I can't imagine doing this.

I dunno: I'm pretty sure my ex was "upside down" in the mid-90s housing downturn, but he just stuck it out. I guess I see real estate as a "buy and hold" kind of thing.

Maybe not for us; we've only been at the house 11-12 years. But it's way too large for us, and we'll be happier in a smaller place.

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"Okay. Let me get this straight. You're at war with three separate bloggers."

"Yes."

"And one of your best buddies isn't speaking to you."

"Yes."

"Is there any chance that it's time to look inside?"

"I tried to get them to do that, but they refused. It's like they don't even want to grow."

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I cannot decide how I'm going to handle the offers on the house that haven't even come in yet, and are of undetermined amounts. And quantity.

All I know is, the real estate agent wants to move quickly. The husband wants to move quickly. And part of me wants to either counterbalance that, or see some damned good reasons why I shouldn't.

This whole process is really nervewracking. This one little business deal is going to make such a big difference in our lives over the next few years.

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Day Three of the Prospective Buyers' Seige. At least three parties went through the house yesterday, and five are going through today.

I've been informed that if I want to, I may go home briefly between 4:00 and 5:00.

What I really want to do is (1) shower, and (2) sleep. Not necessarily in that order.

I'm tempted to try to nap in my car, but in this town there's a very real risk that I'd get arrested for vagrancy or something.

My schedule: I get up, fold the laundry, wash the dishes, make the bed, light the candles, turn on all the lights, and leave the house. Then I come home and clean/straighten/rearrange knicknacks for a few hours before going to bed again—or trying to.

Then I wake up. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I'm essentially a live-in domestic servant for potential La Canada homeowners, so if we don't get an offer that's a few hundred thousand north of what we are asking, I'm going to be kind of annoyed.

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[Composed at 12:33 p.m., over a lovely cup of organic Earl Grey tea, with just a bit of whole milk in it.]

I haven't been online since last night; this is tough. Most of the local businesses require passwords before one can steal their bandwidth and connect, gypsy-stye, from their accounts.

Furthermore, the account I was hoping to tap into simply isn't working, even here at its point of origin.

I really am about to start going through WiFi withdrawal.

According to the barista here, there is a problem with the internet connection that extends throughout Southern California.

This happens to be the most populated state in the Union; whassup with MAE West right now? (It couldn't be MAE West, though: that hub is in Northern California.)

UPDATE: The connection works just fine from home; I wonder who the ISP is for Camp Lefty Bookstore and Coffee House?

Curiouser and curiouser.

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The objectively reasonable price is somewhere north of double what we paid for it. Plus commissions.

Otherwise, why knock yourself out buying in the Los Angeles area?

My friends have informed me that for the amount I'm paying for a condo in Glendale, I could buy a mansion in Riverside, or an estate in Lancaster.

All very well and good, but where would I actually, you know—work in one of those areas? They aren't big media/entertainment centers.

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1 Yes! By all means, move to Riverside! that would be so very very nice. For me.

Posted by: Rin at March 26, 2008 03:50 PM (bSHZa)

2 Fine. I'm sure the magazines I work for will relocate--and I imagine the studio execs and agents A the H deals with would be happy to drive out to the big R for his pitches.

Posted by: Attila Girl at March 26, 2008 04:39 PM (Hgnbj)

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we amscray around 5:15 because one of the local agents is bringing a potential buyer by at 5:30 p.m. We decide to go to the largest local indie bookstore/coffeehouse. A the H Resists Temptation, so he can Set an Example, but I buy a few things because I want them. (Not the Goldberg book, however: I can't quite justify that, and the paperbacks tend to come out on these types of works in a reasonably timely fashion.)

We come back around 6:30 p.m. and try to figure out whether the potential buyers are still there. So it's a rousing game of "try to spot the agent's car." A the H insists that the blue Toyota Matrix must be in.

"No way," I tell him, but enter carefully and yell, "hello?" No answer.

Of course, if the househunters are still here, they could be in the yard. AH goes off to some sort of athletic hoohah event, and I stay. I pour a glass of wine, sit down, and open my laptop. I haven't yet turned off the extra interior lights, or locked the back door—because what if the agent is just starting out? What if that really is his or her Matrix?

After about three minutes, I realize that what I really need—more than I ever have, and more than anything else—is to take a really huge crap. It's worth noting here that none of our bathrooms have locks on the doors.

