Julie and Julia

I never saw the movie Juile and Julia but the rest of America did. Anyhow, as I've taken up cooking I'm now going to post recipes every evening to inspire Juila Childs to cook. As far as I understand it that is essentially the plot of the movie. So this one's for Julia.
Potato Leek Soup.
Cut up some leeks.
Cut up an onion.
Put lots of butter in a pan.
Mash up some potatoes. Drop some more butter on the potatoes for good measure.
Combine the two elements in a bowl.
Eat soup.
Pour you sig. other an extra glass of wine and bring up philosophy of life.
Say something like, "I think we just need to constantly reevaluate everything we believe." Then, immediately reevaluate what you've said and revise it. Repeat steps until your sig. other is bludgeoned into non-sentience by your drivel, so you can watch some television.
And that's my recipe Julia Childs. I think she's really going to enjoy that one.


Excerpt of the sort of conversation that I assumed I'd never be having and had. And felt a strange sort of out of body experience as I was having it. Like, really? is this what you're talking about?: (Standing in line at a farmer's market)
M: I just can't decide if I want to get the whole wheat bread or the rustic Italian boule.
Seller: Ooohhh. I'd go with the rustic Italian. You can really soak up a lot of the soup in the holes.
M: Then that's the one I'll go with. (Make sure that you add a slight lift in my voice at the prospect of capturing potato leek goodness in the crusty bread).

I've got like a thousand other recipes, but I'm probably going to share them at a later date. I'll probably just post the rest of them on my Twitter account which you can follow via my blog.

Ex:
9:00 A.M. Andrew is processing book loans.
10:00 A.M. Andrew is loving processing book loans.
11:00 A.M. Andrew is chillaxing in his chair as he processes book loans.
12:00 Andrew is eating his almonds for lunch.
12:05 MMMMMMMMMMMMMMM...............almonds.
1:00 Andrew is sending books out in packages.
1:14 Andrew loves packing tape.
1:30 Fed-ex!!
2:30 Andrew is processing article loans for CLS.
2:45 What's that stand for?
2:48 Fun. Just roll with me on the acronym.
3:30 Andrew is correcting all the problems that came up during the course of the day whle processing loans.
3:32 Andrew is loving PBJ sandwich for lunch!
3:34 He meant to post that on his lunch break.
4:00 Andrew is checking the clock at work and trying to make it spin faster!!
4:10 Andrew is using multiple exclamation points to help his fans know how he feels.
4:30 Andrew loves a good honey crisp apple.
4:30 Andrew is done with work and ready to make dinner and hit the rewind button.

And so on....I'm anticipating that my followers will be as numerous as ants on an ant hill. But no, wait, like one of those ant hills that a kid has been poking at with a stick for like an hour. And the ants are pouring out of the ant hill to show that little bastard that they mean business. Like that kind of ant hill. Minus the anger.


I'm really just trying to hold down my excitement as S and I prepare for the move and spend our evenings discussing the relative sturdiness of cardboard boxes. What could be more exciting than that? Aside: It's definitely more exciting than reading ant hill cartoons, which are just atrocious in terms of comedic value. See above.

Scooby snacks

That's a picture of our side of the duplex. I tried to make sure that the pic. was taken from the angle that made it look the most haunted as that was S's initial issue with the house. What she calls a "haunted angle" I just look at as a defensible hill in case of a peasant uprising. Then again, I've been warned that I spend too much time worrying about an agrarian revolt and not enough about things like trim and primer.
I typically don't worry about things like trim and primer because they sound to me like the names of Transformers, and I'm not allowed to play with them anymore. Apparently these are the sort of words that I'll be developing and that will become a vital part of my ever decreasing vocabulary/intellect. I started the summer by checking out Heidegger, and I'm entering the Fall with a copy of Crate and Barrel raptly watching HGTV. In HGTV's defense, I found that I understood as much of Heidegger while I was reading it as when it was sitting on the floor and serving as a door jamb.
The likeliehood of an actual haunting in our house is pretty low and I reassured S that at worst we'd be dealing with Slimer and that the likeliest candidate for haunting the house was probably the next door neighbor with a mustache and a vested interest in stealing the property from us. Who, said neighbor, was putting on a costume in the evening and coming by to scare us in hopes of getting the treasure as any child raised during the era of Scooby Doo knows. I always hated Scrappy. Always.



I called a contractor today and asked him what it would cost to knock a hole in our kitchen wall and buff the hardwood floors a bit.

M: We've got about six hundred square feet upstairs that would need to be refinished.
(I wonder if he knows that I'm just making these numbers up? but I sound so convincing. Even to me, and I know that I'm full of shi-).

He quoted me a price of 6,000 dollars. As I know nothing about either of these projects I immediately accepted his offer. The funny thing about owning a home is that even after you shell out the most money you'll ever spend on a single purchase you then continue spending money on that purchase as if it needed it. The home is like the opposite of marriage, where you put in all that work while you're dating trying to fool some unsuspecting fool into marrying you then BAM! you're wearing your boxers with holes in the shorts around the house and singing to songs from High School Musical and there's nothing they can do about it. With a house, you dress up all nice take it out, and don't even get a kiss until the third date, but no matter how much you drink it never looks quite pretty enough but you're already at home with it.

That said, I'm thinking our house could really use some shutters. I wish I knew what color to make them. I wish I wasn't driving around looking at houses and admiring their shutters.

Interpolation:
If you're a smoker do you take into consideration folks around you?
Scene: I'm sitting on a bench having a nice honey crisp (in season) apple when a guy sits down on the bench next to me and begins smoking. I'm downwind of him and now I'm eating an apple and smelling smoke. My real issue is not with the smoking but that the guy didn't have the consideration to do it in a place where it didn't blow into my face. I mean, I was eating an apple. If I was eating a McDonald's hamburger by all means, puff away, I'm clearly trying to crawl into the grave as fast as I can anyhow. But if I'm eating a nice seasonal apple, please smoke elsewhere. If I'm eating a grape from South America in December, light it up.

The sad part is how much money you can save on fixing up a house by doing the projects yourself. However, I've no desire to spend my weekends buffing floors and shuttling back and forth between Home Depot. I don't get any enjoyment out of finding the right size of nickel pipe for my new plumbing or from having middle aged men making me feel inferior. I'm afraid that most of our weekends would just end with me challenging some guy in his sixties to a forty yard dash in the parking lot. And somehow, I think S wouldn't be too fond of that.

As far as I know it's pretty damn simple to cut a hole in your wall. The dudes on Looney Tunes used a saw and cut things in perfect circles. Perhaps I should stop using cartoons as my examples for how to get things done, it suggests a certain level of incompetence that I'm...who am I kidding? I'm entirely comfortable with it. I got a Master's degree, so I wouldn't have to do manual labor. Unfortunately, I got an MFA in creative writing, so I'll probably spend the rest of my life trying to earn as much as the guys doing manual labor.

Work
Co-worker: I just think they got married too young. You know, like maybe they wanted to go out and test the waters elsewhere.
Co-worker 2: Yeah, you might be right.
M: (Trying to figure out who they are talking about in our office)
Co-Worker: John and Kate plus eight.
M: (What a strange world we live in).

Color Wheel!

The camping trip was fantastic. We ate out at nice restaurants, slept in comfortable beds and avoided staying outside in tents where bear sharks would have had easy access to us. On Friday night S and I had a discussion about what color to paint various rooms.
S: (Using a tool that allows you to faux paint a room). This is the sage green.
M: I like it.
S: This is brookside moss.
M: Okay.
S: (Clicks again) This is more of a shimmering lime.
M: It's okay.
S: (Clicks again) Now this is like the underside of a turtle shell.
M: I'm starting to have a hard time telling them apart.
S: We've only been doing this for two minutes, and you're already done with it?
M: I like the sage green.
S: Yes but do you like the sage or the shimmering lime more?
M: I might just watch some television.
S: (Clicks around for a while). They are hard to tell apart aren't they?



