April 2008 Archives

Brother Steve asks in a comment (or maybe it was an email) if I am still following the Lakers.

Sadly, yes.  I say sadly because I am not sure that my relationship with same is entirely healthy.  I swear watching the games works me into a fiddle faddle; I start cursing and feel frustrated as hell when Kobie takes it into his head to start dribbling his ass hither and yon because, come hell or high water, he is going to put it up this time around.  I guess I just have some sort of personality conflict with Kobe.  Though on the upside—his stubbornness does lead him to some sublime moments.

Then I start cursing the refs.  And in the playoffs it is easy to curse them.  Because it’s the playoffs, they get uptight just like the players and start making stupid calls—things they have not called all season, and then they are worried the players might start hitting each other and they start calling technical fouls right and left at the drop of the hat, and then at the end of the game—if it is close—because they don’t want to be perceived as having determined a game they swallow their whistles and won’t blow them at all unless somebody is knocked flat and starts to bleed.

Very irritating.

Then I start cursing the announcers.  They say the same damn things over and over with the same clichés attached.  Thank god they are not talking as much about Mister Momentum anymore.  God, I got sick of that.  Mr. Momentum this and Mr. Momentum that.  I wanted to stick Mr. Momentum down their throats.  And very few people are calling a jump shot a “J.” Crap I hated that.

And if the Lakers start playing poorly, I start cursing Kobe, the refs, and the announcers, and it’s all pretty frustrating because sitting there cursing like that doesn’t do or change a damn thing.  Moreover I am a solitary curser.  I watch the games by myself.  Lots of people get together or go to a bar or something so they can curse along with everybody else.  Maybe as a cursing mob they feel empowered.  I just feel impotent.

Some people I know actually can’t watch the games.  They get sick with anxiety watching.  So they TiVo the games, and will watch them only after the game is over, and only if the Lakers win.  That way you can spare yourself a lot of agony.

But I don’t have a TiVo so I curse them live and in real time.

Well, I am getting one class of student papers in and I am writing responses to them, and as I do so I feel increasingly weary, full of frustration and at one point feel as if I am going to pass out.  These are things I frequently feel responding to student writing, but the passing out part is a bit new. 

I become aware that my tiny closet converted office is really horribly stuffy, so I click on the weather and see that at 1 pm West Coast Time, the temperature in Goleta (that’s where I live) is 90 degrees!

90 degrees!  What the hell.  No wonder I feel as if I am going to pass out.  I need liquids, immediately.  And I certainly don’t need to be reading student papers.  Now I feel bad and wonder if I have been excessively harsh in some of my remarks because of near heat stroke!

90 degrees!  We went through all of last summer with out it ever reaching 90 degrees in our little condo located here in Goleta, CA, maybe a mile from the usually cooling Pacific.  I don’t know what’s up with the Pacific today, because it is not cooling anything.

This odd weather business started Friday night I think.  Carol and I were going through our getting to bed ritual.  Part of that is checking the weather because we had a cooler than usual winter and wanted to make sure we were not going to catch our death of cold or something.  So Carol checks the weather and it is 77 degrees at 10 pm at night.  I cannot remember the last time it has been 77 degrees at night.  So I figured somebody had screwed up at the weather station, and started clicking around on the web and found something called underground weather which listed the temp readings of every weather station in the Goleta, Santa Barbara area and sure enough it was 77 degrees though it dropped to 74 while I was looking.  It was really odd because all around Santa Barbara, down in Ventura and up the Coast the temp was in the 50’s but in Goleta and SB it was in the 70’s.

And now—let me check—

OK, I just got back from checking at 1:54 West Coast Time and it’s:

90 degrees!

I bet my students are not writing their papers.

