Condos for sale isabela puerto rico

I purchased a unit in 2017, and it has been over two years since there was no communication from the builder or the sales office. Many people are facing the same situation like me (Google review link ), who don't know how to proceed further actions.
I created this post for the related discussions.
Probably we can file claims through Tarion ?

Note: I'm currently seeking companionship in my life. I also forgot to indicate my gender.
Something from my personal essays:
Every now and then, I cannot help but wonder about the paths untaken and the alternate lives that lie beyond my current reality. In other words, I cannot help but ponder the roads untraveled and the lives I could have led every now and then.
In a different existence, my passions for history, culture, and the intricacies of human connection might have led me down the corridors of diplomacy or international relations. The desire to bridge gaps and foster understanding among nations resonates deep within my soul. And, in the realm of finance, stock trading beckons, offering the possibility of a life guided by the rhythms of market dynamics, historical patterns, and so much more. But in the here and now, here I am, a web designer and web developer whose heart has been captured by the allure of books.
From my experience working in call center companies, where communication became my armor and confidence my shield, to my foray into the realm of sales, where I learned the art of persuasion and the power of forging meaningful connections, each role has molded me into the person I am today. At the tender age of 12, I discovered the world of web development and web design, and it was around the time I was 14 that I received my first paid job as a freelance web designer. I was entrusted with the task of transforming a simple jpeg file into a fully-functioning, mobile-friendly, and search engine-optimized WordPress theme. I successfully brought the client’s vision to life.
As the years rolled by, I was fortunate enough to explore what lies within my own backyard, the Philippines: Cagayan de Oro, Puerto Princesa in Palawan, and Cebu.
As I navigate the ebb and flow of life, I am reminded that the path we walk is not always a straight line. These detours in life even, every now and then, arrive unannounced, like a sudden gust of wind, altering the course of our lives in ways we could never have foreseen. I learn to let go of rigid expectations and embrace life, warts and all, and I learn to surrender control and embrace the beauty of spontaneity.
So, as I conclude this essay, I acknowledge that the journey is as significant as the destination. While my heart may harbor fleeting thoughts of the different lives I could have led, I realized I am right where I am meant to be.
The beauty lies not in the certainty of the path but in the willingness to embrace the unknown. The unexpected gusts of wind that alter my course, the detours that lead me astray, and the spontaneity that sweeps me off my feet are not disruptions but rather invitations to grow, learn, and discover.
In the end, it is the sum of these moments—the detours, roadblocks, and unexpected turns—that forms my portrait of a young Filipina woman. Each stroke of the brush contributes to the dimensions of my existence, reflecting strength, adaptability, and a deep appreciation for the intricate chorus between fate and choice.
So, I continue to wander with an open heart and open mind, ready to embrace the unforeseen and to hum to the rhythm of life’s ever-changing melody. For it is within the intricate threads of uncertainty that I find the greatest opportunities for growth, the deepest connections, and the truest expressions of my being.

I'm having a 14kW generator installed, as I live in Puerto Rico where the power often goes out. I want a large tank, 500 gallons. One installer says they can do it, but another says they can't because I don't have the required 10' clearance on all sides. Is that a hard and fast requirement? I do have 10' clearance on three sides, but on the last side it's 3' to the property line and the neighbor's garage wall.
Should I go with the installer that says 500 gallons is OK? He says his tank supplier who will be hooking up the tank is licensed and insured by the local regulatory agency for gas installations. If they are willing to install it, that sounds like it'd be OK, but I don't know how trustworthy people really are. I don't want to have issues later or when selling the house. Many things in PR tend to be lax, until they aren't.
If I don't go for 500 gallons, the next largest readily available size is 120 gallons. That is quite small. I can't wait for a 250 or 325 gallon tank as it can take many months to arrive from the mainland. Hurricane season has already started, I'll likely need the generator soon.

About 1year and 6 months ago, my Sister lost her 41 yr old daughter to cancer. Location Puerto Rico. She called for a family conference call. At the time she was taking care of my 90 yr old mother who is suffering with dementia. The call was to talk to the other 10 siblings to see if someone can go live with our mother for 6 months then after 6 months we were to move mom to the states to one of my sisters house. She needed to time away from mom to tend to the surviving family. At the time there were 2 sisters that were single and unemployed. But they refused to go to our mother and live with her. Seeing how it was for only 6 months I reluctantly volunteered. Which meant for me to give up my job and sell my two beater vehicles and all my possessions to be stored in a shipping container. What ever was left that did not fit I gave away. I left a job that only paid $45,000 a year but I was going to get a promotion that would raise my income to $55,000 a year. I talked to my boss he said he would hold position for the 6 months. Turns out after being with my mother for 2 months I gave a sigh of relief to my sister that I only had 4 more months to go. Which in response she tells me that mom can never fly due to her heart condition. This statement shattered any hope of me leaving and getting my life back. So she lied to me. Problem with being here with my mother, she can’t be left alone for more than 4 hours. Thus hurting my chances of getting a job. So here I am no income. After selling both of my vehicles the first one I go a lump sum but I used the money for tools. The second one I sold to my brother but he paid me in installments so to but a car here was out of the question. For 7 months I had no car, until that same brother who paid me in installments came to puerto Rico and bought a used car for the same price I sold him mine in cash and after two months he gave me the keys to use it while I am here. Sound good but the car he bought was a four door sedan Mitsubishi gallant it’s know for its break downs. The family pays me $25 a month and $140 to cut the grass. This is what they promised to pay me but only 4 out of the 10 honor our agreement. The work I used to do prepared me for the work that was needed to be done here at my mothers house which was building maintenance. Believe me after 9 years of no work being done at her house the knowledge came in handy. I have dealt with power outages that was caused by a truck and major repairs needed to be done to regain power. Which the family had no money to repair. I had to dip into my XRP savings to fix the problem I sold 4000 xrp to fix the damages. Mind you I have no way to replenish. Any ways I write this just to put it out there and a way not to fall into depression. Which there is lots more that I can not post but because I am a man no one cares. Every day I do something or create something to gain my sanity. I thought my self how to weld. I build things for escape. I raise chicken and build coops to escape as well. But the worry on how I will get the money for the feed worries me. I gave up my life and holding on to it by a thread. Lord God help me achieve what I need to.