I can't tell you how excited I am to start perusing the color wheel in order to complete the painting of this house. I've decided that I'm a big fan of the color Kensington blue. Unfortunately, Kensington (which is based on nothing I'm assuming. Does anyone know if Kensington is actually a real color or just something created by Benjamin Moore to make me feel a little less masculine) blue is a darker shade, which apparently makes the room appear smaller. I think that's why they always paint dungeons black. Or maybe that's just a lighting problem. I guess track lighting doesn't usually adorn dungeons.

Aside: My master plan is to paint the entire house black and have everyone over for a smashing Halloween party. Granted we'll wake up in the morning wondering why we made such a horrible decision but think of all the fun we'll have scaring people the night before? Probably not enough to warrant painting the walls a uniform black.

Interpolation:
M: This conversation is kind of boring right now, so I'm going to watch some television.
S: I'm going to start my own blog and put that comment on there. That won't make you sound so good.
M: You probably won't.
S: I know.

It's hard to look at the wall above the railing on a staircase and try and decide what color to paint it. Really figure out what color defines you as a person/is going to define you as a person for the next five to seven years. You don't want to pick something pansy like beige. Beige is for HGTV. (And yeah, I watched like five hours of HGTV on Friday for the first time and got scared about inviting a contractor into my home. What's it to you?) I'm thinking royal purple defines us. I'm also excited about using words like trim and chair rail effectively, and generally exuding the sort of confidence that a person who owns a home exudes. I'm also hoping to use the word exude frequently.

Bumper Sticker: If you don't like the way I drive, stay off the sidewalk.

As a child, one of the most important questions for me (and I'm assuming for other kids though I don't have this corroborated) was the eternal, what's your favorite color? Looking back I just wish I'd been man enough to say Kensington blue and totally blow these other kids minds. I was always torn between green and blue but I wasn't comfortable with aquamarine until well into sixth grade. I'm now thinking that aquamarine is a kick ass color for our living room. Does anyone know where we can rent mermaids?


Bumper Sticker: I don't care who you are, what you're driving, who's on board, who you love, where you'd rather bed, or what you'd rather be doing. Just stop driving like a jackass.

We're off to the mountains

In one last futile attempt to escape the clutches of the city, (note that in any OT Bible verse that cities are pretty much harbingers and waystations of crime and tomfoolery). we're heading to the Shenandoah Valley again this fall. It's important to go to the Shenandoah Valley at least once during the fall so when people ask you what you did during the fall you can say, "I went to the Shenandoah Valley," which will sound really impressive. Trust me. A bit more impressive than "I watched a lot of college football games." Even if, deep down, you know that college football games are way better than leaves changing color because things happen faster in a game and leaves take their sweet azz time. I know from reading magazines like Time and US Weekly that our contemporary society likes things to happen quickly and leaves don't change color quickly. Though sometimes it's fun to say, "I can't believe that tree is so red. I feel like it happened overnight," because then it makes nature seem more like television, which is fun.

Interpolation: With S out of town I decided to watch every new television show that NBC or ABC premiered including a tandem watching of DWTS and So You Think You Can Dance. Here's my recommendation for the fall lineup.
Community-Overhyped not funny enough.
Glee-I hate it when any television show does a mock football game. Has it ever been done well? Answer: no. On the whole a pretty decent show. Not like Melrose Place good, but honestly, what is?
Modern Family-It's like some sort of hybrid between two and a half-men humor (read: not funny and intended for mass consumption by Americans who are by and large easily entertained) and Arrested Development. (read: intelligent comedy that demands that an audience pay attention to get the subtle interplay). Ergo; funny enough to watch and typical enough to probably stay on the air.

Interpolation in which Andrew talks to Anne Lacey about their respective Thursday nights.
Anne: And I'm just sitting there wanting to write, and then I find myself watching Cougar Town.
M: Oh yeah, I watched that one too.
M: The whole premise strikes me as implausible. Hey, I'm a really attractive/lusty woman who can't find anyone to sleep with.
Anne: It wasn't funny. It was just a bunch of people in awkward situations.
M: Kind of like this one where two people who got expensive graduate educations to write stand around talking about sitcoms.
Anne: Please don't mention this conversation to anyone else.

If you say Shenandoah out loud you'll notice that it's the sort of place that you should probably go for a fall trip. It just sounds right. I remember my trip to camp there last year. Though really, I primarily remember vast hordes of mangy deer sniffing around our tent. Remember when you were a child and you thought seeing a deer was majestic? Me neither. Deer are giant rats. Also, if one is sniffing/clopping around your tent at 2 A.M. it's pretty easy to lie in your sleeping bag panicking over the bear that is outside your tent. Then telling yourself, "No. No. You're crazy. That's not a bear. And even if it was, what's he going to do? Is he going to rip his claw through the side of the tent and carry you off into the wilderness? Is that what that bear is going to do? And yes, you realize that that is exactly what that deer/bear is planning to do and you start wondering how many people will make it to your funeral and what they'll do about your mangled body. Damn I love camping!

M: I think I'm just going to watch TV this year.
S: Don't make me think we spent 50,000 dollars on nothing.
M: Now when I watch the shows I can at least critique the writing and say things like, "I could have done better."
S: That's not really doing it for me right now.
M: Me neither.

I'm unclear on what bears eat, but I think it's a strict diet of blueberries, hair, and human flesh. Also, every time I'm on a hiking trail with any bear signs I start obsessing over whether a bear is going to be around the corner, and trying to remember if you're supposed to make yourself look big or curl up in the fetal position. I think it might depend on the bear. And you start wondering like how fast you could run. Like if you could outrun a bear. Or even if you would, what with the wife being with you and all. And if you'd be noble like that guy in Grizzly Man and let the bear take you first. And I guess you don't really know what you'd do in a situation like that until you are actually being chased by a bear. Let's just be honest here.

I have similar fears after about twenty minutes in the ocean regarding sharks, which is why I never properly took up surfing. Sitting alone on my board at six A.M. having fantasies about my leg being ripped off my body really didn't do it for me. In the end it's sort of just a long way of pointing out what I said in an earlier post about the world's most dangerous animal, which is (drum roll) a bear riding a shark or a bear carrying a shark. Either way, you're dead.



Note: Please excuse the above vulgarity, which is typically edited in this blog but is being kept due to perceived comedic value. Please also excuse the usage error of now your f-d instead of now you're f-d. Though this blog typically specializes, itself, in common usage errors and probably should not put on any airs or is it errors? about it.

Here's a nicer picture of a bear.

You looked younger

This picture gives me nightmares of house searching.

Let's talk about neighborhoods. One of the great things I learned about driving around beautiful Washington, DC looking for a home is that DC is not beautiful. In fact, 90 percent of the houses are pretty much brick duplexes. This fact lead me to say at one point while we were driving through the desirable Mt. Pleasant neighborhood, "I hate these damn houses. I'm so bored of brick. I think we should get one of those houses that's in a bubble." Naturally we bought a nice brick home a few weeks later.

Interpolation:
S: What happened to that drain in the back yard?
Seller: Oh. He, the dog, you know, he got back there and started digging around.
S: Did he fill in the drain?
Seller: Yeah. He was digging around and then laying in there. You know how dogs are, just messing everything up.



The advantage of the brownstone is that it is sturdily built. Sturdy enough to cause the house to sink a few feet in the seventy years since it was built. Settling is a great term to learn about houses. If a house is perceptibly leaning or a door doesn't quite shut, you can just shrug and say, "The house is still settling" and that makes it all better.

Later:
S: I think the dog is buried in the backyard on that drain.
M: Is that what she was saying?


Later:
S: I think the dog is buried in the backyard on that drain.
M: Is that what she was saying?




As I was driving to the airport to pick up S tonight I was struck by how much I miss the ocean. It was warm tonight in DC, but not uncomfortably so. I rolled down the windows and sang operatically until I injured my vocal chords and looked out over the rolling hills of lights, sad that they didn't end. In CA, if when you drive along the coast the black shape of the mountains is on your right and the ocean on your left. It reminds you that things besides people and freeways and cars exist. It also reminds you that you just bought a house 3,000 miles away from that particular part of the Pacific Ocean. I suppose every big decision you make brings regrets. I occasionally regret buying an appetizer when I'm out at a bar instead, so in the grand scheme of things it's no surprise that I'm not entirely pumped about this whole process. It's just one more step to getting old.

