Day 88- June 8, 2020

Day 88- June 8, 2020

Another day, another pool visit.  My mom spent much of our pool time checking websites, but we must have missed some spree, because most places were sold out completely of their size, or the bathing suits were a fortune (like, $45 for a child's bathing suit that she's going to wear for two months because CHILDREN GROW QUICKLY).  I can't justify that.

I love upcycling clothes for my kids (and myself).  I used to have a friend who would gift me her twin daughters' hand me downs, and even though they are four years older than my girls, it always meant I had a supply chain.

Now, though, I'm in a different job, and when I went to go through the summer clothes, I found that my VERY tall children had pretty much outgrown their size 6X swimsuits (to be fair, they are now 8 and 9, and wearing size 10, so I'm a little behind).  They have a couple of 8's, but since wearing the same swimsuit daily means I have to wash them daily, seeing if someone had one or two to give away seemed a better option.

So instead of spending almost a hundred dollars on two suits (don't forget, you have to pay for shipping), I sent a text to a bunch of mom friends asking if anyone had a size 8 or 10 bathing suits their daughters had grown out of, and one of my friends (who is giving birth to her second child in two weeks) was kind enough to offer three. She had accidentally shrunk them and they didn't fit her daughter, so she gave them to me for the girls.  They fit perfectly, and the girls were thrilled at their new threads.

What's left after demo

After swimming, we drove home down the street our best friends live on, and saw that an abandoned house had finally been torn down.  And I mean FINALLY.  Five years ago when we moved in, our friends told us it had been vacant for years, but the person who owned it bought it under the guise that he would subdivide it into two lots, tear down the house, and put up two new homes that would each be worth a lot more money.

His plans hit a snag when the town informed him that the property on the left side of the lot was actually flood plain- and thus, unbuildable.  He couldn't subdivide.  I don't know what's gone on in the ensuing years, except to know that there were a lot of rodents in the abandoned house that neighbors would occasionally have the misfortune of discovering on their own lawns and occasionally in their own vehicles.  On more than one occasion, someone on the street would joke about molotov cocktails and solving the issue of this eyesore themselves.

But today, there was a glorious pile of rubble.  It had been demo day- "Smashy smashy" as my friend Teddy, a contractor, would say.  The boards were all cracked and twisted, the glass
broken.  In a normal construction zone, I feel like one would have a dump truck (or at least dumpsters) ready to receive the garbage, but here, it just sat out in the sun, with a yellow bulldozer lazily parked to the side.   We pulled over, and talked to a couple of folks who were having a socially-distanced chat in lawn chairs.  "They just left it like that" they said, nodding.  "At least it's done" chimed in another.  "Let's just hope they build quickly" said the third.

And that's a really valid point- what kind of a contractor leaves a giant pile of rubble in the middle of a yard on a quiet residential street? What kind of builder doesn't have the where-with-all to have dumpsters or trucks ready to haul off the debris? And then we all remember that this is the same person who has paid taxes on this property for the better part of a decade, and probably laid out more for that than the purchase price at this point, and we all kind of nod, realizing it could be a very long time before we see a new house there, and get some new neighbors.