit. Mom went into the kitchen for a cup of tea and left me alone with the television, which she had tuned to a church service. I don't remember exactly what the preacher said in his impassioned, sweaty sermon, but I do recall three things crystal clearly: The preacher was Jimmy Swaggart; he gave an altar call, inviting the folks in the congregation in front of him and at home in TV land to pray a simple prayer asking Jesus to come into their hearts; and that I prayed that prayer then and there, alone in the den in front of the idiot box. Seriously. That is precisely how I got “saved.” Alone. Watching Jimmy Swaggart on late-night TV. I also spent a painful vacation with my family one summer at Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Heritage USA Christian theme park in South Carolina. But that's a whole other book…

At around 6:00 a.m., April 30, 1987, we were awakened by a loud bull horn while inside our rented mobile home at an Ozark, Missouri trailer park. "Glenn Miller, Jack Jackson, Douglas Sheets, Tony Wydra, this is a United States Marshal. You have three minutes to come out with your hands up, or we will commence firing." The feds had flown in two SWAT teams; one from Kentucky, the other from Louisiana (40 in all, plus the Marshals and local authorities) to make the arrests. We were surrounded. I had a hang-over, couldn't find my pants, and had to pee, bad.

We, tenants of the Kasota apartments who are not Sound Mental Health clients, hereby notify you that we cannot accept the cruel and unjust way in which we are now being forced from our homes. You have presented us with a rent increase which is so extreme, you must be aware that we could not possibly afford to pay it. It appears that the intent is simply to drive us out. If we are to be forced out of our homes, then we respectfully insist that you provide each of us with relocation assistance, so that we can find other places to live and not join the ranks of the homeless. We hereby pledge: Unless and until each and every one of us has received adequate relocation assistance, none of us will pay the increased rent or voluntarily vacate the building.

(My dove my little one tonight there will be wine and drunken suitors from the logging camps to pin you down in the outlying lands of sleep where all roads lead back to the home-village and water may be walked on)

Genius is children" it lives in far Centaurus and star clusters beyond cold Orion and sometimes visits earth when there is no one home

Life became much more difficult with the Intifada, and my wife and I began to regret that we hadn't rented in the Israeli half. The rent's a little high, but we would have managed with a smaller home.

Literary friendship is impossible, it seems; at least, it is impossible for me. Indeed, all male friendships outside of work sometimes seem to be impossible: you look at each other at the restaurant at some point in the conversation and you know that each of you is thinking, man, this is futile, why are we here, we’re wasting our time, we have nothing to say, we’re not involved in some project together that we can bitch about, we can’t flirt, we feel like dummies discussing movies or books, we aren’t in some moral bind with a woman that we need to confess, we’ve each said the other is a genius several times already, and the whole thing is depressing and the tone is false and we might as well go home to our wives and children and rent buddy movies like Midnight Run or Planes, Trains, and Automobiles or The Pope of Greenwich Village> when we need a shot of the old camaraderie.

To Have and Have Not” It was during 1937 that Ernest Hemingway wrote the novel “To Have and Have Not” about Harry Morgan, a fishing boat captain who ran contraband between Havana and Key West. Things didn’t go well for Morgan as he sank ever deeper into debt. Hemingway’s book continued with Harry Morgan running his boat between Cuba and the United States, carrying revolutionaries to Cuba and smuggling Chinese immigrants and rum into Florida. The depression during the early 1930’s and the hunger experienced by the “Conchs” of Key West was Morgan’s motive for ferrying his illegal cargo between the two countries. When Ernest Hemingway moved to Cuba early in 1939, he took his boat the Pilar across the Straits of Florida to Havana, where he first checked into the Hotel Ambos Mundos. Shortly thereafter, Martha joined him in Cuba and they initially rented, and later in 1940, purchased a home for $12,500. Located 10 miles to the east of Havana, in the small town of San Francisco de Paula, they settled into what they called Finca Vigía, the Lookout Farm. After a difficult divorce from Pauline, Ernest and Martha got married on November 20, 1940. Even though Cuba had permanently become their home, they sought writing assignments overseas, including one in China that Martha got for Collier’s magazine. Returning to Cuba just prior to the outbreak of World War II, he convinced the Cuban government to outfit his boat with armaments, with which he intended to ambush German submarines. As the war progressed, Hemingway went to London as a war correspondent, where he met Mary Welsh. His infatuation prompted him to propose to her, which of course did not sit well with Martha.

