Column for Marmon Newsletter

I REALLY am looking forward to the 26th Mighty Marmon Muster California. If you have never been to a Mighty Marmon Muster before, you should consider coming to this one. It is being held in a beautiful area of the country. I have not been there before, but every Muster that I have attended so far has been somewhere new for me, except for the one that Norby G, Dick S, and I hosted in New Hampshire.

When a Mighty Marmon Muster is held west of the Rockies, we really do not expect a lot of Marmons to be there. Most of the "workin' folk" in the club cannot take enough time off from work to transport their "old stuff" out west and back again and still be considered "productive" at work. The retired folks may have more time, but maybe not as much money or energy. So there probably will not be a large fleet of Marmons at the Muster this year (but I heard that B. Jaquery and I. Lirpa are planning to make a full size cardboard Big-8 to glue to the sides of a rental car, and will place a burning smudge pot in the trunk of rental so they can add the proper "ambiance" to our daily tours).

The members with no Muster experience may ask: "Why have a Mighty Marmon Muster without the cars?" Anybody that has gone to more than one would answer: "The people!"

Marmoneers are a great bunch. Snobbishness is almost unheard of, nobody thinks that any one else's Marmon is "better" than any other, ALL Marmons are great, even the ones that haven't run in a generation or two (but they probably will soon). Some (or all) Marmoneers also own other makes of cars (modern or otherwise) and nothing is held against them because of it, "your 2007 Bugatti is a nice car, but just look at that Marmon". We have members that haven't owned a Marmon before, and maybe some that have never even touched one.

Before my first Mighty Marmon Muster I had never been in ANY moving antique car before.

I drove my Grandfather's Marmon at the end of that Muster but that is a bit of Marmon Club History that morphed into a Marmon Myth.

Come to meet some wonderful people, see things you haven't seen before, have fun, experience the famous "Marmon Hospitality Suite^TM" and really see things you haven't seen before... (just kidding).

We have a very wide variety of personalities, backgrounds, income levels, and most importantly: accents! There are a LOT of different accents to be experienced there.

An interesting linguistic note: If you stand in the hallway outside of the "Hospitality Suite" you will hear a cacophony of different accents, but all of the laughing is done without any accent at all. Marmoneers seem to laugh with some mysterious universal non-accented laugh, producing a lot of it at high volumes. Personally I suspect that all of the Marmoneers have adopted the same laugh that I have always used, simply because it is so effective. It's okay with me, I am not planning to charge royalties, but when you hear somebody laugh without an accent, that's mine, I invented it. You heard it hear first!

To recap: Great people, great fun, Hospitality Suite^TM, universal laughs, food, tours, see things you haven't seen before, talk to people about things you haven't talked about before (it's called learning), you WILL sleep well at the end of each day. Don't be shy, we don't have cliques, you will be welcomed, you will not feel like the "new ones". Trust me. You will always remember it as the most fun that you had in the entire last part of June 2007. Really. See you there.

A note to my fellow Marmoneers: Beth and I will be traveling around North America until we figure out what we want to do when we grow up. If anyone would like to give us a tour of their hometown, we would love to visit. Don't be afraid, we provide our own accommodations. There will be a blog on the internet so you can see where we are and leave us a note: http://warrenandbeth.com

California or Bust,

Warren W

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tom schroeder said...
dear warren and beth, you surely are traveling to or through indiana. we would love to have you. you can park your van and stay inside, on the lake with plenty of things to do in the barn, and beth can relax with becky and joann.take a ride in one of the marmons and work on a marmon project or two . cant wait to hear from you

tom
April 18, 2007 11:43 PM

Pictures of the house that was

 
 
 
 

2nd Gear, feel the acceleration...

OK it is Saturday, Beth is painting somewhere in the house, I am taking the tank off the toilet so that I can finish spackling the walls in the downstairs bathroom so we will be able to paint in there when we get ANOTHER phone call. It's Sharon our Realtor. "Could she squeeze in another showing BEFORE the 4:00 showing this afternoon?" I look around at the disaster and think "what can we lose? At least we can get some useful feedback from these pre-customers so we will know what to fix before it officially goes on the market". They would come at 3:30.

By 2:30 I had packed all of my paper piles from around the computer and stashed everything in the shed.
Beth bought some flowers and washed the kitchen floor that is going to be refinished next Wednesday, I washed the fancy-dandy shower upstairs.

Sharon arrived with more flowers and coffee. We grabbed the dog and left.

