Finishing A Creative Thought Ten Years Later. The Resurrection of Pamplona.

This has been one of those projects that's been biting at my heels like a pissed baboon. So finally I decided to do something about it. I had the slides scanned yesterday, and printed so I could block the idea out. It helps.

I've been doing these mosaic's for some time now, the first I remember designing for the Orange County Register in 1996. It was only 3 images wide but nobody else was doing it at that paper then. I think my managing editor gave me stink eye over it. She was pretty straight, hated me.





For a few years I got into doing the solid panoramics, where I smooth out multiple images into one. But then I got back into the frantic mosaic look. I wish I could say it reflects what goes on in my mind, but it wouldn't be true. It's all pretty quiet up in the bird house.



New York, San Francisco, Seattle, others, and now the ten year-old Pamplona. I shot this from the balcony of my room, some kind of pension I think that once doubled as an office. And back then shooting a mosaic was a commitment, as I could burn through a roll of film in 30 seconds. Wasn't like this chicken sh*t digital age. You try finding slide film in the Basque.



So, anyhow, I don't know what I'll do with this, probably something different, at least beyond the flat canvass. I definitely see it hanging somewhere on a large wall.

Stay tuned.

Yard Care For Morons

Adding to my personal book of truths is #386, which reads, “Mowing a lawn, especially one of a substantial length, to a desired even height is impossible when done with a weed trimmer. This method is to be employed only when absolutely necessary.”

It would seem simple enough, even easy in theory. Just hold the tool level with the turf and sweep from side to side until done. This tool, coined the “Weed Eater,” spins at such a spectacular rate that it appears to have even medical potential with its surgical precision. And it may have that brand of precision in the right hands I suppose, all things being equal.

When I bought the machine and assembled it, I had great hopes. I’d felt as though I’d cheated the establishment by purchasing a $40 lightweight tool compared to a $300 lawnmower at close to 100 pounds. Lawnmowers make such a racket, and spew fumes and throw rocks, as a currently shattered window in my car attests. But the weed trimmer is nearly silent in comparison, feather light and eco friendly. The lawn mower is such a beast, and could hardly be expected to remove old paint and wallpaper, as the trimmer seems to have the potential to do.

Naturally it was Lia, as it is always Lia who opines that it is better to fudge frugally than to spend wisely, who winced at the thought of buying a proper electric mower, as I had suggested. To date we’ve spent $30 to have our lawn mowed, twice, and shatter a car window yet to be replaced, all in the confines of 30 days. As summer approaches our lawns are growing quickly, noticeably longer in the evenings as they were in the mornings. Simple math proves that we will quickly spend the cost of numerous mowers before fall.

Our front lawn was in okay shape, capping out on Saturday at no more than three inches of 90 percent variety, with the remaining ten percent evenly mixed in at about four inches. It was long to the grass aficionado, but chic to the hip. Our backyard, however, looked homeless. It was starting to lean at well over 16 inches, with no sign of the once proud edges under grass and the vines encroaching from the now covered bark.

Thrusting the spinning trimmer into the center of the matted mess created a wet scream, and started spinning the grass like a kitchen appliance designed to make salsa. Sweeping the thing from side to side started the tall grass to fall, creating a magnificent defensive cover for the still seven inches of grass below. I started worrying about small animals frozen in fear under the grass and the nylon blades of fishing line tearing into their furry souls.

Lia’s look of financial genius quickly turned into the look of “You’re not doing it right.” She was pointing and barking at me with art-director concern in her forehead. I did what any smart husband would do. I handed her the tool and retreated a distance before looking back.

Watching from the sidelines it was easier to see that the trimmer’s head and cutting lines were completely buried in green grassy guts of lawn. I raked at the blanket of damp grass which revealed a disaster.

Lia looked at it and said it looked like a really bad haircut. I was immediately reminded of a second or third grade school picture of mine shot a day after I’d taken a pair of scissors to my own hair. I gave the bangs the most attention. And sure enough that’s what the grass looked like, only with holes where grass had never taken root at all.

Twenty minutes of hacking and gouging and ripping went by. By then I was frustrated, and in retaliation, I took the tool of destruction to the gentle vines and blanket of perfect leafy vegetation insulating the poorly prepared bark. (There should have been a layer of plastic under it, keeping anything from growing.)