The instability of a white neighborhood under pressure from the very possibility of integration put the neighborhood into a kind of real estate purgatory. It set off a downward cycle of anticipation, in which worried whites no longer bought homes in white neighborhoods that might one day attract colored residents even if none lived there at the time. Rents and purchase prices were dropped “in a futile attempt to attract white residents,” as Hirsch put it. With prices falling and the neighborhood’s future uncertain, lenders refused to grant mortgages or made them more difficult to obtain. Panicked whites sold at low prices to salvage what equity they had left, giving the homeowners who remained little incentive to invest any further to keep up or improve their properties.

The resulting financial overhead consists of claims on the economy’s actual means of production. Yet most people think of these bonds, bank loans and stocks and creditor claims as wealth, not its antithesis on the debit side of the balance sheet. This inside-out doublethink is a precondition for the bubble economy to be applauded by the mass media, keeping its corrosive momentum expanding. From the corporate sphere and real estate to personal budgets, the distinguishing feature over the past half-century has been the rise in debt/equity and debt/income ratios. Just as debt leveraging has hiked corporate break-even costs of doing business, so the cost of living has been increased as homes and office buildings have been bid up on mortgage credit. “Creating wealth” in a debt-financed way makes economies high-cost, exacerbated by the tax shift onto labor and consumers instead of capital gains and “free lunch” rent. These financial and fiscal policies have enabled financial managers to siphon off the industrial profits that were expected to fund capital formation to increase productivity and living standards. The

I’ve attended some pretty glamorous events over the years, like the Costume Ball at the Met, the Golden Globes, and the Vanity Fair Oscar party. They are usually held at distinguished cultural institutions like the Met or the Annenberg Center—always beautiful spaces that are home to priceless works of art. The first thing they do when a Hollywood party rents out the place is push all the art to the corner so it doesn’t get in the way. They have to do that so there’s room for a red carpet, a bar, a prime rib carving station, a photo booth, and, for some reason, an Acura parked inside, in the middle of the party floor. There’s always a parked Acura at every major Hollywood party. Who

To faculty everywhere, the lesson was obvious: the campus of a top university is not a place for intellectual exploration. It is a luxury home, rented for four to six years, nine months at a time, by children of the elite who may shout at faculty as if they’re berating clumsy maids in a colonial mansion. A

Some 50 percent of Swedes retreat to summer homes, rented or owned, in the country each year.

Marco Cirrini had been skiing on the north face of Bald Slope Mountain since he was a boy, using the old skis his father brought with him from Italy. The Cirrinis had shown up out of nowhere, walking into town in the middle of winter, their hair shining like black coal in the snow. They never really fit in. Marco tried, though. He tried by leading groups of local boys up the mountain in the winter, showing them how to make their own skis and how to use them. He charged them pennies and jars of bean chutney and spiced red cabbage they would sneak out of their mothers' sparse pantries. When he was nineteen, he decided he could take this one step further. He could make great things happen in the winter in Bald Slope. Cocky, not afraid of hard work and handsome in that mysterious Mediterranean way that excluded him from mountain society, he gathered investors from as far away as Asheville and Charlotte to buy the land. He started construction on the lodge himself while the residents of the town scoffed. They were the sweet cream and potatoes and long-forgotten ballads of their English and Irish and Scottish ancestors, who settled the southern Appalachians. They didn't want change. It took fifteen years, but the Bald Slope Ski Resort was finally completed and, much to everyone's surprise, it was an immediate success. Change was good! Stores didn't shut down for the winter anymore. Bed-and-breakfasts and sports shops and restaurants sprouted up. Instead of closing up their houses for the winter, summer residents began to rent them out to skiers. Some summer residents even decided to move to Bald Slope permanently, moving into their vacation homes with their sleeping porches and shade trees, thus forming the high society in Bald Slope that existed today. Marco himself was welcomed into this year-round society. He was essentially responsible for its formation in the first place, after all. Finally it didn't matter where he came from. What mattered was that he saved Bald Slope by giving it a winter economy, and he could do no wrong. This town was finally his.

Not like his mother. Even as he felt guilty for leaving her, he hated her for it. Leaving home was what kids were supposed to do—grow up, get out, start a life. The mortification he’d feel if he couldn’t make rent, if he ended up having to go

you could rent a million-dollar home for less than $833 a month.

