I was poking around at technorati today and discovered that a Wired blogger had written a bit on kites and linked to a 4-year-old blog post of mine about my discomfort around kites. In his words: “being afraid of kites doesn’t make you a huge honking pussy: it makes you smart.” Nifty.

I’ve flown Lennie’s little kite a few times recently, admittedly just in our little street and not higher than 20 feet or so, but it’s a step, yes?

Reading the original entry and the comments (it’s probably the most commented non-techy entry of mine) made me want to give it a little bump. Whether it’s vanity or an inclination toward public service I’m not entirely certain.

This weekend, I conquered my fear of the circular saw. I tried using two different saws to help cut lap joints for a compost bin I started work on. The first is a little battery-powered deal that’s light-weight and easy on the wrist but that loses juice pretty fast and won’t cut very many boards. When it wore out, I decided to try my dad’s old circular saw, which I’ve had for a couple of years now but have never tried using because it’s huge and old and seemed maybe a little dangerous. But I had 32 lap joints to cut and was darned if I was going to do it all the old-fashioned way (which after a couple of hours wrangling various tools I figured out would have been easier anyway, at least for the part I was using the circular saws for). So anyway, as I got my dad’s saw out, I took a minute to think about what I’d do if I happened to chop a finger off. I’ve seen on TV or read that you can transport small amputated appendages to the hospital for reattachment in milk (why milk and not just ice I’m not sure). But this actually represented something of a dilemma for me, as we have two sorts of milk these days, the cheap skim stuff that keeps me from cultivating big floppy man boobs and the 2% creamy organic stuff that we think is probably less likely to make Lennie bear children with extra limbs and radioactive teeth. Which milk should I stick my amputated (and as I pictured it, still twitching) finger in once I picked it up from where it lay partially buried in a drift of sawdust? When I was relating this train of thought to a coworker this afternoon, my dilemma deepened as I realized that breast milk represents a third option in our home, though not one as readily available for amputated appendage transport. I’m happy to report that I didn’t wind up having to make this difficult decision, having kept my fingers intact and having only one close call with the circular saw. Sadly, I’m still not sure which would have been the best option.

Lennie was born on June 24, less than two weeks before July 4. As happens with new parents, we hadn’t been sleeping very well, and though we expected your standard whistley firecrackers in our neighborhood, some neighborhood kids had more in store. Sometime late on the night of the 4th, we began to hear great reverberating booming sounds issuing from the cul-de-sac a few doors down. As in our windows rattled. There was definitely no ignoring these sounds, and as we had finally gotten Lennie to sleep, it was time for us to rest some. I angrily tossed on some clothes and stomped down to the cul-de-sac to see what was going on, and the son of my retired-military neighbor began hastily packing up whatever gear he and his buddy had been using. I confronted them and asked if they were making all the racket, and they denied it, looking rather panicked. I suppose I probably did come off as a little deranged. I glared at them and told them that if I heard the noises again, I’d — I’m a little embarrassed at both the fact and the wording of this statement — “call the law.” Then I stomped back to my house and got back in bed and probably was awakened shortly by my crying child. We later reflected on the incident and giggled over my phrasing and the picture I must have made, all but shaking my fist at the good-for-nothing whippersnappers who had robbed me of my sleep. That, over three years ago, was the first sure sign for me that I was beginning to show some age.

Fast forward to this evening for sign number two. Since before we had Lennie, we’ve done Halloween at our friends Dave and Karen’s neighborhood. The neighborhood we moved into last November has its own big Halloween bash, though, and we wanted to participate in that this year, as we’re trying to do better about letting Lennie out of the basement during daylight hours so that she can interact with neighborhood kids near her age. So our neighborhood has a cookout for Halloween, and everybody runs around with their kids for a while and hands out candy for a while and eats hot dogs at some point, and it’s all very hectic and disorganized, which is fitting for a holiday like this. With two small children and with three mouths to get fed, we had at some point to leave our Halloween candy unattended, which seemed safe enough from where we sat in the dark outside our next-door neighbor’s house. Oh, we figured there’d be some overzealous kids who’d take more than two or three pieces of candy, but the abuse we discovered after dark was really shocking.