I've shared fiction here before and it didn't go altogether too poorly, so I'm going to press my luck and do it again. This was written about a year ago, and I'm tired of trying to peddle it to lit magazines. Might as well share it here, know that it met a few eyeballs, and have done with it.
It's relevant to the sub insofar as it's about urban alienation and the working conditions at a small business run by IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE people. (I tried to pitch it as a story of the great resignation with a momentary flicker of cosmic horror.) It's based on a similar job I took on after getting laid off during the lockdown, and the circumstances of the main character's breakup are faintly similar to one I went through several years back (her job sucked the life out of her).
Without further ado:
* * *
It was getting close to midnight, and the temperature outside was still above 80 degrees. We’d locked up the shop at 10:15 and walked over to Twenty, the dive bar on Poplar Street, where a single wall-mounted air conditioner and four wobbly ceiling fans weren’t putting up much resistance against the July heat baking the place from the outside and the dense mass of bodies giving it a stifling fever from within.
Just now I came close to saying it was a Wednesday night, because that was usually when the cyclists descended upon Avenue Brew, the gritty-but-bougie craft beer and sandwich shop I was working at back then. Every Wednesday between March and November, about fifteen to twenty-five Gen Xers dressed in skintight polyester, all packages and camel toes and fanny packs, locked up their thousand-dollar bikes on the sidewalk and lined up for IPAs and paninis. They reliably arrived around 8:00, an hour before we closed, making it impossible to get started on the closing checklist and leave on time at 10:00. The worst of them were demanding and rude, and even the best got raucous and stubborn after a couple drinks. There were nights when bringing in the sidewalk tables couldn’t be done without arguing with them. Most were sub-par tippers, to boot.
After Wednesday came and went that week without so much as a single 40-something in Ray Bans and padded shorts stopping in to double-fist two cans of Jai Alai, we dared to hope the cyclists had chosen another spot to be their finish line from there on out. But no—they’d only postponed their weekly ride, and swarmed us on Friday night instead.
I was the last person to find out; I was clocked in as purchaser that evening. The position was something like a promotion I'd received a year earlier: for twenty hours a week, I got to retreat from the public and sit in the back room with the store laptop, reviewing sales and inventory, answering emails from brewery reps, and ordering beer, beverages, and assorted paper goods. When I put in hours as purchaser, my wage went up from $11 to $15 an hour, but I was removed from the tip pool. On most days, tips amounted to an extra two or three dollars an hour, so I usually came out ahead.
This was back in 2021. I don't know what Avenue Brew pays these days.
Anyway, at about 8:15, I stepped out to say goodbye to everyone and found the shop in chaos. Friday nights were generally pretty active, the cyclists' arrival had turned the place into a mob scene. The line extended to the front door. The phone was ringing. The Grubhub tablet dinged like an alarm clock without a snooze button. Danny was on the sandwich line and on the verge of losing his temper. Oliver was working up a sweat running food, bussing tables, and replenishing ingredients from the walk-in. The unflappable Marina was on register, and even she seemed like she was about to snap at somebody.
What else could I do? I stayed until closing to answer the phone, process Grubhub orders, hop on and off the second register, and help Danny with sandwich prep. After the tills were counted out, I stayed another hour to take care of the dishes, since nobody had a chance to do a first load. Oliver was grateful, even though he grumbled about having to make some calls and rearrange Sunday's schedule so I could come in a couple hours late. Irene and Jeremy, Avenue Brew's owners, would kick his ass if he let me go into overtime.
Danny suggested that we deserved a few drinks ourselves after managing to get through the shift without killing anyone. Not even Marina could find a reason to disagree with him.
The neighborhood had undergone enough gentrification to support an upscale brunch spot, an ice cream parlor, a gourmet burger restaurant, a coffee and bahn mi shop, and Avenue Brew (to name a few examples), but not yet quite enough that the people who staffed them couldn’t afford to live within a ten-minute walk from the main avenue where all these hep eateries stood between 24-hour corner stores with slot machines in back, late-night Chinese and Mexico-Italian takeout joints with bulletproof glass at the counters, and long-shuttered delis and shoe stores. Twenty on Poplar was the watering hole set aside for people like us. It was dim, a bit dilapidated, and inexpensive, and usually avoided by denizens of the condos popping up on the vacant lots and replacing clusters of abandoned row houses.
When we arrived, Kyle waved us over. He didn’t work at Avenue Brew anymore, but still kept up with a few of us. He was at Twenty at least four nights out of the week.
So there we all were. I sat with a brooding stranger freestyling to himself in a low mumble on the stool to my left and Oliver on my right, who tapped at his phone and nursed a bottle of Twisted Tea. To Oliver’s right sat Marina, staring at nothing in particular and trying to ignore Danny, who stood behind her, closer than she would have liked, listening to Kyle explain the crucial differences between the Invincible comic book and the Invincible web series.
I recall being startled back to something like wakefulness when it seemed to me that the ceiling had sprouted a new fan. I blinked my eyes, and it wasn’t there anymore. It reminded me of an incident from when I was still living with my folks in South Jersey and still had a car, and was driving home from a friend’s house party up in Bergen County. It was 6:30 AM, I hadn’t slept all night, and needed to get home so I could get at least little shuteye before heading to Whole Foods for my 11:00 AM shift. I imagined I passed beneath the shadows of overpasses I knew weren’t there, and realized I was dreaming at the wheel.
I was pretty thoroughly zombified at that point. Heather and I had broken up for good the night before, and I hadn't gotten even a minute of sleep. Calling out at Avenue Brew was tough. Unless you found someone willing to cover your shift on like six hours' notice, you were liable to get a writeup, a demotion, or your hours cut if you couldn't produce a doctor's note. So I loaded up on caffeine pills and Five-Hour Energy bottles at the corner store, and powered through as best I could.
I finished the last thimbleful of Blue Moon in my glass. Oliver wiped the sweat from the back of his neck with a napkin and covered his mouth to stifle a laugh at the KiwiFarms thread he was scrolling through. Pool balls clacked; somebody swore and somebody laughed. The TouchTunes box was playing Bob Dylan’s “Rain Day Woman #12 & 35,” and enough bleary 40-something men around the bar were bobbing their heads and mouthing the words to make it impossible to determine which one of them paid two bucks to hear it. A guy by the cigarette machine who looked like a caricature of Art Carney in flannel and an old Pixies T-shirt was accosting a woman who must have been a toddler when he hit drinking age, and she momentarily made eye contact with me as she scanned the area for a way out. Danny was shouting over the bartender’s head, carrying on a conversation with the Hot Guy from Pizza Stan’s, who was sitting on the horseshoe’s opposite arm.
I never got his name, but when Oliver first referred to him as the Hot Guy from Pizza Stan’s, I knew exactly who he meant. Philly scene kid par excellence. Mid-20s, washed-out black denim, dyed black hair, thick bangs, and dark, gentle eyes. He was only truly alluring when he was on the job, because he seldom smiled then—and when he smiled, he broke the spell by exposing his teeth, stained a gnarly shade of mahogany from too much smoking and not enough brushing.