Chapter 51 In Atlanta, the day had gone mostly as Elliott had expected. The stock market crash had rattled everyone. It was a cloud that hung over the euphoria of Black Friday. The most difficult part of his plan had been convincing the other five families to pool their money with his for the purchases, which together added up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. They had begun by renting two twenty-six-foot U-Haul trucks. They drove them to Costco and filled them with survival necessities. It was mostly food; Elliott planned to be near a freshwater source if worst came to worst. Next, they purchased two high-end RVs. The price was exorbitant, but they carried a thirty-day money-back guarantee, and they only had to make a down payment—the remainder was financed. Elliott had assured his neighbors that within thirty days, they would either be incredibly glad to have the two homes on wheels—or they’d have their money back. Now he sat in his study, watching the news, waiting for the event he believed would come. He hoped he was wrong. DAY 7 900,000,000 Infected 180,000 Dead

Add your monthly take-home pay to your partner’s monthly take-home pay. That is your total household income. Now divide your total monthly expenses by your take-home pay and from that you will derive a percentage. That percent is what each of you should contribute to your monthly joint expenses. Here’s an example. Let’s say your after-tax pay is $7,000 a month and your love brings home $3,000 a month. Your total household after-tax income is $10,000. Now add up all the expenses you have each month that keep the household running. Let’s say those expenses for utilities, rent, phone, and so on, come to $3,000 a month. Divide $3,000, your joint expenses, by $10,000, your joint take-home income, and that will give you 30 percent. That means that you each have to put up 30 percent of your take-home pay toward expenses, or $2,100 from you and $900 from your love—equal percentages, not equal amounts. Set up a joint checking account to pay for household bills. Yes, keep your own checking account, but set up one together. This is a great testing ground for your money habits. You know from the first month of The Save Yourself Plan that I want you to sit and pay the bills together. That means that one week before your appointed bill-paying, both of you are to have deposited your share of the monthly expenses into that account.

Michelle Phan grew up in California with her Vietnamese parents. The classic American immigrant story of the impoverished but hardworking parents who toil to create a better life for the next generation was marred, in Phan’s case, by her father’s gambling addiction. The Phan clan moved from city to city, state to state, downsizing and recapitalizing and dodging creditors and downsizing some more. Eventually, Phan found herself sleeping on a hard floor, age 16, living with her mother, who earned rent money as a nail salon worker and bought groceries with food stamps. Throughout primary and secondary school, Phan escaped from her problems through art. She loved to watch PBS, where painter Bob Ross calmly drew happy little trees. “He made everything so positive,” Phan recalls. “If you wanted to learn how to paint, and you wanted to also calm down and have a therapeutic session at home, you watched Bob Ross.” She started drawing and painting herself, often using the notes pages in the back of the telephone book as her canvas. And, imitating Ross, she started making tutorials for her friends and posting them on her blog. Drawing, making Halloween costumes, applying cosmetics—the topic didn’t matter. For three years, she blogged her problems away, fancying herself an amateur teacher of her peers and gaining a modest teenage following. This and odd jobs were her life, until a kind uncle gave her mother a few thousand dollars to buy furniture, which was used instead to send Phan to Ringling College of Art and Design. Prepared to study hard and survive on a shoestring, Phan, on her first day at Ringling, encountered a street team which was handing out free MacBook laptops, complete with front-facing webcams, from an anonymous donor. Phan later told me, with moist eyes, “If I had not gotten that laptop, I wouldn’t be here today.

Phones and the Internet If you choose to carry your cell phone on your walk, please check with your carrier to ensure that it will work in Italy.  Do this before leaving your home country.  Carriers will sometimes give you special rates between another country and the US. Another option, if your phone is unlocked, is to buy a phone card or chip when you get to Italy.  This might be a cheaper alternative, especially if you’re using your phone for calls within Italy.  You can also buy a data package, if desired.  Check with your carrier to be sure your phone is unlocked before you leave home. A third option, if you want a phone, is to rent one at the airport.  I’d check online for more information on doing this.

Net wages: “It’s not what you make, but what you net” after paying the FIRE sector, basic utilities and taxes. The usual measure of disposable personal income (DPI) refers to how much employees take home after income-tax withholding (designed in part by Milton Friedman during World War II) and over 15% for FICA (Federal Insurance Contributions Act) to produce a budget surplus for Social Security and health care (half of which are paid by the employer). This forced saving is lent to the U.S. Treasury, enabling it to cut taxes on the higher income brackets. Also deducted from paychecks may be employee withholding for private health insurance and pensions. What is left is by no means freely available for discretionary spending. Wage earners have to pay a monthly financial and real estate “nut” off the top, headed by mortgage debt or rent to the landlord, plus credit card debt, student loans and other bank loans. Electricity, gas and phone bills must be paid, often by automatic bank transfer – and usually cable TV and Internet service as well. If these utility bills are not paid, banks increase the interest rate owed on credit card debt (typically to 29%). Not much is left to spend on goods and services after paying the FIRE sector and basic monopolies, so it is no wonder that markets are shrinking. (See Hudson Bubble Model later in this book.) A similar set of subtrahends occurs with net corporate cash flow (see ebitda). After paying interest and dividends – and using about half their revenue for stock buybacks – not much is left for capital investment in new plant and equipment, research or development to expand production.

