Yun and I just watched 500 Days of Summer. It was a great movie with a great soundtrack. I’m beginning to think the soundtrack is about 90% of the entertainment for me. I recommend this movie.
We watch plenty of movies in our house, most of which I stop watching half-way through as I find them utterly boring. One such example is Inglourious Basterds which I started watching last night but stopped mid-way through as it seemed so pointless. Maybe it just had a bad soundtrack.
We were at Ben and Lis’s house last night to visit and celebrate the impending birth of Caleb Leonidas Richards. Lis looks like she’s about to give birth any moment. It was especially freaky to see her stomach moving. It reminded me of a scene from the Exorcist. Yun and I bought them the sweetest looking flower bonnet which we expect to be used for their first photos of Caleb. Ben was very excited with our gift.
This morning we left for Mexico for some dental work. I had to have a crown removed which was mostly horrible. I spent nearly a grand a year ago (after my insurance paid the other 2 or 3k) for a crown that was placed improperly. So I had to re-do the process this morning as a result of earlier incompetence which I was less than thrilled about. Fortunately, the cost of dental work in Mexico is next-to-nothing. We really like our dentists Joel and Fabiola. We’ve taken a few friends to them for dental work.
Yun’s brothers came up for the weekend. We just had a sweet dinner and we’re now watching the Pacquiao vs. Cotto boxing match (on some Irish channel via the internet). I’m not a big fan of boxing, but it’s entertaining nonetheless.
Yun brought home some chicken feet tonight along with some gizzards and livers. The dogs are going to be very happy!
Yun and I have been looking for another house to buy for a while now as an investment property to help secure our future plans in Mexico. We left for Phoenix early on Saturday to attend a foreclosure auction. This was our first experience with a live auction and despite attending the ‘training’ session for first-timers, it was still rather intimidating. This is mostly in part due to the auctioneer speaking at a rate that renders most of what he says unintelligible. This made the bidding process a bit stressful because the bid increments were generally $5,000 and it was hard to follow what the current high bid was.
We have looked at a number of homes here in Tucson over the past few months. There was one in particular we were interested in which by the time we were willing to put an offer, the bank sent the home to auction. This is what prompted us to attend the auction. There were over a 100 homes to bid on, but we were only interested in the one. Each home takes about 2mins to complete and the one we were interested in was near the end of the list. As such, we had to wait nearly 3 hours before we had the chance to bid.
To add to the experience, the convention center had the temperature set at 69 degrees which made it horribly cold! It wasn’t bad for the first 15 minutes, but after 3 hours, we were mostly miserable. The house we were bidding on started at $500 which I opened up the bidding with. There were two other people who were interested in the property and quickly increased the price (each bid raised $5k). Having never done this before, I was not sure as to the strategy to adopt. I could either respond quickly with a counter bid or wait for the auctioneer to do the ‘going once, going twice’ thing. In the three hours we spent there, we saw people doing both. I decided to yell out my counter bids with no hesitation, mostly because I was freezing and obviously over-excited.
Amazingly, we got eventually got to our top number without any intention to go further. At this point it was pretty confusing to determine who had the high bid because the auctioneer, as I stated earlier, is mostly unintelligible. However, the attention was on one of the other bidders who apparently was contemplating if they should continue bidding. The next thing I recall was the rapid fire “going once, going twice, and sold” to us!
We had contemplated our odds before bidding on Saturday and we thought they were pretty good given it was a cash-only sale which would reduce the pool of bidders. It was frustrating that there were others bidding so aggressively on the same house.
We’re pretty excited about winning and owning a house without a mortgage (as opposed to the home we live in!). It isn’t fancy and will require plenty of work. It is structurally sound and the area isn’t too bad. We also like it a lot because it has a guest house on the property which has its own living room, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom. Once restored, we are hopeful that we’ll be able to rent it out for around $1k a month.
iPhones are running over $400 for a 3g 16gb phone. I just purchased the far superior i9Phone (made in Shenzhen, China) off ebay for $66 (delivered). The i9Phone is superior due to having 2 SIM card slots which allows multiple phone lines to the same cell. I can add a US line and a Mexican line for when we travel South. The i9 also has a bank for external memory. I am going to be rocking.
I opened a bottle of red last night – my first experience with organic grapes in wine. Of course, given the lack of regulation, the term is somewhat meaningless. The wine was called Slow Paseo and really wasn’t too bad. I bought it at Trader Joes for something like $6.99.
My uncle Dennis is down in Tucson again for flight training. We went to Casa de Vicente’s for dinner on Friday night. I had rabbit which was pretty good and has instilled the desire to add rabbits to our future compound plans. I don’t think I could tell the difference between chicken and rabbit if the bones were removed.
