Certainly not if you paid somebody to do it. I do it all myself because I like the result and I need the exercise. And I'm a cheapskate. I think the biggest outlay I made on landscaping would be the retaining wall, which ran about $800 for materials, if I remember right. Money well spend because the nimrod who…

Like I said, it all depends. I would talk to neighbors about the HOA before committing to one, but my point was, many of them exist for good reason, just like labor unions (please leave your opinions about unions to yourself). Whether they're worth the monthly fee is another question entirely.

Actually, be very careful when doing this. If the excrement comes into contact with the air circulation device, and you end up losing the place, you'll be kicking yourself for every extra dollar you put toward principal. Better to fluff up your retirement nest egg or your emergency fund, that is, unless you can…

That's the good part of being middle aged. You can more readily recognize a bubble when you see one, because you've probably seen them before. We live in Upstate NY, so we didn't participate in the last bubble (or this one, for that matter), but we did see these ridiculous reality shows on DIY and HGTV back then. I…

They probably bought it because a big house with more bedrooms was deemed more liquid than a small one with fewer bedrooms. A family of five (or whatever) starts looking at houses probably has a minimum size in mind, and you're guaranteeing that yours exceeds that.FWIW, we thought about downgrading our empty nest to…

Except for the time you got to drop a roll of dimes on that jackass across the street who loved working on his beater pickup truck at 6AM on a Sunday, and then leave said beater pickup in the driveway (or worse, in the front yard next to the flagpole where he flies the Tea Party flag over the Stars and Stripes). I…

Depreciation is only good until you sell the place. That's when you have to add all the depreciation you took on your Schedule E back into the cost basis when determining how much taxes you have to pay on the proceeds. Better set aside a good chunk of that fat check you just cashed for next April.

It generally falls under the heading "curb appeal." Still, I would love to have had a place that I didn't have to do years and years worth of very hard work just to get the yard looking nice. It's dogsbody work, I tell you, but now I get compliments on the results.

And yet they love to move out to the country, beyond the suburbs. The riding mower should come with the property.

What about landscaping? There's something that's kind of hard to mess up and you can do it yourself if you're physically up to it. Our place was basically an 200x235 blank slate of grass before I got hold of it. Now the whole place is a garden, with fruit trees, regular trees, retaining walls where piled up rocks…

I agree. Better to leave Janeway and company stranded on some planet in the Delta Quadrant. That leaves open the possibilities for further storylines, movies, etc. I'll give you my ending for Season 7. They find a wormhole that looks very promising. They get real-time Starfleet subspace traffic through it. After…

Except that the Astros are now in the American League.

Somebody else's project. No thanks. CP.

But at what point in Musk's life did he make a living humiliating himself? That's a key part of Sideshow Bob's character.

Non, non, mon ami. Thees ees a moustache!

And the Grenada of the 1970s was a sort-of copy of a Mercedes-Benz. As if you couldn't still tell you were driving a Ford with a crappy inline-6 cylinder engine from the Stone Age with all kinds of emissions crap attached to it.

I seem to recall that there were around 5000 fans in attendance the day Ernie Banks hit his 500th home run. (1) The Cubs were terrible, and (2) it was a day game in the middle of the week.

I was thinking about duranium alloy. The next version will have multiphasic shields and quantum torpedoes.

Does he also have a white cat?

Were the groundskeepers on strike or something? That looks like what happens to a freshly sodded lawn if you forget to water it.