“How’s Best? Marcus still a joker?” Danny asked him.
“Yeah, you know Marcus. You know how he is.”
So the Hot Guy had been working at Best Burger (directly across the street from Avenue Brew) ever since Pizza Stan’s owners mismanaged the place unto insolvency. (Afterwards it was renovated and reopened as a vegan bakery—which incidentally closed down about a month ago.) Danny used to work at Best Burger, but that ended after he got into a shouting match with the owner. I happened to overhear it while I was dragging in the tables and collecting the chairs from the sidewalk the night it happened. It wasn’t any of my business, and I tried not to pay attention, but they were really tearing into each other. A month later, Oliver welcomed Danny aboard at Avenue Brew. I hadn’t known he’d been interviewed, and by then it was too late to mention the incident. But I’d have been a hypocrite to call it a red flag after the way I resigned from my position as Café Chakra's assistant manager two years earlier—not that we need to go dredging that up right now. Let's say there was some bad blood and leave it at that.
Anyway, I was thinking about giving in and buying a pack of cigarettes from the machine—and then remembered that Twenty didn’t have a cigarette machine. I looked again. The Art Carney-lookalike was still there, fingering his phone with a frown, but the girl was gone—and so was the cigarette machine.
I had only a moment to puzzle over this before Danny clapped me on the shoulder and thrust a shot glass in front of me.
“Starfish!” he said. (Danny called me Starfish. Everybody else called me Pat.) “You look like you need some juice.”
He distributed shots to everyone else. Marina declined hers, but changed her mind when Kyle offered to take it instead.
She and Kyle had stopped sleeping together after Kyle left Avenue Brew to work at the Victory taproom on the Parkway, but Marina was still concerned about his bad habits, which Danny delighted in encouraging.
We all leaned in to clink our glasses. Before I could find an appropriate moment to ask Marina if I could bum a cigarette, she got up to visit the bathroom. Danny took her seat and bowed his head for a conspiratorial word with Kyle.
I watched from the corner of my eye and tried to listen in. Like Marina, I was a little worried about Kyle. He got hired at Avenue Brew around the same time I did, just before the pandemic temporarily turned us into a takeout joint. He was a senior at Drexel then, an English major, and sometimes talked about wanting to either find work in publishing or carve out a career as a freelance writer after graduating. But first he intended to spend a year getting some life in before submitting himself to the forever grind.
He read a lot of Charles Bukowski and Hunter Thompson. He relished the gritty and sordid, and had already been good at sniffing it out around the neighborhood and in West Philly before Danny introduced him to cocaine, casinos, strip clubs, and a rogue’s gallery of shady but fascinating people. (None were really Danny’s friends; just fellow passengers who intersected with the part of his life where he sometimes went to Parx, sometimes came out ahead, sometimes spent his winnings on coke, and sometimes did bumps at titty bars.) Kyle recounted these adventures with a boyish enthusiasm for the naked reality of sleaze, like a middle schooler telling his locker room buddies about catching his older brother in flagrante and seeing so-and-so body parts doing such-and-such things.
Marina hated it. She never said as much to me, but she was afraid that the template Kyle set for his life during his “year off” was in danger of becoming locked in. The anniversary of his graduation had already passed, and now here he was trying to convince Danny to contribute a couple hundred dollars toward a sheet of acid his guy had for sale. He wasn't doing much writing lately.
I was the oldest employee at Avenue Brew (as I write this I’m 37, but fortunately I don’t look it), and when Kyle still worked with us I felt like it was my prerogative to give him some advice. The longer he waited to make inroads, I once told him, the more likely he’d be seen as damaged goods by the publishing world. He needed to jam his foot in the door while he was still young.
I could tell the conversation bored him, and didn’t bring up the subject again.
The bartender took my glass and curtly asked if I’d like another drink.
“No thanks, not yet,” I answered.
She slid me my bill.
I missed the old bartender, the one she’d replaced. I forget her name, but she was ingenuous and energetic and sweet. Pretty much everyone had some sort of crush on her. Sometimes she came into Avenue Brew for lunch, and tipped us as well as we tipped her. Maybe three months before that night—Danny witnessed it—she suddenly started crying and rushed out the door. Everyone at the bar mutely looked to each other for an explanation. (Fortunately for Twenty, the kitchen manager hadn’t left yet, and picked up the rest of her shift.)
She never came back. None of us had seen her since. But drafts still had to be poured and bottlecaps pulled off, and now here was another white woman in her mid-twenties wearing a black tank top, a pushup bra, and a scrunchie, same as before. Twenty’s regulars grew accustomed to not expecting to see the person she’d replaced, and life went on.
“How’re you doing?” I asked Oliver, just to say something to somebody, and to keep my thoughts from wandering back to Heather.
“Just kind of existing right now,” he answered. His phone lay face-up on the counter. He was swiping through Instagram, and I recognized the avatar of the user whose album he hate-browsed.
“And how’s Austin been?” I asked.
“Oh, you know. Not even three weeks after getting over the jetlag from his trip back from the Cascades, he’s off touring Ireland.” He shook his head. “Living his best life.”
He’d hired Austin on a part-time basis in September. We needed a new associate when Emma was promoted to replace a supervisor who'd quit without even giving his two weeks. There was a whole thing. I'm having a hard time recalling the guy's name, but I liked him well enough. He was a good worker and he seemed like a bright kid, but he was—well, he was young. Naïve. One day he found Jeremy sitting in the back room with his laptop, and took advantage of the open-door policy to ask why the store manager and supervisors didn’t get health benefits or paid time off. Jeremy told him it "was being worked on," and that he couldn’t discuss it any further at that time. I understand the kid got argumentative, though I never knew precisely what was said.
Irene started visiting the shop a lot more often after that, almost always arriving when the kid was working. No matter what he was doing, she’d find a reason to intervene, to micromanage and harangue him, and effectively make his job impossible. A coincidence, surely.
It’s something I still think about. By any metric, Jeremy and Irene have done very well for themselves. They’re both a little over 40 years old. I remember hearing they met at law school. In addition to Avenue Brew, they own a bistro in Francisville and an ice cream parlor in Point Breeze. They have a house on the Blue Line, send their son to a Montessori school, and pull up to their businesses in a white Volkswagen ID.4. But whenever the subject of benefits, wages, or even free shift meals came up, they pled poverty. It simply couldn’t be done. But they liked to remind us about all they did to make Avenue Brew a fun place to work, like let the staff pick the music and allow Oliver and me to conduct a beer tasting once a day. They stuck Black Lives Matter, Believe Women, and Progress flag decals on the front door and windows, and I remember Irene wearing a Black Trans Lives Matter shirt once or twice when covering a supervisor's shift. None of the college students or recent graduates who composed most of Avenue Brew's staff could say the bosses weren't on the right team. And yet...