So I take care of business in one of the upstairs bathrooms, and come out again. No sign of anyone in the yard. The Matrix is still parked in front. No one in this area drives anything like that—it's too nice to be a housekeeper's car, but not nice enough to be one of the local homeowners'. I figure it belongs to the tenant who's renting out the guesthouse next door, and remind myself to ask not to trample our plants next time he hikes up to his car. I don't mind him taking the shortcut, but he should go easy on the landscaping if he's going to go through our yard.

Contra my husband's opinion, a Matrix isn't the kind of car a real estate agent would be ferrying clients around in. Not in this town.

I lock the back doors, and turn out the lights in the rooms I'm not using. I hope we get an offer on this place before the electricity bill shows up; I daren't even think about what that's going to look like.

And, you know—Mother Earth is weeping. And stuff.

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In the context of the possibility that Denver will see violence at the DNC, Stacy McCain is dubious:

I don't think so, mainly because the parallels don't work. In 1968, you had a Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, who was chiefly responsible for "escalating" the war in Vietnam. LBJ's vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, had become the Democratic presidential nominee almost by accident. The early anti-war candidate, Eugene McCarthy, had faded after Robert F. Kennedy jumped into the race. Then RFK had been assassinated, leaving the pro-war candidate Humphrey to claim the nomination despite a strong anti-war presence among the delegates.

None of those political conditions is duplicated for the Democrats who will gather at Denver this year. Most importantly, there is no military draft, which was the basic factor that made the anti-war movement of the 1960s as strong as it was.

Finally, the protests at Chicago turned violent because of a hard core of SDS/Yippie radicals who actively provoked confrontations with police. Today's protesters don't have the numbers, don't have the leadership, and don't have the discipline necessary to pull off anything remotely like what happened in 1968.

I've seen these latter-day protesters in DC at anti-globalization rallies in 1999-2000 and at anti-war demonstrations held regularly since 2001. The protesters come in two varieties: Over-the-hill hippies out for a little nostalgia, and spineless young punks.

Still, the situation between the Clinton camp and the Obama camp has gotten quite severe. For the record, I don't expect violence, but the rift is going to set the DNC back on its heels for a couple of years, until someone can bring the mainstream folk, the feminists, and the whites into some kind of dialogue with the left wing of the party and much of its African-American component.

Also, see Ross Douthat has a great feature in April's Atlantic about why the film industry has attempted in some ways to go back to the filmmaking style of the 1970s—and why in doing so it is misreading some of the cultural zeitgeist:

The Vietnam War was a cultural phenomenon in part because it couldn’t help being one—there was no way for Americans to keep the war at arm’s length, not with more than 50,000 dead, a million deployed over the course of the war, and every able-bodied teen and twentysomething at risk of conscription. In contrast, the Iraq War, a lower-casualty conflict fought by an all-volunteer military, takes place at a greater distance from the everyday lives of those Americans who don’t have a family member deployed overseas. The objective correlatives needed for a truly pessimistic era simply don’t exist for many Americans today. The last time around, we were participants; this time, we’re voyeurs.

This doesnÂ’t mean that the current paranoid, doom-ridden mood in cinema and television was manufactured in Hollywood and foisted on an unwilling public. Up to a point, at least, Hollywood is meeting Americans where they are. Mistrust of government and disquiet about the countryÂ’s future have risen to Vietnam-era levels, and reviving Â’70s-style paranoia and pessimism is a natural way for the culture industry to connect with a public coping, once again, with a military quagmire, rising oil prices, prophecies of ecological doom, and corruption in high places.

But the ’70s revival isn’t simply a case of supply responding to demand; it’s also a case of Hollywood giving the audience what Hollywood wants to give it. The ’70s were in many ways dreadful years for America, but they’re remembered much more fondly in the film industry. There’s no surer way to establish your artistic (and political) bona fides than to name-drop a ’70s movie—whether it’s George Clooney bringing up All the President’s Men (1976) while promoting Michael Clayton, or Stephen Gaghan remarking that of course he was “thinking about The Parallax View and also Three Days of the Condor” while making Syriana. The suggestion is always the same—that the age of leisure suits and sideburns was also the high tide of politically engaged filmmaking, before the studios embarked on the relentless pursuit of the blockbuster and the Reagan reaction pushed American culture steadily to the right.

