Tag: local

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Our first look at the lease from new owner of Country Fair Apartments made it clear that they would ruin the place—a place we’d lived happily for 20 years—so we moved out. Even so, I’m a little surprised to see this just 8 years later:

Because the heat is not working, 9 out of 42 buildings are considered unlivable…. If the property owners don’t fix the issues in a timely manner, tearing down the buildings may be the next step.

https://foxillinois.com/news/local/tenants-living-without-heat-at-apartment-complex-court-steps-in

In happier times.

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Thought it might be getting a little late for third coffee, but looked at the clock and it was barely after 9:00 AM! Maybe we should go back to standard time every day!

I would prefer local solar time, and had thought next best would be permanent standard time, but maybe setting the clocks back an hour every day would be even better!

Sun setting over a Winfield Village parking lot

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Breaking news in the latest issue of the real estate trade journal Duh! “Apartment landlords call for lower tax assessments!”

I found this whole article especially hilarious because Jackie and I lived very happily in Country Fair Apartments for more than 20 years before these clowns bought it, renamed it Grammercy, and managed to ruin it in less than a year:

Grammercy said its annual net operating income has dropped from more than $1 million in 2014 to a loss of more than $300,00 in 2018. It said its vacancy rate was 41 percent in 2018.

Source: Apartment landlords call for lower tax assessments amid higher vacancy rates

In what is not at all a coincidence, 2014 is the year we moved out—the last year that the old leases were in effect. I wrote a whole post about the preposterous non-lease that they wanted us to sign: Why we moved.

For those incompetents to be losing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year is richly deserved, although I am sorry if it ends up hitting Champaign and Urbana’s tax base.

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Jackie and I went to the University of Illinois Meat Sales Room, aka the Meat Lab, to buy eggs. On the way in, I noticed a sign on the window saying that they had fresh chickens available for $1.75/lb.

I had just been saying on twitter that, with USDA changing the rules to allow chicken to be shipped to China to be cut up into pieces and then shipped back to the U.S. and sold as “Product of USA” with no further inspection, it was perhaps time to just switch to only eating local chickens. These chickens, produced by the university’s agriculture department as part of their educational mission, certainly qualify—the Poultry Research Farm is only about 2 miles away from our house.

So, once we got in line with our eggs, I told the woman at the fresh case that I wanted one chicken. And I got one.

It weighs 8.26 lbs.

Basically, it’s the size of a small turkey.

I have never seen a chicken this size. It outweighs the next biggest chicken I’ve ever bought by a solid 50%.

Jackie has undertaken to cook this enormous chicken, which will no doubt provide leftovers for days.

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We were downtown for drinks and dinner at Seven Saints with Barbara and Rosie, and I noticed a rather spectacular sunset (click for larger, more spectacular version).

A merely fair picture of it—it was more spectacular in person—but good enough, I thought, to share.

And, in relation to my recent post on pelvises, among the Halloween decorations inside Seven Saints, I happened to notice another depiction of a skeleton with iliac crests dramatically smaller than an actual skeleton’s. Look at that! Surely no one could expect a lifetime exposure to such misleading representations to do anything other than produce a whole range of body dysmorphic issues.

another-small-hips-skeleton