I'm sorry—I was talking about Austin. He was maybe 30 and already had another job, a “real” job, some sort of remote gig lucrative enough for him to make rent on a studio in the picturesque Episcopal church down the street that had been converted into upscale apartments some years back. Austin wasn’t looking for extra cash. He wanted to socialize. To have something to do and people to talk to in the outside world. He wanted to make friends, and all of us could appreciate that—but it’s hard to be fond of a coworker who irredeemably sucks at his job. Austin never acted with any urgency, was inattentive to detail, and even after repeated interventions from Oliver and the supervisors, he continued to perform basic tasks in bafflingly inefficient ways. Having Austin on your shift meant carrying his slack, and everyone was fed up after a few months. Oliver sat him down, told him he was on thin ice, and gave him a list of the areas in which he needed to improve if he didn’t want to be let go.
When Austin gave Oliver the indignant “I don’t need this job” speech, it was different from those times Danny or I told a boss to go to hell and walked out. Austin truly didn’t need it. He basically said the job was beneath him, and so was Oliver.
It got deep under Oliver’s skin. He did need the job and had to take it seriously, even when it meant being the dipshit manager chewing out a man four or five years his senior. He earned $18 an hour (plus tips when he wasn’t doing admin work), had debts to pay off, and couldn't expect to get any help from his family.
The important thing, though, the part I distinctly remember, was that Oliver was looking at a video of a wading bird Austin had recorded. An egret, maybe. White feathers, long black legs, pointy black beak. Austin must have been standing on a ledge above a creek, because he had an overhead view of the bird as it stood in the water, slowly and deliberately stretching and retracting its neck, eyeing the wriggling little shadows below. As far as the fish could know, they were swimming around a pair of reeds growing out of the silt. The predator from which they extended was of a world beyond their understanding and out of their reach.
The video ended. Oliver moved on to the next item: a photograph of the bird from the same perspective, with a fish clamped in its beak. Water droplets flung from the victim's thrashing tail caught the sunlight. And I remember now, I clearly remember, the shapes of like twelve other fish stupidly milling about the bird's feet, unperturbed and unpanicked.
Danny peered at Oliver’s phone and observed a resemblance between the bird—its shape and bearing, and the composition of the photograph—and a POV porn video shot from behind and above, and he told us so. Elaborately. He made squawking noises.
“And mom says I’m a degenerate,” Oliver sighed. “Can you practice your interspecies pickup artist shit somewhere else?” Oliver flicked his wrist, shooing Danny off, and held his phone in front of his face to signal that he was done talking.
Danny sagged a little on his stool and turned away. I sometimes felt bad for him. For all his faults, he had the heart of a puppy dog. He really did think of us as his tribe. There was nobody else who’d only ever answer “yes” when you asked him to pick up a shift, and he did it completely out of loyalty.
He was turning 29 in a week. I wondered how many people would actually turn out to celebrate with him at the Black Taxi. Kyle probably would—but even he regarded Danny more as a source of vulgar entertainment than a friend.
Then it happened again. When I turned to speak to Oliver, there’d been a pair of pool cues leaning side-by-side against the wall a few stools down. Now they were gone.
This time it might have been my imagination. Somebody passing by could have casually snatched them up and kept walking.
But a moment later I seemed to notice a second TouchTunes box protruding from the wall directly behind me. I let it be.
Marina returned from the bathroom. Danny rose and offered her back her seat with an exaggerated bow. Before she got settled, I asked if she’d like to step outside with me. She withdrew her pack of Marlboro Menthols from her canvas bag, which she left sitting on the stool to deter Danny from sitting back down.
Marina never minded letting me bum cigarettes from time to time. I couldn’t buy them for myself anymore; it’s a habit I could never keep under control, and was only getting more expensive. Like everything else in the world. About once a month I reimbursed her by buying her a pack.
The air out on the sidewalk was as hot as the air inside Twenty, but easier to breathe. After lighting up, Marina leaned against the bricks and sighed.
“I wish Oliver would fire Danny already and get it over with.”
I nodded. Marina rarely talked about anything but work.
“He sneaks drinks and doesn't think anyone notices he's buzzed,” she went on. “He steals so much shit and isn’t even a little subtle about it. He’s going to get Oliver in trouble. And he’s a creep.”
“Yeah,” I said. These were her usual complaints about Danny, and they were all true. “At least he’s better than Austin.”
“That’s a low bar.”
Three dirt bikes and an ATV roared down the lonely street, charging through stop sign after stop sign, putting our talk on hold.
“Remind me. You’ve got one semester left, right?” I asked after the noise ebbed.
“Yep.”
Marina was a marketing major at Temple. She’d had an internship during the spring semester, and her boss told her to give her a call the very minute she graduated. Her parents in central Pennsylvania couldn’t pay her rent or tuition for her, so she was a full-time student and a full-time employee at Avenue Brew. Her emotional spectrum ranged from "tired" to "over it." She’d been waiting tables and working at coffee shops since she was seventeen, had no intention of continuing for even a day longer than she had to, and feared the escape hatch would slam shut if she dallied too long after prying it open.
She’d considered majoring in English, like Kyle. She went for marketing instead. I couldn’t blame her.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You’ve been kind of off all day.”
“I’m terrible.”
“Why?”
I gave dodgy answers, but she asked precisely the right follow-up questions to get me going about what happened with Heather the night before.
It was the new job. Before the pandemic, Heather worked as a server at a Center City bar and grill. (That's where I met her; we were coworkers for about a year, and then I left to work Café Chakra because it was quieter and closer to where I lived.) When the place closed its doors and laid everyone off during the lockdown, she got a stopgap job at the Acme on Passyunk, and hated it. Then in March, she found a bar-and-lounge gig in a ritzy hotel on Broad Street. Very corporate. Excellent pay, great benefits. Definitely a step up. But her new employers made Irene and Jeremy look like Bob and Linda Belcher by comparison. It was the kind of place where someone had recently gotten herself fired for leaving work to rush to the hospital after getting the news that her grandmother was about to be taken off life support, and not finding someone to come in and cover the last two hours of her shift.
Heather seldom worked fewer than fifty-five hours a week, and her schedule was even more erratic than mine. At least once a week she left the hotel at 1:00 or 2:00 AM and returned at 9:00 the next morning. Neither of us could remember the last time she’d had two consecutive days off, and it had been over a month since one of mine overlapped with one of hers. She’d spent it drinking alone at home. All she wanted was some privacy.
I’d biked to South Philly to meet her when she got home at 1:30. The argument that killed our relationship for good began around 2:30, when I complained that we never had sex anymore. Heather accused me of only caring about that, when she was so exhausted and stressed that her hair was falling out in the shower. Quit the job? She couldn’t quit. The money was too good. She had student loans, medical bills, and credit card debt, and for the first time in her life she could imagine paying it all off before hitting menopause.