It was slow motion war cinema at its most disturbing, something that would send a light-headed Oliver Stone careening into the theater lobby. I swung the trimmer-now-bringer-of-death into the fleshy greenery and bony chain link with complete abandon. I saw weeds and beautiful foliage alike twisting and writhing in the air. The trimmer’s plastic head was grinding against the bark of a giant cherry tree, then against an ancient rose tree, and then into the ground.

When I wore the nylon line to the nub, I pulled out more.

Chunks of bark were flying, and wet shards of flora were hitting me in the face. In my memories I see Lia’s contorted expression of revulsion as she watched the carnage, and at this point she had no opinion as to whether I was doing it right or not. But even if she had I wouldn’t have cared. At one point I stopped, looked at her and said, “There’s no question anymore as to who’s in charge of this yard.”

It went on until there was nothing left but the smell of chlorophyll splattered in the air.

“Okay, enough,” Lia said quietly. I turned and walked solemnly to the front yard, leaving Lia to clean up the mess. I went on to the street-facing side of the house, and made a much bigger mistake. Ask me sometime. It’s a funny story.

But when I returned to the back yard it looked great. Lia had raked and scooped and bagged the yard's lost innocence leaving grass that looked abused, but mannered, if not disciplined, the way a farmer’s son looks with the tight, albeit rough, kitchen-delivered haircut that’s got mother’s love written all over it. The bark was visible, the lawn edges apparent, and the fence free from besiege.

I then went chemical, and started laying down a suppressive layer of weed killer. What the Marines hadn’t killed, the Air Force certainly would. The bottle said that results could be seen in as little as three hours, in the form of unhappy-looking weeds. But by day’s end, they were as healthy as ever. And Monday morning they looked defiant, proud even. However, tonight as I rolled home, I recognized the sadness Bayer (the makers of my chosen Mickey Finn) had mentioned. I suspect by tomorrow I shall have the full attention of my yard, and they who seek refuge in it.

We returned the weed eater as soon as we were done with the yard, and now have our eyes on a proper $150 electric lawn mower, through which I’m sure to realize my personal truth, #387.

"Is he looking back?"

I haven’t been shot at in over 9 years. And I haven’t had a gun pointed at me in about 5, and that was by my wife, Lia, so it doesn’t count as an actual hostile act, even though the gun was loaded and had just seconds before been fired. Funny story. Ask me sometime.

That’s nine years of pretty smooth sailing – no attacks, no near misses or close calls outside of sports, and nothing criminal with the intent to harm . . . me. Or us. And that includes three years of living on the edge between great and not-so-great Los Angeles neighborhoods.

Lia was freaked out when we first moved into our last house in LA. In fact her very words upon seeing our last neighborhood for the first time were, “Oh Fuck no! I’m not living here.” But we did, and in the end she cried genuine tears of sadness when we left that house for the less threatening and far damper environs of Seattle.

Fact is we didn’t get our house at such a great price on our negotiating prowess alone. Fact is our basement has a low ceiling height. Fact is much of the electrical system is old. Fact is it’s poorly insulated. Fact is there’s so much new wiring and piping mixed with the old under the house it’s hard to tell what works and what doesn’t.

Fact is, it’s a beautiful house in a transitional neighborhood.

Lia never said it out loud, but the potential for the discussion was always there. It was the turbulence just before a wet runway landing where passengers make quick eye contact but don’t really say anything. And neither one of us wanted to be the first to truly question what was going on.

Lia did her homework, and quoted crime rates and economic stats like a pro. She still does as she now tracks the daily flux of Seattle home values. But she never outright says, “We shouldn’t be living here.” Again, I see our new place nestled in a great area. Compared to our last place, it’s safer (tho’ Lia disagrees), and has even fewer signs of potential risk. And it’s a gated community compared to where I spent much of my teen years and early twenties.

Lia's on guard. She walked in to the house recently and walked out, wide eyed saying, "I smell cologne in there. Go in and see who's in there." It turned out to be a candle I'd pulled from a box. That says volumes about how she feels.

But every thing's been going along swimmingly. (I borrowed that from Ann Coulter. That’s how she once summarized how things are going in Afghanistan.) We swam to the store one day last week, IKEA maybe, and on the swim home and just around the corner from our house we came across three police cars parked akimbo in the middle of the street. It didn’t startle me. Cop cars in Seattle are baby blue and white, not the fear-inducing black and white you see in Los Angeles. Genetically my Los Angeles Mexican half is coded to recognize black and white as a bad situation about to get worse. But blue and white? It didn’t click.

