Should I Purchase Property On Eagle’s Nest Ranch?

“Should I buy property on Eagle’s Nest Ranch in southeast Oklahoma?”

If you’re asking this question, you’re one of its few intelligent prospective land buyers. As someone who has been living in the area for over ten years, I have some thoughts for you that I hope will help you make your decision.

Whitetail Properties aren’t the conservationists they claim to be.

Eagle’s Nest Ranch is being developed and sold by the rural Real Estate company called Whitetail Properties. On their website, they claim to be conservationists. However, by the time they finish preparing their three housing developments, they will have clear-cut several hundred acres of forest from what used to be a beautiful, pristine mountainside. They have destroyed the homes of countless birds and the habitat of deer and other animal species. 

If you purchase a tract on one of their “ranches,” there will be few to no trees on your property, or separating your property from the others. The Powers That Be at Whitetail Properties are, in effect, attempting to build suburban subdivisions in the middle of a forest.

Cutting to the chase, Whitetail Properties is run by people of dubitable moral character who care much more about the money they can suck out of people than about nature and conservation. When my husband and I bought our property in 2011, we had to sign a contract agreeing, among other things, that we would not cut down more than twenty percent of the trees on our property. 

Given that the developer had divided the area into tracts that were no smaller than five acres, and that the people purchasing the properties wanted to live in the woods – which is as it should be for anyone buying property inside of a forest – most of the forest in our mountain development remains intact, despite the fact that well over half of the owners have built houses, even gardens, here. The developer who sold us the property where we live has more conservationism in his pinky finger than the entirety of the staff on Whitetail Properties, or the managers of Eagle’s Nest Ranch.

Whitetail Properties is inconsiderate of its neighbors.

If you go to the Eagle’s Nest Ranch website, one of their bragging points is the roads they have built through the mountains (again, a lot of loss of forest and wildlife). The material to build those roads did not come out of thin air. They had to get it from somewhere.

You’d like to think that they went to a pre-existing quarry and bought gravel. You’d think wrong. What they did was to destroy over five acres of forest in order to harvest the shale underneath.

But not just any five acres. The forest they eliminated, the land which they turned into a moonscape, is in the direct view of the two non-Eagle’s Nest Ranch properties which butt up against ENR. The quarry is ugly, and in the future should the current owners of those properties try to sell, the quarry will make it more difficult and possibly lower the land value.

Oh, and did I tell you that they decided it would be clever to burn the trees they were killing right next to the lower non-ENR property, and that they ended up burning to death several trees on that neighboring property? They never offered compensation to the owners of that property to cover the loss. The owners would likely have to file a lawsuit to get any.

There is also concern among the low-income residents of Clayton, the town nearest Eagle’s Nest Ranch, that their property taxes will increase considerably thanks to Whitetail Properties. If that happens, many people might be displaced.

They charge exorbitant prices.

Whitetail Properties is known for overpricing properties to excess. One tract that is one and a half acres on Eagle’s Nest Ranch is priced at over $227,000. Even given the cost of bringing in utilities, this is way overpriced. The market value of mountain land in this area right now is around $20,000 per acre.

If you purchase from Whitetail Properties, you will be ripped off. And that’s before the ridiculous post-CoVid19 cost of building a moderately-sized cabin.

Speaking of market value…

The housing bubble has arrived twelve years late!

We were living in the Dallas area when the housing bubble burst happened back in the early 2000’s, and it missed Texas – and I think Oklahoma – completely.

I’m no economist, but it seems to have arrived here now. When we bought our southeast Oklahoma property in 2011, we paid $3800 an acre for a piece of the beautiful mountains. Now, you’re lucky if you can find anyone asking for under $20,000 an acre. While housing prices in Dallas haven’t gone up by five times since 2011, they have more than doubled.

Yes, some of this can be blamed on Biden’s acceleration of inflation. But not all of it.

Let me give you a hint about southeast Oklahoma land: it ain’t worth $20,000 an acre. You can’t grow food unless you spend a lot of money amending the soil, or buying a lot of bagged potting mix – and then most of what you might try to grow is likely to die of some sort of fungus. If you want land for hunting, well, how many deer are there going to be with developers creating small towns in the mountains? Besides, with the current cost of land being what it is, you’d save money staying where you are and buying deer meat for the rest of your life!

