Kweznuz

Look, Microsoft Kinect, Jimmydunes and I were simply shooting the breeze about real estate - you just happened to be in the room.  We never asked you to chime in with your quirky “Negative-I-Am-A-Meat-Popsicle” worldview.  I don’t know what you thought you heard, but something of a triumph on getting absolutely none of the conversation correct at all.  

Well done!

House Hunt Recap

During our search for a new home I have become more familiar than I care to be about the different neighborhoods in the area.  They all seem to have some highfalutin titles that make everywhere sound like the names were grabbed from particularly uninspired 2-word Mad Libs responses.  My wife seems to have mastered them, but they all just blur together for me. 

So, instead of trying to remember if the last house we saw was in Shady Pines, Sheetrock Hills, Rock Ridge, or Radiator Springs, we decided to give nicknames to the houses themselves.  Here are a few:

Squirrel House - This house was a sample model on the fourth fairway of a local golf course.  As attractive as it was picturing myself screaming “Hey, you old people, get out of my yard!” for eight hours a day, there was another problem.  As we were leaving I heard a scrabbling up near the roofline that was coming from at least two squirrels darting in and out of a slightly-larger-than-squirrel-sized hole in one of the gables.  Fun!  But wait... Near the hole... Is that bat guano?  Yup, looks like it... Next.

Showcase Showdown House - My wife calls this one “Ravine House” because of the alarming, toddler-enticing 45-degree drop-off in the backyard that led down to a swampy inlet (Hey, dad, my soccer ball went down the hill of poison ivy and into the water moccasin farm again... Can you go get it?). I called it “Rotten Tree House” because of the two near-death 60-foot poplar trees leaning in the most expensive direction possible.  Since the sellers were throwing in a pool table, three flat screen televisions,  a desk, a set of lawn furniture, and, believe it or not, a 2004 Volvo, we decided that “Showcase Showdown” was a much better name.  

If you think about it, these are not the actions of someone selling a house.  These are the actions of someone fleeing something.  Whether it is “the long arm of the law” or “Tony ‘Grievous Bodily Harm’ Masconi” remains to be seen, but not by us.

Swamp House - An otherwise perfect house with yet another 45-degree drop-off near a swamp, this one straight off the back porch.  Look, realtor people, stop calling it a “marsh”.  Here’s how you can tell the difference between a “marsh” and a “swamp”.  It’s a “marsh” if it is in a romantically desolate watercolor painting.  It is a “swamp” if you are actually in or near it. 

Olive Garden House - Horrifyingly realistic Mediterranean-themed tromp-l’oeil murals upstairs and down shot “OMG, Hire Painters, For The Love of All That Is Holy, Hire Painters Now” to the top of the “to do list” with a bullet.  This house would have been fine, but there were other... complications... aside from rotten window frames and an unexplained craving for breadsticks after we left the place.  Let’s just say there was some unpleasantness.  Let’s also say our lawyer advised us not to write anything more about it.  Period.

Power Line House - We didn’t even go in here.  The place had a really nice back yard and was about 200 feet from a huge set of high tension line towers.  No.  No.  No.

1313 Mockingbird Lane - We did go in here.  A bank-owned property.  We were put off by the ant-farm-like floor plan, the huge cracks all throughout the brickwork, the laughably high price tag, and the boxes of “Squatter-B-Gone” peppered throughout the place by whatever poor slob got stuck with the job of trying to make this structure even remotely sellable.  We would say the bank would be lucky to get half of what they are asking for it.

Colonel Expletive Deleted House - We wanted this house.  It was a fine house.  The guy living in it, though, was unwilling to move out before “the end of July... maybe later”.  See, he is waiting for his final military orders to come through.  He is getting a $50,000 moving allowance and doesn’t want to risk losing the money by leaving the place early.  Go ahead and read those last two sentences as many times as you need to to get them to make sense to you, cuz I am at a total loss.  Fifty grand?!?! Where the hell is he being stationed? Low Earth Orbit?  A palace under the sea?  A magnificently appointed Zeppelin permanently parked over the Grand Canyon?  

After we balked at the idea of living in this single bedroom efficiency for two months (probably more) and walked away, their realtor sent the second-most-condescending letter I have ever read to our realtor. It informed us that by walking away now we risk (get this) “losing the house of your dreams because you are not willing to wait a few extra weeks.  Sometimes the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, and we (the sellers) may still be here if things don't work out for us elsewhere”.   

I’m like, look, I don’t know what kind of crummy dreams you have, but a house possessing a room which, with a lot of work, could make for a cool TV room someday does not constitute a “dream house”.  It is an adequate house.  My “dream house” is 10,000 square feet, has an Olympic-sized swimming pool, dual matching glass and bronze elevators, an observatory, a helipad, and sits square in the middle of a hundred-acre vineyard.  In my dream I would fly the house you are trying to sell in on weekends to use as my servants’ temporary guest quarters.  You need better dreams.

