Hugh's Worthless Blog

Yesterday, St. Louis county announced they had updated their online property database and that the overall property values for the county is down 9% from 2008 to 2009. So, of course, I had to check it out and see what the new numbers looked like. Well, we currently still own two homes in St Louis county, and both of our homes saw their values go up from 2008 to 2009! For our new house that was understandable since we upgraded it substantially since we first purchased it in 2008 with a major kitchen renovation which the county inspected (so they knew all about it.) We saw the value on that house increase almost 11%. However, the house we are in the middle of selling has not been substantially improved for several years (when we added a sunroom the county also already knew about) and it went up by 5%. So why did this happen? I thought with prices supposedly going down it should have gone down or at least stayed about the same. But then I realized the 9% number is for the county a

My wife recently had a birthday, and she told us what she really wanted. No, not jewelry, or flowers or anything like that -- she wanted the same tool our neighbor at our new house had for picking up sweet gum balls. It is a strange contraption that looks like a rotating whisk at the end of a pole, somewhat like you would see at a bingo game. So then we had to find one! The local Lowes, Home Depot or other hardware stores did not seem to carry them so I looked online (Thanks again, Google !). What I found was it is a "Nut Wizard" and it is sold several places, including online and locally by some fellow named Dick Level who grabbed the domain name thenutwizard.com . Since I realized the guy lived locally in the St. Louis area, I thought I would call him just to see if he knew where I could buy one nearby. He just told me to give him my credit card information and he would ship one out. Well, since I was the one who called him, and he is easily tracked by his phone and website