So, yeah, I was cranky about our sex life being dead in the water. Say whatever you like. But at that point, what were we to each other? We did nothing together anymore but complain about work before one or both of us fell asleep. That isn’t a relationship.
She said my hair always smelled like sandwiches, even after bathing, and she was done pretending it didn’t turn her off. I told her she was one to talk—she always reeked of liquor. As things escalated, we stopped caring if her roommates heard us. “You want to be a father?” she shouted around 4:00 AM. “Making what you make? That poor fucking kid.”
We fought until sunrise, and I left her apartment with the understanding that I wouldn’t be coming back, wouldn’t be calling her ever again. I biked home and sat on the steps facing the cement panel that was my house’s backyard. After my phone died and I couldn’t anaesthetize myself with dumb YouTube videos or make myself feel crazy staring at the download button for the Tinder app, I watched the sparrows hopping on and off the utility lines for a while.
At 11:40 I went inside. One of my roommates was already in the shower, so the best I could do was put on a clean Avenue Brew T-shirt before walking to the shop and clocking in at noon to help deal with the lunch rush.
“That’s a lot,” Marina finally said. “Sorry.”
I don’t know what I was expecting her to say. She was sixteen years my junior, after all, and just a coworker. She didn’t need to hear any of this, and I definitely didn't need to be telling her. But who else was there to tell?
She’d already finished her cigarette. I still had a few puffs left. She went inside.
I decided to call it a night.
The second TouchTunes box was gone—naturally. Danny had taken my stool, and regarded my approach with a puckish you snooze you lose grin. I wasn’t going to say anything. I’d just pay my bill, give everyone a nod goodnight, and walk the five blocks back home.
And then Danny disappeared.
One second, he was there. The next—gone.
Danny didn’t just instantaneously vanish. Even when something happens in the blink of an eye, you can still put together something of a sequence. I saw him—I seemed to see him—falling into himself, collapsing to a point, and then to nothing.
You know how sometimes a sound is altogether inaudible unless you’re looking at the source—like when you don’t realize somebody’s whispering at you, and can then hear and understand them after they get your attention? I think that was the case here. I wouldn't have known to listen if I hadn't seen it happen. What I heard lingered for two, maybe three seconds, and wasn't any louder than a fly buzzing inside a lampshade. A tiny and impossibly distant scream, pitchshifted like a receding ambulance siren into a basso drone...
I don’t know. I don’t know for sure. I’m certain I remember a flash of red, and I have the idea of Danny’s trunk expanding, opening up as it imploded. A crimson flower, flecked white, with spooling pink stalks—and Danny’s wide-eyed face above it, drawn twisting and shrinking into its petals.
For an instant, Twenty’s interior shimmered. Not shimmered, exactly—glitched would be a better word. If you’re old enough to remember the fragmented graphics that sometimes flashed onscreen when you turned on the Nintendo without blowing on the cartridge, you’ll have an idea of what I mean. It happened much too fast, and there was too much of it to absorb. The one clear impression I could parse was the mirage of a cash register flickering upside-down above the pool table.
Not a cash register. The shape was familiar, but the texture was wrong. I think it was ribbed, sort of like a maggot. I think it glistened. Like—camo doesn’t work anymore when the wearer stops crouching behind a bush and breaks into a run. Do you get what I’m saying?
Nobody else seemed to notice. The pool balls clacked. A New Order track was playing on the TouchTunes box. A nearby argument about about Nick Sirianni continued unabated.
Finally, there was a downward rush of air—and this at least elicited a reaction from the bartender, who slapped my bill to keep it from sailing off the counter.
“Danny,” I said.
“Danny?” Kyle asked me quietly. His face had gone pale.
“Danny?” Oliver repeated in a faraway voice.
After a pause, Kyle blinked a few times. “You heard from him?”
“God forbid,” said Marina. “When he quit I was like, great, I can keep working here after all.”
“Oh, come on—”
“Kyle. Did I ever show you those texts he sent me once at three in the morning?” The color had returned to Oliver’s face.
“No, what did he say?”
Oliver tapped at his phone and turned the screen toward Kyle.
“Oh. Oh, jeez.”
“Right? Like—if you want to ask me something, ask me. You know? Don’t be weirdly accusatory about it…”
I pulled a wad of fives and ones from my pocket, threw it all onto the counter, and beelined for the exit without consideration for the people I squeezed through and shoved past on the way.
I heard Marina saying “let him go.”
I went a second consecutive night without sleep. Fortunately I wasn’t scheduled to come in the next day.
The schedule. It’s funny. Oliver was generally great at his job, and even when he wasn’t, I cut him a lot of slack because I knew Irene and Jeremy never gave him a moment’s peace. But I could never forgive him those times he waited until the weekend to make up and distribute the schedule. This was one of those weeks he didn’t get around to it until Saturday afternoon. When I found it in my inbox, Danny’s name wasn’t anywhere on it.
As far as I know, nobody who hadn’t been at Twenty that night asked what happened to him. We were a bit overstaffed as it was, and everyone probably assumed Danny was slated for the chopping block. The part-timers were, for the most part, happy to get a few additional hours.
Oliver abruptly quit around Labor Day after a final acrimonious clash with the owners. I never found out the details, and I never saw him again. Jeremy and Irene took turns minding the store while a replacement manager was sought. None of the supervisors would be pressured into taking the job; they knew from Oliver what they could expect.
About three weeks after Oliver left, I came in for my purchasing shift and found Jeremy waiting for me in the back room. I knew it was serious when he didn’t greet me with the awkward fist-bump he ordinarily required of his male employees.
“You’ve seen the numbers,” he said. Business for the summer had fallen short of expectations, it was true, and he and Irene had decided to rein in payroll expenses. My purchaser position was being eliminated. Its responsibilities would be redistributed among the supervisors and the new manager, when one was found. In the meantime, I'd be going back to the regular $11 an hour (plus tips of course) associate position full-time.
Jeremy assured me I'd be first in the running for supervisor the next time there was an opening.
I told him it was fine, I was done, and if he’d expected the courtesy of two weeks’ notice, he shouldn’t have blindsided me like that.
“Well, that’s your choice,” he answered, trying not to look pleased. His payroll problem was solving itself.
I racked up credit card debt for a few months. Applied for entry-level museum jobs that might appreciate my art history degree. Aimed for some purchasing and administrative assistant gigs, and just for the hell of it, turned in a resume for a facilitator position at an after-school art program. Got a few interviews. All of them eventually told me they’d decided to go in a different direction. I finally got hired to bartend at Hops from Underground, a microbrewery on Fairmount.
I’m still there. The money’s okay, but it fluctuates. Hours are reasonable. I’m on their high-deductible health plan. There’s a coworker I’ve been dating. Sort of dating. You know how it goes. In this line of work you get so used to people coming and going that you learn not to get too attached. I walk past Avenue Brew a few times a week, but stopped peering in through the window when I didn't recognize the people behind the counter anymore.

