Like a good Agatha Christie mystery (anyone ever see 1944 academy award nominee Gaslight, Angela Landsbury's first role at 19?) or a Sherlock Holmes yarn, the bird feeder drama took a turn towards clarification. It was a bear. How do I know? First, I was confused at how the bird feeder didn't shatter as it hit the concrete porch - by the laws of physics, and it's construction makeup, it certainly should have. 2nd, there wasn't a seed from the spill anywhere to be found on the ground, and while certainly I could imagine Mr Squirrel and his friends and assorted birds making quick work of the spill, not quicker than I would have noticed the increase in activity since all I really do these days is sit in my man chair reading and watching the bird feeders.
So, 3 evening past, I was sitting here in my well-worn chair, reading, when from the corner of my eye some new shape enters peripherally. It's funny how the brain works - it works backwards from what is most probable, most familiar, rules them out by process of elimination and continues paging through other scenarios. So, in this millisecond, I went from bird, child, gardener, neighbor to looking over, 7' away through glass, to see a momma bear with one little cub the size of a soccer ball. Literally the cub most have been on his first life excursion. Momma is reared up, paws to the bird feeder. Fumbling for my phone, yelling for lucas, the bear senses danger and meanders off.
So, I owe the Amish bird feeder maker an apology. It wasn't his craftsmanship. The bear literally reached up, delicately put two paws on the bird feeder, gave a quick tug, broke the rope, put it on the ground and ate away.
So there's that.
Funny how putting a kid in a classic car with an American flag makes us seem like anti-mask wearing, social distancing denying, open now nincompoops, but we aren't. We just love our country and the freedoms, be is speech, opportunity, religion, etc... that is part of This American Life.
I remember after the white supremacists invaded Charlottesville VA a few years back and my friend Bryan commented that it was embarrassing to buy tiki torches for his yard at Home Depot since the racists down there were using them in their marches - really sad the flag has the same ability to divide now.
There's also a pandemic explosion of urban flight looking for upstate properties. I'm not usually as wrong as I was on this one, but any theory I had about depressed demand because of deep cuts this virus is making into the heart of NYC will need to wait, since for now, demand is off the charts.
News article we were quoted in -
http://www.westmilfordmessenger.com/news/local-news/pandemic-driven-house-frenzy-hits-local-towns-AL1159772
I'm still not all that certain for what the future holds, since it seems like a lot of the pain is being artificially delayed with Fed action, with mortgage forbearance action (as opposed to default), with federal stimulus, rent holidays and increased unemployment compensation levels. But for now, you have a level of activity in an already busy marketplace I've never seen before. And there is not a whole to sell, so if you are a seller, or thinking about selling, now is definitely the time.
This resale of Farm 33 in Rhinebeck is going into contract for nearly $1m, the largest increase over sales price ever recorded for a Catskill Farms home.
Barn 7 in Barryville went into contract in one week with multiple backup offers.
And Farm 19 in Narrowsburg survived on the market for 5 days before 2 full price offers came through -
The new Catskill Farms Ranch 37 home in Kerhonkson just went into contract -
This Lazy Meadows sale happened on Friday -
And Catskill Farms put 3 homes into contract that aren't built yet. I fended off another dozen clients with badly executed karate moves.
As someone who values competence, when I read things like the following it makes me sad and mad, not sure which emotion is more pronounced, since I confuse the two half the time, like any red-blooded emotionally challenged American male should -
"In the first six months of 1942, the [U.S.] government gave out more than $100 billion in military contracts, more than the entire gross national product of 1940. In the war years, American industry turned out 6,500 naval vessels; 296,400 airplanes; 86,330 tanks; 64,546 landing craft; 3.5 million jeeps, trucks, and personnel carriers; 53 million deadweight tons of cargo vessels; 12 million rifles, carbines, and machine guns; and 47 million tons of artillery shells, together with millions of tons of uniforms, boots, medical supplies, tents, and a thousand other items needed to fight a modern war.
"The Ford Motor Company alone produced more war matériel than the entire Italian economy. By 1944 its Willow Run plant was turning out B-24 bombers at the rate of one every sixty-three minutes. Henry J. Kaiser, who at first knew so little about ships that he referred to the front and the back instead of the bow and stern, brought the techniques of automobile mass production to shipbuilding. He reduced the time needed to build a liberty ship -- the standardized freighter of seventy-two hundred tons and thirty thousand parts -- from 244 days to 42. A total of 2,710 were produced during the war, each, in Roosevelt's words, 'a blow for the liberty of the free peoples of the world.'
And we can't even ramp up to produce virus tests in this day and age.