At one point, I went over to check our candy level and found some teenagers sifting through the bowl to find the good stuff, which they were taking liberal helpings of. They scattered as I approached. Even after this pilfering, the bowl was nearly full, and full of good stuff (it hadn’t been too long since we had set some more out). Satisfied that we weren’t going to be short-changing the neighborhood kids, I went back over to eat another hot dog. A few minutes later, we packed up to bring Lennie home for bed, and as we approached, I saw a couple more teenagers hovering around our bowl. I could see in silhouette that they were each taking multiple great big handfuls of candy. I made some noise as we approached and they scattered, and I couldn’t help saying something snide to the effect of “try to leave some candy for the little kids” as I passed. Even having witnessed the greed in silhouette, I thought surely there would be some good candy left to hand out to honest trick-or-treaters, but the bowl was empty save for a few cheapo suckers.

Later, I was stewing over this a bit and found myself thinking things like “what could you possibly do with all that candy anyway,” for surely even as a teenager with unfetterable desires, I would have known that double-handfuls of candy times a few dozen houses would be more than I could be up to glutting myself on in any reasonable amount of time. And from this bit of retrospection, I thought about greed generally and supposed to myself that perhaps part of growing up was learning to balance greed vs. what’s reasonable (though I think this is probably flawed, as there are plenty of grown-ups who can’t seem to do this). And from there I got to thinking about it in terms of empathy and how maybe that was the actual defining characteristic of maturation, for while I was a little personally miffed that there weren’t a couple of sleeves of Whoppers and a Reese’s cup or two left over for me to enjoy, what really bothered me was the fact that any more trick-or-treaters I had to face for the evening would get the filler candy because a bunch of teenagers couldn’t see far enough past their own desires to understand that they’d really be as happy with 5 pieces of my candy as with two dozen at no cost to the pleasure of little kids who would come behind them.

There was no shaking of fists, but I can’t help seeing this series of thought processes as sign number two that I’m getting old. In fact, I wonder if becoming introspective about the nature of greed and maturity isn’t itself a sign of maturity into a different phase of adulthood. Surely sleep deprivation had something to do with my previous fist-shaking, but perhaps a certain general hot-headedness was at play as well; I was assuredly more hot-headed about other things when I was a slightly younger adult. Of course, the most famous of fist-shakers are the real old-timers, and if my brief history to date as an old-timer in training is any indication, I’ll be a righteous fist-shaker indeed. This is fitting enough if the old cliche about starting and ending life in similar states of mind and body is true. As I was born and will die incontinent and toothless, it appears that the beginning and end of my adult life may be book-ended by mirrored behaviors as well.

When we visited my parents for the holidays in early December, they told us that some shadows had appeared on a chest X-ray Mom had gotten during a routine physical. It was too early to confirm just yet, but the probable diagnosis was lung cancer. I flew to California from their house after that visit for a week of work there, and during that week, Mom and Dad confirmed inoperable non-small-cell (the “good” kind) cancer in the lungs, around the bronchi. They engaged a world-class oncologist to build a team to fight the disease, but things were still a little up in the air, and more thorough testing needed to be done. The following Thursday (I was back home), Mom and Dad called to let me know that the cancer had spread to her adrenal glands and one of her hips (she had been hobbled by a case of sciatica that it turns out is actually the cancer).

Friday morning at about 11:30, I was on the way home from Home Depot after buying a bunch of stuff to help spiff up our new house over the holiday break when they called again and suggested that I pull over. The cancer had also spread to Mom’s brain, and they were preparing to admit Mom for brain surgery the following morning to remove the tumor. From zero to brain surgery in two weeks is pretty fast accelleration. Mom and Dad have been dealing with this for just a few more weeks than I’ve been in the loop.

Naturally, I dropped everything and went to Charlotte for the weekend. Mom’s surgery was mostly successful, though the surgeon had to leave some cancer intact around a blood vessel he didn’t want to cut near. They’ll attack that with radiation, which was on the agenda anyway. I stayed through Christmas Eve to try to give Dad some support, and I drove back late in time to get home and spend Christmas with my nuclear family (funny how the nucleus of your family shifts when you partner up and have kids). Mom was able to go home Christmas afternoon, and they’ll kick off radiation and chemotherapy starting in the new year.