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We got a call from Sharon at 4:10 that everyone had left. We went home and she explained that the first showing went well and they were just leaving when the second showing arrived. The second realtor was still chatting with Sharon when the customer popped back in the kitchen and said "let's go, we have to write up an offer" and they left.

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While we were waiting for the offer (from the second showing) to come in, the realtor for the first showing called and said that she was going to send in an offer and wanted to know the fax number.

We had two offers before 5:00. Both of them offered more than our asking price.

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Now it was time for the regrets to settle in. We OBVIOUSLY had priced it too low.
That is what you are supposed to think when anything sells fast.
We went across the street to Janis & John's to get some advice.
We will have to sleep on it.

ww

Put it in 1st, and let the clutch out slowleeeeeee...

We checked out a few Real Estate agents to see what our options are.
Long story short, we found an agent that is a real hustler.
Her name is Sharon and she arrived for her second visit with a complete marketing plan, this tomorrow, that the next day, open houses next week, ice cream socials, an indoor yard sale ("estate sale"), and other ideas that bowled over the Procrastinators Supremo. My wife and I looked at each other, I pushed Beth's jaw closed, and we decided to bite the bullet and let it happen.

Sharon came back the next day and took pictures, we signed the contracts and let her loose. We went out for chinese food with our pals Kathy & Stu and told them about our plan. Then we drank champagne. They don't want us to go but they have heard about that sanity stuff that we all hear so much about, so they gave us their blessing to try to chase it down.

Our house officially went on the market at about noon today. I couldn't find it online locally, but I DID find it at a site for a real estate agent about 40 miles from here.
By 4:00 this afternoon Sharon (our agent) called to see if we would be willing to show the house to someone with an agent in Hillsborough on Saturday, which just happens to be tomorrow. We were planning to spend the weekend frantically redoing the entire downstairs bathroom so that it looks pretty for the "Virtual Tour" camera on Tuesday, spackle, paint, and other quick stuff. The house is a mess, my stuff is all over the place, the place is trashed, Beth and I have sucumbed to some type of stomach bug, and there is a major problem at the auto club that I am a president of....

I said sure, no problem. Bring 'em over.

One house to go... ("pick-it-up-fifteen-twenty-minutes"),

This link doesn't work right now, but maybe tomorrow when the local MLS server gets updated. Obviously they don't use one big server for everybody or we ALL would have gotten the listing at the same time. This link is not to OUR Realtor's site, but to one of Century 21's local competitors that has a MUCH better site designer (with faster database updates too).

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This procrastination stuff isn't that hard to beat as long as someone else is doing all the work for you.
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I feel really crappy right now, so I will fill in the details later.
I know that nobody is reading this yet (because nobody knows about it except me), but I have to get in the habit of posting often and oftener.

Warren

The Adventure

The Idea...

We had decided that we were going to sell our house (because of reasons we will explain later), and we were thinking of moving to Asheville NC.
Unfortunately Asheville is in the middle of a population boom, so the housing prices are stupid right now. We think that we should wait a bit to see how well they handle their growing pains.

So where to go?

We had no idea...
and then we had an idea...

We would have an Adventure! We are going to put our house in Antrim NH on the market in April. It will sell almost immediately (you have to think positive), we will climb into our car and start driving.

Cool plan, huh?

Being homeless isn't that difficult if you have money. Not that we have a lot of money, but we do have some that was planned for Derek's college expenses, and so we are going to travel around to see where we want to live.
This Adventure could take weeks, months, years, decades, or any combination thereof. We are very excited. We haven't been excited about anything for quite some time. It's a wonderful opportunity for Beth and I to find our spark for life again. We will enjoy some time off while our health is good, and we figure there is really nothing to lose.

It will be fun. This blog is so that our friends can keep track of us, and we will try to enter posts whenever we can. We will include pictures so that you can see a slightly blurry version of what we are seeing.
There are also some people out there that just read other people's blogs for fun and profit. Well if you are one of those people that have never met us, you could help by recommending restaurants, cities, travel hints, places to stay, and anything else you can think of. Your help will REALLY be appreciated. Sometimes my entries will be rants, but for the most part I will be polite and I will attempt to be concise... which is a real battle because my fingers just seem to jump around at high speed without any real control or throttling and next thing you know there are a preponderance of words... a lot of words.... sorry.

I will now set up my DNS jumps so that WarrenAndBeth.com and BethAndWarren.com will jump directly to this blog. It would be WAY too difficult to remember which way to spell it, so both will work.

Thanks for reading this,

Warren (and Beth by proxy)