...when I see something like this:
https://www.zillow.com/homes/28523-Bacus-Rd-Sedro.dash.Woolley-WA_rb/

(I think it's more striking if you start with photo #23 [of 25 in the presentation], so "go left-arrow three times" and then start looking at the photos.)

.

I immediately start thinking, "How cool would this be for me & my GemStone cronies?!?"

(Seriously, it's for sale right now, for less than a million bucks...)

.

.

And what I arrive at is, me & twenty four other folks (== 25) rope in some lawyer to set up a partnership, plonk a thousand dollars apiece as a down payment, fork over $300 a month as our piece of the ongoing costs, and we're only out ~$6500 a month operating costs (mortgage, taxes, PMI, whatnot); the business has $1k operating capital for things like gas, water, electric and so on.
Hell, with that three-car garage we can buy an SUV to have a run-around vehicle getting us to & from the airport every week...

Then we set up a schedule, in order by membership (1-25) and then--good Settlers player that I am!--reverse (25-1) selecting weeks of the year to be 'ours'.
25 partners, makes 50 weeks claimed, leaves 2 spares.
And the people who have "the week of" and "the week after" SimuCon week, get to take those two, also.

.

Presto! Instant vacation home that I could actually afford (after going in with 24 other people).

.

BUT HOW COOL WOULD THAT BE?!?!?

(Seriously, if you don't think it's cool, you didn't click through the picture slideshow. :)

I mean, we would have to schedule so's not to compete with PAX...

.

Shall I mark you down as "first one interested"? :)

... "it's not the down payment, it's the monthly payments that'll kill me..."

---
;tune towncrier
Rohese: "... the TownCrier (tune in if you haven’t, it’s without doubt the best thing to ever happen on LNet)"
Xanith: "It's flat out amazing"
Doug: "100.times ^"

TownCrier News Submission link: http://bit.ly/TownCrierNews

That's the thing, Luxelle: I looked at that and said to myself, "Three hundred bucks a month? That's a credit card payment..."
(And for the record: not even the one linked to my Amazon Prime account, either.)

>>Should I mark you down as "2nd one interested"? :)<<



Can't do it. Still paying on my current castle.



Clunk

(Buy your swords at CBD weapons in Zul Logoth.)

My mistake: the lake is 20 acres. The property as a whole was 100 acres (with barn).

I know, right?!? <flail>

For the aggregate total of what some of our bigger years have been, we--the Simutronics playerbase as a whole--could've bought that sucker one year and just held 'Con there ever since.
(Getting there a day or more in advance and leaving a day or more after, I know that my hotel bill came to about a thousand bucks each year. And there were certainly years when we were in the 1k+ headcount range, I'm sure.)

With even a mere hundred acres, we set up some concrete pedestals and throw large barn-like structures over, ginormous (12') fans for air movers, big-ass HVAC setup, and call up the county distributor to back up the shipping truck for the liquor companies to the loading dock right over here, thanks....