Facebook related Interpolation:
M: That picture of me doesn't look quite right.
S: That picture I made a comment on?
M: Yeah, the one from the other night.
S: I think that picture is from a few years ago.
M: (Looks closer) No. I wore that grey shirt on Saturday.
S: Are you sure?
M: Yes. It says literary dessert after party.
S: Oh. You just looked younger.
M: (Laughing) Thanks.
S: Don't put that on your blog.

Pass through or electric?

It's probably best to just skip to the bottom of the page at this point and turn on the Jaws theme to increase the intensity of the reading experience.

Before I begin calling contractors and getting estimates and using other adult sounding words frequently, I need to decide whether it is more important to make sure that the electrical box in our house is in working order or if we should get a pass through in the kitchen.

Plus of the pass through is that we can discuss the latest issue of the New Yorker while S cooks dinner.

Minus, S is going to be interrupting me as I try and watch a really great episode of DWTS.

Plus, other people will come over and compliment us on our pass through, noting the fine craftsmanship and vision that we possess and asking us for recommendations on their future pass throughs.

Minus, other people will come over to our house and possibly compliment me on our pass through while I'm trying to watch a Michigan football game. And I'll have to stand up, and sort of angle my body towards the television while engaging in half-hearted conversation with them and feeling really conflicted about my love for football and my hatred of other people.

I hate people, and yet I enjoy gatherings.

Plus, Our kitchen will not be exactly like the hull of a pirate ship.

Minus, Our kitchen will not be exactly like the hull of a pirate ship and I won't be able to call S a wench as she prepares dinner. Extra minus for the talking parrot we won't be able to get as well.

Plus, it will make S happy.

Minus...I guess that's enough.

Electric
Plus, getting it fixed will prevent us from trying to reset the breaker and getting heartily electrocuted.

Minus, has anyone ever seen the movie Weird Science? That movie is awesome and Kelly Lebrock is attractive even though it's set in the 80's, so you know she's the real deal. I think that by electrocuting ourselves we could create some sort of Weird Science scenario whereby we both get really cool and get hot gf's. I'm not sure this is as much of a plus for S.

Plus, Frayed and rusting wires around electricity are a bit of a hazard.

Minus, I like to live on the wild side. I mean, I'm considering biking to work.

I think the pass through wins out by virtue of having a better plus minus performance. Ergo; if anyone knows any contractors/how much it's going to cost or just really enjoys hammering/rewiring electric please drop me a line.

I suppose my third idea would be to put an above ground swimming pool in the backyard and stock it with fish. Then proceed to wake up loudly at 5 A.M. every Friday and put on a bunch of fishing gear including a trip to buy live bait somewhere in Maryland before coming back to the pool in order to fish.

The minus of this idea is that after watching the movie Jaws I was afraid to even take a bath. Why? Not exactly sure that I was reasoning at a high level. I'm fairly certain Great Whites don't live in the sewers but one never can be too safe.

What Comes Next?

A commonly held fear by the two to one people who read my blog bi-monthly is that I will not have anything to write about now that our housing search is over. However, I've already begun to compile a list of topics that I plan to blog about over the next few months/years/decades. Including:

1) Are babies cute when they are born or are we all obliged to just call them cute? Note: According to my sister (congratulations on the boy!) they don't exactly come out looking like the baby from the Charmin commercials. Apparently it's more of a cross between Stewie from Family Guy and those crappy aliens from that over hyped movie Signs. I mean, all I get is like one scene with the aliens? The suspense wasn't killing me it was boring me to death.

2) How much money will it cost to turn our new home into Pee-Wee's playhouse?/What sort of mold will we be required to grow in our basement in order to facilitate this?

3) Is it better to buy something expensive and well-made or to buy something cheap because you got a good deal. And you can go home and secretly remind yourself every hour or so about the good deal you got on that lamp that is now adorning your end table. And yeah, maybe the lamp doesn't actually turn off without being unplugged/slapped vigorously, but it was like four times cheaper than that thing at Pottery Barn.

4) Learning to shop at Crate & Barrel. Learning why Crate and Barrel is such an effective name even though ostensibly crates and barrels are pretty boring things mainly useful for carrying root vegetables or rolling over Niagra Falls.

5) Meeting new neighbors/beginning a systematic assault on them in order to facilitate a move on their part/enticing friends or family to move in next door.

6) Lemonade Stands? Great way to have neighborhood fun? An opportunity to teach a child about cost-benefit analysis.

If my math is correct, and it often isn't, that should cover about the next six years of blogging.

Interpolation/Reminder of the sort of thing that we often forget, which is that occasionally things in life get better.

S: Oh my gosh!
M: What? (Said with anxiousness).
M: Is it a roach?
S: Well, (said with trepidation) it's a black spot on the floor.
S: Oh, wait. I guess that's just a piece of a brownie.
M: Are you still upset about it?
S: A little.

Interpolation #2 surrounding an ongoing discussion of whether to buy a new can opener, which I've been in favor of for months but have faced vociferous opposition to what is being characterized as a needless purchase when we have a fully functional can opener that is basically guaranteeing us both arthritis in our declining years. Ie next year.
M: Can you come in here honey? Note: I may or may not have said honey.
M: I don't seem to be doing anything to this can except fraying the paper edges.
S: (Begins to open the can).
M: Let me finish. (Almost finished opening can).
S: (Rubbing her arm). I may actually agree to your wish.
M: You're going to dress up like Barbara Eden from I dream of Jeannie?
S: I was thinking more along the lines of getting a new can opener.
M: Oh.
S: Are you upset?
M: A little.

Inspections abound

The scenario is as follows. Suppose you put on what you think is your best outfit, make up, shirt, and gel/hair spray your hair into perfection. You're looking good. Then you invite someone who is a beauty expert to come over and tell you all the things that are wrong with you. (I think this might actually have been the plot of the show True Beauty). At the end of an hour of learning that your face isn't entirely symmetrical, that your pores could be smaller/less red, you're no longer feeling so good about yourself. Like maybe you should go out and get some collagen injections and do a thousand sit ups. You feel like maybe you should just stay in and watch an episode of MacGyver. What a great show.
This is essentially what you do when you ask someone to inspect the home that you're about to pour most of your life-savings/future income/first born child in order to purchase. After three hours of listening to the litany of things that were wrong with our potential purchase I was ready to buy a brand new condo.

Inspector: This dryer doesn't actually have an outlet that pushes the hot air out. You're going to have to figure out what to do with that?
M: I'm the least handy person in the world.
Inspector: Chuckles.
M: (Does this guy think I'm joking?) My way of solving the problem would be to move the dryer outdoors, which might cause other problems. I don't know. I've never really owned a proper dryer except when we were in Santa Barabara and kept it out back.

Thankfully as the day progressed the inspector caught on to my extreme fear of places like Home Depot. Me walking into a store like that is akin to that thing that dogs do when they present a submissive pose to other dominant dogs. Except that my submissive pose, is quickly getting a headache/getting lost/listening to someone (patronizingly, probably inferred) explain what to them seems like a simple process of putting on a door knob and what sounds to me like man traveling to the moon minus a space ship.

HD: So you are just going to want to use your screw driver...
M: Now hold on. Tell me more about this screw driver you speak of.

Anyhow, the whole process is just overtly/incredibly depressing. You'd like to think that if you are bankrupting your future for something that it should be perfect right? I suppose that's a rather unhealthy relationship to have with the home purchase/anything in life/because it doesn't always go perfectly. Perhaps having things go wrong builds character. But at some point I'm hoping to have enough character built up to not have anything go wrong and to live in a big mansion where I swim in piles of money to express glee. Aside: I grew up watching the Disney afternoon and Duck Tales had a profound effect on what my future dreams entail. Mainly a large Egyptian tombesque structure full of gold coins that I can swim in. Is that too much to ask for/want/expect? Probably.

Let's get rich and buy our parents homes in the south of France

8:00 A.M. Wake up frightened because my alarm is going off. Think to myself, that clearly must be a mistake I'm way too tired for that to be real.

