To Sell a House

We blogged in January on how the Google Maps new street view photo showed off to full effect the front perspective of our old house in Arlington, Virginia just after it had been listed and contracted for sale.  We had the after picture but no before for contrast.  Well, I was recently rooting around the web and sure enough the Bing Maps application had a street view showing our Arlington house prior to the sale spruce up.  The before picture presents like this.

Bing Maps street view of our old Arlington House

Notice the side and the front borders are overgrown with unruly bushes.  A spindly tree blocks the side view to the rear.  Porch floor paint is dull and pealed, and the grass splotchy and barren.  The garage door is yucky white.  An ancient aerial sprouts from the chimney and the trim paint is faded and pealing.  The dreary faded cushions on the porch glider are barely visible.  The old (1939 original) casement windows have rusted frames and are dark and dreary.  Then we got our mitts on it.

Google Maps street view of our old Arlington House

With a little bit (well a lot) of elbow grease the bushes are trimmed and uniform, framed by freshly mulched beds.  The spindly tree off to the left was removed offering a clear view to the sunny back yard.  The porch is brightly painted, and the lawn restored lush and green.  A fresh coat of paint on the garage door sets it off and integrates with the background and color scheme of the rest of the house.  The aerial is removed and the trim paint is bright and white again.  Shiny new windows with bright borders replace the rusted hulks.  The front porch is spruced up with fresh glider cushions and bright pillows, hanging flower baskets and flower boxes to the fore, with a classy cast iron and candle arrangement on the back wall. 

We can also get a flavor of what happened inside the house because I was lucky enough to find a long overlooked in progress picture of the basement rehab in the flash memory of our digital camera.

Basement rehab in progress

By the time this in progress picture above was taken I had done almost all of the painting and repaired most of the ceiling holes but was just beginning to re-tile the basement floor and install new base board to cover the old dark and dingy asbestos tiles.  As you can see the before picture is a mess.  The after picture is a listing agent's dream.

Basement real estate listing photo

In total, over 8 months, we probably put $35K into the house, plus a ton of sweat equity, with the biggest monetary investment being installation of central air conditioning (we had two wall units and three window units).   It's anyone's guess but I would bet that we did somewhere between $75K and $100K better on the sales price for investing the time, money and effort.  It pays.

Definition of a Progressive

Someone who hates Michelle Bachmann for praying for what Americans most want.

Progressives, keep on throwing egg on her face, please.

Bike Share -- Big Subsidies for Big Wheels for Big Incomes

When progressives say share what they really mean is that someone else pays.

Progressive moral relativists (to be redundant for the moment) can justify the government taking your money to hand it out to just about anyone for just about anything. Take bike-share programs in Arlington, Virginia for example. Median household income in Arlington is $100,735, third highest in the nation. Arlington nabbed federal grant money to pay for the bikes and then installed the bike stations along the Metro corridor, locale of the bars, bistros and barristas serving the young affluents in their luxury condos or nearby million dollar homes. Annual bike-share operating deficits are funded ad infinitum by the county taxpayers, though Arlington County's bureaucrats will no doubt find ways in the future to get chunks paid for by the federal taxpayer. Remember, these are the same people who brought us million dollar bus stops, paid for by you the federal taxpayer. 

New York City just started its bike-share program. And sure enough, it is serving the few, bikes for the affluent. 

DC Bikeshare:  Free Ride for Government Workers

The bike-share program includes a few racially and economically diverse neighborhoods—like the lower East Side and parts of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. But on average its neighborhoods are more affluent and have fewer minority residents than the rest of the city. 

They include the most expensive downtown neighborhoods like SoHo and TriBeCa and have a median household income of about $73,000 compared with $48,300 in the rest of the city, an analysis by The Wall Street Journal found. The population of bike-share neighborhoods is 56% white, while the rest of the city is 30.6% white. The analysis looked at Census tracks within an eighth of a mile of a docking station to determine the size and ethnicity of nearby populations. Income was estimated from broader Census data.