Lia saw the guns right away. She saw the cops hiding behind trees and the dudes kneeling with their hands in the air. The blue and white so totally threw me off that I was lost. I was thinking maybe cat in a tree, or spilled popcorn in the street or anything not including cops, guns and bad guys. I turned left and parked in front of our house before retrospect started setting in. Then I saw it all as Lia filled in the blanks.

But she wasn’t freaking out. Why not? I was waiting for it, more concerned about her reaction than what we’d just seen. That was a rough bump too serious to ignore. This was screaming-passenger, dropping-oxygen-masks and crash position stuff, and still Lia was more concerned about getting the facts of what she’d just seen straight, than any reactive argument she could be leveraging against me, because for sure, cops, guns and bad guys would naturally fall under the category of Things Anthony Brings To The Table.

I don’t know how long it was until we spoke about it, but the consensus was, ‘bring on the cops.’ And since then we’ve noticed a real presence of the blue and white in our neighborhood. I don’t think a trip home goes by without cop sightings within a half-mile of our street.

Last night right at dusk, a guy came running around the corner, and bolted down the sidewalk across the street. I’ve seen that run before. It was panic. The Mp3 player or cell phone in his hand glowed brightly and streaked in the air like a psychedelic iPod ad. He had on a gray jacket with a hood, and baggy jeans. No cleats or numbers on his back. Lia and I again made brief eye contact as he ran past.

“Is he looking behind him?” Lia asked. “Is he looking back?”

###

Garfield High School is around the corner from us. I’m told it’s the second best school in Seattle behind Roosevelt. And it’s currently undergoing a major renovation. That, in my opinion, is the barometer for what’s to come. Sinking millions into a school is more than ripping out asbestos and replacing drinking fountains. It’s gambling, forecasting that the school will have the community behind it, a community with behaved kids, watchful eyes and money to invest in trumpets and science projects and booster clubs. And real estate.

Try getting New York to sink millions into renovating a Bronx high school in a ramshackle part of the borough, and see the resistance you get from the future. Nobody cares about falling ceiling tiles, or busted plumbing, or broken radiators because without the power of money in the community, there’s no real reason to invest, and even less leverage to force it.

Likewise, take a high school in a good neighborhood, or even a transitional neighborhood people are betting on at the real estate tables, and try running it into the ground. Let a cracked window go unattended, or a mysterious mold grow, and see what sort of outrage ensues.

I suspect our neighborhood is going to rise up a great deal, and quickly. No doubt there are a lot of people at the table leaning on the leather rails over the green felt - home owners looking to cash in and the Realtors circling overhead, and tax assessors, and proud mothers and fathers chasing the American dream, and Whole Foods and Trader Joe's and numerous restaurant entrepreneurs, and gardeners, and ice cream men looking to bump a single cone from $1.50 to $3, and flippers waiting for the market to heat up again, and me and Lia who most recently threw the dice – we’re all looking for sevens.

Lia is not so sure.

I’m not worried. It’s been nine long years.

I'm Really Dreaming About A House

I don’t have reoccurring dreams, per se. But I do have different dreams that result in the same thing, dreams that trigger a pouring of adrenalin into my blood. It isn’t the same as when I ski, or when I’ve bungee jumped or anything, but instead it feels like my body is burning. It’s really a bad trip.

My father once told me about getting human adrenalin in a vial, and shooting it like heroin. I think this must be what it feels like, to ride something out that comes on like murderous rage, yet has no cerebral reason to exist.

During Sunday morning’s dream, I was standing in a basement watching as some moist, greasy, black winged creature opened and fell in through a window. It was wounded or something, and it made a sound like two wet steaks being slapped together. It tried standing up, but didn’t look too well put together.

Whatever it was it didn’t frighten me, and at some point I knew it was a dream. But the physical response was one of the worse I’ve ever felt. And as I moved from dream into consciousness, it really burned. I laid completely still, channeling the physical fear off someplace else. But it became so intense I felt that if I didn’t jump out of bed and scream, something was going to break. And it happened in my vision. What is normally black turned a bright white, like searchlights were being shined into my eyes. That was completely new.

Not many of my dreams are very brightly lit, so when the sun comes out or any lights go on it’s really cool, and makes me question if it’s actually a dream or not. But I was awake when this happened. So when the bright lights hit my eyes as I waited out the fire, it was enough to make me smile.