9:00 A.M. Begin processing loans.

11:00 A.M.-2 P.M. Sit at my computer watching our incredibly slow connection take a minute to load each page. Consider starting Da Vinci naps but don't due to fear of being discovered. I wonder if you could take mini-Da Vinci naps. I believe most people call them cat naps. It's long been a goal of mine to learn to sleep with my eyes open.

Evening-Attend an Ingrid Michaelson concert. Arrive later than I should have because I walk in the exact wrong direction. Can we start implanting babies with GPS systems just to save them a lot of internal annoyance/spousal disputes?

Enjoy the music of Miss Ingrid Michaelson with the other 100 guys and eight hundred girls at the concert. Girls, most of whom appeared to be in high school. Swear that my next concert will be the Rolling Stones so at least we'll feel young.

Aside: Remember when you were younger and you wondered at what age you got to listen to the music that you liked sans judgement? Everyone always claims to have eclectic taste in music. Isn't having eclectic taste just having taste in music? However, the real lie, (that at least I was told) was that at some point it didn't matter what kind of music you listened to. With that in mind I've enclosed a link to a rather happy song at the end of this blog that I like. I'd like to say unashamedly but I'd be lying.

Event from Austin:
M: turns on his version of Pandora
Friend: What is this slow crap?
M: (Sigh/a little part of me dying inside).


Interpolation:
M: See. Everyone else thinks I'm nice. You're the only person who doesn't like me.
S: Remember that I know you better than anyone else.
M: That is the meanest thing that anyone has said to me in weeks.
S: Really?
M: I didn't intend for that to be something you'd be excited about.

Morning inspection-Our home inspection is taking place at 8 A.M. tomorrow morning. And, let's be honest, no matter what he says we're buying the damn house.

Inspector: The foundation is actually set in quicksand. This whole house will be underground in about three years.
M: That gives us time to adapt to breathing sand.
Inspector: The upstairs is actually just a cleverly placed set of mirrors that is reflecting the bottom floor.
M:We'll invite kids over and tell them to play in the funhouse.
Inspector: It appears that shed in the backyard is actually a small-scale meth lab.
M: I'd been wondering how we were going to afford our mortgage.

Anything short of the two of us being shot at as we exit our car will not dissuade me in the least.



Two notes to the parents.
1) No chance.
2) If I start making more than a quarter of a penny a day writing I'll see what I can do for you. I know a good real estate agent or two.

Work

The changing of the seasons: Ah, the dying of the cicada, the leaves turning color, the air getting crisp and everyone in the Northern Hemisphere disappearing for upwards of four months to Lord only knows where. Needless to say, I consider fall to be probably the worst season if you live in a cold place. Primarily because people are always praising how crisp it is, and how nice it is to live in a place with seasons. Clearly none of these people have lived in Santa Barbara where the seasons never change. It's heaven.

Highlights of my cube. An air-conditioner runs at a high volume from the ceiling above my cube blowing consistently cold air on to my right hand and forearm. Thus, while the rest of my body is at a comfortable temperature is always freezing. What's that? Just put on a sweatshirt you say? I can't because then it gets way too hot in my cube. I think I need to wear an Allen Iverson arm sleeve to work, but I'm concerned that co-workers might impugn my fashion sensibilities. I live in constant fear of co-workers impugning my fashion sensibility.

Interpolation:
M: I wish I felt better about the house.
S: I was just starting to feel good about it.
M: I just keep having the feeling that we made a huge mistake. But I don't think we could have made any better decision.
S: What are you saying?
M: We're not rich enough to be happy.

The sky is the color of cement. The ground is wet but doesn't smell of rain. Everyone is reading a book or listening to an iPod. A few of the trees are showing the first signs of fall. A small puddle reflects a patch of barren sky.

M: I just never pictured myself living in Washington, D.C. This whole house thing makes it feel permanent. (Sigh).

I'm walking home with my headphones on. The ear pieces held together with scotch and masking tape. Sometimes I pride myself on not spending money on the smallest things.

S: You're only twenty eight years old. It's not like you're on you're death bed.

Today feels like any other day, the air crisp, a small black squirrel climbing the trunk of a tree.

I find the saying "my mind was somewhere else" to be somewhat of an oxymoron. The mind is always focused on itself. Sometimes I wish I could be somewhere else, watching me read a book or pick out an apple, test its crispness. But there it is again, I cannot get away. I hope I'd think I was a fine fellow. I know myself too well for that.

S: D.C. is too cold. Some other place would be too sunny or too rainy.

Sometimes I turn the music on my headphones off but pretend like I'm listening, so it looks like I have something to do.

M: You made a good point there about D.C. being too cold.

A girl, sandy blond hair, sits on a bench pouring over a book about Shakespeare. Another girl walks past, a look of intense concentration on her face.

S: The point is that no place is perfect.

I am not eager for the days to grow shorter. The days seem short enough. I do not know how much people slept before the invention of electricity.

M: (Continues to listen to Holiday in Spain with a depressed look on my face).

The buildings in the city all appear grey. Monuments to all those who have come before and we walk the streets in the city of the dead.

M: (Choose to ignore the irony of said song planning a Holiday in Spain to get away from Los Angeles).

It strikes me as odd that the whole world, myself included, is busily going about their lives as the center of their own universe. I wonder what people think of me, then stop, because the answer is probably not that often.

I hate Los Angeles too.

The whole scenario strikes me as obscene. The girl reading the book on the bench, a light breeze on my right forearm. And that other girl, crossing in front of me, a look of intense concentration on her face.

Too much damn traffic.

None of us knowing a damn thing about each other, not even names.

Even in the land of eternal sun people are unhappy.

People's sleeping habits have always been influenced by the sun. Even before the arrival of electricity people living on the equator could stay awake for longer. Is sleep a mini-death or a respite from this life?

How odd, that we should all be shuffling about these strange cities believing we are the center of the universe.

According to some Da Vinci slept for only two hours a day.

I wonder if my job will let me take ten minute naps every few hours if I promise to become a genius?

And their is nothing to dissuade us from that fact. Perhaps our minds our right, perhaps we are the center of the known world. What a boring place.

I'd probably just lose coordination skills and act drunk not draw airplanes before they were invented.

Today, it barely rained. I didn't regret my lack of an umbrella. The sky spitting droplets of rain was like cool air upon my forearm. The two woman and I are as far apart as the sun is from the moon. But what if I could close that little space that lies between us? Tell you a story about how I walked home from work today and tried to remind myself that I am not the center of the known world. Would you care how it ended even though it's not a story about you? It ends with me sitting here and you sitting there, a few streets over where the city lights are still bright, or on another continent where the soft morning light is already pushing against the curtains inviting you into another day of prayer. It ends with us together.

Warm the House

I've got October 31st tentatively set as our house-warming party. As I understand house warming parties, people will bring gifts to our house like matches and lighter fluid, and we'll burn the place to the ground and collect the insurance money. I've not been to a lot of house-warming parties, but I also think that we're all supposed to wear knit sweaters and drink hard cider before the flames go up.

Confession: I'm not sure that I've ever been to a proper house-warming party, and I'm excited to have one to look forward to. It's like the adult version of senior prom. We are officially real grown-up people.

S: Can you help me calculate these numbers on our closing costs?
M: Can't we just watch the rest of Glee? (Never trust her big butt and her smile).

Anyhow, anyone who has ever read my blog or heard about it from a friend or accidentally clicked on it, or unfriended/taken me off their news feed because of it

Interpolation:
S: I need your signature on this paper. (Said with a deep sadness of a person who has come home from a job only to do more laborious paperwork).
M: What's going on? You don't seem like you're having a good time?
S: This is not fun.
M: (Sign the paper and notice that S does dates with a / and I do them with a -.
M: I do dates different than you. (Pause for comedic effect). I always go home with the girl. Note: appropriate to provide canned laughter from Two and a half men at this point. Self-high five administered.

will receive a paper invitation as well as an Anyvite. (Josh Hill). I'll expect all of you to fly in from far away extravagant places like Arlington and Silver Spring to share in the happiness of our new home. I'd also like to request that every person who arrives brings a drawing (preferably done in melted crayon) of what their dream house looks like so we have things to put up on the fridge and later deride when folks have gone home.

