April 2026 Island Trip – Day 5

I slowed way down today. Yeah, still attended to things, but no mowers involved. I’m at a point where I could take the shop vac out of Stella along with a 32-gallon trash bag of carpet. While it still feels like red neck/white trash living, it’s much nicer to have things cleared up a bit. This is partially in service of making dump runs tomorrow. The tenant and I are going to do a run with their stuff and then mine. I have our stuff staged in the upper barn. And no, we can’t do it all at once the way our transfer station works… There’s be zero way to figure out which one of us owed what for the trash, so driving another 6-mile round trip is the easiest way we can think of to do this! I know some would ask why I’m helping them get their box collection and garbage to the dump… Mostly because to do so helps mitigate a fire hazard and potential rodent problem. My lease explicitly states ‘The tenant is responsible for their trash management…’ It is easier and kinder to answer, ‘Sure we can make a dump run’ (my truck verses their small Honda) than to let things get out of control and potentially end up needed to evict people because they’re struggling in this one area.

In other interesting tenant news, the propane company called me to ask if they still lived here. Evidently they hadn’t paid the last three invoices. I walked down the house to let her know about the call. Evidently the rent and the propane are the only two bills they have that are not on auto-pay, so she forgets to pay the propane! They call her, and she pays them every other month 😳. This time it slipped to three months. I’m dumbfounded. She called them and paid it right away, but this means she/they are ignoring their e/mail, or as she said, not remembering one of the two monthly bills they have to handle manually.

I walked down the west drive and installed a sign that says, “Exit Only Do Not Enter.” Given the 10K I’m about to fork out to rehab this stretch of the drive, I’m going to get militant about people entering the property from the east and exiting to the west. The problem is when you speed up a steep gravel road, it gets torn up, and here we are. I’ve gotten three bids and they are all landing in the same 10K area. I had to take a required distribution out of the IRA I inherited from my mom… About 10K, so it seems fitting that it’s going to get poured back into the property.

I cooked dinner over at my neighbor to the east’s this evening. A friend of hers, who I’ve met a number of times was there too. We had a really nice time. On my walk back, I could hear Mr. Tenant practicing one of his brass horns (he plays many different brass instruments ~ very talented). It made me smile.