The Capital Bikeshare system in place in Arlington Virginia is wildly skewed to favor the daily user (many are commuters to high paying government or government contract jobs), who can purchase an annual pass for $75 dollars, which entitles the holder to an unlimited number of 30 minute trips. Not surprisingly, given that it costs pennies per day, the most common use of Capital Bikeshare is to travel to and from work.  But the unwary visitor or tourist gets hosed by the progressives. Riding around the National Capital region for 8 hours on a single day pass costs $101. Through direct government subsidies and distorted pricing plans, the progressives subsidize the local affluents to the point that the well off pay almost nothing. Isn't that grand?  

Portland bicycle crazed Congressman Earl Blumenauer

promoted bike share for Portland at the Portland Art 

Museum earlier this year, mingling with high society donors,  

corporate bigwigs and local bike industry luminaries, 

his core constituents.

Major Cost Savings Opportunities

Since the US government is indiscriminately sweeping up your emails and tracking your telephone calls, the government can lay off the lawyers and judges who previously applied for and granted warrants authorizing targeted electronic surveillance for actual criminal investigations and prosecutions.   They already got it all!

Susan Rice Gets to Work

Barack Obama announcing appointment of Susan
Rice to run his national security apparatus

White House sources report that Susan Rice is digging in her heals, getting hard to work, focusing on rooting out the rogue low level employee at the NSA complex in Fort Meade, Maryland, who was responsible for securing a court order from a rogue low level judge, requiring Verizon to turn over records on each and every phone call and each and every number made through its nationwide network.  We are all so happy that Barack Obama has put the right person in charge, someone who is forthright, honest and dedicated to truth and doing the right thing, and cutting through the bureaucratic fog and pushing aside political agendas to do her job.  We are confident that management of sensitive information can be trusted to Susan Rice.  Go to it Susan, show us what you are made of once again.

Oval Office Personnel Antics

So the leaker in chief of classified information, Tom Donilon, is resigning as Barack Obama's national security adviser and will be replaced by Susan Rice, whose most notable qualification for high office in the Obama administration is a willingness to repeat and defend without hesitation most any lie that is put in front of her.  What is the matter, isn't there an opening in the White House press secretary's office? There are reports that Rice is being selected for the post because it does not require Senate confirmation.  I remember a time when political insiders who couldn't pass muster in a Senate confirmation hearing were shunted off into positions on the Postal Rate Commission, where they could not do much more than decide whether the First-Class Mail stamp rate should be rounded up or down.  My oh my, times have changed. 

Susan Rice lies to a Sunday talk show, September, 2013.

Meanwhile, Rice's position as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations will be filled by Samantha Power, who is best known to the American public, as the women who had to quit Barack Obama's campaign in 2008 for having called Hillary Clinton a monster.  The UN ambassadorship, behind only the Secretary of State, is well known for being the second most import diplomatic post in the U.S. government.  Good fit.

This is not a policy driven administration.  This is not a merit driven bureaucracy.  This is not a fact driven government.  It is political and identity driven, pure and simple.  Enjoy the show, particularly the women out there who the show is most meant to cater to.  I hope you find the entertainment worthwhile.

The Lines Have Crossed

Rain, Rain Comes in May

The Bozeman monthly averages.

This year's actual month of May -- east of the Continental Divide fared well.

Now a rainy June could get us through the fire season with a month or less of fires and full irrigation rights into September.

Gallitan Valley Land Trust Trail Building

Is what I did Saturday morning.

Hoping for extra special credit for wading into the sea of Subarus with Obama stickers and NPR decals in the parking lot at the staging area.  By the way, notice the only person actually working is the guy in the middle with a shovel.  He wasn't a day under 80.

Saturday Pictures

Saturday Pictures

June 1, 2013

(click to enlarge)

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BNSF train chugs up the approach to Bozeman Pass.

Why does Warren Buffett hate the Keystone XL pipeline and love Barack Obama?  He loves making money hauling oil on BNSF. a wholly owned subsidiary of Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate empire.