Questions?
If you have a bar in the new basement do you use it for?
a) A bar. Putting all sorts of hard alcohol behind it and keeping the basement ill-lit to help singles out.
b) Keep cute things like Pepsi and Coke down stairs. The sort of things that good people keep behind their bars.
c) Get rid of the bar and replace it with a nice couch from some place like Crate and Barrel.
D) Use the bar to have sock wars with future children.
E) All of the above excluding c, which, who the hell would pick that one anyway?




If you have a small/uninteresting back yard do you?
a) Put up a privacy fence to let your neighbors that you won't be f-ed with.
b) Put in raised beds, (which is the sort of thing that you hadn't heard of/seen until recently) and nod knowingly when people discuss the acidity level of the soil in DC.
c) Put in a patio with flagstones and a small grill. Invite neighbors over to grill with you over the top of your privacy fence. Bonus points if you left the chain link.
d) Pave over the grass and sit happily in the backyard beckoning your neighbors over through the chain link to admire your lack of a lawn mower and free Saturday mornings.
e) Begin selling your little plot of land as a pet cemetery. Charge extra for dogs/porpoises.








Prayers for baby Caleb.

Bike Quest

While anxiously awaiting our home inspection on Saturday (nothing gives me more of a thrill than following someone around a home that is trying to figure out if all the light switches are wired properly.

M: Can you do that again?
Inspector: What?
M: Do the thing where you turn the light on and off.
Inspector: Okay.
M: (Claps joyously).

And trailing after him/her as she tells us all the things that are wrong with our new home.

Inspector: You've got a whole in your chain link fence big enough for a rat to climb through, climb up your chimney and gnaw away at your insulation.
M: Is that likely?
Inspector: Absolutely.
Inspector: It appears like you've got a non-functioning door bell and you've got a family of talking bears living in the crawl space beneath your front porch.
M: I never understood the Care Bears).

and in the meantime we've been discussing various luxuries of living in our new home including my Lance Armstrong like determination to bike to work. I think once I here one person who believes in my biking plan I'll be able to commit to it fully.

M: I'm planning on biking to work.
Mom: Oh. That's not a good idea.
M: It will be shorter than public transit.
Mom: You're not much of a biker remember?

M: I'm planning on biking to work.
Brother: Promise your big brother that you won't bike to work.
M: Can I promise but then continue to bike anyway?
Brother: (Deep sigh that implies my impending doom if I choose to bike).

M: I'm planning on biking to work.
S: I'd rather you didn't.
M: Don't a lot of your co-workers bike to work?
S: Yeah, but, I'm not so confident in your biking skills.

It's fair to say that all I need is a little encouragement and I'll be purchasing spandex before the week is out.

An aside involving a conversation about the word dither.

S: Why did you allow me to just finagle around when I needed to be going to class?
M: I don't think that's the word you're looking for.
S: What would you have said.
M: Dither.
S: Dither? That's not even a word.
M: I'll prove it to you. (Reads confusing Wikipedia entry).

Dither is an intentionally applied form of noise, used to randomize quantization error, thereby preventing large-scale patterns such as "banding" (stepwise rendering of smooth gradations in brightness or hue) in images, or noise at discrete frequencies in an audio recording, that are more objectionable than uncorrelated noise.

S: That's not real is it?
M: I'm confused.

Then the good Old Webster's (a pretty crappy dictionary when you get right down to it but who pays attention to something like that) pulls me through: to act nervously or indecisively;

M: I'm not sure dither means what I thought it meant. F-ing post-modern world.
S: I'm going to class now.

For those that do bike to work, I assume that it's sort of an accepted reality that you draft off cars/grab onto bumpers when necessary while blaring Power of Love on your iPod? Do cars frown on you pouring champagne all over them to celebrate you winning the Tour de DC? Will they allow me to bring said champagne into work? So many questions and so few answers. F-ing post-modern world.

Load bearing Walls?

Now that we've ratified a contract on a house and moved into the next adult phase of life I'm going to grow back my mustache and begin wearing a tool belt at all times.

Child: What's that do?
M: That's a circular saw son.
Child: I think that circular saw is cutting into your leg.
M: (Turns white) That's what it's supposed to do.

Needless to say I grew up watching Home Improvement (Digression: I watched it when it was a funny show and Pamela Anderson was an unknown actress/tool girl with much smaller mammary glands. I didn't continue watching the waning years of the show when girls went crazy over JTT because the show became derivative and terrible. Every television show should be cut off after a six year arc at the absolute most) and look forward to beginning repairs on our house.

I'm currently researching the cost of taking out a load bearing wall. Most online responses warn of heavy costs, and finding random things inside your wall like electrical outlets and plumbing pipes et al. I'm really looking forward to finding a nest of baby raccoons. Do raccoons lay eggs?

According to various web sites the cost of removing a load bearing wall is somewhere between two thousand and infinity billion dollars. Words like load bearing and steel joist actually scare me, so we'll probably be pushing the infinity billion range if we actually decide to move ahead with the project. (This, despite the fact that I thought we'd originally agreed on a privacy fence to be built before our first move in day. The sort of things that says, "Hey neighbor, we're new to this area and we're really excited about our new home. We'd be even more excited if you didn't live right behind/next to us, so we're going to put up a little fence to pretend like this never happened.") I think it sends the right message.

S spent the day shopping around rates with lenders, which turned out to be yet another part of this housing game that turns quickly into the quay of a small African village bead seller. I sort of thought that things cost x amount of dollars, but apparently you just have to know how to talk people down.

Whole Foods Clerk: That will be seven fifty two? Cash or credit.
M: Hold on a minute fine sir. I saw that same apple at Safeway for a mere 79 cents a pound. Can you knock off a dollar or so to make your price comparable.
WFC: WTF?
M: Because I can just take my business elsewhere, and I will.
WFC: The price hasn't changed.
M: Pays the amount asked. You're lucky I'm too lazy to drive two blocks.

I think we're now going to take the large sum of money that our lender is throwing our way and start our own dollar liquor store/realty company. Bertaina and Bertaina. If you can't find the right house, we'll probably help you feel even more confused/conflicted than you ever thought you could be. Then, just when you think you've found the right thing, we'll throw a wrench in your plans by mentioning the crime rates/sex offenders. And if that doesn't work, a literal wrench. Note: We're going to have very large business cards to fit all this in.

How does it feel to be on your way to owning a home?
It feels like I've completed the first third of a triathlon in record slow time, and perhaps a shark got a bit of my thigh on the swim back in. And now we've still got to run and bike. And I don't even like biking.

I like driving on fast streets with dollar stores

As any normal almost first-time home buyer we spent the morning looking at another house.
S: I wouldn't need to see this house except that it's my dream house.
M:Snorts in a way that conveys disdain/an implicit disgust at the need to sabotage the end of our long journey.
S: It's just that if we don't see this house I'll be afraid that I'll always regret that I didn't even give it a chance.
M: Snorts in a way that implies the line of logic being used is the sort that has made for many a great plot in a romantic comedy but falls a little short of sane in a housing search.

We drove out to the burbs early in the morning to check out the "dream house." Though the house turned out to be quite beautiful the surrounding neighborhood left a bit to be desired. What future parent can't picture their kids scrambling across several busy streets with forty mile an hour speed limits and impatient drivers to reach school? The dollar and liquor store density was also top notch but we decided that our future plan of opening a dollar liquor store would be hampered by a market already flooded with said stores.

The issue with this whole search is that we can either afford to live in a sketchy part of D.C. or the scary suburbs. For my money, unless you're in an extremely scary part of a city the scary suburbs are far worse.

We then drove around the back streets of Silver Spring re-living our housing adventures and remembering them fondly. And when I say fondly I mean with a sort of deep bone/soul weariness that one associates with extremely trying times in their lives. I think that's what fond means.

S: We looked at a house on Larch.
M: We did?
S: Oh yeah.
M: I don't remember that. Did we?
S: You were there?
M: Was I? Maybe physically, but I think my spirit had begun to die a little by that point.
S: Has this process really been that bad for you?
M: Worse.