If you purchase a tract from Eagle’s Nest Ranch – or anywhere in southeast Oklahoma, really – then decide to sell in a few years, there’s a chance that you will lose money.

“But it’s beautiful country! The view is worth it!”

Trust me. If you’re thinking about leaving the city because you’re tired of seeing a brick wall every time you look out a window, you may eventually get tired of the forest view, too. Even if you wouldn’t, you need to decide if a “view” is really worth overpaying in a market that might be about to burst. You may be better off saving your money to go on more vacations.

Especially when you realize the truth of the next issue…

Southeast Oklahoma don’t got no shopping malls or Whole Foods.

Another boasting point on the Eagle’s Nest Ranch website is that the properties are “only” two and a half hours from either the north Dallas area or Tulsa. That’s two and a half hours to get to a decent department store. Two and a half hours to a Whole Foods. An entire day, and five hours sitting in a car, just to buy groceries or a new, quality dress.

“I don’t shop at Whole Foods. I’ll just go to the local grocery store.”

All right, then you can come to my house and tell me if they have stopped selling wilting lettuce, carrots that have begun to rot in the bag, and moldy grapes.

Yes, it’s that bad.

The closest place that sells decent groceries is either in Antlers or Wilburton, both nearly an hour’s drive from Eagle’s Nest Ranch. Walmart is about the same distance in the city of Mcalester, but take it from me, if you’re used to a chain as even as humble as a Tom Thumb or Kroger, Walmart produce and frozen foods won’t cut it.

Oh, and by the way, grocery delivery services don’t come this far out, and the nearest Azure Standard pickup is over an hour away, and run by a family who will try to give you religious tracts that tell you you’re not saved unless you’re following the laws in the Old Testament book of Leviticus.

McAlester does, thank heavens, have a Lowes, but if you love Target or prefer Home Depot, they are at least an hour and a half away.

Clayton has one beauty salon, a variety store that charges up to five times the market value for the items that they sell, and a hardware store whose tools aren’t always the best quality. If you want to eat out at a halfway decent place, again, we’re talking an hour and a half drive to Paris, Texas.

Don’t care about that? You say you’ll just order everything from Amazon and eat homemade meals? Fine, that’s what we do, too. But think about this: how long do you think those shale-based roads are going to last with UPS trucks going over them every day to deliver to everyone in your treeless mountain subdivision?

Besides, UPS won’t deliver handymen or A/C servicemen to your door. And when you finally find one who will come all the way out there, you may wait a week or more to get whatever repairs you need done, done. That goes for plumbers and any other contracting service, as well.

Speaking of UPS and roads…

The county won’t melt the ice and snow for you.

We usually have a decent sleet, ice, or snowstorm every winter. The higher up you live in the mountains, the colder it is, and the longer it takes for everything to melt – several days longer than it does in the DFW metroplex.

And the county isn’t going to give the suckers residents on Eagle’s Nest Ranch special treatment. When you live in these mountains, it’s possible to be stuck on your property for several days after a winter storm.

Secluded? Not so much.

The Eagle’s Nest Ranch website promises seclusion for its new owners. However, none of the tracts are much larger than two acres. You can only get so far away from your neighbor on two acres.

We live on five acres, yet we can see two of our neighbor’s homes from our house. That’s even with all of us having obeyed another one of the developer’s agreements on the sales contract, to build a house not closer than 100 feet to any boundary, and with having thick copses of trees between us. And I’m guessing Whitetail Properties isn’t making anyone agree to any such thing. You might build your house on what you believe to be the best site on your acreage, and your new neighbor could come along and build their house right across from yours.

Also, how “secluded” is a 48-tract development, with all the tracts being small and hitting up against each other, with no trees in sight? 

Here’s another gem the Whitetail Realtors won’t tell you about, even if they know about it: There is an ammunition dump just outside of McAlester, on the south side. Two to five times a month, they blow up ammunition underground. We can not only hear the explosions, but sometimes feel the tremors which the detonation causes. Eagle’s Nest Ranch is located a little closer to that reverberation than where me and my husband live.

The locals already don’t like you.

No one around here likes Whitetail Properties. Some still aren’t happy, ten years after the fact, that people like me and my husband bought mountain land, though we’ve done our best to maintain the natural environment. I can only imagine the hostility that owners of Eagle’s Nest Ranch properties are going to face by the Clayton, Oklahoma locals. They want their small town, rural community environment to stay that way, not turn into a suburb full of wealthy people who don’t care about preserving the land.

