Keeping tabs, Christmas style.

People around here move a lot. What would you expect? It's New York, a state that actively hates its elderly. People retire, they flee. The kids move out, they flee. Or they just flee. This state is run by criminals, stupid heads, and criminal stupid heads. 

It's still a hot market here in the lower Hudson Valley, because as lousy as it is here it's worse the closer you get to the city. So it can be hard to tell from one month to the next if the occupants are the same as they were a month earlier. Sometimes there are indicators of a change. 

Way back in 2016, while walking the dog, I noticed the Christmas tree in one family's picture window. It was there through December, of course, and into January 2017. Way into January. ALL the way into January. Way into February. It became a topic of some conjecture on this blog. Was there a family member who has volunteered to take the tree down and was just lazy? Did someone die and the house just fell into chaos? Or was it a bone of contention between warring factions of children? ("I'll take the decorations down but BILLY has to help me." "No way! That's YOUR job!") I never knew. But one day as spring was peeping over winter's transom, we saw the tree was gone. 

Whatever caused the tree to stay up so long, the incident was not repeated in subsequent years.

But this year, the moment I saw the house decked out in lights, I knew it had new owners. 

Not that the previous owners did no outdoors decor -- they were just more reserved. Once your house lights require ladders, your reservations are out the window. The new people went game.

And indeed, I was right. I checked in Zillow, and the house had been sold over the summer. Fast, too -- I don't go that way every day, but I never saw a For Sale sign out front. 

So welcome to the new folks, and thanks for bringing some light into a darkened world. Especially in New York, where our governing class has dark hearts and occluded brains. We need all the hope we can get. 

🎄🎄🎄

Lingo-Fact! The phrase "keeping tabs" goes back to tabs as in bar and restaurant tabs, and is believed to have come from the tablets upon which one would write the debt. But that's not certain; in fact, the origin of tab as a noun is simply unknown, according to Merriam-Webster.