Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

Yesterday, I made a roughly 600 km / 375 mile trip to visit my father, who I haven't seen for some years.

( The Trip Outbound )

I pulled up at my father's house just after Noon. I masked up before coming inside. Neither Dad or his wife (my stepmother) said anything, but I volunteered right away that because of my father's health and because I have no idea who I might have encountered lately, I wanted to protect him. To my massive relief, they responded enthusiastically about that. They still go out masked to stay protected.

We visited for around four hours, and could have gone longer, but Dad was starting to look tired, and I had a long way still to go, so I left around 4 PM. I decided to drive out of the way to go visit my childhood home in Challenge. Those of you who have followed my journal for a while know that I inherited that house from my grandfather through my mother, and that the property had fallen into severe disrepair, but that I sold it to someone who initially was only interested in salvaging lumber from an outbuilding. What I found was surprising, but I think it's good news.

( Taking the Long Way Home )

Then it was back down the La Porte/Willow Glen/Marysville Roads to CA-20 and home via Grass Valley/Nevada City. I was rained on off any on during the drive, but nothing serious. I did not take any more photos, which is perhaps too bad because there were some interesting views along the way. I made a lot of bathroom breaks, as I've had to do a lot these days, and picked up a take-out burger on the edge of Reno that I ate on the way home.

Most of the snow that engulfed the Donner Summit rest areas is gone, although there's still plenty of snow nearby. To my annoyance, both rest areas were closed, and furthermore, the scenic overlook on CA-20 that used to have pit toilets no longer has them. Because I anticipate making this trip a few more times, I explored a couple of the campgrounds, and found at least one where it looks like I could park at a trail head and use the toilets there.

CA-20 is also under an immense reconstruction project that appears to be meaning to, as the Dukes of Hazzard TV show theme song says, "straightening the curves; flattening the hills." I'm glad I didn't come through on a weekday when they are working.

Lisa did not come with me on this trip. We had contemplated spending the night in Oroville and then driving home through the Feather River Canyon. However, not only was Lisa not up to the trip, but CA-70 is apparently closed all summer except for a few windows to clear landslides from this past winter.

I'm glad I made this trip, and hope to be less of a stranger and visit my father more often. I was very tired when I got home, but I'd had so many caffeinated drinks to keep me moving during the day that it took a couple of hours to come down sufficiently to sleep. Surprisingly, I only slept for six hours overnight, plus a two hour nap late in the morning. Maybe I'll be able to get back on schedule for tomorrow.

This is the first of two trips I have scheduled over the mountains in two weeks. I'll have more to say about the second trip later this coming week.

Some of you may recall my writing about my grandparents' house in my home town of Challenge, California. I consider this my childhood home. My grandparents moved to Sutter years later, but retained ownership of the house, which went through a series of renters who were... not kind to the place. Here's a Google Street View from 2012 that showed what it looked like at the time.

As I recall, this was taken at a time when my nephew was trying to clean the place up, an effort that fell through and the place was left to rot.

I inherited the property through my mother, who when my grandfather died, told me she did not want it, and gave it to me. (It took a bunch of legal fees to make that happen.) I did not really want the place either. At one point I thought I'd found a buyer, and because we were working on getting clear title, I rented the property to the prospective buyer at peppercorn rent as they tried working on repairing the deteriorating property. About the time I actually got clear title, they had to pull out of the sale because the money they'd been saving for the down payment had to go to pay catastrophic medical bills.

( It Got Worse )

I'd been hoping to do something about the junked cars at least this spring, but the lockdown came and shut down everything. As things started to open slightly, I was contacted by someone who was interested in salvaging the lumber in the old garage. (How that building, which was leaning when I was a child, was still standing, I'll never know.) He offered to deal with removing the trash from the property and to deal with getting the junked cars removed in return to the right to tear down and salvage the garage. I agreed to that, but I also asked if he might be interested in the buying the property outright. After a bit of back-and-forth, he made an offer for about 40% of what the probate referee (part of the title clearance, not the value for property tax purposes) assessed the property to be worth. I agreed, as long as he bought it "as is" and paid all of the closing/title costs. As he is a semi-retired property developer, that was relatively easy for him. He's also purchased several other lots in that area.