Please find below the list of the grandchildren of William Berner Tingle and Bertha Mines Tingle as compiled by Jenny Lind Good Bannister:

Grandchildren in birth order:

Gordon Brockman (d.)                         9-5-44             Edith and Bill

William Nicholas Tingle (Nick)               12-14-45         WB and Joan

Neal Mines Tingle, Jr. (Rusty)               12-20-47         Neal and Doris

Susan Gayle Brockman Pittman            4-8-48             Edith and Bill

Stephen James Tingle                         4-11-48          WB and Joan

Jacks Berner Tingle                             2-25-49           Neal and Doris

Wayne Keith Brockman                        7-29-49           Edith and Bill

Elizabeth Nan Good Williamson            4-7-53             Addie and Ed

David Andrew Tingle (Dave?)               5-12-53           WB and Joan

Charlotte Ann Tingle                          11-17-54          Carl and Virginia

Lucy Day Tingle Dean                          4-4-55             Neal and Doris

Tony Kevin Tingle                               4-27-57           Neal and Doris

Theresa Brockman  Hershberger          7-31-58           Edith and Bill

Jenny Lind Good Bannister                  1-8-59             Addie and Ed

Catherine Louise Corbett (Cathy)         12-18-59         Mamie and Wylie

Janet Lowry Good Walston                  5-4-60             Addie and Ed

Daniel Jeffery Tingle (Dan)                 7-15-60           WB and Joan

Helen Elizabeth Corbett (Beth)              2-1-61             Mamie and Wylie

Edward Floyd Corbett                           10-2-63           Mamie and Wylie

Richard Berner Tingle (Ricky)               5-6-64             Douglas and Becky

Sam Fuller Tingle                                10-6-64           Neal and Doris

Amy Rebecca Tingle King                      5-4-66            Douglas and Becky

Cynthia Lee Good Stockman (Cyndi)       10-14-70        Addie and Ed

Emily Viola Tingle                                  6-10-76         Douglas and Becky

My blog has a search function.  Should you wish to refer to this list in the future, type in First Cousins and this page should come up.
 

Just yesterday I became a Facebook friend of Samantha Dobbins of Greenville, SC, whom I infer from the list above is the daughter of Sam Fuller Tingle, and the granddaughter of Neal and Doris.  Is this correct? 

century, so goes the claim, “character” was cultivated; in the 1920’s however one can begin to see a change towards the cultivation of “personality.”

I may be wrong but I think that I did have some exposure to the cultivation of character as late as the 1950’s in the rural South.  After all, your average farmer tried to sell his crops, not his personality.

Character, of course, was cultivated first though the Bible, but I believe also that it was passed along in short sayings.

For example:

Waste not, Want Not.
A stitch in time, saves nine.
A penny saved is a penny earned.
Money doesn’t grow on trees.
If wishes were horses beggars would ride.
A place for everything and everything in its place.

Benjamin Franklin—a key figure in Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism—cooked up a good number of these sayings (including some of the above); additionally:

Beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship.
Buy what thou hast no need of and ere long thou shalt sell thy necessities.
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.
God helps those who help themselves.

These are fairly mundane sayings, practical in their import.  They are also doable by the individual.  Take care of the small things—not only because not doing so may lead to disaster—but because these small things are things a person can do.  And partly because they are things an individual can do, a person with character might be said to be self-activating.  He or she internalizes the rules of character and acts upon them (without reference to how these actions are perceived by others).

Driving today, while out shopping, I noticed that I turn on my turn signals, no matter what.  I am for example moving from the right lane to the left and though—I notice—there is no one in sight in either direction, I still signal I am moving into the left lane.

This might be a sign of character or perhaps of dumb habit.

I welcome other sayings.  I think I remember  Grandmother Tingle saying,  "Sweep the corners and the center will take care of itself."

Oh, Brother Steve would like to know the names of all our first cousins.  Not a small matter.  I have a partial list in my head.  If any one has a complete list, could you please post it and I will put it in an entry so all can refer to it, as occasion dictates.

Carol and I continue our walks to the bluffs, but with the change in the clock we no longer arrive at sundown.  I have taken few pictures consequently since the sky appears uniformly bright and a bit glaring.  But the winds were up today and the wind surfers were out again:

Brother Dave and Sister in Law Teresa went to SF recently:

They took the trip out to Alcatraz:

Inside:

Brother Steve raises a technical question.  In the instance of the Zombie Strippers, how does the zombie virus know a person’s occupational status so that it might infect that person?  This implies a mighty intelligent virus, and Brother Steve imagines a scene worthy of Monty Python in which Eric Idle, in drag, asks people if they are strippers before passing along the virus to them.

This, while humorous, would make I suspect for a rather slow movie. 

I suspicion then that zombies, in Zombie Strippers, become zombies by the more traditional means of first being bitten by a zombie and then becoming one.  Traditional Zombie lore is very consistent on this point; if you are bitten by a Zombie you become one, no matter what you do.    In one film, a person, bitten in the forearm, had the foresight to cut off his entire arm in an attempt to halt the spread of the zombie bug throughout his system.  But even this radical attempt at cure, as I remember it, did not work.