I always walk away from these things feeling as though it’s taken years off my life, that I’ve been damaged in some way. I’ve never told anybody about it before.

But what does it really mean? If dreams are windows to our deeper selves, what triggered it? The other night I was stewing in a hot tub when my friend asked me if I was excited about the house. I hesitated.

Of course I recognize the future – the hammering of nails, the pitter-patter of little feet, the sunny mornings spying on neighbors from behind half-drawn curtains. And I look forward to it. I really do.

But there are so many serious things going on in the process I feel like I’d be laughing at a funeral if I were excited in that way, and I’d get my knuckles rapped by a nun, or the wife’s stink eye, or tossed up by a gang of caffeine crazed cops in a Starbucks parking lot.

I’m excited. I’m excited in the way one gets excited about any daunting task, where nearly half a million bucks are on the line. We don’t own anything and we’re already a proper grand into inspections.

I’m excited. And though I’ve never sat before the sellers, or even met the seller’s realtor, I don’t feel I can be caught smiling, which really makes it hard to be excited.

So, the dream. I’m in a situation where excitement is in order. But it isn’t coming out. It seems much like the way I will lay still with my blood boiling, yet ride it out without a sound, because if I for a moment connect myself with the hot current of anticipation, things are going to fly off the walls.

It’s Tuesday morning, and we’re waiting for the seller’s response as to the list of fixes we’ve asked for. If they accept, then the deal is locked, and there’s nothing left to negotiate. If they don’t, then I’m pretty sure we walk. And we aren’t asking for much, in fact a fraction of the work we’ll be shouldering in the haul.

Stay tuned.

They accepted our offer, and now the inspection

Having an offer accepted is much like getting that date with someone way out of your league you never thought you’d land. You stumble up drunk and brave, lay down some incredibly stupid line – which sounds real good when you’re loaded. You even turn around and give a wink and a thumbs up to your friends in an attempt to cushion the impending crash and burn. But then he or she turns to you, looks you up and down and says, “Let’s have dinner, and then sex.”

Well, crap. Now what? Then you really have to dress nice. You have to shave, or, wax – the big wax. You have to talk, and even be interesting. You have to eat without spitting chunks of food across the table. And then you have to get through the sex and then the days afterward going through it in your head wondering if it all went down right.

Then you meet a few friends, there’s speculation, then interrogations, and onto the biggie, an inspection. And there are any number of unforeseen things that can derail the future.

So, yeah, we had the inspection today. Not a pre inspection, but the official on-the-record inspection. My two big concerns? The house’s structure, and the electrical.


The structure is a given. I don’t want the place falling down. The good news is that the house was built in 1903, when we had lumber to burn, and back when builders really dried the wood, instead of throwing up wet wood that continues to warp with age. The wood I saw looks like the type of stuff churches are built of, and big animal-hauling arks – beams and posts and boards. LUMBER, not sticks and fiberboard.


Now from the first day I saw the guts of this house, I noticed some structural additions around the perimeter in the basement. I knew right away it was added to support something, but didn’t know exactly why.

Bonnie, the inspector, found it. Between the foundation and the walls of any house is a “sill,” which sits on the foundation, and to which posts and studs attach. Today’s codes require sills to be pressure treated, or made of a bug resistant wood like cedar, to keep bugs from eating it and moisture from destroying it. In 1903 there were no codes, and even if there were, 105 years is 105 years. The wood sill has dry rot, and started turning to dust under the pressure. In an effort to lift and support the house around the perimeter, someone braced it with treated wood and new cement.


The big question . . . is that kosher? In the case of a seismic event, like an earthquake, or, say, an earthquake, we don’t want the perimeter cement to move one direction, and the house to move another. So we have to get a structural engineer down there to take a look.


As for electrical, let’s take my friend Doug. His house was built in the 50’s, I guess, in the trendy neighborhood of Eastern Venice Beach. I remember the day he threw out his microwave because he thought it was fried. But then something fried behind the fridge, which fried something else, and Doug started tripping.

Doug had an electrician come take a look, who scared the crap out of Doug.

“Holy crap! My house almost burned down!” he said as I tried coaxing him to go surfing. “Hell no, I have to rewire the house!”