After leaving the busy streets and Mega dollar stores of ghetto Silver Spring we drove into the neighborhood where we'll be living barring any mishaps on the home inspection.

First sight of our new neighborhood: A person, (gender unidentifiable) is attempting to push a large stroller up onto the curb and is struggling to get the wheels up. Why? Because the person has a large German Shepherd in the stroller. The German Shepherd was looking rather scaredly at the curb as the person tried to push it up onto the sidewalk.

M: Well. At least the people here feel safe enough to walk their dogs.
S: I'm sorry I missed seeing that.
M: It was amazing.

A conversation that my brother's wife had with the neighbors kids:

Child: We're going to church later.
BW: Oh really. What church do you go to?
Child: Oh, the God one.
(Pause)
Child 2: And Jesus too.

A simple theology.

And without further adieu we finally purchased a house on the day that I found out my sister had birthed a baby boy safely in Italy. A good day all the way around.

I do other things as well

I think it's safe to say that people who read this blog do so because they are
related to my by blood or marriage, or have a profound interest in finding a home in the Washington, D.C. area. That said, sometimes I fear that I'm painting myself as too one-dimensional. I do a lot of other things with my time besides blogging about housing.

1. Spend time on Redfin looking for houses, scrolling through neighborhood stats, crime ratios and looking at pictures of sex offenders
2. Driving through neighborhoods and looking suspiciously at anyone congregating. Note: We're putting a no congregating sign in front of our house.
3. Making offers on houses
4. E-mailing our realtor
5. Drive down random D.C. streets examining other people's porches and drawing S's attention to fine grillwork on a wrought iron fence.
6. Look at people walking dogs on the street and proclaim Petworth, Eckington, Columbia Heights/anywhere we can afford to live a great neighborhood.


All in all I feel like I have a really balanced life that isn't being properly represented by this blog. Ergo; my aim is to give some free and entirely unwarranted/unwanted advice to people. I think it's safe to say that really this blog has morphed into a must read for fashion conscious DCites. Sort of like a Sex and the City for people who don't like cities and who are moderately afraid of sex. Ergo; I'll begin with some fashion tips.

1. I don't know when this fad started where girls where galoshes at the slightest hint of rain but it's not even remotely cute. Note: If you're reading this and you happen to be a galoshes wearing girl I'm certain that you pull it off with the style and grace of a young Jackie Kennedy so bear with me as I talk about others. Perhaps it's because I worked in child care for years, but it's only cute when a five year old girl wears galoshes. Do you know why? Because she's five. Five-year olds enjoy doing things like stepping in puddles and splashing and generally making a nuisance of themselves. Do you know why we don't wear galoshes when we grow up? Because we don't jump in every random puddle, and we hate having anything remotely approaching water on our selves. So the galoshes protect against that you say? Wrong. Not walking through puddles like a jacka-- protects against that.

2. While working in the library I witnessed a young lady wearing a hat that seemed to be a cross between a court jester's hat and a long over-sized sock. I'm going to go ahead and say no right off the bat and hopefully prevent the craze before it gets started. Just because it rains doesn't mean you get to dress like a hobo. Note: I've been accused, rightly so, of dressing like a hobo by friends.

3. I ran out of fashion tips. But I have this great story about a house.....

How would this scenario end up if you were a child bidding?

I want ten.
I'll give you two.
Eight.
Four.
x

Solve for x using common sense. That's kind of the point we're at in the house negotiations, waiting on the final offer to come through so we can buy a house and begin talking about grout/resale value/school districts/how overpriced fences are. On the other hand, I've always been terrible at math and maybe x is like some huge number that I can't even fathom. Now I'm freaking myself out. Let's see, if I can get the variable on one side.....

Aside against fall: The rain started in today. Everything was grey. I took an umbrella to work and left it. I'd do that every day if given the chance. Umbrellas are for wimps. I'm not a big fan of fall because it is followed by winter. Winter lasts about five months and typically throws me into a great state of sadness/loneliness. Something about being from CA makes the cold seep down into my bones and just kind of sit there. When I came home I took the hottest shower I've taken in months. I tried to warm myself up for the onset of winter. I sat at the window and watched the rain batter the street and all the people scuttling from place to place beneath half-shells like crabs on the sea floor. Perhaps the winter makes for better writers. One can't read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy without concluding that Siberia may be bad for the body but it certainly deepens the soul. Here's to a long winter.

Things to remember

We're finally in the game on a house and probably going to get it. Knock on cheap imitation IKEA particle board. Ergo; one of the most important things to do when you finally are ready to get a house is to immediately go onto your local crime web site and check out how many registered sex offenders you'll be living near. Really, it's a great tool if you want to unconvince yourself of buying a house. I'm aware that unconvince is not a word, but it sort of is.

Anyhow, you can go on the web site and view pictures of these people and see the actual crime they were accused of. It's the sort of thing that no doubt brings a great deal of assurance to our parents. It's also a great way to frighten yourself out of ever leaving your home. As if the constant noise of cicada's didn't do that enough. Do they eat people?

S: We'll be sharing our back yard with a registered sex offender.
M: Our actual back yard?
S: Almost.
M: That's why we're building the privacy fence.

Notes on making a deal.

I've decided that I'm great at bidding on houses because I grew up ripping off my friends in baseball card trades.

M: I'll give you a Dale Murphy Donruss for your Mark McGwire Topps rookie.
Friend: Is that a good deal?
M: Oh yeah, that's a great deal. I'm doing you a favor taking that card off your hands. It's worth it to break up your complete set. You'll have a Dale Murphy


Thus, the tough part about dealing on a house is that I can't rip the person off and then go home and celebrate with my Beckett monthly.

Honestly, it feels like a game of Monopoly at this point because the sums are so far above what I've ever spent on something. Besides that time I treated myself to the spa in Vail, but I just really needed that month. Thus, a difference of five thousand dollars almost feels like nothing. I mean, we're basically talking about Baltic when I'm trying to put a house on Board Walk. Remember landing on Baltic? And you'd have to shell out sixty bucks to buy it, but then a house would only net you like twenty or so in rent. I mean, what the hell was the point? And why didn't anyone ever land on the overpriced greens? I lost so many games because green was my favorite color. And yet, everyone was always going to jail or landing on community chest, and I'm damn near bankrupt with those expensive and useless greens. Aside complete. I mean, Baltic, who cares?



Do we overvalue shelter? Yes. But theirs nothing I can do about it. My plan to redivert (now a word) the Potomac back into the city and turn it into a modern day Venice was shot down by my wife and the kind people who run the series of locks along the river.

I don't think you get to celebrate at all when you buy a house. I think you get to go to Benjamin Williams web site and decide if you prefer a deep red or a nice mossy/sage green for your kitchen. Its times like these when I wish that I was color blind like my dad, so I could opt out of the whole thing. Oh wait, I did.

S: I went to a blinds store while I was waiting for you.
M: Oh.
S: You wouldn't believe how expensive blinds are.
M: Oh.
S: Can you guess how much a good set of venetian blinds costs?
M: I can't.
S: What kind of blinds would you prefer on our windows?
M: I'm not having this conversation.
S: What?
M: I'm not talking about blinds. Call your sister or some other woman.

Despite the registered sex offenders, lack of knowledge on how one makes a pass through in a kitchen, (every time I google it everyone suggests doing it yourself. Isn't their one more person like me who isn't sure which end of the hammer you're supposed to use? What's with all the do-it-yourself folks. I thought Americans enjoyed watching television, not rewiring plumbing) or whether light colors do indeed make a room appear larger, I think we're going to get this one. And then, let the regrets begin.

A decision is made

Sometimes the easiest way to make a decision is to have it taken away from you. The rickety but large house that we were considering putting a bid back in on went contingent, taking the baby with the bath water or something to that effect. Ergo; we went down to the local Starbucks, (and when I say local I mean the Starbucks that takes me upwards of forty minutes to get to because it is just outside the beltway, aka, a million miles away) and put in our fourth offer on a house. I'm thinking that I'm going to professionally write offers on houses for people. I'm good at initialing. Note: I am not good at initialing. My penmanship earned me a c- in second grade, by far the lowest grade I ever received in school. Thank goodness it didn't scar me Mrs. Wallace.