I am due to close next Monday on a condo in New Hampshire. Originally, I was to take possession of the unit with a tenant in-place. The tenant informed me a few days ago (i.e. ~10 days before closing) that they changed their mind about staying after closing because they objected to signing a new lease for a month (she is a travel nurse and her contract with the local hospital ends in a month) and objects to paying a security deposit.
Consequently, I sent the following message to the seller's agent (Background context: The seller's agent is the seller's mother. I also do not have a buyer's agent):
"I want the seller to sign an addendum that the property will be sold in broom clean condition. The tenant can't move out right before I take possession -- there should be some cleaning involved before the sale but after the tenant moves out. I would also like a signed addendum that there will be Delivery of Vacant Possession. Otherwise, how can I be guaranteed that I won't be purchasing a property that is left in shambles, right after I drive over from closing, or that the tenant has actually vacated the premises?"
The seller's agent countered that we could move back closing to later in the day, in the afternoon, and I could do a tour of the property in the morning, before closing. Is this a reasonable compromise? Is my ask for signed legal addendums reasonable? I've been in a bad situation where I purchased a property with an in-place resident, he stopped paying rent, and it took almost a year to legally evict him. Meanwhile, he caused $20K in property damage. Hence, I'm a bit scarred.
Thanks.

I began with a mistake; around January of 2023, I was convinced by my dad and uncle to buy a property partnered with my uncle; essentially, my uncle and I were going to pay for it via a mortgage.
Now let me give a bit of background to this. First, this all takes place in Puerto Rico, and as you know, PR, well... it's not in the best state, I guess you could say; as for me, I was 21 at the time with no knowledge about real estate what's so ever, so as you can already see we're starting on the wrong foot, as for my dad he knows a couple of things but surface level nothing too profound, now as for my uncle his the one who brought us the deal. My uncle works on a small business owned by the property owner, also located on the property my uncle was offered. According to the owner, he wanted to sell the property to someone who would also take over the Air conditioning business. His sons didn't want it and were doing their own thing, so he decided to sell it to my uncle AKA "the son he never had," however my uncle, well, he doesn't have the money, and that's where I come in at the time I had recently received a lot of money from some insurance my dad had done a long time ago so my uncle came to us and pretty much sold us on the dream that the owner had promised which entailed the following: first from an original price of 1 million dollars he would sell it to us by half $500k it is a 3.88-acre approx. property and has two main buildings. But the cherry on top was that he was going to give us the business and that with the business, we would be able to pay for the mortgage plus, he was going to stay with us every step of the way for the next six months also it was a ten year 0% fixed interest rates with a 25k down payment. the owner flexed about how much the company made, how he owned X, Y, and Z, and that he had traveled to many places, etc., and like good little trusting fool, I bought into it.
I'm not that social my communication sucks and I'm way to passive I all ways had my questions and doubts but I never mustered the courage to state them or anything my dad and my uncle were full on head first trusting especially my uncle since he had been working there for years and according to him the business was doing great and moving a lot of money (emphasis on "Moving"), my dad did ask some important questions about numbers and debts and other things but the "numbers" were never really shown only checks and words that were tossed around with a lot of "yeah, yeah tomorrow" or "soon" it's also important to note that both my uncle and my dad can be quite gullible for reasons that we shan't name but yeah after merely a couple of weeks passed everything was extremely fast and rushed and we were told we could go seal up the deal anytime and we went with a lot of trust and hopes and so we took over the business and we quickly found out how false and shit everything was starting with day one the owner left for vacation and along with him went the promise to stay with us for the next six months and guide us we didn't even have access to the company's bank accounts till nearly a moth later so I spent the first moth learning with the secretary wtf I had in my hands and I quickly learned that what I had in my hands was a near dead horse full of NEGATIVE RED NUMBERS! as well as a horrible infrastructure and also an imbalance between income vs expenses I check with the business bank and its history for the past couple of years and found it full of negative numbers now I have no idea to this day what the hell the owner was doing whether he was laundering money, avoiding taxes, using the business as a credit card or some sort of other trick
Yesterday I finished up with the layer and stuff to undo all this. Thankfully it went smoothly with no issues with the owner or anything overall. I lost like $55k during the whole thing. Some fail, and some win. At least I got out of it fast and minimized my losses from and learned much one of which is always start small. TL;DR: I got scammed into buying a property and a business where the owner promised me the company could pay for the mortgage and then some, only to find out it was a dead business!? And the buildings needed expansion permits and water meters because the owner had it set up as residential and not commercial.