Home Freaking Sweet Home - Hopefully we close on this one at the end of the month, but we have been down that path before (see Olive Garden House above), so we will see... Stay tuned.

Another Delightful Spring Shower

Last week, amongst the stacks of pre-move-out cardboard boxes and rows of rows of random and probably completely unnecessary items we have accumulated over the years, we hunkered down in the hallway and waited for the most recent tempest to pass.

See, for years our neighborhood had been the target of hyper-local unrelentingly violent weather.  A two-mile-wide corridor of blood red on the radar map had us at ground zero more often than not.  During a storm, the nearby high school would report half an inch of rain.  We would get half a foot.   The rare snows would be the same way - one or two inches four miles away, eleven inches at the house.  

Bizarre.

The downstairs hallway was probably the safest place to be at the old homestead in the event of a typical “shower”, or, as we liked to call them "Jeebus-H-Rice-Doesn’t-It-Ever-Just-Freaking-RAIN-Here?"  Of course, no place is 100% secure against an onslaught of the elements but I refused to have the newspaper headline "Run-of-the-Mill Cantaloupe-Sized Hail Slaughters Clearly Unprepared Family - Neighbors Not Surprised" become a reality.

Here’s a typical weather-related news blurb from the useless local weather morons:

A cold front is pushing through which will provide some much needed rain to the area.  Temperatures will drop from a high of 97 degrees to 60 degrees over the next couple of hours which should bring welcome relief from the heat, then climb back to the 90s just in time for yardwork tomorrow.  After the break, how a recent six percent hike on parking fees at the local zoo could affect your wallet this summer.  Stay tuned!

Here’s our typical reaction honed by years of experience:

Bring in the lawn chairs!  Shut the garage door!  Batten down the hatches!  Lash the Escort to the driveway!  Our wills are up to date, right, honey?  RIGHT?!?!  They’re calling for a 20% chance of light rain for parts of the viewing area!!!  Have the neighbors finished that ark yet?

I’m not being fair.  Actually, calling the weather folks “useless” does a complete disservice to things that are genuinely useless.  They would have to really improve significantly in order to be considered for the title “useless”, and, even then, only at a probationary level.

These guys actually think that “parts of the viewing area may get some rain tomorrow” is an actionable piece of data.  Should I mow the lawn now?  Can I wait?  Shouldn’t it matter that the viewing area is, like, the size of New England? If you are truly interested in bringing us up to the minute weather news from your Super Ninja 3000 Quadruple Doppler Radar Technotron or whatever, why do you put the info online in 5 minute increments, and then only when that info is already 15 minutes old?

I guess having the TV on does provide some info, though.  The meaningless lull of the bald guy or the tall guy (depending on what local news station you watch) is comforting as they prattle on and on about unconfirmed reports of dime-sized hail in tiny burgs seventy miles away. It is less soothing when the weather guy’s voice quavers and says “If my wife and family are watching, now would be a good time to take cover in the place we talked about before” (that actually happened about a year ago).

So, as the cul-de-sac out front disappeared in a grey mist of nearly horizontal rain (sigh... again) we calmly and with a tone of utterly transparent joy and exuberance say to our three-year-old "Ok, buddy let's go to the hallway!  You can play with the iPad if you want to!  Sound like fun?  Here you go... just BOY HOWDY WOW!  Did you hear that?  That lightning was super close, huh?! Hahaha!  I can see the smoke from the tree it hit out back!   Cool, huh?  Hey, why don't I go get your sleeping bag - it'll be just like camping out!  Awesome!  I'll go get it right after I change my underwear!  Can I get you a snack?"

I mentioned before that we are in the process of moving.  The house sold faster than we hoped and much, much faster than we expected. The last item in the list of things to do was the septic tank inspection - it passed, of course, but the real test was the eight (yes, eight) inches of rain that came almost immediately afterwards.  Again, it passed with flying colors.  Or at least it passed with a complete lack of floating colors.

The ditch was filled with quick-moving rainwater runoff from the forest behind the house so the boy and I made a tinfoil boat, peopled it with a multi-colored ping-pong ball "family", and set it on it's merry way.  In his head it is out to sea by now.  In reality, it probably got hung up on a fallen branch shortly after it turned the first corner where it will stay for the next 500 years when it will be discovered and its "purpose" grossly misinterpreted by archeologists.

Hmm... In retrospect maybe I should have spaced out the last two paragraphs a bit...

Other than the rain, the “local viewing area” sponsored a waterspout that turned into a tornado.  Depending on which news outlet you went to, it caused either “minor damage to the facade of a yacht club” or “completely leveled the city of Hampton, chuckling evilly and salting the fields in its mighty wake”.  Since I drive through that area every day, I am guessing it was more on the “exciting but inconvenient” side of that coin.

Well, regardless, I write this now from the comfort of a single-bedroom efficiency (more on that later), and I see they are calling for showers for “the area” over the next three days.  I wonder if I should contact our old neighbors and ask if I can lend a hand hauling gopher wood or converting board-feet to cubits or something...