By the way, it is June 1st and the snow line is about 1,000 feet up.

The Bozeman Trail - On July 14, 1806 Captain William Clark accompanied by 11 members of the expedition party camped about a mile east of here on the flat at the mouth of Kelly Canyon.  The next day, Sacajawea guided the party up the canyon on an old buffalo trail to a pass at the summit of the Gallitan Range.  In 1863, after failing to open the Bozeman Trail, John Bozeman and a small party on horseback traveled west over this pass when they returned to Montana.  The men in the party named the pass for Bozeman.  The pass became the route of the Bozeman Trail when it was opened in 1864.  Most Bridger Trail  travelers went through Bridger pass several miles to the north.

From Bozeman Pass, the Bozeman Trail crossed the head of Moffit Canyon to Kelly Canyon.  The trail descended Kelly Canyon and entered the Gallitan Valley at the site of Fort Ellis.  As they approached the town of Bozeman diarist enthusiastically recorded seeing the first fences, plowed fields and cabins since leaving the eastern settlements.  Today the lower three miles of Kelly Canyon Road follows the historic Bozeman Trail as it winds its way down from the summit to the Gallitan Valley.

FORT ELLIS - Established as a military post August 27, 1867 by order of President Johnson and General U.S. Grant 

the post was abandoned in December 1886.  

Captain Wm Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition encamped here July 14, 1806 with his Indian guide Sacajawea.  and the following men

Toussaint Charbonneau, George Gibson, Sergeant Pryor and others.

Back east it was Virginia is for Lovers.

Horizon at twilight from the rear of our home.

Home sweet home.

Big Government Sequester Armageddon Wrong Again

Who is the real extremist?

So recall that Obama got into his Chicken Little routine on February 10 backed up by firefighters who would no longer be able to douse blazes, police who would no longer be patrolling the streets and EMT's who would abandon dying accident victims along the side of the roads  Obama told us the sequester will cost the economy "hundreds of thousands of jobs." Pure silliness and fabrication spewed forth. It turns out the sequester has barely impacted its ground zero economy, Washington, DC.

“The surprise is that the [DC region] economy is as good as it is,” said Stephen S. Fuller, the economist who directs the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University. “We’ve done better than I expected.”

In January, Fuller predicted that the sequester, if enacted, would be an “end-of-the-world kind of hit” to the regional economy. He wrote an analysis of the cuts in March concluding they would kill more than 325,000 jobs in Virginia, the District and Maryland combined.
That estimate included both direct and indirect effects — that is, layoffs not just among federal workers and contractors, but also the workers, such as waiters or car salespeople, whose jobs depend on spending from federal paychecks.

So far, the direct job effects have been relatively small. The metro area shed 1,000 federal jobs in April, accelerating a belt-tightening trend; in the 11 months before that, the area lost nearly 4,000 federal jobs. Meanwhile, professional business services — the job category that includes government contracting — has grown at roughly the same rate this year as in 2012 and 2011. No major contractor has issued a government-required notification that it is planning a mass layoff.

The sequester is a no-quester in terms of its economic impact. It always was. You can't trust this president or his lapdog experts, not at all.

"Independent" IRS Chief Visited White House 157 Times

So-called independent IRS Commissioner Doug Schulman visited the White House 157 times, more than than each of Obama's cabinet pals, misleading Congress with flippant answers before the data came out,

Asked to explain the visits, Shulman gave lawmakers a list of possible reasons. 

"The Easter Egg roll with my kids ... questions about the administratibility of tax policy ... our budget, us helping the Department of Education streamline application processes for financial aid," he said.

According to the Caller analysis, no other top official logged more than 100 visits.