The thing about this house is that I really thing we're going to get it. And, as I've learned from other recent home buyer's apparently the only thing worse than looking for a house is actually getting it. (It's fine to end sentences with prepositions). Remember that girl/guy who you always wanted in high school? Remember when you saw her after your sophomore year in college when you suddenly realized that you were way cooler than you'd ever suspected. And you run into this person at a bar/party/Roman bath and you hit it off. And the whole time you're ignoring the fact that this person is actually not half as cool as you once thought they were because in your mind they are still the piece of candy/ice cream that you couldn't have. Eventually you wind up proving to yourself by going out on a couple of dates that you could have had them. And you're internally really excited, except you have a gnawing suspicion at the back of your mind that you're not actually dating the actual person, but the reflection of them that you've created in your mind. You're actually dating yourself in high school or junior high in some weird way. And after a while you realize that you've outgrown that, and that the person sucks, and that you'd rather watch that exact same plot unfold in a movie but life is a little more final.

That seems to me to be an apt metaphor for purchasing a home. In the rush to make it yours you look past all the flaws and lack of crown molding. Because, it is the the thing that you've always wanted. American dream and all. And you don't want to spend x amount of dollars on something that you don't really really want. So you sell yourself the house. And then you move in. And you realize the house isn't as pretty as you once thought it was. It's got roaches like every other place, and the neighbors are no longer college students, just quiet old people, and you find yourself missing the loud parties that came from upstairs that reminded you of being young. And even though you have a front porch no one ever walks by.

Of course, that's just a guess. Maybe finally getting a home will feel like winning the lottery. And I'm certain that I'll have a neighbor who will like dispensing wise advice over the privacy fence I'm going to build between our yards like Wilson. And if he/she doesn't have a fishing hat, I'll give them one.

M: Hello there Wilson.
Neighbor: Who the hell is Wilson?
M: I just don't don't know what to do about my kids. They are really driving me up the wall lately.
Neighbor: Why are you talking to me about your kids?
M: Thanks Wilson. I needed to hear that.
Neighbor: Are you insane?
M: I'll get you that fishing hat soon old pal.

And I'll learn to do things like pull out the sink to find rings, and I'll talk about things like caulking and grout constantly and become a real bore. I'm getting too excited. I'd better stop.

Houses?

Remember the first time you heard the term "the grass is always greener on the other side?" Me neither. But it's kind of true. Now that we've ostensibly decided to make an offer on one house another house has come back on the market that is making me question our decision to offer on the new/old one. I think it's fair to say that this blog now relies entirely on inept metaphors to describe our housing lot. With that in mind, here goes: The house that we think we want to put an offer on is like a new girlfriend. She's sweet and kind. You imagine that you will never have any fights and that things will continue in bliss for ad infinitum.

Unfortunatley you're also certain that bliss is overrated and that you'll be bored after a few months. And then, your old girlfriend, in this case a house that we offered on ten days ago and would have been happy to get, comes back on the market. Maybe its been a while since you've seen her and you're remembering all the imaginary cabinets you put up in her stomach, and the recycled glass counter top eyes of hers, and you're suddenly wondering what you're doing with this new house when you have all this history, (about three days total) with this old house/girlfriend. And you know that with the old gf you have more potential, but you've got a lot of repair work to do. Some fences to mend, some floors to refinish. Or you can just start fresh with the new girl/house with the lack of junk and repairs. What to do?

I find that I make most of my best decisions at the last possible minute. I'm thinking that we'll probably flip a coin with our real estate agent tomorrow to decide which house we offer on. That's actually the same decision making method that sent Columbus to the New World, Washington to Valley Forge, and the god Poseidon to the sea as opposed to the land. Those might all be false. Except for the Poseidon portion, which is clearly factual.

Irrespective (I sort of just wanted to use that useless word to begin a sentence) of which home we actually end up with it's a slightly dehumanizing process. For all of the walking around other's homes, and putting your sofa where their's is, or punching a mental hole in the kitchen wall to connect it with the dining room, it's strange that we don't actually know the people whose homes we are trying to buy. I'm almost entirely certain that I have nothing intelligent to say about this, but I find it odd. I'm not even sure if its always been this way or not. I'm willing to even consider the fact that a time existed when people didn't go to IKEA every Saturday after they moved into a new home. (Not really. I mean, can you imagine?) Insert shudder here. Insert another shudder if you think I have any desire to put together a piece of furniture from IKEA. Lord knows I wish I had a better job, so that I could afford to pay someone else to make me feel emasculated by doing all that sort of stuff around my house.

It seems like it might change the home-buying process to know who you were buying the home from. Do things like that matter at all anymore? Is there any difference between a large corporate bank and an old lady strapped for cash? How much can a consumer reasonably be asked to care on a purchase that ranges into the hundreds of thousands of dollars? And if not then, what is the financial threshold at which one is responsible for making an ethical/moral purchase? Is it the 99 cent value menu at McDonald's? where we went two Friday's ago thank you very much.

S: What does your gut tell you to do about this housing situation?
M: My gut tells me we should offer on both houses. Then, dig a tunnel between them large enough to periodically flood and conduct battles between mini-submarines to help subsidize the expenditure.
S: I'm not sure I'm going with your gut on this one.
M: We could design one of them to be fortified against zombie/vampire attacks and the other for your more garden variety floods et al. It's a pretty sensible approach.
S: Yes, but the one has Pergo floors. I feel like we're destined to never have hardwood.
M: You can't imagine how disappointed about that I am. Note: If you can imagine not being disappointed at all and kind of just going about your day with nothing being any different then you'll have a pretty good idea of how disappointed I felt.
S: I just don't know what to do?
M: Me neither. Sigh.

Labor Day Weekend or Back to the Future

In honor of LDW we took a break from the housing market to enjoy being relatively young and unencumbered by school work for the first time in years. We began our break from the housing carousel by looking at houses on Saturday morning with our real estate agent after exchanging a couple of e-mails at 8 A.M. Nothing says taking a break from something like continuing to do that exact same thing.

Back to the future: Two months ago, in the early stages of our housing search, sometime around when this blog began, we looked at a house that I loved that S claimed was haunted. Her claim seemed a bit unsubstantiated as their was no sign of the Stay Puff (sp) Marshmallow Man or that creepy quiet talking kid who got what was coming to him in Pay it Forward. Kidding. Kidding. Thus, despite the amazing built-in bar in the basement, knotty pine included as well, S was not crazy about the house.

Unquestionably the first Back to the Future movie is the best. In most cases the first movie is the most inspired and subsequent iterations fall pretty far short. The following titles started well and went out with with the trash. The Matrix. Die Hard. The Land Before Time. Transformers. Karate Kid. Teen Wolf. Weekend at Bernie's. Star Wars (any of the latter movies). We hadn't seen cars that could fly in the nineteen eighties, and we didn't realize how cool Huey Lewis was until we saw someone skateboarding on the back of cars. The Freudian overtones with his mother, the audacity and charm of the first movie make it the best.

Going back into the house was like rewatching BTTF. However, this time S saw the house in all its glory. I could hardly keep her from mixing drinks behind the bar and punching holes in the kitchen wall to make a pass through. I have no idea how much a pass through costs, but I'm guessing I can do it with a large hammer and a lot of pent up frustration. Contractor my as-. I can handle punching a hole in the wall. And why? So we can talk to each other while she's in the kitchen? Is this a good idea? I kind of like being able to read a book or watch a game while she cooks. Is it too fifties of me to assume that she might enjoy cooking in the kitchen by herself and humming a nice song while birds flutter about? Note: We watched Enchanted tonight to counteract a movie we'd watched earlier in the evening. A movie, Goodbye Solo, that I liked, but S was threatening to ban me from queue making after its sad ending.