Yun and I spent the last week at a retreat at the Cepin’s home here in Tucson. It was truly an incredible event
Dana has pointed out it has been over a month since my last update. We’ve been busy, but it’s past due.
The last few weeks we’ve been spending our weekends in Mexico. We went down yesterday for some more dental work. That should be eventually coming to an end. We had breakfast with Yunuen’s parents and then later had dinner at their house. We always enjoy going down and spending time with them. They’ve been doing massive renovations to one of their homes and it’s looking great. Dr. Vargas has about 20-30 chickens in the backyard – I am very envious. We took the Passat to get an alignment and to be detailed just prior to our dental visit. Can’t beat the prices.
Last weekend we took a group from our Church down to Josue and Martha’s house across the border. Obed, Brenda, and Jacinto were there and we had a good time familiarizing ourselves with their work. We had carne asada for lunch – always my favorite. We need to do that more often.
Yun and I have been looking to buy another home for a little while now. Our hope is to buy a foreclosed home with cash, but it’s been incredibly difficult to find something we think would be a good investment. Ideally we’d like to have a few rental properties here in Tucson before retreating to our compound in the South of Mexico. Perhaps in time.
Nimbus Brewery has a new pub on Wilmot, just south of Grant. We went their for lunch today with Ben, Lis, and Ashley. They have two private rooms for poker where they supply a designated server, cards, and chips. We have plans to meet Thursday at 8.30pm. I anticipate some big winnings.
I’ve been reading some good books lately – Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Meacham’s American Lion, and Gaffin’s book on the continental reformer’s view of the Sabbath. All good stuff. Postman’s book is for our book group – we should be meeting at some point in the next week. Meachem’s book on Andrew Jackson (the guy on the $20 bill) was a great overview for me given I had no prior knowledge of the man. Gaffin was an excellent work and a preliminary text to my next book group selection of Dennison’s The Market Day of the Soul which is the Puritan’s view of the Sabbath (and quite distinct to the continentals). Also, I read Ron Paul’s book End the Fed recently as well which was exceptional. It prompted me to buy Griffin’s massive piece on the origin of the Federal Reserve, The Creature from Jekyll Island. I am excited to get to that one. I purchased a few of Murray Rothbard’s books on economic policy in the 30s and Von Mises work on banking and inflation in the last week. So much to read, so little time.
Back to work tomorrow. Time for another glass of red.
I purchased a new camera today to replace another that had died after about a month’s use (a Samsung). I prefer my Canon SLR of course, but its not something I can always carry around easy. So I want something I can stick in my pocket. The Samsung was a nice camera, but didn’t last long, so I wasn’t about to purchase the newer model. Instead, I thought I’d try the Fuji. So far I’m not impressed. Its too minimalistic having only a couple buttons. So setting changes are a burden. I’ll give it the long weekend to make a decision and then I may just return it for a few others I had thought might be a better choice.
I took the dogs for a blood run tonight. We call them that because their paws were pretty bloody at the ends of the ‘walks’ in the early days of doing them. They no longer bleed though, but the title still seems appropriate given the intensity of the runs. Our dogs are in pretty good shape and can run at a high speed for miles without stopping.
I brought the new camera with me on the run to try out the video – so I am attaching one below. As you can see, we’ve done these runs so frequently that they know the routine and stay along side the car no problem.
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I have attached a song by ‘Just Jack’ entitled Embers below which I like a great deal. You should listen to it and tell me what you think. I have pretty sweet taste in music obviously.
In 1984 Charles Murray wrote the book Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 which was an analysis (replete with plenty of data) of federal meddling in social welfare. Although I was a bit reluctant to read this book at first (Luke’s choice in our book group), I found it thoroughly helpful in understanding the paradigm shift in this country’s social policy. We met to discuss the book early this morning and it proved to be a good discusion (despite Ben’s incessant appeals to panarchy).
Ben and I went shooting later in the morning at the Tucson Pistol Institute. I have been shooting my .40 Glock pretty exclusively lately, but one thing I like about TPI is that they have a vast array of firearms you can use for $6/day (including semi-automatic assault rifles). They have a number of subcompact 9mms at a fairly reasonable price that I am contemplating for purchase. My Glock 23 is the compact model, but it’s still pretty bulky on the hip when concealed. The price of ammo has been making a steady reduction in price now which is quite helpful. It is nearly half the price for .40 S&W as it was only a few months back (50 cents a round then versus 26 cents a round now). It was pretty difficult to go shooting when one clip cost $6.50 to fire under 60 seconds.
Josue and Martha came over last night for an awesome dinner that Yun made. They were a lot of fun to have over and spend time with. We began putting together some plans for visiting Campeche before the end of the year. Josue and Martha own land there and we thought it might be nice to look at what’s available as land is quite inexpensive there.