It had been a long time since I’d seen anyone shock themselves by sticking a screwdriver into a socket, but leave it to Doug to do exactly that, and thank God it happened while I was there. Maybe if it had been my wife, or my downstairs neighbor, I wouldn’t have laughed so hard. But it was Doug, and so I had to take a good 20 minutes to enjoy that.


A week or so later Doug had his house rewired. Seeing the fried and charred wires melted into his electric panel made a believer out of Doug, and so motivated him to fish and pull and crawl and wiggle and cap and screw and at one point even ask for help from Peter, our Austrian friend, and an electrical engineer. Wires were doubled up, mystery wires went nowhere, wall outlets were bombs waiting to happen, and he fixed it.

So, I was very concerned about this electrical system. Tim, our realtor, had already pointed out the “pole and tube,” or “tube and pulley,” or “post and hanger” wiring is still common in old houses, and warned us before we even went to the house that it would probably be there. (Bonnie, the inspector, even mentioned a few times that “plug and spark” or whatever, chases a lot of people away from buying perfectly good houses.)


The kitchen wiring is new, and the bathrooms are new, but for the most part the house’s electrical system looked rigged by Thomas Edison himself. Now, in theory it works. Positive to negative and zap, lights go on and toasters toast. But it lacks the all important ground element, or that third prong. And it looks like some old telegraph set up, missing only that lone Indian with his ear pressed up against the pole listening to the “Talking Wire.”

But the wiring that’s there is in great shape for what it is. The electric panel, or the switchboard as I improperly call it, is the important part. It’s the nerve center of the operation, and it is, I’m told, fine, at 125 amps. There are a lot of wires running about, and consists of a mixture of old and new. But it isn’t Doug’s nightmare of a bomb ready to blow, and we can replace it when we get around to it.

So, sturdy as gorilla bones and safe - that’s fine by me. Now we’re waiting on getting a structural engineer in there to take a look. If he signs off, then I’m good.

We’ll see.

A Game Of Cat And Mouse

Everything is flawed. A BMW may have many perks, but it only has to lack a coin tray to be imperfect. Pamela Anderson is cute, I’m told, but she’s permanently diseased. Malibu has an amazing wave, but it’s crawling with pricks. So, anyone who’s ever been on the market for a car, a woman or a sweet surf spot knows that we tend to overlook the cons and really play up the pros.

BMWs scream between 4500 and 6000 rpm, and with that power, we’ll pocket the change. Pam will do things wives won’t, and she isn’t camera shy, so we’ll get all the immunizations we need. And if we just become one of those assholes at Malibu, then everything’s gonna be alright.

The chances of a house being everything we want are astronomically against. If only the upstairs had better insulation. If only it had a farm sink in the kitchen. If only the basement had a full height ceiling. We may rationalize and we may even fix things we don’t like, but dammed to hell if we aren’t going to take those imperfections to the negotiating table to leverage down what we’re willing to pay.

And this is where the disconnect in the real estate game takes place. Sellers don’t want to hear about the flaws. They don’t even want to face them, especially if they’re selling something that isn’t as strong. So sellers and buyers circle the ring for quite some time before engaging in the actual skin to skin combat, and neither wants to engage from the weaker position.

Take the house we’re looking at. The sellers came onto the market at a pretty inflated price of $550,000. Can’t blame them, I guess. Fools and money do part from time to time. And there’s no shortage in Seattle of fools. Or money. But by coming out at such a high-hopes price, they’re risking losing an amount of credibility when the house doesn’t move.

Reducing the price of anything carries an amount of desperation, a wacky clown-and-balloons-sales-event flavor. A Ford dealer will have a “Super Slammy Sales Saturday,” but BMW is more likely to treat their inventory reduction efforts with much more care, and with a deeper voice, perhaps an English accent. Doing so retains their credibility, their brand bargaining power, the power that BMW doesn’t bargain, because their car is worth all the money they’re asking.

After two price drops, to $529k and then to $499k, the clown is in front of the house we want to buy, dancing in a yellow polka dot suit and flipping a sign in the air. There’s a string of balloons stretching into the sky, and happy families are jogging along the sidewalk to see.

But the clown is really a young wildebeest limping around in the front yard. The balloons are drops of blood scenting the air. And the happy families are people like us sensing a weakness in their game. And the last thing the seller wants to do is sit at the table where they have to face the claws and teeth. Best-case scenario is that new and friendlier animals happen along unaware of the damaged and vulnerable seller.