The ball is in your court.

You now know that Whitetail Properties is not as ethical a company as they claim to be. You know that if you purchase a tract on Eagle’s Nest Ranch in southeast Oklahoma, you will be supporting the destruction of natural habitat, including the cruel death and displacement of innocent animals.

In addition, having to drive five hours round-trip to experience culture – concerts, orchestras, community theater – gets old fast.

You need to decide: will you take the moral high ground, or not? Do you really want to be a part of the systemic, ongoing bulldozing of nature and habitat, when you already live in a perfectly good house with all the amenities that you could ever want within easy reach?

Living in the country, even one with a view of mountain forests, is not nearly as romantic as the people running Whitetail Properties want you to believe it is.

Introducing My First Early Childhood Education Series!

 Are you looking for fun ways to teach your young child various different concepts? Whether you homeschool or not, if you have children under the age of nine, my little books offer fun and engaging ways to learn the basics. 

My first series, “Billy Bear Learns Adding,” teaches tricks on how to add one, two, three, four, and five. The books, which consist of rhymes, could even be used for reading practice! More importantly, however, they provide a foundation for doing mental math. I have just published that series, and the books are available in both ebook and paperback format.

Following are the book covers for each book in the series. Click each image to get to the product page on Amazon.

A couple of notes.

Note #1: Should you purchase any or all of the books, please don’t throw me under the bus in your review of it because I used clip art. It would have cost me well over $3,000 PER BOOK to have them professionally illustrated. While I believe it’s important to have story books properly illustrated – especially those that are given a higher price tag – the point of my educational books are to educate, not to entertain.

Speaking of price tags…

Note #2: I want to be clear about this because I know that a lot of people look at the prices of books these days and get sticker shock. In some cases, I do, too, and I can tell you with certainty that many self-published authors overprice their products simply because they want to make more money, not because the products are worth the price tag. So I want to explain the cost of not only the “Billy Bear” books, but those that I will publish in the future.

I have priced the ebooks as cheaply as Amazon will let me. I wanted to price them at 99 cents, but I guess because of all the graphics, that price point was too low given the cost to send pictures digitally. Therefore, they each cost $1.99.

The paperback books I have priced only 99 cents more than the lowest price Amazon allows per book, making their print price $7.99 each. Because of the lack of those kinds of books, and those that I will be creating in the future, I wanted to make them as affordable as possible for parents. Print-on-demand is much more costly than mass printing.

For each e-book purchase, I will make a whopping seventy cents. For each print book purchase, I will make eleven cents fewer than that. 

Thank you for understanding, and thanks in advance for considering them for your children’s educational needs. Follow me to stay informed about my future publications.

I DID IT!

I finally finished the novel which inspired this post, this post, and this post. I even have a title for it: 'Tis the Season for Surprises. 

Every novel in this holiday romance series has a title related to a Christmas song. 

You have to understand, since The Envelope, my very first novel, it has never, never, NEVER taken me this long to write a novel. It usually takes me six weeks or fewer.

This one? I started it back in November. I've abandoned it for weeks two or three times. I only finished it because I just couldn't ditch the series when I'd already completed half of it. I stopped telling myself the story wasn't working, and made it work.

I have but the final run-through to polish it up. 

I'll be writing the fourth and final book in this series by late summer, and will be publishing the series in October. In the meantime, I'll be working on other projects that are not romance novels, because I need a serious break from the genre. 

Was It Just a "Honeymoon Phase"?; or, My Enthusiasm for Writing Romance Is Underwhelming

UPDATE, THE VERY NEXT DAY AFTER I PUBLISHED THIS POST:

I have resumed working on the romance novel in question. The fact is, I don't hate either reading or writing romance. Usually. But my brain goes in cycles. And because I'm autistic and think at every moment that the way things are now is the way they'll also be, well... the result is thoughts as you are about to read.

There is more to it than that, which I will write about later. For now, suffice to say that the following article is a good illustration of a brain which is commonly labeled with the insufficient and not quite accurate label of ADHD. A good illustration of how the neurodivergent brain can seriously mess with its owners.

***********

 Ever since I was little, I've loved writing stories. In grade school, where my peers would write a paragraph to fulfill a story assignment, I would write multiple pages. Even as young as third grade. If the mainstream culture bearing down on me had encouraged it rather than cautioned against it, I likely would have gone to school for either a music degree or whatever degree would have taught me how to write quality fiction.