Being gummed by an elderly toothless Zombie does not lead to zombieism; the skin must be broken.

Zombieism when passed in this form does not require the introduction of a hyper intelligent virus capable of knowing a person’s occupation.

But lacking the virus as an explanatory system, we are left with the problem of the first or final cause.  With it, we know where zombieism came from; the government did it.  This implies, however passingly, a critique of government as run by a bunch of callous indifferent idiots who risk the lives of all citizens in pursuit of some impossible scientific solution to something or other.

One is put in mind, for example, of that giant particle accelerator—17 miles long—in Europe that is going to be fired up some day soon in an attempt to duplicate astral events immediately after the big bang.  People are concerned—and scientists don’t deny the possibility—that banging particles together as they intend to do might produce a “black hole.”  The scientists, however, argue that even if this does occur the “black hole” will not be long enough to eat up the whole earth since it will last far less than a billionth of a second.

Romero, however, in his zombie flicks offers no explanation at all.  The dead simply get up and walk.  I prefer the non-explanation.  It suggests merely that something has gone terribly wrong or that there is stuff out there that we will never understand.  In Dawn of the Dead, one character (with no particular authority—I mean he does not necessarily speak for Romero, says cryptically, “The dead walk when hell is full.”  This is suggestive but scientifically speaking entirely speculative.

Traditional zombies in black and white...and demonstrating slow, wooden movement. 

I have very much appreciated and learned from comment upon my entry “Zombie Lore.”

I had thought that Zombie Strippers might be an addition to the small sub-genre of Zombie Comedy.  But Brother Steve’s description of said movie suggests otherwise.  Some Zombie movies are of course unintentionally funny; I think here of “Zombies on a Plane,” derived directly from the equally ridiculous, “Snakes on a Plane.”  “I Married a Zombie” clearly aimed in the direction of comedy, but missed the mark completely.  The little I was able to watch verged on the grotesque and in what one might call the more intimate scenes far, far too little was reserved for the imagination.  “Mexican Zombies In Texas” might be a comedy, but I will never watch it to find out.

Being a student of the Zombie Genre, I rented Shaun of the Dead as soon as it hit the shelves.  It remains to my mind the finest example (and perhaps only) of Zombie Comedy.  Made by the duo that later made Hot Fuzz, this film shows the conventions of zombie flicks a proper respect.  Liberal in its gore, though observing the conventions of good taste (relative to good taste as defined in Zombie Movies), this film celebrates the human spirit in its capacity for limitless stupidity and, I might add, not incidentally, male bonding.

The beetle browed protagonist survives.  But even more, so does his long time drinking buddy, a drink sodden dope, given to frequent flatulence, though he has been zombizied, in the act of saving the protagonist’s life.  The final scene in which the protagonist, in a shed out back of his house, plays video games with his zombie friend is, well, heart warming in its celebration of a bond of friendship so strong that it transcends the deep antagonism of zombie for humans and vice versa.

Had I seen the film in a theatre I would have stood and applauded, so moved was I.  But as usual while viewing a film, I was lying on the floor of the condo, with the cat in my lap, and in any case did not feel like getting up.

That's Shaun on the right, with his bosum buddy to the left, not yet the zombie he will become (though he appears close to being a zombie in his natural state). 

Of George Romero’s three great zombie flicks—Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead—the last is the least good.  A bunch of normals, headed by lunk headed and sadistic military men taking care of a number of crazed scientists, live in a bunker underground.  They go out now and then and round up a few zombies and then the scientists do horrible things to the zombies to see if they can cure or control them.  By the time the normals are done with what they do, you start to wondering: who's worse—the normals or the zombies.  Sort of Romero’s be nice to a Zombie movie, or the start of a society for the prevention of cruelty to zombies.

When I saw somebody had made a remake or redo of Day of the Dead, I decided to check it out. As I had with the remake of Dawn of the Dead—not as good as the original, in feel, or intent—more of an action flick, really, but with good production values.  And Ving Rhames who is always good.

Sadly, Day of the Dead’s resemblance to the original was purely coincidental.  Were I Romero I would sue, because if you are looking for a remake of Day of the Dead—this isn’t it at all.  More a pastiche or conglomeration of any number of Zombie flicks.