The seller knows we want the house. And if we’re the only ones at the table, and after 120 days on the market, it’s unlikely they’ll chase us away entirely. And knowing they’ve flip flopped between a clown sale and a special investment incentive, we can smell the panic.

In the waiting game, they’ve come back with the idea of a pre inspection, meaning, getting an inspection done before the offer goes in. Tim explained it’s intended to get all the facts on the table so that the seller has a grasp of the Net, and doesn’t have to take a hit to the agreed upon selling price during the post offer acceptance inspection.

Sounds fishy to me. What I see is our paying for an inspection so that they will know what’s coming when a real inspection hits, avoid a sale falling through, get the info, patch up what the inspection finds, don’t negotiate on anything and we’re left footing the bill.

That would be easy to believe, if I could convince myself that the seller hasn’t already done an inspection on their own. With half a million oysters on the line, how could they not prepare by doing an actual inspection themselves?

But then, there’s always plausible deniability. What they can claim they don’t know about, they can sell. Meaning they can sell a bad electrical system if they can claim they never knew about it. An inspection would blow that. Wouldn’t it?

I spoke with Tim, and said that if the seller will put out there that a pre inspection will bring them to actually negotiate, we’ll do it, because then, if they don’t work on the price after saying they would, that would be sticky, right? Right?

Lia’s aching to get to the table with the sellers. But the game of cat and mouse continues. Today she came across another ad from a different agent offering the same house. Same price. What does that mean?

Time To Buy A House

At no point in my life had I ever taken seriously the notion of buying a house. Like choosing a college and working toward an actual major, I just didn’t know anything about it, had never had any examples or guidance on the matter, and so never perceived it as something that pertained to me. Which is why my collegiate career careened in such an interesting and drawn out manner.

I chose my college courses by two criteria; whether attractive girls were enrolled, or if I had any personal interest in the subject matter. I suspect I looked at property in much the same way – with criteria not involving things that matter in the long run - market analysis, value speculation, upgrades and such.

In Los Angeles, Lia and I would hop into the occasional open house, as they were popping up in our neighborhood as the economic downturn war drums started. I was simply intrigued how the other half lived, sort of a voyeuristic curiosity. I think Lia, on the other hand, was taking close notes and gleaning what knowledge she could from anywhere she could.

Lia also kept tabs on mortgage trends, rates and sales statistics. Her head works the way cats do in a way. Cats instinctively chase things that move, and Lia is the same with numbers. If an 8 bolts down to a 2, Lia pounces.

Friends of ours bought a house near Venice Beach, in the Mar Vista neighborhood. It was a little fixer on a giant lot. I heard talk of fixing up the house, and then building an apartment complex in their back yard. I scoffed about it, thinking there was no way. But in surrealistic fashion they did it, at times scraping the earth with their own fingernails. I simply couldn’t wrap my head around it. It wasn’t enough that a large majority of our friends were getting knocked up, and Lia and I weren’t even close, but now they’re building real estate with their own hands. Next, I suspect, they’ll be starting countries.

Lia lived in the same two houses growing up, one built by her grandfather, and the other built by her father. I can only imagine what a motivating factor that is in someday getting a home of her own. I don’t even know how many different places I’ve lived in, at least all ten fingers and all ten toes. My longest stay in any one place was 5 years – my Pasadena bungalow. I was 32 when I started that.

When we moved to Seattle we started looking at property. It was fun in all the excitement of being in a new city. And we weren’t very efficient, often arguing more about being lost than what property we liked.

Once we got around to actually looking at places, the rule of marriage kicked in. I found that if I looked at a place, and said anything about liking it, Lia hated it. If I didn’t like it, for reasons such as blood-stained carpeting, Lia would rave. I learned to refrain from forming any sort of emotional reaction, which confused Lia, and forced her to form her own poker face. Ultimately we were our own worst enemy.

The first real estate agent we spent any time with we met in a condo office. There we met a girl, dressed in a kinda-buttoned blouse and wearing a thigh length skirt. To say she was hot would be a below sub under statement. The girl was dripping sex, oozing it like one of those chocolate fountains you see at expensive Sunday buffets. It was hard to take her seriously. And being married for a while now, I know better than to speak with a girl like this for any reason. It’s just inviting trouble.