As a sophomore in college, I wrote what I know now was a terrible novella. I wrote a few short stories, as well. When I got out of college, I even shopped a couple of them around.

No takers.

But, no matter, because by then, I’d convinced myself that I wanted a career as an elementary school teacher, and lasered in on achieving that goal.

I was twenty-nine years old before I began writing fiction again. I began with short stories for children’s magazines. After receiving multiple rejections, I decided to try my hand at writing a novel. After all, that was where the real money was. And by that time, I was desperate to get out of the educational system, having realized several years prior that being a classroom teacher wasn’t, and never could be, what I’d imagined it was when I first set out to get my degree.

Other than a fake literary agent who scammed me out of $200, I had no takers for my first grown-up novel, either. However, in 2004 I attended a writer’s conference where an editor of a small Christian publishing house (which no longer exists) encouraged me. Though they couldn’t publish it because they only published two novels per year, he told me that “someone should publish it.”

Let’s cut to the chase, shall we?

Though by my early thirties, I was dreaming of living in the country, living a quiet life where I’d spend my days writing novels and communing with nature, my sole motive for getting published at that time was to make more money than I did at my teaching job and thus be able to quit my job.

In other words, though I loved to write, I was writing novels because I wanted to make money, and a lot of it.

A decade after that writer’s conference, having built up a large enough nest egg to do so, my husband quit his job (I’d quit mine when I got pregnant) after we’d spent some time organizing our finances and choosing an amount we believed would finance a frugal lifestyle. But those first years living on five wooded acres, I didn’t trust God to provide, was anxious about what might happen to our investments, so when I learned about self-publishing on Amazon, I returned to writing novels. Romance novels, because those were the kind that sold the best.

In other words, I wrote with the sole motivation of making money.

Are you getting the picture here?

But focus on money wasn’t the half of it.

It might have been that God had called me to write romance novels, but my motivations had gotten skewed. Or it might have been that I had divine permission to write anything within the bounds of His teachings, as long as I was using the writing talent He’d given me.

But if either of those have been true, I'm not sure they're true now. Why?

I haven't enjoyed writing romance in a long time. During the past few years, there have been characters that I fell in love with, and certain scenes that I had fun writing, but overall, since 2018 or 2019, writing romance stories has felt like drudgery. I've also had an increasingly harder time finding romance novels that I truly enjoy reading. Around the time of the pandemic, I began to prefer upmarket, non-romance women’s fiction stories, or intriguing or inspiring non-fiction. By then, I had a bunch of non-romance novel ideas swirling around in my head, as well. The reason I didn’t write them?

Self-published authors struggle to make money unless they write in one of the top genres, romance being at the pinnacle.

Ah, and here we arrive at another big issue: the tug to write a novel for traditional publishing has been slowly growing stronger. Though I've handed the desire over to the Lord several times, it keeps creeping back into my soul, poking at me a little harder every time.

And, quite frankly, I’ve been tired of the self-publishing game for several years. Probably since around 2018. Yet, I've kept pushing myself. I've had no joy in my days because I “had” to finish whatever novel I've been working on within six weeks of starting it.

And most of the time, that novel has been a romance. Which, at the moment, I don't even want to read.

Stronger than the desire to find a trad publisher has been the desire to return to God’s ultimate vocation on my life: as a teacher and encourager. In my head I've been hearing more and more descriptions of nature, stories of my experiences, explanations of how ABC helped problem XYZ.

I've been hearing myself write non-fiction. Essays. Spiritual growth books. And so on.

What it all comes down to.

God has called me to be a teacher and a writer, no question. But, a romance author? And, self-publishing? At the moment, I can't see myself writing romance anytime in the near future. I could be wrong. I've been wrong in making similar statements in the past, but I've never struggled with a novel before as I have with the last romance I tried to write. 

As far as self-publishing, well, I think I gave up on querying literary agents too soon twenty years ago. If nothing else, God has allowed me to torture myself writing romance in order to hone my craft, and that now, I’m skilled enough to create work that has a good chance of getting the attention of a quality literary agent.

I’m not saying I’ll never write another romance. And I could be wrong about the trad publishing thing. But at this stage in my life, romance novels – reading or writing them – do nothing to enrich my life at any level.

It’s past time that I take a few steps of faith and write the kind of books that God wants me to write, not the kind that I think will make the most money.