No need for commiseration or comment of any kind; I deal with this sort of thing in my own quiet, private way. I’m just posting this to capture the timeline for my future reference.

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Dear the movie “Little Miss Sunshine“:

I fell in love with you the first hour and forty-two minutes I saw you. I’ll never forget the moment we met. Well, maybe I will, so I should record it for posterity. It was on the second leg of a three-leg trip home from a business trip to San Francisco. I wasn’t in the mood to read, and the seat next to me was unoccupied. I mention this latter fact only because we might not have met under other circumstances. You see, the headphone jack in my seat was missing, and I had to bogart the jack in the seat next to me. But enough about how we met. Let’s talk about why I’m so drawn to you.

First, there’s all the literary goodness that I know must be lurking just below your surface that I don’t quite get but know I should. Take for example all the Nietzche stuff and all the mentions of Steve Carell’s character as a Proust scholar. I can name a few works by both of these guys, and I know they’re both major literary figures, but that’s about all I can say about them. Nevertheless, I suspect there’s some complex relationship between their general philosophies that the movie itself probably exposes to those in the know, and the fact that I can even name a couple of works by each gentleman makes me feel as if I’m at the margins of some circle of privileged knowledge. Which makes me feel almost as good as not knowing anything else about these guys makes me feel bad. One feels cooler when he can nod and say “yes, I’ve heard of that” than when he can’t.

“Little Miss Sunshine,” you also showed me a different side of Steve Carell. I loved his deadpan work on “The Daily Show,” and I love his work on “The Office,” but a movie’s worth of those characters would be, well, an Adam Sandler or a Will Ferrell movie, which would have driven me screaming from the airplane. But the more understated character Carell plays in you is more palatable (with, however, darker echoes of his character in “The Office” that keep me in a comfort zone without overloading me with absurdity). Carell also happens to look a little bit like Marcel Proust.

Your grandfather character is charmingly irreverent. Your father character isn’t terribly believable, but caricature of a well-meaning but misguided (by which I mean guided more toward appeasing his own insecurities than his children’s well-being) father is forgivable. Your mother character is fine, generally unmemorable. Your teen character is generally believable (much more extreme but I think sort of kin to me as a teenager), and the little girl character is at once absurd and vaguely believable. My own daughter would probably, left to her own devices (as perhaps she should often be), trounce around the desert in an all red outfit with red cowboy boots. (She went to bed the other night wearing pink cowboy boots, at any rate.)

I love your bleating horn. Had my fellow passengers been awake at 3:00 a.m. in whatever timezone I was in when I watched you, they would have heard me stifling cackles. You got this absolutely right.

You made me think of Faulkner, “Little Miss Sunshine.” In particular, you made me think of “As I Lay Dying” and the quest that ensues therein: the self-interested father who behaves as if he’s interested in the proper care of others; the darkly comedic trek with (spoiler) a dead family member’s body. There may be other correspondences. I hope you’ll forgive me for not seeing them. I can blame only my poor inadequate memory and the decade it’s been since I read “As I Lay Dying.” My sense of failure at having such a poor memory is mitigated somewhat, I must confess, by my renewed sense of insider status at being able to bring up another literary name alongside Nietzche and Proust. That you make me want to learn more about these icons and find ways to tie them all together is a big part of why I like you so much.

Finally, dear movie, you conclude positively. You bring a misfit family together while sending up the whole bizarre Jon-Benet-type pageant scene. I like in you what I like about the story arc of “Napoleon Dynamite.” For all your darkness and weirdness, you’re ultimately validating and triumphant while appealing to the crass old codger in me. I can’t think of a better use of an hour and forty-two minutes of my time on a sleeping plane, and I thank you for your company. I’m sure we’ll meet again.