The 8 Basic Headers Work Family & Kids Spouse Health & Fitness Home Money Recreation & Hobbies Prospects for the Future Work The Boss Time Management Compensation Level of interest Co-workers Chances of promotion My Job Description Subordinates Family Relationship with spouse Relationship with children Relationship with extended family Home, chores and responsibilities Recreation & hobbies Money, expenses and allowances Lifestyle and standard of living Future planes and arrangements Spouse Communication type and intensity Level of independence Sharing each other's passions Division of roles and responsibilities Our time together Our planes for our future Decision making Love & Passion Health & Fitness General health Level of fitness Healthy lifestyle Stress factors Self awareness Self improvement Level of expense on health & fitness Planning and preparing for the rest of my life Home Comfort Suitability for needs Location Community and municipal services Proximity and quality of support/activity centers (i.e. school. Medical aid etc) Rent/Mortgage Repair / renovation Emotional atmosphere Money Income from work Passive income Savings and pension funds Monthly expenses Special expenses Ability to take advantage of opportunities / fulfill dreams Financial security / resilience Financial IQ / Understanding / Independent decision making Social, Recreation & Hobbies Free time Friends and social activity Level & quality of social ties Level of spending on S, R&H Culture events (i.e. theater, fairs etc) Space & accessories required Development over time Number of interests Prospect for the future Type of occupation Ratio of work to free time Promotion & Business development (for entrepreneurs) Health & Fitness Relationships Family and Home Financial security Fulfillment of vision / dreams  Creating Lenses with Excel If you wish to use Excel radar diagrams to simulate lenses, follow these steps: Open a new Excel spreadsheet.

For example, every year, I rent Intuit’s TurboTax so I can do my income taxes. I pay for something I only need for a few weeks in February even though it holds my data for the entire year. That is because it has my data from the previous year (and for years before that). It simply asks if my financial situation has changed or if I have unique needs for a given tax year. It even has built-in, crowd-based support to help me when I get stuck. TurboTax meets many of the lovability requirements. It solves my problem, meets needs I did not know I had, makes my life easier, and adapts as my circumstances change. Best of all, I pay a reasonable price to rent it every year. But how does Intuit really know what I need? Well, Intuit is famous for a program they call Follow Me Home. It sounds exactly like what it is — a way to observe customers in their homes or offices in order to understand how they actually use Intuit’s products. The founding team used Follow Me Home as a way to help their teams get an immersive look at what customers liked and what they needed, as well as what worked and what did not work. By observing customers in their own spaces, the Intuit team was able to see how often customers were interrupted while trying to use their product, or if they started on one device and finished the task on another. They were able to funnel that information back to their development team to make updates in subsequent releases. It is important to note that they were not following customers home to look for bugs in the product. No, they had a deeper purpose — to truly understand the experience of their customers and if their products were making their work and life easier. That deep commitment to understanding customers helped Intuit find elegant ways to help them. It is a simple concept and one that more product builders would benefit from.

On August 12, 1933, President Machado fled Cuba with ABC terrorists shooting at his laden airplane as it prepared to take off from the long hot runway. He left Cuba without any continuity of leadership and a smooth transfer of authority to the next administration became impossible in Havana. American envoy, Sumner Welles stepped into the vacuum and encouraged Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada to accept the office of Provisional President of Cuba. Céspedes was a Cuban writer and politician, born in New York City, son of Carlos Manual de Céspedes del Castillo who was a hero of the Cuban War of Independence. Wearing a spotlessly clean, crisp white suit, Céspedes was installed as the Provisional President of Cuba, on what was his 62nd birthday. This expedient political move failed to prevent the violence that broke out in the streets. Mobs looted and behaved with viciousness that lasted for six long hours and created a mayhem not witnessed since Cuba’s Independence from Spain. Students from the university ransacked the previously pro-Machado newspaper “Heraldo de Cuba.” The Presidential Palace was stormed and severely damaged, with the culprits leaving a “For Rent” sign hanging on the front gate. The temperament of the mob that rallied against the Machado supporters, including the hated Porristas who had been left behind, was ferocious. They wounded over 200 hapless souls and cost 21 people their lives. Five members of the Porristas as well as Colonel Antonio Jimenez, the head of Machado’s secret police, were summarily shot to death and trampled upon. The rioters then tied the mutilated body of Jimenez to the top of a car and paraded his bullet-riddled carcass through the streets of Havana, showing it off as a trophy. When the howling throng of incensed people finally dumped him in front of the hospital, it was determined that he had been shot 40 times. Students hammered away at an imposing bronze statue of Machado, until piece by piece it was totally destroyed. Shops owned by the dictator’s friends were looted and smashed, as were the homes of Cabinet members living in the affluent suburbs.