Which, by the way, have never netted me more than $3,000 a year. That was one time, and that's including all thirty of them.

In case you think it’s easy to make money as a self-published author.

Why I’m DONE Posting About Works In Progress

 At least four times in the past (mostly on the paid blog I used to have), I have made dire announcements regarding my writing career; namely, that I was no longer going to write novels. In a recent post, I did the opposite, stating that I was back to writing a romance novel that I had abandoned for several months. 

However, not many days after I published that post, working on that story began to feel like having a root canal, my fingernails being removed one at a time by a pliers, and a thousand paper cuts on my head,* all at the same time.

I gave myself the usual pep talks. Told myself that it was just the weather, or my neurodivergent brain acting up. All I needed was to put on my “big girl panties,” push the negativity aside, and I’d get it done.

Yesterday, after having completed around three-fifths of the novel, I abandoned it again.

Maybe – chances are high – for good this time.

I will explain why in my next post.

But… do you get why me making announcements regarding unfinished projects, or about my decisions around my writing in general, is a bad idea?

I can’t be consistent.

Before last year, when I discovered my brain was neurodivergent, I blamed my inconsistency on perimenopause, then menopause. Basically, hormonal imbalance.

As I suggest in this post, it hasn’t been the fault of my hormones at all. It’s my brain’s fault. At some point, I get bored with almost any project I start, and need to change direction for a while before regaining enthusiasm for the thing I dropped. If I ever regain it. 

Also, being Highly Sensitive, I struggle with weather changes (which are much more frequent in the South than up North) and the gravitational pull of the full and new moons. Both mess with my brain chemistry and energy levels.

These factors come down to me having to:

**1. Work when I’m sleepy much of the time, and

**2. Fight feelings of worthlessness and indifference.

Those times when I declared to the world that “I’m never going to write another novel!” have been days when I gave up fighting and gave in to the “truth” that I’m a terrible writer and my novels suck and they’re not making a difference in anyone’s life, anyway.

Only to have the sun to come out or the moon to stop messing with my head, a day or two after my online bemoaning, and upon which I returned with enthusiasm to writing novels.

Sometimes, it’s a matter of being unable to focus on a huge ongoing project (getting the garden started in the spring, redecorating my home) and a story at the same time.

The future of this blog.

I’m going to write mostly evergreen content on this blog. If it’s about something personal, it’ll be about something that is done and over with and how it’s helped me grow. Not about issues I’m dealing with at the moment.

And, I will post whenever I have completed and already published a new work.

You can also follow me on Instagram and/or Goodreads to stay up-to-date with my publications.

Ciao, au revoir, and hasta la vista. J

*I got this last line from an old Weird Al Yankovic song. Don’t ask me which one.

Why I Can't Finish Certain Christian Novels

There are two main reasons I don’t finish a Christian novel: one, it’s too preachy (which also generally leads to a boring story); two, it contains bad theology. The latest one I ditched had both problems going on, but I dropped it primarily for number two.

These extremes will kill your relationship with God.

The bad theology in the novel in question involves one of the two extremes that come out of the faith-works doctrine. The first of the extremes is the belief that salvation is all you need in your life. As long as you have that and do your best to obey the Golden Rule, you’re golden.

On the opposite end of the spectrum comes from the apostle James’ admonition that “faith without works is dead.” Rather than taking that scripture on a moment-by-moment basis, people who take it to the extreme believe that good Christians should be constantly working for God. They believe what one of the characters in the aforementioned novel said: “God loves eager workers. It proves your faith.”

Both extremes are dangerous. Let’s look at them, one at a time.

Faith in Yeshua is enough.

A growing number of people who claim to be Christians believe that all they have to do is have faith that Yeshua is the Son of God and that He died for their sins… and then sit around and wait for God to make them holy.

I’m not talking about the issue the apostle Paul brings up in Romans (“Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?” [6:1]). Rather, I’m talking about the doctrine that teaches that until and unless God makes a change, we are free to act as our nature provokes us to act. Got a cussing problem? Say the “F” word all day long; it’s okay. God’s working on something else in you, and if He wants you to stop saying that word, He’ll do a miracle that will obliterate it from your vocabulary.

Are you in the habit of gossiping? It might take until you’re eighty for God to do something about it, but just hang on! One day, you’ll no longer be tempted to stick your nose into other people’s business, and then you can praise God for the change He’s done in you!