Article is in Spanish, but the TL; dr reasons for closing are:
The Pandemic effect, Climate disasters, Population reduction.
https://www.elnuevodia.com/negocios/empresas-comercios/notas/avon-cierra-operaciones-en-puerto-rico-y-el-caribe/

Hi Everyone, I love shooting, but I've found it hard to find good areas (public lands) to do it anymore. Many I used to use are now full of condos or very far from the Sale Lake area. I also enjoy taking things out to shoot, like old hard drives, or small things I want to destroy. I always clean up my mess, I'm not one of those that leaves my garbage for others to deal with. That being said, I know there are business I can go to where I can shoot anything from a little .22 to a 30-06 as well as shotgun, but they don't let me bring things to destroy. Where can I go?

I will be traveling with my green card for the first time. Port of entry would be San Juan Airport, Puerto Rico.
Wondering how will be the immigration experience while entering US. Last time I entered I had H1B, and it was on Orlando. Had to queue up to talk to an officer who asked a bunch of questions, took a photo and let me in. Will the process be same with green card?
Thanks.

My insurance does not cover Mounjaro. Does anyone know if it’s cheaper to have it filled in Puerto Rico? I’ll be going for work, and would love to spend less than $1100 on it.

I have a friend of mine (F25) who is taking a break from her relationship, she has left the country to live with her grandmother in puerto rico till she feels more financially stable to be in a relationship. She hasn't landed a full time job other yet, but there is a minimum wage job there that she is waiting on. She is hoping to supplement her income with thirst traps on tik tok and instagram. I am trying to find a nice way to tell her she is not likely to make much money doing that. However she get defensive when I say that posting thirst traps on social is a bad way to gain a following. She takes it like I am trying to call her ugly. I reassure her, I don't think she is ugly. But, ever since she asked to me moderate her lives, I can see how much she is getting. Through all her lives she is averaging about 0.75-0.5usd per hour. I don't want to discourage her from posting but, she'll go on live for 3-4 hours and make less than 4 dollars. Her engagement hasn't really increased since started posting thirst traps. She gets more comments but a vast majority of them are hate comments or just disgusting requests. She has been telling it is just a part of her grind. I don't want to be a negative Nancy, but I miss her old content. It wasn't much just her posting her drawings, and little songs she made to go along with the paintings. But, she had real engagement and positive experiences.
TLDR Friend in Puerto Rico is broke, started posting thirst traps for to get money, she isn't. I want in a positive way suggest she lean less heavily on thirst traps for income.

I have a prescription for Mounjaro. Is it cheaper to get it in Puerto Rico than it is to get it in the US?

Hey y'all. I'm a Charleston local living abroad and I've been feeling a tad homesick. A way I cope is by looking for homes for sale on Zillow, especially in my old neighborhood and I noticed that there aren't any homes listed for sale. A LOT of condos, though. I know it's the summer season and with the housing market being what it is, I know things are getting snatched up quick, but usually there is at least a house or something. I've lived in Savannah, too and looked there. They also had the same issue. Is this a new trend in the market or is this just a coastal tourist town trend? I'd love some insight from people still there!
Cheers from Norway! Missing sweet tea and fried chicken.