Mr. smartass IRS Comissioner apparently
attended something like 157 Easter Egg Rolls

This hasn't come out yet, but in time it will eventually be disclosed that many of those visits were with Obama University of Chicago Law School pal, confidante, intellectual mentor and best bud Cass Sunstein who Obama installed in a key OMB position as his regulatory czar. When it comes to "extremist groups", like the tea party, radical Harvard Professor Sunstein encouraged the Government take on a "Monkey Wrench Gang" approach to disrupt and destroy their operations.   Sunstein has advocated the government take steps to "undermine the crippled epistemology of believers."  

The path to the IRS scandal is getting closer and closer to the Oval Office.  Sunstein resigned from his OMB job late last year as the IG's investigation into the IRS was wrapping up.  It does not end.

Rachel Loses to Yellow Journalism

Its official, Rachel Maddow's ratings fell below CNN's Headline News' offerings in May. America judged that Jody offing her boyfriend had more to offer.  C'mon Rachel, we don't want to miss you. Please don't go the way of Ed Schulz. What else are we going to do for our daily dose of laughs and guffaws if both of you are moved to cartoon time?

So Why Did You Move?

For one thing, avoiding a $7,000 property tax bill.

Obamacare Driving Small Businesses to Self Insure

The biggest employment drivers in the US economy are small and medium size businesses -- small startups becoming successful, small businesses becoming medium size and medium-size businesses graduating to large.  The conduits to growth for these business are open markets and free enterprise. Burdens and barriers are anathema to their job-generating potential.

The Wall Street Journal notes that Obamacare is driving small and medium businesses to the high risk self-insurance route as never before.

As businesses cast about for ways to minimize new costs related to the federal health law, health insurers are stepping up. Among their latest offerings: allowing ever-smaller companies to switch to a riskier form of coverage traditionally favored by big employers.  UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Humana Inc. will begin offering smaller employers—including firms with as few as 10 members in UnitedHealth's case—the option of so-called self-insurance in some markets later this year. Self-insured businesses pay their workers' medical costs directly, instead of joining a traditional managed-care plan. Usually, they hire benefits firms or insurance companies just to administer their plans.

Most big companies choose the approach, because it gives them more control over benefits and can lower costs  For small businesses, being self-insured would let them avoid new requirements under the law that call for traditional small group plans to include richer benefits, such as mental-health and maternity care. Self-insured companies can also avoid changes to pricing rules that could increase costs for groups of healthy workers.

It comes with risks: A car accident or cancer case can leave small businesses on the hook for big medical bills. That is why most large insurers have generally offered such services to companies that have 100 or more workers and can spread the costs around.

Now, the health law is changing the risk-benefit calculation for smaller businesses such as Buckno Lisicky & Co., an 85-person accounting firm in Allentown, Pa. The company switched from a traditional health plan to a self-insured plan run by benefits-manager WellNet Inc. this year, in part because of the law's small-business rules, said Jack Lisicky, a founder.

High risks and higher costs are two ways that Obamacare impedes economic growth, something that a nation with a $17 trillion dollar debt, growing welfare rolls, a shrinking workforce and continuing deficits can ill afford.  The chickens will come home to roost. 

Pickled Herring

Thanks to my sister for coming forward when I lamented on the "lost" pickled herring recipe.  Here goes.

PICKLED HERRING

Elsa Stuberg Recipe

1 pound                salt herring filets or pieces

1 cup                    white vinegar

1/2 cup                 sugar

1 small                  yellow onion

1/4 cup                 whole allspice (NOT ground)

 Put herring in a bowl with plenty of cold water and refrigerate overnight.  When you’re ready to make the herring, drain off the water and rinse lightly.  (This is to remove some of the salt from the herring.) 

Cut up the herring into about 1-inch pieces, if not already cut up.  Dissolve the sugar in the vinegar. 

For a fancy presentation, place the cut-up herring in a one-quart glass jar (I use a large Adams peanut butter jar) skins sides up.  Otherwise a glass or ceramic bowl is fine. 

Add the vinegar with the sugar dissolved.  Cut the onion in half and then cut the halves into slices.  Put the onions in the jar on top of the herring. 

