(no subject)

[which_chick]

I spent a lot of the day today over at the Chambersburg courthouse, looking at deeds.



When I got home from work, I finished up the grey alpaca (it's a good grey) and made the executive decision to spin up the white alpaca so that I could ply it with the grey alpaca to make a tweedy yarn for the insides of the mittens because I don't want to have to divide the bobbin in half in order to ply up the grey as just grey plus also I don't know that there's enough just grey to do the innards of the mittens. Plying it with the white will double the amount of yarn available to me. Also, I want to try spinning the white uncarded, from the tips, to see if more crud drops out that way. There is some crud in the alpaca fur (this is in spite of the alpaca lady's statement that alpacas are "cleaner than sheep" -- I think she was referring to lanolin. The lack o' lanolin means alpacas are also more staticky than sheep. Honestly, with a couple of balloons and a few minutes of effort, you could stick alpacas to each other, the backs of people's shirts, and like that. Amuse your friends!) and it annoys me no end to have to stop spinning and pick out bits of crud. For nonspinners in the audience (Why are all ya'll an audience when you aren't listening? You're fucking reading. You should be a lexience or something. Srsly, this language it sux0rs.), bits of crud in the fur make for LUMPS in the yarn. Lumps in the yarn are just... no. I can't be having with that.

Right now, I'm going to have to start on the squash soup fixin. Once it's done, I'll bag it (go ziplocks!) and put it in the fridge to chill. It'll travel to Philly (three hours of driving) in the cooler, with ice, so that it does not get all yuck. On site, I will put it into the crock pot to keep it warm for the function. That'll work, I think.

Comments

[ladyivy.livejournal.com]

Of course this begs the question of *why* were you looking at deeds?

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

Once upon a time, we (and that's the "one of the companies that belongs to the family" we) used to own land on top of a mountain. (This is not the mountain where I live.)

Now, when we bought the land, it was in a large piece with some hunks out of the middle missing, like a slice of swiss cheese. We bought the large piece quite a while ago and then proceeded, over the course of time, to sell off small pieces of what we owned until it was (mostly) all gone, securing a tidy profit in the process. We may have retained title to one small section of this property to settle future disputes that might arise due to the swiss cheese nature of the original parcel.

We don't know if we still own any of the parcel or not because the taxes for that, if we still own it, are bundled with the taxes on a (much larger, has a building on it) piece of property from the same damn parcel that is under a contract of sale so we still have title to the thing. The tax bill comes to us, we send it to the guy who is buying the bigger piece and he pays it. Taxes on a small (less than an acre) piece of mountain land without buildings or septic are nominal so this is not a huge burden for the guy to bear.

Now, here lately, we've gotten a (handwritten, all capital letters) missive from a Mr. Someone stating that he believes he is the true and rightful owner of some of the pieces of land on the top of the mountain. These pieces, he is claiming, we didn't own and allegedly wrongly sold them to people who have since sold them again. He has not yet bothered to share with us which pieces he thinks he owns by record book and page where their deeds are recorded because that might actually allow us to research his claims. Instead, he took special care to mention in his letter that he would be very happy to offer us a quit claim on the disputed areas and "settle" for the alleged retained tracts mentioned above. Damn kind of him, innit?

So, we trotted over to the courthouse and did a little research. Mr. Someone, judging from the number of transfers in his name, appears to make a living out of buying up useless pieces of mountain real estate at tax sale (for like $250 per parcel) and reselling them to clueless urban residents at $5000 per parcel. It's good work if you can get it, I suppose.

Anyway. Of the twenty or so deeds in the appropriate township that show Mr. Someone as the grantee, the titles that we believe Mr. Someone is claiming as "disputed" in his letter (since he wouldn't tell us, this is our best guess) derive from the original 1915 Swiss Cheese selling-off, which apparently was a somewhat shady affair involving a free Ox Roast and concomitant Property Sale for a development (that never got built) on the top of the aforementioned mountain. See, there was gonna be a railroad (never got built) that would go to the top of the mountain. The people selling off the top of the mountain, they also were the people who were gonna build the railroad. They were planning this development (never got built) on the top of the mountain for to meet the railroad (never got built). At the Ox Roast and Property Sale, which I did not attend due to it being in 1915, there was PROBABLY a lot of impressive talk about how the railroad (nonexistant) would make all that mountain land which is worthless and on solid freaking rock (we once tried to drill a well there, unsuccessfully) worth lots o' money so that it would be a sensible thing buy one of the 25' wide lots (the original drawing, which is "not to scale", makes the place look like a fucking rowhouse community in Baltimore or something) and settle in for some serious down-home mountaintop prosperity with good neighbors and wide, curving streets (that, yo, never got built). I bet they served beer at the Ox Roast, too, because some people fell for this song and dance.

Anyway. That's why we were at the courthouse.