We’re on the home stretch with the sale of our current house and the purchase of a new one. A week from today, I’ll have all my stuff moved out of my house. Some of it will already be in my new house, and some will be in transit on closing day. I’ve had a month to do repairs requested by the purchasers of my house, among them the repair of a toilet (which doesn’t need repairing) and getting the roof evaluated for possible hail damage. I also had the microwave, which was on recall, repaired at no cost, and I tried my hand at applying bondo and caulk to a water damaged back door (with pretty good results, I think). For the toilet and roof repair, I had contacted Mleeka’s uncle — a contractor — to see if he could refer to me anyone who’d do a good job and not bend me over on cost. His plumber keeps saying he’ll show up but never does, and I went ahead over the weekend and officially gave up on the roofer. The toilet thing is a 1-hour job in the right hands, so I’m not really sweating that, but the roof has been a big unknown.

So I called a random roofer over the weekend to see if he could come do an evaluation on Monday. He said he’d be here bright and early, but he never showed up and never called. We did get a surprise snow flurry at midday, and that’s what he blamed his no-show on when I called him, but it wouldn’t have been an issue if he’d made an appearance in the morning as promised. So there I was, halfway through Monday, with two more workdays before the holidays this week, closing on my unrepaired house on Tuesday next week, and worried from some things the absentee roofer had said that I was going to have to replace my whole roof, a very much unanticipated expense.

Here’s how the rest of the day went:

• Call a bunch of other roofers to try to find somebody who could get out to look at my roof asap.
• Finally find one who can come yesterday afternoon. He calls back to reschedule for this morning. Which is fine, because at least he called to let me know he couldn’t make it, and he was still the fastest responder from among the many roofers I called.
• Sit and wait for the plumber. No show.
• Wait for a call from the power company, who’s supposed to turn on pilot lights at my new house so that I don’t blow the place up trying to do so myself.
• Work.
• Wring hands.
• Grow gray hairs over this roof thing.
• At the end of the workday, have friends show up a week early to help us move. I was going to paint Lennie’s new room yesterday, so they came along and helped.
• After the first coat of paint gets applied, run Lennie and Mleeka home for bed-time, go back to buy more paint, and apply a second coat of paint.
• Get home at midnight.
• Can’t sleep.
• Find email waiting for me from the lender on my current home offering me a rates of 5.875% and 7.25% on the two loans I’m getting on my new house. These rates are lower (by 1.5 percentage points on the smaller loan) than what I’m locked in at for the new house. We’re talking a $36 difference per month, $450 a year, $13K over the lifetime of the loans. Nothing to sneeze at.
• Work for a couple of hours until I’m finally wound down enough to hit the sack at 3:00 a.m.

So far, today’s looking a little better. My roofer showed up and seems to think the roof is ok. There are some nails that have popped up and need to have their holes caulked and their shingles renailed. The boots on the fans need to be replaced. There’s one cracked shingle that’ll need to be replaced. Otherwise, he says the roof looks fine. No hail damage whatsoever. I’ll drop $200 to have this stuff repaired rather than the $4K - $5K I was suddenly confronted with paying to buy somebody else a brand new roof. I paint again tonight (and tomorrow night) and will probably be up late again, but it’ll be with one load lifted, at least. I called the lender on my new home and tasked her with trying to break the locked-in rate and get me a slightly better loan. We’re almost there, almost done with all this hassle.

Simultaneously buying and selling a house is the biggest single pain the ass I have ever endured. When you sell, you’re constantly pushed out of your house by people who it turns out look down on the abode you’ve loved for lo these many years. When you’re buying a house, you’re constantly pushing out of their homes people who have loved their homes for lo these many years. It’s a lose-lose situation until you have contracts at both ends of the deal, at which it’s still an utterly bittersweet proposition.

A couple of weeks ago, we got a contract on our house. We did two or three counters and finally agreed upon a deal that got us our minimum acceptable bid. The buyers’ inspection turned up a couple of things that should be within the budget I allotted, so provided they can get financing (on 100%!), the selling part of our pain the ass is over.

The buying part is a whole other story. When we bought our current house, we worked with a realtor who took us around to various houses and tried to convince us that each one was the house we were born to live in. The house we finally bought was one we happened to drive by on our own and think might be ok. It was for sale by owner. We got our realtor to contact the owner and get us in, and we fell madly in love with the house. We’re still madly in love with it. If there were enough yard and the covenants would allow it, we’d just add a room or two and stay here. We looked in some earnest at no fewer than four houses in our current subdivision in hopes that we could stay at least pretty close to where we currently live. But it wasn’t in the cards.