It’s long . I have a vey close Best Friend for 17 years. We are very different. I am a teacher , in grad school, who works 50 plus hrs a week with a modest life, no kids ( I tried for many years but it never happened), divorced. My parents have been married for 52 years. My mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and is currently in the middle stages of the disease. So needless to say I have a lot on my plate.
My friend: has 4 kids, 13 years ago her twins father went to jail for life for selling drugs. She’s never been married and has always had to hustle to provide for kids. She even received felonies for not testifying on her BD. (I even almost got in trouble for getting a cashiers check in my name for them . But I never got mad for being put in that situation. ) her amount of sacrifice for her kids takes real courage. She is the hardest working person I know. She built a very successful business from the ground up. She spends her days surrounded by some of the wealthiest ppl in our town. This last year , she majorly leveled up her career, her car, her house, etc. She sold her house and moved into a very expensive condo, bought a Range Rover, and spent an insane about of $ on shopping and vacations from the sale of her house. She would be gone days/ weeks at a time with her kids home alone. I never judged. I was happy for her success. I have always admired her, looked upto her, and just always had unwavering admiration for our friendship . We have had soo much fun together. I respect her life’s decisions. There hers. Her childhood, her life, it’s all shaped her and made her the way she is. I thought it was unconditional. We always had each other’s backs. I never judged her . I only want her to be happy. She does however have a strong personality. She can be opinionated, bossy, and almost come off as arrogant. Some people aren’t for everyone. But that’s her …. We we’re definitely opposite. But I felt like twinflame friends.
We have been through everything together, pregnancies, child loss, domestic abuse, divorce, addiction, etc. I have been unwavering in my support for her and her family. I was going through a horrible divorce with a abusive drug addict husband when her house flooded. I moved her and her children into my home while I was in the middle of divorcing a monster. Her house had black mold I couldn’t let them live like that. But her presence actually save me. My ex husband couldn’t behave badly in front of her. So we saved each other that summer.
Last summer I started dating someone new… it’s been a year now. My man is kind, loving, humble, thoughtful, his character and the way he sees the world is beautiful. It’s the healthiest relationship I have ever been in. I’m grateful for him. He’s been through a lot. He’s older than me, he has an 11 yo daughter, and ultimately he wants a family. I spent my whole life Trying to have a family. So he’s my missing piece. He has a modest life. Modest career …etc. We are not going out and partying, we’re not traveling, . We are meditating, working out, spending time with family. Enjoying each other’s company. Cooking, talking about philosophy, politics, the world. We’re truly life partners. But my friend doesn’t think he’s the one. She thinks I shld be dating to find someone better. Someone rich, who can take me/us on vacations . Who will include her in everything we do. But that’s just it… we’re on a budget. We don’t even make together what she makes in a year. So it’s starting to feel like our morals and character is Changing.
In February my friend started to change. She started making hurtful comments to me out of the blue. Comments about my divorce and even more hurtful my relationship. She tried to say “why don’t you guys go out?” Why don’t you hang out with me?” Why don’t you travel more?” “He can tell you anything , etc.” like he was taking advantage of me for some kind of glow up. I thought she just missing me . So went out of my way to cancel my Saturday dinner plans and convince my man to come out with us. He reluctantly obliged because it was important to me . We were Supposed to meet downtown, but she forgot her travel bag for The airport the next morning, so we met At her house instead. When we arrived at her house she was drunk. She was extremely rude, and sarcastic to my Man. She kept saying “why don’t you go out?” I was sick by her behavior and I just kinda froze. I tried to get her to go out & have a drink but she didn’t want too. We completely changed our plans for her temper tantrum. In hindsight, I shld have checked her. She was not being kind. My man’s priorities are not partying in a bar or club. He has a daughter . She was out of Line speaking to him that way. He was kind to her even though I was horrified. But I know when she said “ I need a man to give me 10k a mo or he’s not my man “ my man felt some kind of way about her after that day….
After that night all the little things she’s said to me this year started to come flooding in..,
1)She said “ I feel like you weren’t a good friend because you didn’t tell me what was going on before the divorce “. When I was in a mentally abusive relationship and I was being mind fucked every day it’s hard to know what’s right and what’s wrong . I had soo much shame until I was finally ready to be free… it wasn’t about her. That hurt me.
2) “I feel like your not a good friend, you let me behave badly and don’t tell me” this is when she stole a parking spot from a hot guy to be cute. She was with her adult daughter. Who lost her mind that she did that. But some how it was my fault. Again I said That’s just her ….I said
3) “you should be able be rich on 70k a year with no kids, Why aren’t you traveling more ?” Keep in mind her condo rent is $3500 a mo that alone, is more than I make a mo. I have a entire house to pay for on a teacher salary.
4) “ I don’t hang out with you like I do with Kate & her man. I should just let you go !” Wow that’s a real friend thing to say…
5) in April “ I’m moving to Florida , &leaving my business here!” In May “I think I’m not moving to Florida …“
6) “ nobody is ever there for me “… that one probably hurt me the most.
There’s more but I digress….
Fast forward after 5 weeks of not talking. We met for drinks. When I tried to explain how I felt ….she dismissed the situation said well “I was drunk and high” and then proceeded to argue with me about my version of the situation , keep in mind I was sober. So I just buried my head in the sand that day. I tried to let it go. I figured there would be time to address it further later. But after that my feelings were hurt and my feelings about the friendship were different. So we really haven’t spoke since.
This morning I finally got a text from her…,
It read STFU….

I’m looking for the episode of big body bes at the Puerto Rico festival screaming “everything I do is Puerto Rico” haha

I purchased a pre-con condo in 2021. The realtor communicated that 80% of the units need to be sold before the builder would allow assignment sales. We’ve reached that threshold, but I now see the contract states the threshold is 95%. I should have reviewed this with a lawyer (I accept that is my mistake) but is there any recourse or action I should take?
For context, I was served an N12 and now have to move. I want to sell my assignment to buy a resale property.

It's really simple:

1. Use VPN (any VPN, even the free ones work) and select a US server. ProtonVPN is one of the best free VPNs.
2. Create free KFC account
3. Link KFC account with BattleNet account
4. Redeem first reward for free

For the remaining 4 rewards, you do need to place an online order with KFC. Just pick the cheapest item in their menu that is eligible. I found a $4.99 sandwich. Select to pick up the order at a random KFC place in US. Just pick one in a poor state like Puerto Rico, Kentucky, or Louisiana because they have the lowest prices and taxes. You will need to add a phone number, just go on google maps and find a business in the area that has a phone number listed and add it to your order. Pay with your Visa/Mastercard, KFC does not limit purchases to US credit cards or something funky. Never pick the order up.
And that's it. Repeat the above step 4 times and you get all rewards, each order unlocks the next reward. However, for a total of $20 plus tax, I don't think this is worth it, you can get a full set of armor for the same price on the Diablo store.