We agreed to a bill of sale pending title reporting and clearance, which came through a few days ago. He proposed that we meet in Truckee, roughly halfway between where he lives down toward Grass Valley and where I live in Fernley. So I took a half-day off work yesterday and Lisa and I drove to Truckee. (We remembered our face masks.)

We met at an office-services shop in a shopping center at which Lisa and I have stopped many times before. Lisa and I had to have several documents signed and notarized, which is why we went to that shopping center. It was also convenient both to his bank and to mine. As a "just in case," Lisa signed a quit-claim to any title she might have had in community property, and I signed the other necessary documents, and we had them all notarized. I sort of wish I'd known that he didn't have to have anything notarized, because otherwise I would have had us go get the documents notarized here in Fernley, as Nevada's fees are lower, but never mind. I of course kept photocopies of the documents for myself. I had already long ago scanned all of the relevant title documents for the property for my records.

I gave the buyer the notarized original documents, he gave me a certified check for the agreed amount, and I handed him a folder with the original chain-of-title documents dating back to 1943, when the person who sold it to my grandparents bought it from someone else. We did not shake hands given the current environment, of course, but I wished him well, and hope he's able to redevelop it and find someone who will love it once again, the way my grandparents did. Lisa and I then went across the street and I deposited the cashier's check into my bank, and we drove back to Nevada, stopping at Reno to do grocery shopping before going home. For all that it had taken years to get to that point, the actual exchange took only minutes. We spent more time getting our signatures notarized than doing the actual sale.

I did not realize a huge amount of money from the sale. Indeed, the probate referee's assessment was less than the inflation-adjusted amount my grandparents paid for the property in 1956. (The person who sold it to my grandparents was the Postmaster of the Challenge post office. My grandmother was the clerk — the only other employee at that office.) I think I may have gotten back the legal fees I paid to get clear title, the property taxes I've been paying on the property since my grandfather's death, and maybe a little bit more, but not a whole lot more than that. But I'm also rid of a real potential liability, such as someone breaking into what's left of the place, getting hurt, and suing me, and for that matter the risk of fire, as the forest is all around the place.

There was no good reason to keep that property, and lots of good ones to sell it (we should have done so twenty years ago; I think we might have gotten at least the inflation-adjusted value out of it). Yet I do feel sad about the whole thing, illogically so. That is the first place I really think of as home, even though my parents' home from my age 0-5 was actually a short walk away. I probably spent far more time that house awake than in my own home. There are ghosts of memory, such as it being used as the base of operations from which my uncles and aunts and cousins would come to the mountains and go deer hunting, ending the day with a big family meal, filling the small house to bursting with relations of the Reynolds Clan. I have the memories still and always will, but the house was gone in practice and now it's gone in fact. So now I think of a childhood more than forty years past and apologize to the spirits of my grandparents for how badly I managed their property. But it's time to move on.

I don't think I mentioned it here, but recently the final hurdle of getting my late grandfather's house into my name (via my mother, who was the direct heir) so that I could sell it on behalf of the family to a willing buyer fell into place. But now comes the next hard part. I know y'all think that every piece of property costs a million dollars a square foot, but in fact, there are piles of low-value property in California, and this $15,000 lot of land with a derelict house on it is one of them. The value is so low that it's not worthwhile for a real estate agent to draw up the papers. They want to work on things with a minimum value of at least $100K. Anyway, to avoid eating up any more of the property value (we've already spent close to $2K in legal costs as it is), I'm trying to work it all out myself. Today I've been going through do-it-yourself forms and getting things to the point where I could send them to the people buying it (to whom I'm leasing the land at peppercorn rent as they've been trying to clean it up) to have them start going through all of the things they'll be agreeing are wrong with it and that they're buying it with full knowledge. I really do want to sell this to them, so they can really start working on it. I know how they feel.