So we made our realtor — the wife of a former boss of mine –  take us to probably 20 houses. We offered on one that we liked quite a bit, but it turned out to have a cracked foundation. A couple of weeks later, we found another we liked on a faux-lakefront property, and we offered on that one contingent upon approval for installing a fence, but it turned out that we couldn’t install a fence.  We finally decided to really blow the hell out of our budget on a brand new house in a nice new subdivision, but as a last resort, we checked out the house pictured above, and it turned out to be totally decent and many thousands of dollars closer to our budget. We seem to have an accepted contract on the house, inspection and some repairs pending. In any case, we’re out on our butts on Nov. 28, so if this third offer doesn’t pan out and you know us, we may be knocking on your door with hat (and furniture and all other earthly possessions) in hand for lodging until we find something different

If you’re buying a house in Knoxville any time soon, here are some tips you may find useful. I’ve learned this the hard way. Phone numbers listed are current at the time of this composition but are of course subject to change. If you live somewhere else, there are probably comparable agencies, and maybe it’ll be useful to you to know that such agencies exist. I had to do a lot of calling around and sleuthing to learn some of this stuff.

Realtors can pull tax data about properties you want to buy that will include information about things like quality of materials used for external construction. On one home I was looking at, the report my realtor gave me listed  construction quality as being below average. My realtor didn’t know what this meant and suggested that I call the registrar of deeds. They didn’t know anything, so I called the vendor of the report my realtor had showed me. They didn’t know what the rubric was or what all fell under the umbrella of construction quality. They did inform me that they get their data from the tax assessor’s office. I called there to learn that the line item in question likely applied to things like vinyl siding and shingle quality and not to things like stud placement or lumber quality, etc. They also listed the quality for the house in question as being a little higher than what my realtor’s report had indicated, and that was odd. In any case, you can call the tax assessor’s office (215-2360) to ask about this sort of information for a given property.

Next, I wanted to find out information about the builder of the house I was looking at. If he’s using below average materials, then I want to see if there are any negative consumer ratings on file for him. It’s not terribly hard to find out who built a house in a subdivision in Knoxville, though it’s an elusive enough bit of information that my realtor couldn’t trace it down easily and I had to do some sleuthing on my own. Luckily, Knoxville has a nifty GIS application with a viewer that lets you look up all kinds of information about property. I went there, did an address search, clicked the parcel icon along the top, and then clicked the “owner card” report in the right-hand pane. This lets you see the general history of the deed, and for houses in subdivisions, you can usually figure that the first or second buyer is the builder. In many cases, the owner name for the builder includes “LLC” or some other corporate marking, so that’s another hint. Now that you have the name and possibly the phone number and address, you can get in touch with the Better Business Bureau (692-1600) and the Knoxville Builder’s Exchange (525-0443) and the state Contractor’s Licensing Board (800-544-7693) to try to get more information.

The Knoxville Builder’s Exchange is a dues-dependent trade organization. They don’t make recommendations and will only confirm membership of a given builder. I imagine they recommend best practices for their builders, but my understanding is that it’s not necessarily a bad sign if a builder isn’t a member (they may just not have wanted to pay dues). I gather you have at least to be a licensed builder to join, and joining means that you’re trying to be a member in good standing of the area builder’s community, though it could also mean that you’ve screwed up somewhere along the line and this is just a way of joining an organization that seems to give you some credibility without necessarily actually requiring anything of you to confer that credibility. So next you’ll want to call the licensing board to make sure the contractor’s license is current. It most likely is, but you’re probably talking about spending tens of thousands of dollars here, so a 5-minute due diligence call is probably worth your time. Finally, you can call or visit the BBB to see if the builder has bothered to become a member and if there are any claims against the builder. When I called, I was told that it’s pretty rare for the BBB to get reports on contractors (these things tend to be sorted out in court), but that if there is one, you can bet it was probably a pretty bad case (then again, some people are just complainers). Still, I figure that if a builder has bothered to join, that’s just one more thing to check on to get some degree of peace of mind.