Also the zombies themselves have changed since Romero’s original conception.  The original Zombies in Night were, if you recollect, rather slow, dim witted and plodding creatures.  They were not capable of high speeds and sort of stumbled along woodenly, with their arms stretched out for no clear reason.  They were not all that strong either.  They captured their victims, if that is the word, mostly by overwhelming them with sheer numbers.  Your original zombies were really pack animals.  They would surrounded a person and then sort of fall all over him or her and then eat their brains out.  They were sad creatures who took no real pleasure in what they were doing—they just had to have those brains was all.

But the remake of Day had those new, upgraded zombies that have been around since at least 28 Days.  These zombies become zombies by the spread of some sort of virus—usually created by the government for the purposes of germ warfare—and they are like zombies on steroids.  All pumped up like PCP hop heads or something.  These guys can run really fast and in some cases they seem to be abnormally strong; I mean stronger than your normal human.  Additionally, these zombies seem to enjoy what they are doing—I mean ripping limbs off of people.  It’s like these sadists have watched too much TV.

I liked the old zombies better.  As I said, they were sort of sad—as if they had lost something and were looking for it by eating brains.  These new zombies, though, well, they seem to have pretty high self-esteem and more happy than not with being a zombie—because it’s sort of high.  I don’t know if this change in zombies reflects some deeper cultural change in society’s attitude towards zombies, or maybe they just make for faster action.

Started warming up on Friday, and wham! yesterday, Saturday, we hit 90.  Out of nowhere.  Today still supposed to be hot, but according to the weather service tomorrow promises a “tremendous” (their word) temperature drop of between 30 and 40 degrees.  These sudden comings and goings of hot air are called the Santa Ana, a phenomenon responsible for the occasional strange Christmas of 80 degrees or better.

On another front, the flood of anxiety that threatened to engulf me this last week (part of a three week long anxiety weather pattern) has abated somewhat.  I am reluctant even to mention it though, it being something of a knock-on-wood issue.  Knock-on-wood!  This weather pattern can be very unstable and the stuff could fly back in my face at any second.  If I could figure out why it has abated I might be able to figure out what started it—but I can’t figure out either.

Maybe it’s something I ate.

I was lying there watching TV last week some time.  I don’t know why but when I watch TV I don’t sit in a chair or on a sofa like most people.  For years I would lie down and stretch out on the floor with my head propped on the bottom of the sofa.  A year or so back though we got one of those TV chairs, a rocker sort of thing, that sits low down towards the floor, and I use that some, though sometimes I don’t sit on it, but drape myself, lying on my side across it, using it for some upper body support.

In any case, lying there watching TV (this was last week some time) and I become aware that I am about to have a righteous panic attack, complete with being unable to breathe.  I am quite positive, lying there, that I am going to die at any second, and if I don’t do that, I am positively doomed to experience a horrible lingering death that will utterly wipe away any possibility of what people used to call the “golden years.”  I mean, the jig is up. But then this voice comes into my head that says, in effect, “Hey Nick.  If you just think about right now, this moment, as you are lying here, you can see quite clearly that you are not dead or you couldn’t be thinking this thought, and further at this moment you have no concrete evidence either medical or experiential that you are going to die a lingering painful death.”

And strangely, thinking these thoughts, it was as if I had reached out and pushed the anxiety over to the side of my consciousness.  I even remembered to stomach breathe a little while.  Funny.  Odd.  The anxiety was still there, but more distant.

Who knows maybe thinking such thoughts on future occasions will help, though I rather doubt it.  Anxiety is a protean creature and slips up on you from all angles.  Still, I do wonder if perhaps at that moment I managed to push my way just a little bit towards the Zen now that promises some released from the wheel of transience.

This memory business is started to agitate me.  I was watching TV and a commercial came on for an upcoming movie with Steve Carrell as Maxwell Smart of the show, Get Smart, produced by Mel Brooks, as I recollect.  In any case, I sat there for a good 15 minutes annoyed as hell that I could not remember the name of the guy that played Maxwell on the TV show.  Damn.

Finally, it came to me…Don Adams?  Is that right?  I refuse to look it up.  Then I got pissed that I could not remember the number of his trusty female side-kick.  That’s what she had: a number not a name.  So I am going like in my head 41?  22?  79? And after running through a bunch of numbers I hit 99.  I am pretty sure that’s her number and I think she was played by a person named Barbara Hershey…though I am not sure of that.