And:

The paranoid style of filmmaking . . . is defined in both its Vietnam- and Iraq-era incarnations by the insistence that villains at home are more dangerous than any enemies abroad. This was a plausible point of view when the enemy abroad was Ho Chi Minh: the Vietnam War didn’t begin with “Charlie” bombing downtown Manhattan, and there was little chance that VC cadres would follow America back home. It’s a tougher sell in the age of Osama bin Laden, and as a result an air of omission, even denial, hangs over this genre’s contemporary incarnations.

Yup. Read the whole thing(s).

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I might talk my part-time co-bloggers into throwing some posts up over the next few days, but it'll definitely be a bit sparse around here until the first showing of the house—the real estate agents' "caravan" on Tuesday.

That would be this Tuesday. There was a lot of spirited discussion around here about whether perhaps next Tuesday ("Tuesday week," for the Brits) would have been better. But I lost on that one, didn't I?

Off to bed, soon: the photographer is coming by tomorrow to take pictures of our house's bitchin' features.

Plan A: I'll get up at 5:00 a.m., and have all the rooms cleared of extraneous books and boxes by 10:00, when she's due to arrive. Then I'll spend the rest of the day repotting plants/arranging accessories for the "staging" (or "set dressing," as A the H refers to it).

Plan B: As the photographer composes each shot, I'll scurry around and de-clutter within the exact field of view she needs to get the picture. Then I'll frantically re-shuffle everything for the next shot.

After she leaves I'll crawl under the bed and cry.

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. . . of the Lock.

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. . . as Attila the Hub used to call it back when he was in the drinking game.

Drive safe. Treat others as decently as you can manage. Say a prayer for those of other religious faiths.

Hope that the Irish economy will serve as a model for the rest of the world.

(And if you have a child today, please don't name him "Patrick," as Cousin Kevin did with his second-born. I love my cousin Patrick, but that's just over the line, like my friends whose kids' names alliterate, for crying out loud.)

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It looks like the world is our oyster: we can choose between either a slightly decent amount of living space with gang grafitti and peeling paint in the common areas of the complex, or a nice complex in a decent area, but with drastically reduced square footage.

So off I go to throw away everything I own.

I came home today, sat in a corner of the living room, and said goodbye to the view. And then I cried.

And then I laughed at myself, because over 99% of the world's population would kill to have my "problems."

Namaste, boys and girls.

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It's easier than you might think:

Via Write Enough, the Running King.

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That's sounding pretty good right now. I have to get up early to take a shower, clear out the hall bathroom afterward, and give the kitchen another quick tidying-up.

The good news is the husband and I got through the day without killing each other, which impresses me. Neither one of us looks good in orange, and he's Irish—so it's not his color in any way.

Tomorrow I'm on paint-selection duty. Unfortunately, since we're staging the house in order to sell it I'll be going bland, bland, bland. No specialty paint finishes from the marvelous B.—strictly solid colors provided by the local Korean solid-color-superheroes. And, yes—I'm mostly going with the whitest white I can get that will still reflect a decent amount of light. (So. A drop of yellow. No more.)

But if we get a good price for the house, and find a condo that isn't too costly, I might splurge and have B. do my next den in faux Venetian plaster; I've always loved that look.

It'll be odd to be solvent. I wonder how that will feel. Will I start getting pedicures again? I know we'll be shopping for a better car for the husband, and I'll probably replace my laptop. I might even get my pants tailored so they fit me at this weight—I've been going with the "sudden cancer" look for too long. (Alternatively, I could just keep eating cheese Danish coffee cake until the problem solves itself.)

Over and out. Blogging may be very light tomorrow, depending on my deadlines at work, and how things go in the morning with the painters.

With any luck at all, in late spring or early summer I'll be able to walk from my home to a restaurant—and I might even have enough money to walk in.

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We were pretending that I was going to have all the junk cleared out of my den by 1:00 p.m. today.

But tomorrow morning is an absolute deadline; the painters will be here then. So the den has to be straightened, and the "satellite den" (my corner of the dining room) cleared out as well. Also, the living room. That would include my reading corner, which is surrounded by CDs and textiles and books and magazines and other . . . valuable stuff.

Tomorrow night and Tuesday we'll probably be camping in the Husbandly Den.

A the H suggested that I switch from "obsessive sorting" mode into "shoveling" mode. I looked at him, and opened my mouth. And then closed it. And then looked at my books, papers, and that pile of "clothes to mend" in the corner.

"My preciouses," I whispered.

I am not good at this.

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. . . from my gun-magazine days.

"Too bad you missed the SHOT Show," he remarks. "Again."

