This morning I am imagining being in the Extreme Makeover house on Massachusetts Avenue. Note to out-of-towners: The TV show Extreme Makeover was here in Buffalo over the past week and it has been a huge happening.
They did over a house on our Lower West Side not far from where Leonard Pennario used to live. That is how I think of it anyway! Pennario's family lived on Jersey Street and this is a house on Massachusetts Avenue.
This Jamaican single mom with four kids and I do not think any job lived in that house and they knocked the house down and put up a new house for her.
It bugs me that they knocked down the house because reporters made a big deal out of that this woman had done a lot to fix it up. She had installed windows, fixed a hole in the floor, all this stuff.
Now, all gone!
All that work for nothing!
Zut alors!
But that is how I think. The world thinks that newer is better. So here she is in this new house and that is what I am thinking about today.
For me it is just another Monday and an especially stressful one at that because I have a ton of stuff due. It is like the other day, on the treadmill...
... except, alas, without my friend Leroy next to me to tell me funny stories about people falling into graves.
But for this family, they are waking up in this new house with all this new furniture and Rich Products filling up their fridge every week for a year plus scholarships for all of them at Canisius College.
So what do they do today? Do they go back to work?
At what point does this new house start growing old?
Howard and I were also wondering what about the taxes. You would think the house would be assessed for more than these people have money to pay taxes on. And then what? Perhaps someone will set up a fund to pay the taxes. That is what I am imagining.
Anyway. It is certainly the first day of the rest of their lives. It will be an interesting story over the next few years to see what happens to these people, starting on this Monday morning.
You know what they say. Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach him to fish, you might get rid of him for a whole weekend.
Hahahahaha!! That is a joke that comes from Mary Kate O'Connell.
Oh, wait. What I meant to say was: Teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime. Give a man a fish, he will flounder.
Flounder, get it?
That joke was Howard's.
5 comments:
Ah, now we are caught up again, lol! Founder on a flounder... I am goin' nuts! :)
Apparently, scuttlebutt has hit that the TV show rents the property while they are making the improvements. Supposedly, that protects the winners from having the tax bill of all the improvements as well as all the stuff left inside. I don't think they can be insulated from the assessment that the city had at the ready.
That joke is far too lame for someone of Howard's level of sophistication.
Thanks, Budd. You are correct. My editor murdered me! The actual joke was still in research & development when she grabbed it and altered it. I was experimenting out loud with: Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime. Teach a fish to be a man and you will flounder. That is as far I got with it before I deep-sixed my fish.
I thought the flounder joke was funny! Larry, I am glad you did too!
Michael, interesting tax wisdom. Thank you for telling us what you know.
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