BTTF2 presents you with the hovering skate board and you're immediately sucked in to believing that you're actually seeing something cool. But what the second movie lacks, besides charm, interesting plot developments, Freudian complications, disappearing fingers and Huey Lewis, is dystopia. The future is always bleak. People are not unhappy individually. We've always been taken over by a race of machines or some sort of emotional control serum. That's pretty much what we all realize we have to look forward to. In no way shape or form does BTTF2 address this obvious universal theme: the coming great uprising of machines/overlords/aliens. The irresponsibility of the movie, and the lack of Power of Love, make this movie infinitely less appealing than its predecessor. And the only people who still think of it as the best of the trilogy are, I think it's fair to say in a blanket statement here, trapped in some sort of misguided dream of childhood fantasy of hovering skate boards and has not embraced true adult sadness.

Bright side of the house: Very clean and well taken care of by an elderly lady.
Down side: The furniture is circa 1950, so it occasionallly makes it hard to move in our somewhat crappy IKEA furniture and imagine how hip it will be.

Bright side: It has a bar in the basement.
Down side: I've never mixed a drink in my life.

Bright side: It has a small back yard.
Down side: It has a small back yard.

Bright side: The house is in good shape.
Down side: The house is in good shape which means we can't jack up the resale value.

The third BTTF movie does a fairly good job of wrapping up the whole plot line. And, we get introduced to the Wild West, which is infinitely more interesting/less fraught with sad dystopian themes than the future. The viewer also gets the satisfaction of seeing Marty introduced into the adult world as he loses Doc to the Wild West, (pardon me for calling it that) to a woman that he loves.

Ergo; we're putting in an offer on a house that I would have been happy to put in an offer on two months ago. However, far be it from me to even mention that fact out loud or in print. (Excluding here). I'm guessing that at the last second a new bidder comes in and decides that this house, which has been on the market for quite some time, is the house of their dreams.

Reality. The house is in fact simultaneouly the 1st and third BTTF movies. For me, it was love at first sight, riding skate boards on cars and listening to Huey Lewis. For S, it was the third BTTF. Note: She prefers the second, but I pretend like she doesn't for the sake of our marriage. The one where you realize that you can't have everything. Perfect neighborhood, a million cabinets, a life with Doc next door, but that what you have is pretty good. And sure, you've gone through a whole lot of crappy houses/problems in the future/past school districts, ideals formed of where you want to live in a city, and you're going to be okay in this new place.

Author's note: Again, I can't wait until we don't get this place a week from now. It's going to be awesome!

A relatively short history of housing part two

Americans by and large turned to their houses to fund these new and extravagant pursuits. It was decided by one person and some other people thought it was a good idea that flipping a house was a great way to earn cash. These people also decided that shelter was worth a hell of a lot more than had previously been thought. Enough people agreed and the housing boom was born. This allowed everyone to start paying for all those new things that were also not making them happy.

However, those things changed, and became things like watching television, paying someone else to cut that damn big lawn you thought was a great idea, getting your nails done, pick out a nice class to take to get away from the kids, just pampering yourself a little because the world as it turned out yet again, is not out to do anyone any f-ing favors.

Now women joined in the crusade and pretty much everyone was constantly walking around wondering just how they were going to make themselves happy. But thank god for those houses, which cost infinity billion times more than caves, which allowed them to pursue the root of their unhappiness. People were still putting up pictures on the wall, but now everyone pretty much had their own unique style, which was oxymoronic of course, the style having come from somewhere. And everyone was pretty sure that they were the arbiter of truth for their own life, and pretty much everyone else's life as well. And people like experts or academics were regarded as snobs. And humanity all had a nice moment of patting themself on the back and realizing how far they had come from those thatch houses. In general the era of choice was regarded as a positive step for humanity, even if the amount of choices was occasionally overwhelming and people still felt soul-crushing sadness and were unsure why.

The living conditions were much better, though it was largely agreed by "scientists" that the indulgent lifestyles that were being lead were eventually going to result in some real problems. Everybody had a nagging suspicion that that was true, but they also really enjoyed, (or thought they enjoyed) things like cable television, Internet, trips to foreign countries, cars, freeways, commutes that don't involve nasty public transportation and big homes. Thus, things sort of continued as they had before but now with people feeling sort of guilty about something only identifiiable if you really stopped and thought, which was avoided at all costs. It's sort of like religion for those that have left the church but still have the nagging feeling taht something is missing.

"Morality has nothing to do with the decisions that you make every day and everything to do with where you stand on pro-choice vs. pro-life." This is my sarcasm quote.

At some point in this timeline a relatively young couple decided to buy their first house and discovered that buying a house requires trade-offs. Neighborhood, schools, accessibility to transit/jobs, home size, number of cabinets in kitchen and grew very depressed. They felt that the housing market in the large metropolitan area where they had jobs was unduly stratified financially, and that they were priced out of getting what they wanted. Wanted being the sort of term that could be defined in about a thousand different ways and which they tried to define for each other on an almost daily basis and found it frustrating because even after all these years of evolution human beings are still trapped insider their own heads. And this struck them as sad because the very things they said they espoused turned out to be much more complex in reality. And they discovered that no matter what you say you want reality is still waiting to kick you in the ass and show you how wrong you were about yourself. And being wrong about yourself is a pretty hard thing to deal with.

And secretly, at least one of them wished that they were sitting around a fire amongst friends, trading stories of this great woolly mammoth they had taken down in the middle of the day, blissfully unaware that they were wiping the species off the planet. And when they were done talking and laughing they'd retire to a cheap little bit of rock that they could call their own.

A relatively short history of housing divided up into two parts

I've run out of intelligent things to say about housing. Note: Probably about thirty blogs ago. Essentially a house is something that provides shelter for you on a day to day basis. In the early years, humans, and I use the term loosely, would hunker down in caves around fires and then scrawl pictures of themselves hunting woolly mammoths to impress the local women. And though we may now look back at those etchings, and scoff at the craftsmanship, standards were lower then and the local women were sufficiently impressed enough to help males turn those cave-dwellers into the dominant species on the earth.



Human beings advanced, doing a variety of things like inventing the wheel and the Inquisition, and moved into larger stone dwellings called castles. Some of the poorer folk lived in straw huts infested with lice, but I'm sure they all had good times. The castles were cold, like the caves, and had rats, like the caves, but now the men didn't draw on the walls, they employed other people to paint things on the walls for them for a sum of money. This was done to impress artsy scullery maids and proved somewhat successful. The folks who lived in the thatched houses pretty much worked hard and then died. Most Americans today have a whole lot less in common with those people than with the people in the castles.



Human beings continued to evolve in various places and replaced the small thatch houses with solid stone things. This was generally regarded as a positive step, a more equitable sharing of wealth et al enabling this change. Note: Some of the broader strokes in the latter half of the housing development are more typically associated with Western Europeans and good old United Statesians. People in traditionally poorer countries having figured out long ago that paying 350,000 dollars for something that was essentially free is just plain nuts. These stone dwellings became cities and people sort of learned to live together by doing things like closing off the run of open sewage into drinking water.

The housing development took a slight detour in the nineteen fifties in the good old America's, where it was determined that too much of the land was green and was in need of paving. Ergo; everyone moved out to the burbs where happiness resides, and sort of replicated each other's life values in the way that pretty much every human being has ever done. But it was way sadder because that particular lifestyle made it so evident. And this plainly evident ununiqueness made people a bit uneasy. The men no longer put paintings on the walls to attract the women. The women themselves now became the attraction and they summarily cooked good meals and kept a neat house so that other members of the species would be impressed, compare themselves, and generally find that they were falling short in all sorts of ways just as the early mammoth hunters were acutely aware of how much better the best hunter was and desired his wife/mate/share of the meat. Humans had come a long way.

Thus, the boomers all decided that they were unhappy and disillusioned, and they probably invented a whole lot of other words that pretty much just meant unhappiness. But nay, not like the eons of human beings who had come before them and who were pretty much united in unhappiness, death, disease, infant mortality, bubonic plague et al. These people decided that they were uniquely unhappy and that happiness lay somewhere in the external world: new cars, new wives, new psychologists. This did not make anyone happy but all of these things cost a lot of money and demanded that people start making more. But where was the money going to come from?