"It happened simultaneously with CPAC," I tell him. "There was no way. Next year we can hope that they'll be disjoint." [Note: they will be. The SHOT Show will be on January 15-18 in Orlando, FL; CPAC will be February 26-28.]

We catch up on what various gun writers are doing, and we talk about the Presidential horse race, along with the future of the various media we keep tabs on. He agrees to advise me on technical matters when I start my podcasting this spring.

"So." I take a bite of my gnocchi. "I'm starting to think I might be a bit of a bitch."

"You're starting to think that, huh?" He smiles. Concho Kid has long been aware that I have a . . . strong personality.

"Well, it just seems that sometimes I feel that I'm being a bit arch, but I don't mean any real harm. Yet I draw blood anyway."

"Continue," he tells me. "I don't want to get in the way of your self-discovery."

"My friend Joe has informed me that I often use a machete, in the apparent belief that I'm simply playing with a paring knife. He says I don't know my own rhetorical strength."

"That could be."

"Alternatively, it could be that I hang out with people who are brighter-than-average, and that such people tend to be hyper-sensitive."

CK gives me an odd smile. We had a hell of a falling out back when we were working together, and yet I stay in closer touch with him than I do any of my other colleagues from that time. And it's been over a decade. I call that a happy ending to any story.

I find myself thinking about what Martin G. used to say. (It's Martin's anniversary today. Yes: he got married on Leap Day. You know how mathematicians are.) Martin always maintained that one never really understands any given chapter in a college textbook (or, by extention, in life) until one was in the middle of the next chapter.

For years I thought that meant I was somehow behind schedule. Now I see that it's perfectly normal. It's also the reason I tell people my age: I have no desire to be confused with a 30-something—never mind that I look like one.

Everything I've ever figured out in life has cost me too much for me to turn my back on it now.

Including the fact that I can be a real bitch, without even meaning to. I keep thinking it would be worse if I weren't able to be a bitch at all.

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for no reason at all, except that I wanted to post this pic on his birthday, but my computer was acting up. It lets me post pix when it is in the mood, and at no other time.

Trivia question: what Southern California pier was this taken on?

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and the company will be out hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But Laura will be happy. So stay home if you're sick, even if you're under deadline!

The question of the day being: When does the American work ethic/way of doing business conflict with sound public health policy?

Seriously: I used to work for a company that had me shipping a "book" (a magazine) every two weeks. Getting sick wasn't an option. I used to keep a stash of cough syrup in my desk drawer, and I switched from coffee to tea-without-milk, so I could muddle through when I was sick. I had to be there.

And my mother the schoolteacher helpfully reminds me that in one's first 1-2 years in a public school, the human immune system is utterly overwhlemed, and one is sick half the time—or better.

So, teachers: stay home. The kids will entertain themselves, and your immune system won't get "over the hump."

But Laura will be happy. Has she never worked somewhere where she was actually, you know—necessary?

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Zendo Deb on why this school shooting was different from other recent ones that have received a lot of publicity. I dated a girl in high school, and we tried to be discreet. But the gay and bisexual guys were the ones we had to be very protective of, and extremely secretive about.

Because if someone found out about girls having affairs with girls, we'd mostly get taunted (e.g., the girl in my anthropology class who'd exclaim "dyke," every time I showed up). The stakes with guys were higher: if any of the supposedly straight guys were found out to be bi or gay, they might get beaten up.

Or killed.

So don't talk to me about the gay fuckin' agenda, okay?

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a guide to survival.

My system:

1) Wait for an earthquake, windstorm, riot, or terrorist attack.

2) Take another First Aid course. Put together emergency kits for car, desk at the office, home. Mentally given yourself a Merit Badge for preparedness.

3) Get bored. Get tired of lugging a backpack around in the car, and having to move hiking boots around under the desk at work. Begin to take stuff back home, stash it into the back of a closet, and forget where it is.

4) Misplace even the main flashlight that lives on each story at home. Eat the canned soup in the 72-hour kit, and fail to replace it. Throw away those little cans of Vienna sausage in a fit of pique.

5) Wait for next earthquake, windstorm, riot, or terrorist attack. Get annoyed at self when flashlight is nowhere to be found and the matches are miles away from the candles. Stare dolefully at the old gallon-sized plastic bottles of supermarket water in the garage, and wish they hadn't sprunk leaks and somehow achieved an interesting sort of rust-color on the inside. Wonder how thirsty one would have to be to actually drink that.

6) Repeat.

Who knew that those Cat Eyes had such great focus?

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