Home is anywhere: Weeks 3-4 recap

I’m conflating the last two weeks into one post because nothing happened over last weekend, except the place that might have been The One went under agreement to somebody else. Ah, well. This weekend was a survey of places fitting the cramped city-living description, none of which really sang to me. I mean, I can’t argue with location, location, etc., except when it means slanty floors and ceilings so low that I could touch them. One of the other places had balconies with views of downtown Boston, but also of every ugly billboard and smokestack in between. I would dearly love to get this part of the process over with and just make an offer on something, but nothing is hitting the sweet spot yet and I don’t feel ready to compromise yet. Meanwhile, I’m trying not to get frustrated as I am awakened every day by the clog-dancing moose upstairs, and I could have gone cycling this afternoon if I hadn’t been tramping around gawking at flawed real estate. I guess there has to be a darkness before the proverbial dawn, but bleah. Current keyword: angst. Will something pop up this week that works? Man do I hope so.

Best haiku ever

We famous! Swami and I have collaborated on Wizards/Bullets haiku, posted for posterity on the completely insane fan site Wizznutzz. Click here and scroll down to the contributions by “Steve F.”

More Hibachi love

It seems kind of pointless to watch the NBA All-Star Game, but then you realize you get to see Agent Zero dunking off the stunt trampoline!

Also, speaking of dunks, Dwight Howard’s dunk during the competition, though cruelly underappreciated by the judges, was the best. The best.

Home is anywhere: Week 2 recap

All right, week two of house hunting has just wrapped up after today’s viewing of four places, and I can happily report that the trajectory is definitely beginning to form the desired spiral shape. Two of the four places seen this week were solid contenders, and one of those would be worth an offer if I didn’t have so much to do at work and plans to go out of town next weekend. So now the game plan is: decide whether we want semi-cramped city living, or more spacious but more car-dependent near-suburb living. And if the one place doesn’t have an offer on it by the time we get back on the 20th, then that might very well be The One. The most memorable thing seen? Not a tacky wallpaper pattern or a munchkin-sized closet, which make for good blog material, but a gorgeous, friendly silver tabby cat who made me feel very welcome in the semi-cramped place. I think he's on the list of exclusions, though.

Girl Scout Cookie conspiracy

It’s Girl Scout cookie time again, usually a source of joy and calories that I have always looked forward to. But there is a dark side to those disc-shaped delectables. When I moved to my current state of residence in 2000, I was surprised to find out that the old familiar names were gone from the boxes I saw for sale. The most majestic and tasty kind, the Samoa, was suddenly called a “Caramel Delite,” although everything else about the purple box seemed to be the same. In need of my cookie fix and willing to keep an open mind, I bought a couple boxes and took them home.

Well, despite them looking almost identical to the Samoas of my fond memory, they didn’t exactly taste like them. And a lot of the caramel had oozed out of the cookies and stuck to the inside plastic tray of the box, so that it was a huge pain to pry them out in order to taste their inferiority in the first place. “Egad,” I lamented, “They changed the name and the recipe too!” And I thought I was screwed.

But I was mistaken. When I complained (okay, whined) to my sister about it, she said that they still sold Samoas where she lived. And she sent me a box. (This has assured her entry into heaven, if there is such a thing.) Imagine my relief when I opened up a box of those Samoas and found the same delicious coconut and caramel extravaganza that I’d always loved.

So what gives? Turns out there are two different companies licensed to make Girl Scout cookies, and I can say with confidence that one of them produces lousy-ass cookies. Unfortunately, in my area all the councils seem to contract with the purveyors of demonic Caramel Delites, rather than the bakers of wondrous Samoas. So now I have to rely on my sister every year to send me boxes of the real deal. And whenever I walk by a table of Girl Scouts selling, I take a look at the purple boxes. Delites? No dice.

Home is anywhere: Week 1 recap

Okay, Week 1 has ended and here’s the score so far. Places visited: 7; places with potential: 0. The number of horror stories is sadly very small, although I did see one Pepto-pink bathroom and one place that was so 1980s, I swear I saw Sheena Easton in the living room wearing those huge geometric earrings. The nicest place had had an offer on it within the previous half hour, so hopes were deflated before they’d even had a chance to rise. Plus, that one had a tang of Wretched Excess, what with the special wine refrigerator in the kitchen. I don’t think I could in good conscience keep my wine at 54F and whatever percent humidity while children are eating tree bark in Africa. And so the search continues. There are two or three more prospects that didn’t hold open houses; hopefully we can check them out sometime this week.

Speaking of Sheena Easton, I still remember her guest starring on Miami Vice. The love of Crockett’s life, cruelly struck down before her time. I think we can all learn a lesson from that tragic tale: make sure to upgrade to the bulletproof shoulder pads.

Home is anywhere you hang your clogs

In the midst of the chaotic and angst-filled move at work (D-Day is coming up fast, Feb. 23!) it now becomes apparent that the once-hypothetical plan to find a pad with more space is coalescing into reality. The main reason for wanting to buy a new place? Well, there’s the rational, and the emotional. Rational is that it would be very nice to have a third bedroom, for hosting all our nonexistent guests that come to visit, or perhaps for stashing all the guitars and the keyboard and amps and other music-related stuff. Rational is that it would be very, very nice to have more than one bathroom. Rational is that now that prices are sliding, why not upgrade into Swankitude, Mark II. And that’s all good in theory, but it’s the emotional that has me practically running out the door of the place I’ve been happily living in for the last 2.5 years: the upstairs neighbors.

I can even narrow it down further: the female upstairs neighbor. Sure, she seems like a person of normal weight and height, and in possession of the normal amount of empathy toward fellow humans, but in reality she stomps around like a drunken overweight moose at a clog dance. And it’s back and forth, back and forth, all the damn time, starting at a ridiculously early time of day.

(I’ve been doing my best not to mention the 1-year-old toddler, by the way, who is far too young to do anything but the Frankenstein Walk and certainly can’t be blamed for crashing to the floor and/or dropping things at unpredictable moments. Not that it ain’t annoying.)

I can blame the unparalleled ruckus directly on Ms. Clog-Dancing Moose (CDM) quite easily, because last summer she was gone for three months and it was absolute bliss. Mr. Moose, despite being not a small guy, walked around more like Felt-Slipper-Wearing Mouse—and I would also like to point out that he is eminently considerate in general, always apologizing after flooding the shared basement or flooding our bathroom or flooding the basement a second time. Meanwhile, the swami went up there last week to beg for a minor concession, that the clog dancing be moved to a room other than the one above our bedroom in the early mornings, and found out that CDM is not only heavy-footed, but also bereft of all empathy and conscience.

So we’re starting to look at the listings and got in touch with the Realtor (tm) that helped us buy last time. It looks like there is a lot of good stuff out there, and hopefully it’s not the usual hyperbole of exuberant and semi-unscrupulous selling agents making shit up. I’ll try to provide updates as things happen, and hopefully will have some good horror stories regarding other people’s decorating ideas (though it will be hard to top the Cheetah Wallpaper Bathroom of 2001).

Wish me luck, fair readers, for this way lies madness!