Like I said. I got friends with hella worse. But yeah. Emotionally I'm pretty sure I'll be long dead before this house is habitable; it's the only logical outcome. The only thing that balances the scales.

The house is being paid for with crypto, BTW. I don't know if you've noticed what a nasty bunch of jerks they've become. It's like watching the arc from the Whole Earth Catalog to Pump.Fun as a four-year speedrun, except they used to be your tweeps.

My sister was pretty shell-shocked by the whole affair. She's now acclimated to the ocean which means 7000ft high desert in February gave her a sore throat, burning lungs and bleeding mucosa... which basically puts her on par with the rest of us. Four days in Albuquerque left her with laryngitis. It also - obviously - nearly curtailed her daughter's first teenage birthday so she decided to splurge and buy the kid a DSLR, which means I got to advise on the DSLR (and buy the kid a Gorillapod; I hope she thrives).

I opted not to tell my sister my "my first camera" story because it would be sour grapes. But I'll tell you guys.

It's actually my "my second camera" story because I had asked for a camera in 6th grade, expecting maybe some $30 Kodak point'n'shoot. Instead my father saddled me with a Zenit Automat. On the one hand? it was before Iran-Contra so having a Soviet camera was fuckin' badass. On the other hand? It was a primitive piece of USSR junk with wretched build quality, a go-nogo gauge for a light meter (that ran on Soviet batteries so... no light meter) and the nasty tendency to cause UFO trails across my pictures from a poorly-clearanced shutter mechanism. That, combined with the need to bike four miles round trip to get film developed proved an insurmountable challenge for learning photography.

But when I was about to graduate college, my (manic) mother decided that she wanted to get me a camera, I should pick one out. Knowing her generosity wasn't boundless I settled on a used Canon for $400 that looked pretty bitchin'. I let her know. She (depressed) told me that not only would she disown me if I ever used a Canon, she would disown me if I said the word, because she had a Canon microscope that she hated, apparently. So I went and looked at Nikons, which had much shittier ergonomics, but were apparently acceptable, and she goaded me into looking at better and better cameras until I'd picked out a $1200 combo. That was acceptable. So I put it on my credit card and waited - waited for the camera store to actually ship it (they took long enough that I missed every summer flower) and waited for my mother to pay me back.

She never did. Her graduation present was $1280 of debt at 18.9% APR.

A year later my mother (manic) informed me that my sister had taken up photography, and following the advice of the camera store they had bought her a Canon. Unfortunately it was a broken Canon, so they had paid $700 for the camera, $400 to get it fixed, and then $900 for another Canon because the first one was un-fixable, and then my sister had lost it (sold it for drugs). When I asked her what happened to her fatwa against Canon she assured me that the camera shop -run by a guy she was sweet on - knew best. And when I asked if she ever intended to pay me back for the camera she said "well but yo'uve already paid for it, haven't you."

I didn't mention any of this to my sister. I just told her she was doing a good job supporting her daughter in her artistic pursuits. I figure that's about the maturity called for, and adheres to my "whatever you do, don't fuck shit up for your sister's kids" mantra, which kept me from jumping off a cliff in 1992.