He may have won the case, but he’s still an asshole:
Thanks to the wonderful BooHunney for filling in while I took the week off. No, I didn’t go anywhere — but I did use your donations to go out for crabs Saturday night. Yummy!
Instead, I went on a decluttering binge. I read the The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing and I’ve been getting rid of a lot of stuff. Very gratifying. Oh, and I finished a bunch of books.
My washer also stopped draining. (Happy fucking Mercury retrograde.) It’s still not fixed, I guess I’ll have to go to the laundromat tonight ’cause I’m out of everything. And I spent a whole day recovering from a migraine that resulted from the stagnant water in the washer. (Ugh.)
For my last day of vacation, I went swimming at the state park pool with a friend. After a week-long heat wave, it was very refreshing. Ahhh.
And yesterday, on my first morning back, I went to sit down in my desk chair but slid off and wrenched pretty much everything. I went to the chiro right away, but man, does everything hurt today.
The thing I used to love about Philly was how affordable it was. Not now! The rents are going much, much higher and my nightmare is that I’ll have to move back to the suburbs. Nice to see at least one major city doing something about it:
Berlin has become the first city in Germany in which rent-control legislation has come into force in a bid to put the breaks on some of the fastest rising rents in Europe.
From Monday, landlords in the capital will be barred from increasing rents by more than 10% above the local average. Such controls were already in place for existing tenants but have now been extended to new contracts.
“The rent ceiling is very important for Berlin because the difference between the rent paid in existing contracts and new contracts is so high,” said Reiner Wild, managing director of the Berlin Tenants’ Association. “The other problem is that we have 40,000 more inhabitants per year. Because of this situation the housing market is very strong.”
Berlin is pioneering the rent cap after the national parliament approved the law, targeted at areas with housing shortages, in March. Berliners say flat-hunting is becoming increasingly competitive.
“We were looking for the best part of a year,” said Vlasis Tritakis, a student. He, his partner Sofia and their 18-month-old son moved out of a flat-share into a one-bedroomed apartment in the district of Kreuzberg in April.
But sooner or later they will have to find a place big enough for his son to have a room of his own. They say they don’t stand much of a chance against competition from potential tenants with better finances. “I don’t know how we will do it,” said Tritakis.
Although rents are still low compared with other European capitals, Wild says it is vital to keep the city affordable for lower-income residents. “We don’t want a situation like in London or Paris,” said Wild. “The reality in Paris or London is that people with low income have to live in the further-out districts of the city.”
The Stylistics:
https://youtu.be/tFPTXxrZ31s
Aretha Franklin:
https://youtu.be/O9NB4yasJeM
Al Green:
https://youtu.be/jJLe3o8IrNA
I’m sure more than a few of us can relate, yes?
I once lost a whole truck over a few hundred bucks. It had been towed, and when I called the company they told me they’d need a few hundred dollars for the fee. I didn’t have a few hundred dollars. So I told them when I got paid next and that I’d call back then.
It was a huge pain in the ass for those days. It was the rainy season, and I wound up walking to work, adding another six miles or so a day to my imaginary pedometer. It was my own fault that I’d been towed, really, and I spent more than a couple hours ruing myself. I finally made it to payday, and when I went to get the truck, they told me that I now owed over a thousand dollars, nearly triple my paycheck. They charged a couple hundred dollars a day in storage fees. I explained that I didn’t have that kind of money, couldn’t even get it. They told me that I had some few months to get it together, including the storage for however long it took me to get it back, or that they’d simply sell it. They would, of course, give me any money above and beyond their fees if they recovered that much.
I was working two jobs at the time. Both were part time. Neither paid a hundred bucks a day, much less two.
Anything can make you lose your apartment, because any unexpected problem can set off that Rube Goldberg device.
I wound up losing my jobs. So did my husband. We couldn’t get from point A to point B quickly enough, and we showed up to work, late, either soaked to the skin or sweating like pigs one too many times. And with no work, we wound up losing our apartment.It’s amazing what things that are absolute crises for me are simple annoyances for people with money. Anything can make you lose your apartment, because any unexpected problem that pops up, like they do, can set off that Rube Goldberg device.
It’s a traumatic story and I don’t want to relive it in any detail, but a couple of weeks ago, my car got towed. Illegally. I finally got it back several hours later, but if not for the help of a friendly cop, I would have had to cough up $250 to get my car back. Which was not as bad as my car being stolen – the very thought had me gasping for breath. I’ve taken such good care of this car — how on earth could I afford another one that’s in as good a condition as this one? Thankfully, I didn’t have to.
But I’m always in the shadow. You know?