Very coarsely ground the allspice.  I use a good mortar and pestle to do this, and all I do is break each “corn” of allspice open.  Put the allspice in the jar on top of the onions.

If some of the pieces of herring are not covered by the liquid, add more vinegar to cover.  Put a lid on the jar and refrigerate.  There is no need to mix the ingredients.  The flavors will blend just sitting in the fridge.  Use only glass or ceramic to store the herring, not plastic. 

Rachel the Pig
Pike Place Market

Sis recommends preparing the herring about a week prior to serving to give it time to marinate.   Once prepared, the dish seems to last a long time so long as it is refrigerated and the herring covered with vinegar.  But it won't be around too long because it is really, really good.  

It is important to purchase herring that is firm and bright looking (with a definite blueish cast like fresh trout).  In Seattle my sister has had good luck buying herring at the Pike Place Market at the “fish-throwing” stand (aka Pike Place Fish Company) by Rachel the Pig.

Now, there was the question of recipes for the meatballs and the potato salad.

Memorial Day Weekend

This year I miss the roar of Rolling Thunder down the I-66 and US-50 corridor through Arlington and into DC this holiday weekend.  Many locals complained of the disruption to their peace and quiet.  Wiser heads said they enjoyed the sounds of freedom.  It is a fitting tribute to the many who have sacrificed their lives for the cause of freedom.

A few dozen of the hundreds of thousands of this year's Rolling Thunder participants crossing Memorial Bridge
between Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia side of the Potomac, across the river to the Lincoln Memorial.

On the Road to Sweden: Grandma and Grandpa Stuberg

Grandpa and Grandma
John and Elsa Stuberg

This is a John and Elsa Stuberg post -- at least when I get beyond the preliminaries.

I previously blogged about my father’s side of the family but not my mother’s. The biggest part of the explanation is in the numbers. My dad was the youngest of 11 children while my mother was an only child. The sheer quantity of aunts, uncles and cousins on my father’s side, makes for not only more material, but also for better access to stories, timelines and photos. My Uncle Herb and Aunt Margaret lived in the Chicago area with us as I was growing up. They were a constant part of our lives, whereas my mother had no close relatives living nearby during most of my youth.  

Another factor in the unequal attention to ancestry is members of dad’s family were active in civic affairs and/or politics. As a result, there is a wealth of published material, much searchable on the internet. My dad’s father and grandfather founded and developed their hometown of Bathgate, North Dakota (2010 population 43).  I visited Bathgate several times. My dad’s father, Isaac J. Foster, was county sheriff, local civic official (president or chairman of the fair board and various other boards and commissions), a Grand Mason, an auctioneer, a purveyor of insurance and real estate, and an appointee to various state boards and commissions.

My dad’s namesake, his uncle George, moved from North Dakota to Chicago where he studied law, was elected a City Alderman before the turn of the century (the 20th Century that is), served as a Democratic Party Cook County Committee official, worked as assistant prosecuting attorney and ultimately became a municipal court judge. Early in the 20th Century, when few women attended college, two of dad’s two older sisters, Bina and Grace, were university trained, one educated and employed as a druggist (known modern day as pharmacist) and the other became a teacher, well known in the towns where they served.  His sister Charlotte eventually taught school as well.

My dad’s second oldest brother, Lyndon (aka Lyn or Red) Foster, was a partially disabled WW I veteran who went on to be a newspaper publisher and political firebrand in California. At one time or another Lyn was a candidate for Los Angeles City Council, he vied for a seat in the U.S. Congress and he campaigned to become Lieutenant Governor of the Golden State. Lyn irked his rivals to the point where political opponents bombed his apartment in 1935.

A Wonderful Holiday to One and All!

We hope everyone ...

... is having a great holiday weekend.

Saturday Pictures

Saturday Pictures

May 25, 2013

(click to enlarge)

Typical Montana Pickup Truck

Looks Great in Green.

Cowboy Hats Are Great Protection from the Rain.

Flowering Front Yard Tree.

Hyalite Reservoir Filling with Spring Runoff.