As someone with some family ties to VTech, just wanted to say, well, something. I’m completely speechless but thought this unbelievable awfulness should not go unmentioned. The worst thing that should ever happen to someone in a classroom is being called on.
The last couple of weeks have been a rollercoaster ride, to say the least. I haven’t even found the time to upload pictures of our short trip to San Francisco, or inform you loyal blog readers about it! (Summary: lots of fun, great food, great to see Erin and Keith.) But all the news these days is on the home front. Yesterday was the first open house to sell the condo, and I’m still not sure whether to be optimistic or not. I took Friday off work and spent a Herculean effort getting the place staged—that’s real-estate-speak for hiding all personal items and making things as empty as possible while still projecting a homey and lived-in appearance for your gracious dwelling. And apparently, despite the insanely wet nor’easter that blew through the whole thing, there were a lot of people looking around and looking interested. We even managed to cajole the moose cloggers upstairs to go out somewhere and not stomp around and drop things.
After a somewhat tense evening of anticipation, an offer did come in today, although it’s a little lower than we were hoping for. So now the chess game really begins: counteroffers, sizing up the offer, deciding how to act and when. This is where our agent will make her dough, because I definitely don’t have the fortitude to play that game. If I’m not careful, “The Gambler” will start playing in my head and that could seriously drive me over the edge. So the game’s by no means over.
Speaking of games, I must add a postscript that the NBA regular season is over on Wednesday and I’m about to repeat as super duper champion of Andy’s league! I am the greatest! Go me! Just had to woof a little, there.
Whoa, this is a new thing for me, I’ve been tagged by my man Lifton. (Edit: To my embarrassment, I see I missed one last month. Sorry, man.) And I say, why pass up a chance to blab about myself? To pass it on, I hereby tag Raoul, Frantix, Sashe, and Danielle. Maybe this will inspire those slackers to get back to posting.
And now on to the Q and A.
Well, mark it down, I mean. The current condo goes on sale this weekend, and I’m vacillating between anxiety and complete freakout. Will anybody want to buy this place? Will I manage to get all of the sensitive personal items locked down and/or stowed in the car in time? Will my thoroughly noisy neighbors keep a lid on it for the two hours of the open house? Will some crazy kleptomaniac steal my toothbrush? I’ve been advised to “de-clutter,” and I do appreciate that things shouldn’t be stacked to the ceiling or spilling out of closets, but anyone who knows me can imagine that the place is pretty low on clutter as it is. Blah. I’m just feeling lazy. The real challenge will actually be trying to continue living here for another month, and somehow get packed up, while it’s staged to woo those elusive buyers. Maybe I should bury that statue of Saint What’s-His-Face in the yard. It would help if I remembered which saint was the relevant one.
Small frustrations all, but they add up.
Thanks to Danielle for pointing me to Wil Wheaton’s reviews of ST:TNG. They’re awesome! Can you believe it’s been almost twenty years? Yikes. And TNG is still the best Trek series, however craptacular that first season was.
Yes, I’m still alive. We signed the Purchase and Sale agreement on Thursday and wrote a big check. There are now no more ways for us to back out (unless the mortgage application is denied, which better not happen). The seller has to fix the things he agreed to fix, and assuming that he does, we are going to have a new place! So on the buying end, things are now quiet until closing (scheduled for late April). On the selling end, things get started now. I’ve done some cleaning today, and we’ve started formulating a plan on Making the Basement Look Decent. That may or may not be possible. If we’d really worked on it this weekend, we could have gotten this place on the market by next weekend, but thanks to us being usual lazy selves, it’ll probably be the weekend of April 14. Might be a flower or two blooming outside by then, that should help! And if I could only get the knob screwed back on to one of the kitchen cupboards—it’s defying all laws of physics and refuses to stay on. I’m gluing the sucker on if I have to, dammit.
I don’t think I can write coherent sentences as this point; time for a list. Here’s what’s been going on since the last update.
—Nerve-racking home inspection
—Most things fine, a couple not fine
—Tense couple of days waiting for the seller to decide whether to fix stuff
—Transferring large amounts of money around
—Meeting with lawyer
—Hashing out the details of the mortgage application
—Scheduling the pest inspection
—Seller agrees to repair major problems
—Meeting with other unit’s owners
—Signing approximately 17,000 places on mortgage application
—Hashing out the details of the Purchase and Sale agreement
—Not sleeping particularly well at night
—Neighbors’ racket continuing to provide only motivation for this crazy plan
—Considering alcoholism
That about covers it!
It’s an efficient way to keep the peeps informed, and a forum for their hollers back.
It’s a good way to work shit out; writing encourages fuzzy ideas to form coherent shapes.
It’s a record of your life, for when time passes and you forget the rawness of the immediate moment.
It’s another way to kill time on slow afternoons at work.
It’s a window into your tiny, tiny slice of the world, and a precious link to exotic other slices you might not have known about otherwise.
It’s navel-gazing with cool cascading style sheets!
Well, I didn’t plan it, but the first house to meet all the criteria finally presented itself today, and in a stroke of birthday luck our offer was accepted. Better location, top floor with the attic redone, and everything done well. No wondering how soon I’ll have to take a sledgehammer to something, no hitting my head on the ceiling in the bathroom shower, no sloping floors, and bonus items such as air conditioning. Aaaaah. Now I can take a deep breath and prepare for the sprint that happens after going under agreement: home inspection, punch list, lawyering up, mortgage mobilization. Oh, and getting ready to put the current pad up for sale. And if I ever have moments where I wonder if I want to go through the hassle of moving, I have a morning like yesterday’s, where the lovely upstairs neighbors vacuumed at 8:30 a.m. I mean, for chrissakes that’s practically a violation of my civil rights.
Makes up for the peeps who forgot my birthday. You slackers!
Looks like Diebold might drop their voting-machine unit after, I guess, finally noticing all the bad press from the last few years, and due to the number of states now noticing how useful it might be to have a paper trail for voting. I’m sure election fraud will happen whether Diebold provides the machines or not, but I’m not crying a tear when that business unit bites the dust.
Week 5 has wrapped up, and it was quite a roller-coaster ride. As of midweek there still wasn’t a single interesting prospect to look at, but then one came on late in the week that promised all kinds of magic. It has all three things we’re trying to improve: location, one more room, and top-floor placement. Seeing the inside on Sunday, however, was a bummer. The kitchen sink was the same kind that I had in my semi-crappy apartment in grad school—that is not a selling point. And the all-important third BR upstairs turned out to be just okay, with a bathroom off of it that only a person under five feet tall could comfortably utilize. In fact, the shower was nestled under the eaves such that the curtain rod was at an angle—you had to hook the curtain at the tall end so that it didn’t slide down to the short end via the cruel pull of gravity. Since I still feel the bitterness of that first rush of disappointment, I almost want to reject the place outright, but that would probably be irrational. So I think the game plan is to wait and see if it languishes on the market. And if someone is willing to house only munchkins upstairs and offer the asking price, I’m not interested in competing with that.
A far happier report on the weekend would focus on the sporting angle: the weather was actually warm enough for cycling (yay!) and we managed to play tennis even though Swami’s back is not 100%. Another successful round of calorie burning to offset all the consumption.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
