Kelo revisited

Remember Kelo v. New London?  The case in which the Supreme Court ruled that a city could exercise eminent domain to take land and property, not for the public good, but to give to a private commercial developer?

A third of the land — including the land upon which Susan Kelo’s home one stood — is still sitting there undeveloped.  The hotel?  The conference center?  The office buildings?  They never got built, because the developer ran out of money.  Neither did the Coastguard museum that was supposed to be the grand centerpiece, and the Coast Guard Foundation has stopped fundraising attempts for it.

Susan Kelo is quite understandably bitter.

Nothing's ever straightforward

Good news:  The house repairs are almost finished.  On a smaller scale, I finally found a source of affordable cartridge brass for my 1889 Martini-Henry rifle.  (For those interested in such things, Gad Custom Cartridges, $30 for 20 unprimed cases, $45 for 20 rounds of loaded ammunition.)  I also got a pointer from lwj2 for 5-round magazines for my M14.  Either of those would give me a shot (literally) at putting a deer or two in the freezer to help with the food bills.  (Though my gradually deteriorating vision would be a handicap.  I can't see iron rifle sights clearly any more, and I don't have a working 'scope mount for the M14.)

Bad news:  I can’t afford to actually buy any, because New Hampshire unemployment is now eight weeks behind on cymrullewes' unemployment benefits.  That's about $3600 owing to us, without which we don't have enough in the bank to cover the mortgage, the car payment, and the electric bill¹ this month — let alone fill the kerosene tank² or buy propane for winter heat.³  We can't get any clear answers out of them as to what's going on; just "We'll get back to you".

Supposedly, they're switching over to a different system that uses direct deposit instead of mailing checks.  But come ON, people!  When you're changing a system that's vital to many people to keep a roof over their heads, you test it BEFORE you switch over to it!

[1]  On which, I discovered when I went to pay it this morning, we're a month behind.  The combination of "where the hell are the unemployment benefits" and the chaos of emergency house repairs has really disrupted our routines.

[2]  Granted, the kerosene tank only supplies our demand water heater and the emergency-backup monitor heater in the dining room.  The quarter-tank that's in it now will take us most of the way through the winter — basically we use about three quarters of a tank of kerosene per year — and we only used 50 gallons of propane (for cooking) since about April when we turned the heat off for the summer.  But with the totally inadequate insulation in our roof, we go through a LOT of propane for winter heat.  (It's insulated to maybe R-10, whereas the roof insulation recommendations for this climate zone now call for R-60.)  We didn't know the roof was this poorly insulated when we bought the house, and fixing it requires rebuilding the roof.

[3]  We applied for energy assistance, because we didn't know how we were going to cover winter heat bills on just cymrullewes' unemployment and my disability, but we were notified yesterday that we got denied because we're apparently over the income limit by a couple of hundred dollars a month.  We don't know yet whether this means we're also not getting the winterization they promised us in return for letting them use our house as a test house for energy-auditing students.