Instead and Else, 32nd Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Deneb): Another house was sold in the 'hood today. $1.23M, which surprises me, because from all outward appearances it's one of the nicer houses in the neighborhood, with four bedrooms, five baths, and 2,965 square feet. I haven't met the new owners yet, so I don't know if they're another seemingly impossibly young couple or not, but the former owner, Charlie, was an elderly widower and has lived here longer than almost anyone else in the neighborhood. 

Charlie thought that I had tried to kill him once. For the record, I wasn't trying to kill him but I didn't mind at the moment that he might have thought so. Back in 2005, someone stole a box of checks from my mailbox, and was cashing them all over Atlanta. I immediately told the bank and they closed the account, but it didn't stop Walmarts and Krogers all across town from still cashing the checks. One day, as I was returning home from the bank after contesting the latest batch of fraudulent checks, I saw some random man going through my mailbox.

I couldn't believe what I saw, that I was catching a thief red-handed. My mailbox is set in a brick monument, and I brought my car, a Jeep SUV, in tight behind the man so that he was trapped between my car and the monument. I wasn't trying to hit him and deliberately avoided contact, but there were only a few inches to spare on either side of the man.

The man, as I'm sure you've guessed, was Charlie, and he wasn't stealing but as it turned out going around the neighborhood voluntarily putting flyers in each mailbox about some upcoming community social event. We introduced ourselves, I explained my situation and why I was so suspicious and hostile when I saw him in my mailbox, and apologized for scaring him. He said he understood, but every time we saw each other over the years since then, he always brought up that incident. "Remember the time you tried to kill me?"

Charlie. One day, the power in my house went out during a thunderstorm. With nothing else to do other than sitting all alone in the dark, I put on my raincoat and hood, grabbed a flashlight, and went outside to see if I could find the cause of the outage (probably a fallen tree). It was easy to find, not a fallen tree but a fallen branch just past ol' Charlie's house that had taken out a power line. The live line was on the ground, still occasionally sparking. While I looked at the line from a safe distance back, Charlie came out of his house dressed in raingear like me. We exchanged neighborly greetings, confirmed that the branch and the live wire were the cause of the power outage, and then, standing in the rain in the middle of a thunderstorm with a live wire sparking just a few yards away from us, Charlie asks me, "You hear they're coming to take our gas stoves away?"

Too much Fox News. One other time, in a not dissimilar situation (we have a lot of power outages in this leafy community), he told me, astonishment in his voice, "They're going to put Trump in jail!" Sorry, Charlie, but too much Fox News, too much misinformation. The Stable Genius is still roaming free, and at least my gas stove is still in my house (maybe that's why Zillow lists it for less than half the price of Charlie's).

Anyway, Charlie's wife died about a year ago and with five empty bedrooms since the kids have grown up and moved on, I think the empty nest became more than Charlie could bare. He put the house on the market and it sold within no more than a week.

We're still in a rainy pattern here in Georgia with storms of various strength and intensity passing through daily. I managed to squeeze in a 4.9-mile Madison before this afternoon's rainfall arrived. The soggy conditions are forecast to continue over the next ten days.