In other words, followers of this doctrine ignore Paul’s admonition to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling [Philippians 2:12].”

The harder you work, the more God will like you.

I’m not even sure I need to expound on this extreme. More than one Christian denomination is founded on the works-make-holy principle. The leaders in those organizations are experienced travel agents, specializing in guilt trips.*

Some denominations require penance, or something similar, for the sins you admit to. Others simply tell you service after service that you’re not doing enough, praying enough, reading the Bible enough. They hold missionaries and others who have completely left the modern life in order to serve and/or spread the Gospel as ideal Christians. As the author of the novel in question did, they pick out verses such as Yeshua’s story about the widow’s two mites and tell you that if you don’t give away everything you have today, God will see you as less-than.

Televangelists throughout the decades have used this kind of manipulation to make enough money to own mansions, yachts, and summer homes in Paris.

Though I believe that we are to stretch our faith – and, yes, bank account – to grow as servants as our Lord, I cannot latch onto the works mentality as being a divinely-given doctrine. Why? Well, where’s the point at which you’ve done enough to please God?

Answer: There is none.

In other words, you can never do enough. It’s an eternal treadmill. As soon as you’ve sold all your possessions and given to the poor, then you must live on the streets and preach the Gospel to your fellow homeless. If you develop a disease, you must offer it up to the Lord to prove that you are as spiritually and emotionally strong as the apostle Paul.

Or you go from church to church, begging for funds to build an orphanage in a Third-World country. And when you’ve done that, you must take on additional jobs so that you can build a school, as well. Once the school is built, you take on the administration of the institution, at the same time scheduling talks with world leaders about the importance of godly homes for all children.

Understand, I am not criticizing those who have answered a bona fide call to build an orphanage or to work as a missionary. I am criticizing those who condemn people whom God has not called to live their lives in such a way, accusing them as being lazy, greedy, selfish. Accusing them as not being a “real” Christian.

The middle ground.

Most of us could probably do a little more, try a little harder, to show love to our neighbor. But does God require it in order to accept us? No.

How about this? Learn to walk moment by moment with the Lord, and let Him lead you into the good works He has for you to do. During those in-between times, do your duty to the best of your ability. Challenge yourself to go a little bit above and beyond. At least sometimes.

Remember most of all that there is nothing holy about guilt.

*I borrowed this phrasology from Dave Ramsey.

My New Best Friend; AKA, When You Get Tired of Being a Green Extremist

Green extremists, take note! What follows is an email I just sent to a friend. Before you read it, you need a little background about my home.

It does not have plumbing. 

No pipes, no tap water, no flush toilet, no (GULP!) shower.

No automatic washing machine.

Yeah, I know. But it sounded like a good idea at the time, ten years ago when I was all idealist about saving the planet. And saving money on our energy bills.

Then there was my husband, who was, like I, not happy with all the plumbing bills our suburban house had incurred during our seven years there. Also, knowing that it would be tantamount to pulling teeth to get a repair person out to where we live, he didn't want to take any risks.

We've adapted well to our semi-primitive lifestyle, except for one thing.

The laundry. Which the following copy of the email elucidates. Enjoy.

***** 

I wisheth to introduce to thou my new best friend.

His name be Mr. Spin Dryer. Before he came into my life, I despised mornings, for the washing of laundry was a daily chore. Why didst I torture myself so, you asketh? Alas, I had to wring everything by hand, and, not wanting to incur Carpal Tunnel Syndrome or other injuries to my hands, I therefore had resigned myself to doing a small load of laundry every day. 

Yea, by "small" I thus includeth large items, such as sheets and sweat pants.

Then, one day, I could bear the torture no more. Yearning to return to the love of mornings which I had abandoned in my youth, and knowing that my hands were slowly turning toward the sunset of their years, I desired to beset a change to the horrendous morning routine.

And so, I acquired Mr. Spin Dryer, who had, most ironically, been awaiting a new home and companion. Now, I washeth the laundry a mere three days per week, as sane people are wont to do, and nevermore shall it be required of my poor and weary hands to wring sheets and sweat pants until they are dry. For lo! Mr. Spin Dryer squeezeth out much more water than my hands ever could, drastically reducing the line-drying time of every item.

Rejoiceth with me, my dear reader, on this happy change of circumstance which God hath so wonderfully wrought.