calmloki
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Read a bunch as a kid - didn't matter much what it was, I was a voracious skinny dreamer and books were my friends. Remember at 10-11 reading some book from maybe 1920 or so with a come-on title like "How I made $100,000 in ten short years!" - something like that.
The author spent time as a young man living in a cheap one room NY apartment, bathroom down the hall. He wrote about how he scrounged tough chunks of meat from the butcher and slow cooked them all day on a hot plate while he was at work. According to him these cow elbows and knee pads were miraculously turned into the most tender delicious delicacies by that cooking process. Somehow I think not eating all day while at work may have seasoned his view. He credited his landlady at the time with a saying that directed his life later: "tenants stay to suit themselves: if they don't be suited, out they go"!
As I recall, he later got into chicken farming, which scaled up quickly and afforded him the means to get into buying and renting apartments.
I remember feeling the old landlady was hard-bitten and didn't care for her attitude, but the first part of her saying made sense. As a landlord I have tried to not take it personally if a tenant wants to move. Also tried to make changes to places to suit myself; not the tenant du jour, because tenants move.
The part that changed my life the most though was the description of turning tough undesirable things into something good - all it took was knowing it could be done, spending plenty of time with persistent modest energy expended to convert the undesirable into food, and being hungry enough to appreciate the result.
The author spent time as a young man living in a cheap one room NY apartment, bathroom down the hall. He wrote about how he scrounged tough chunks of meat from the butcher and slow cooked them all day on a hot plate while he was at work. According to him these cow elbows and knee pads were miraculously turned into the most tender delicious delicacies by that cooking process. Somehow I think not eating all day while at work may have seasoned his view. He credited his landlady at the time with a saying that directed his life later: "tenants stay to suit themselves: if they don't be suited, out they go"!
As I recall, he later got into chicken farming, which scaled up quickly and afforded him the means to get into buying and renting apartments.
I remember feeling the old landlady was hard-bitten and didn't care for her attitude, but the first part of her saying made sense. As a landlord I have tried to not take it personally if a tenant wants to move. Also tried to make changes to places to suit myself; not the tenant du jour, because tenants move.
The part that changed my life the most though was the description of turning tough undesirable things into something good - all it took was knowing it could be done, spending plenty of time with persistent modest energy expended to convert the undesirable into food, and being hungry enough to appreciate the result.