But she started emailing me listings, checking in and asking if there is anything she can do for us. I was impressed by her dedication. We took her up on viewing a condo, and when we arrived, she was in tight slacks framing what can only be defined as an “as-seen-on-TV” ass. From that point on, Lia just didn’t seem interested in any listings she sent us, no matter how nice they were. It culminated in “why does she always email YOU the listings?”

Well, as flattered as I was by Lia’s inference to the Realtor’s steamy lust for yours’ truly, I wisely let that whole phantom ship slip beneath the waves without much fanfare. No matter how much I liked the listings she sent me, I just let that sleeping dog lay.

There were a few other Realtors we met, saw a house or two with, but it wasn’t until one of Lia’s co-workers connected us with her own Realtor boyfriend that we really invested ourselves in one. Tim blew us away with his version of “shock and awe,’ a full frontal assault in real estate confidence, knowledge and upbeat optimism. And, he dresses like he really knows what he’s doing, which I know scored major points with Lia.

By the time we met Tim, Lia and I had tried the full court press it takes to keep up with house shopping. Having someone who knows as much as Tim does, and someone we felt we could trust was huge for us. Were Lia and I to have had one more fight about something house hunt wise, we would have made the police blotter, and my body would probably never be found.

My life has always been zero to 60 in crushingly short periods of time. It’s Saturday night, and Lia and I are expecting to hear tomorrow if our counteroffer counteroffer is accepted. I can’t believe it, and it’s so strange to think we could be this close.




The first time we saw this house must have been four or five months ago. We were driving aimlessly through unknown neighborhoods, scanning the long streets for signs when Lia spotted it. I was whining about something, the rain, I was hungry, tired, whatever, and when we pulled up in front of the house, I rolled my eyes knowing it was out of our league. There was no way I was getting out. Lia jumped out, I think while the car was still moving, and gave it a full walk around. There was some sort of construction or demolition going on next door.

Lia got back in the car and told me the price, just a new 5 Series over half a mil. Jeez, that was, what, 40 hours with Spitzer’s hooker over our budget. Before pulling away, I did give the house a real look, and for an instant enjoyed a brief vision of living in a house like that. I recall it looked beefy, solid, tall, and had lots of glass.

Lia, being the smart one between us, or at least the conscious one, paid close attention to local and national market trends, our own finances, and listing behaviors. She spotted the house when it resurfaced on Redfin four months and two price reductions later. Assuming I give up my taste for expensive scotch, and Lia gives up her heroin habit, we can now afford it. I’m kidding, I don’t really drink scotch.

The house originally sat on two lots. The current sellers bought it, subdivided the lot, sold the other half, and are now selling the remaining half with the house. They originally listed the house at $549,000, which is what the sellers paid for the two pieces of property under a year ago. They dropped the price, twice, resting at $499,000 in February. After extensive study, Lia established the house to actually be worth $450k. That’s what we offered. They countered with $499,000, we counter countered with $470,000, a $20,000 increase, which is a pretty big step. It’s Sunday afternoon now, and they counter counter countered with $498k.

That’s pretty strange, but kind of consistent in Seattle – people seem to be hanging on to the notion that Seattle is immune to the national downward spiral in property values, or it seems they’ve banked on it. Where I want to be is a fly on the wall, there for the conversations between flippers and real estate agents over time, from the honeymoon stages through the slamming doors and unreturned phone calls.

Naturally, investors want to buy in low and sell high – from Tupperware distributors, to cocaine dealers. Of course there’s a lot of optimism at the onset of a deal: “This is going to be great! Easy money!” Now, flipping property at the onset of a recession is risky business. Buying a big chunk of land and splitting it is a good bet, but slapping a $550k price tag on a $450k property when your profit margin is pretty transparent? Dunno.

I suppose if the sellers have the cash to ride out an economic slump, they can wait for overall housing prices to bounce back to the $500k range, which I don’t think will hit that particular street for a long time after that. Bush says there isn’t going to be a recession, however all the indicators are pointing to a really nasty fall. Is Seattle that immune? Boeing just lost a pretty big deal it had seen as locked, and that domino is a big one. We’ll have to see how Seattle holds up.

For now we hit the bricks again, which is pretty exciting, as houses appearing on the market now are much more polished and at lower prices than the house we bid on. With any luck the sellers of this property will see the writing on the wall, in the form of all the other houses they’ll be competing with. And perhaps our bid won’t look so bad after all.