Tony Brewer

My aunt has asked me to help her price shop for Connecticut insurance on her vacation home.  She’s easily confused by the Internet, so I offered to help her with some research on that topic to try to help her save some money.  I like websites like netquote.com that will help the consumer to do some comparison shopping between companies.  Being able to compare policies online is a great convenience.  I like doing things online – things get done at MY convenience and I don’t have to leave my own home to get things done!  Just fill out a few blanks, press submit and you are off and running!

Teri has been talking about putting up some screens in the basement to partition off a part of it to create an exercise room.  She has been on a “let’s exercise more” kick since New Years.  Yeah, it’s one of her resolutions.  Neither one of us needs to lose any weight, but she has decided that we don’t exercise enough.  I agreed to give it a try, as long as we had a television down there to watch while we were exercising.So we have spent several hours moving things around in the basement to make room for the equipment.   So now we are in the process of picking out some carpeting and screens to make the place a little bit nicer.  There is nothing enticing about bare concrete walls and floors!

I’m sure that once we get the samsung lcd tv, the Reebok exercise ball, the Proform elliptical, the treadmill, and the room divider screens up, the carpet down, and a small refrigerator down there (for cold water) it will look like a respectable exercise room.  I just hope she (we) stick to it.  I hate to waste the time, effort, and money to set up something that won’t get used!  I do know one thing, though, we won’t be able to use the excuse that we don’t feel like going out to the gym because of bad weather!

Being in the real estate business, I’d like to encourage homeowners who are trying to sell their homes to take a close look at using some window boxes on their houses.  I think that having some nicely done, well-maintained garden window boxes add a real visual touch of homey charm that will make just about any house more appealing to the prospective buyer.  Having some pretty trailing ivies and colorful cascading petunias flowing out of a couple of window flower boxes on the street side of the house will make the house look more inviting. 

But if you are going to do that, you really need to make sure that you keep them looking nice.  Make sure to water the plants often enough so that they don’t droop, and keep dead-heading the petunias so that they will keep flowering for a longer period.  And make sure that the boxes themselves are in good repair – seeing boxes with peeling paint will definately be unappealing!  It might be wise to invest a few dollars into some new ones, just to spruce up the place!  After all, street appeal is important – it is what gets the prospective buyers into the house in the first place!

Every couple of days Teri mentions to me that we need to take down the Christmas decorations.  To be honest, I’ve just been so busy that when I have got a few minutes I really don’t have much of an interest in taking down the tree!  I’m really in no hurry; the house looks nice and the tree is an artificial one, so there is no fire hazard!  I keep putting her off but I think she’s not going to let me get away with it too much longer.  She’s threatening to haul the entire tree out to the curb, decorations and all if I don’t help her take it down by the end of the month!

I like listening to my aunt tell me stories about her life.  She’s only in her mid-fifties, but she has some good stories to tell nonetheless.  Like the time that she and a group of friends decided to “TP” a neighbor’s house and unbeknownst to them all her parents watched the whole thing!

One of her stories has to do with moving 800 miles on her own.  She used to work for a company that allowed transfers from state to state.  She was single and had a pet dog.  She had determined that she wanted to move from Virginia to Maine because she had gone on a skiing vacation with her boy friend and decided she liked Maine enough to move there in search of being able to ski more often.  Her boyfriend had relatives in Maine and thought he would be fun to move there with her.  So she put in a transfer request.

A week before the transfer request was granted her boyfriend broke up with her!  But she went to Maine without him, not knowing a single soul.  Fortunately she had been given the name of the Maine Senator’s field representative to call and ask for help with the move.  That woman was so nice; she invited my aunt to stay with her while she found a place to live! So my aunt recruited her brother (my uncle) to help with a a U-Haul and they drove from Virginia to Maine. They met up with the field representative and spent the night. The next morning the field representative took them to her office and then sent one of her assistants to take her looking for apartments for rent. It was a real challenge; especially since no one wanted to rent to a single girl with a dog!

But believe it or not, by the end of the day they had found the perfect place! The next day she moved in and paid for an airplane ticket for her brother to fly back home. My aunt stayed in Maine for 29 years after that, but that is a another story!