And like I am writing an email and all of a sudden I can’t remember the name of a colleague whose office is like two doors down from me and with whom I spoke last week.

God!  Right now, I am pretty sure I am forgetting something though I have no idea what it might be.

But for some damn reason, I have been remembering for weeks now that Joan died April 10, of last year, 2007.  So here it is April 10.  Jewish people traditionally light a candle on the anniversay, I guess it would be called, of the death of a close relative.  I have no candles and am afraid I would forget it and burn the condo down.

So I will put up a picture here of Joan from 1943. 1943?  But damn that was a long time ago.  No?

What the hell am I forgetting? 

Not much going on upstairs, but I can’t help noticing, though I try not to, that the economy seems to be…I don’t know…in some distress.  The rates of housing foreclosure have reached Great Depression proportions.  Carol saw a list of like 26 foreclosures right here in the Goleta area.

Americans are now spending more servicing debt, 13%, than they are on food, 12%, though I would expect that with continuing rises in the cost of gas, the food percent will catch up with the debt percent, though Americans may have to borrow more to be able to buy food, so that would mean an additional increase in debt servicing.

In one column again, I saw some financial expert saying that the reduction in consumer spending was endangering the whole economy, and that by not buying Americans were only bringing down further ruin upon their heads.

So it’s all our fault because we are not buying enough even though buying more would seem to mean going into deeper debt.  Oh, woe is me—torn between my selfish desire not to go into enormous debt and my patriotic duty to my country to spend as much as I possibly can with no thought of personal consequences.  Talk about self-sacrifice.  So buying an SUV I guess means one is a truly righteous and self-sacrificing American.  I find something confusing in this logic.

Two articles I have recently skimmed were titled in effect “Is the Next Big One Upon Us?”—the big one being of course the Great Depression.  If we don’t know history, I suppose we are doomed to repeat it.  But a little history also suggests that the conditions of the Great Depression simply to not apply to the current one.  In part because of the first Big One, we now have our money federally insured.  Even if the damn bank goes under, we will get our money.

So I thought till reading that of course the federal money backing the banks is not without limits.  The government sells bonds to back what’s in the banks; if they can’t sell the bonds or sell them fast enough, the government will actually print more money.  The idea of the government printing money just because it needs to print money freaks me out and puts me in mind of grainy footage of Germans after WWI pushing wheelbarrows full of the money necessary to buy one loaf of bread.

We of course can fill up our SUVs with the money necessary to buy gas to get the SUV to the bank.

Marx on money:

By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object of eminent possession. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being. It is therefore regarded as omnipotent. . . . Money is the procurer between man’s need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, also mediates the existence of other people for me. For me it is the other person.

If I were one of those Atlas Rockets and anxiety was missile fuel, I would be half way to the moon by now.  I seem to be in the middle of a flood of anxiety; it’s as if I have a black hole inside eating up my energy.

I have always been prone to the stuff.  It’s as if an alarm goes off and gets stuck.

Lately it may have been aggravated by my having terminated my 28 year relationship with my 85 year old therapist, and then calling later to see how she was doing to find out she had been in the hospital for two days because her heart was beating way, way too fast.

And last week a new quarter started and for some reason, even after 30 years of teaching, that still makes me a little anxious.

And add to that—tomorrow, April 10, is the one year anniversary of Joan’s death.

What a long year it has been.

A little while back Brother Dan was thinking about Joan.  He wrote:

Ok so into the Joan. Joan. Joan K. Tingle. JKT. She had a Kleenex in her hand, her right hand or her left hand, I can't recall which. It doesn't matter…. I can't help thinking of her and her Kleenex.

Ah, yes…the Kleenex.  She always had some of it, mashed up in a little ball, somewhere on her person.  Sometimes, if she had a sleeve, a piece would be rolled up in that, like how sailors used to store their cigarettes in those t-shirts with no pockets.  Or if she was wearing a belt, a piece would be stuck behind that.  Or lacking any other place, it would be sort of behind the opening in her blouse at her neck, maybe tucked behind a bra strap, I guess.  And Brother Steve reported that later she kept the Kleenex in her hand and that trying to hold onto that while using her walker made the whole walker business precarious going.

And it is a sign perhaps of my distracted mood that while I can remember the Kleenex a-ok.  I mean I can see it behind her belt there, I can’t for the life of me remember her ever having blown her nose.  I can’t remember either the sight or the sound of it.  And I have tried to visualize it too.  I have looked at a picture of her to remember her nose better and we have Kleenex, so I looked at that, and I tried to visualize the two together.  But the life of me I can summon up no memory of an actual nose blowing. 

If you look out the window and there’s snow on the ground, you can pretty safely assume it snowed last night, and if there is Kleenex, well there should be a nose blowing.  I can assume it happened.  But lacking a memory that’s all I can do.

 But that’s my mood lately—bits and pieces of this and that—all fragmented.

Carol too became involved.  This morning she located a house in Laurens.  So we sat in front of the computer and drooled a while over this house on Main Street in Laurens for 264K—four bedrooms and two baths.

A little landscape work still necessary.

Lots of light! 

A home this size in SB—even with recent drop in property values—would be in the millions.

With very low, compared to CA, property tax of $795 per annum.

Brother Steve has been zillowing real estate in Anderson County.  Zillowing is like googling except zillow is a premier real estate site.  One can zillow the area of Laurens, SC, for example through this link.

The difference in property values might be explained in part by per capita income:

CA ranks 13 in income at: 22,711 per head.

SC ranks 37 at 18,795 per head.

A looooog week.  First week of classes again, this time for spring quarter 2008.

I truck into the first class dragging my computer, which weighs a ton, and all my other stuff in one of those airport bags on little wheels, and I am all ready to go when I see the place where the computer should go is there alright, but it’s a big box podium that is all locked up with a computer inside it, and of course I don’t have a key that fits.  I don’t see how I can get to the place to get a key and back and not lose at least ten minutes on the first day, and the room is jammed with crashers.  I need to take roll as soon as possible and see if I can get the class set.  So I wing it without my web page up on the screen as visual aide.

The second class is 15 minutes after the first class.  It’s in another room.  This time I am able to set up the computer, but I find more crashers, some people I have kicked out of the first class, and some people who have taken me for a previous class and have gone out of their way to take another class with me.  I call roll and it looks like there may be some empty spots for the crashers, but I really can’t tell because people come ambling in 20 minutes late because they got lost or went to the wrong room.  And I know additionally that two at least will not be there this first day because of airline screw-ups, one being stuck in that mess at Heathrow.  Oh, and another has had to go in for surgery on his shoulder.

 And then the second day of classes I go in the room with the computer all locked up in a box and I have a key now already to open it up.  I stand there trying to stick it in this way and that but it won’t go and I start to think I am going crazy.  So I rush over to the place where you get the keys and find out that sure enough, they have given me the wrong key.

And the crashers are still there.  Frequently crashers just go away the second day, but these people are persistent.  A couple of them are seniors, and if they don’t get this class out of the way this quarter, they will not be graduated on time or have to stick around till summer school to take it or something.

So I just give up.  That’s unusual for me.  So when I last checked—and I don’t know yet if this is an accurate count—I have 26 students in one class and 27 and another.  Sure, that’s only 3 over my limited.  But it does mean more work and when colleagues say things like, I let 28 in my class, I say don’t do that.  Because you are getting paid for 25 and that’s all, and additionally, the National Organization that pays attention to such things says no writing class should have more that 20 in it.

 I just gave up partly because the whole week I’ve had persistent intense anxiety because I terminated with my shrink, or she terminated with me, and when I called to say hello to her later in the week, I found out she had been in the hospital for two days over the weekend because of an irregular heartbeat.  Way too fast.

I am left with the sense that this whole first week has been pretty much a mess and completely out of my control.

Brother Steve seeks info--in case you missed his comment on the previous entry:

I'm going to use Nick's blog to see if I can get some info from Carolina cousins....what's Williamstown like, in Anderson County? There's a one bedroom house for rent there for $400 a month, says it's walking distance to stores....I'm looking into getting the most out of a modest retirement income, and living in one of the most expensive places in the country doesn't really make sense....how cheap can I live back home?

For more direct contact Brother Steve may be reached at:

sjt1@localnet.com

Brother Steve and Brother Dave have been carrying on an email conversation about the cost of living in different parts of the country.  We seem to agree that CA has the highest cost of living of all 50 states.