One of these agencies suggested that I call a builder to ask for references, but I’m not convinced that’s worthwhile. Who points people to their disaster case studies when asked for references?

If you want to take the sleuthing farther than I’ve managed, you could look for other public records pertaining to the property, or you could call the city court (and presumably the county court) to try to find out how you might look up litigation the builder has been a party to.

Believe it or not, this little summary of info is the result of a full morning’s worth of calls and call-backs and web searches and hair-pulling. I document it here for my future benefit and in hopes that some of it is useful to somebody else trying to do diligence before buying a home but just not terribly sure how.

A couple of weeks ago, we began major house-cleaning in preparation for selling our house. We made Mleeka’s siblings come over and do manual labor in exchange for pizza. I pulled an all-nighter to paint the office, only to have to hire a guy to come in and clean up the trim. I spent a day in the rain manually clipping weeds and grass from underneath my fence slats (don’t ever get a shadow-boxed fence if you want to keep it looking tidy without a lot of effort) and scrubbing vinyl siding slats one by one, and I pulled the master toilet up out of the floor to fix some wobbliness (broken flange) only to have to pay a plumber to actually fix the thing because the flange was cemented into the pipe. See to the left the picture I like to call “Stopper or Fuse?” that depicts my having shoved an old tee-shirt into the gaping hole of sewage to prevent us from dying overnight from raw sewage fumes (honestly, we never smelled a thing, and I even out of curiosity got my nose right down in the pipe and took a deep whiff, proving that, as we’ve been saying for years, our shit doesn’t stink).

So, the plumber came, puttered around and killed a bunch of time (luckily, he charged me by the job and not the hour), and eventually fixed my toilet with the help of a big power saw and some shims. He even caulked the toilet for me using some caulk I had on hand, saving me the effort. I was satisfied with the work, if not terribly happy that it cost me $300 (though the guy cut me a break by not charging me for parts, even though he wound up buying a new flange when the one I had gotten wasn’t one he was familiar with). Now flash back for a second to all the hubbub of siblings scrubbing and polishing the house, furniture and appliances and toilets strung out all over the place, a very rainy day (the rainiest I’ve seen since moving to Knoxville), and fatigue on my part. I failed to notice that the plumber had spilled some purple stuff on the floor behind the toilet and in the middle of the kitchen floor. When I did notice it a day or two later, I figured it was the sort of thing that’d come up and didn’t attend to it immediately. And when I did try to clean it up, it wouldn’t budge.

I called the plumber’s office, which informed me that it was PVC primer, which doesn’t come up (why in holy heck do they make it purple, then? the plumber’s office told me that there’s also a clear variety!). They’ve said they’ll fix me up, they’re supposed to have an area manager (it’s a big service company and not a three-guy shop or anything) come out this week, and have generally been pretty responsive. But I’ve been dreading having to get a new floor, even at somebody else’s expense, while trying to sell my house. My dad was in this weekend, and he cleans stuff for a living, so he knows lots of tricks, and even his fancy gadgets and chemicals wouldn’t get the stuff up.

But today, the day of an open house during which we sure hoped to provoke an offer on our house, I tried one last thing to clean the junk up. And I triumphed (partially). The trick was using SoftScrub with a Ceramabryte scrubbing pad and plenty of elbow grease. I’ve briefly and visually documented the cleaning experience here (uh, it’s not riveting or anything). This worked in the kitchen but not in the bathroom. The floors in the two rooms are different, and my guess is that the finish on the bathroom floor is either sturdier to begin with or just less worn-down, the area behind the toilet not being a terribly high-traffic area and the affected spot in the kitchen one of the highest-trafficked spots in the house. Before you try anything like this yourself, beware that it actually seems to remove the finish from the floor. So instead of purple spots, I’ve got slightly duller spots on my kitchen floor. They’re hard to notice unless you know what you’re looking for, and I imagine there’s a wax or substance of some sort that folk less savage than I am treat their vinyl floors with routinely anyway, and that’d probably take care of it.

Anyway, I can’t say enough about how pleased I am with SoftScrub and Ceramabryte, which have saved me a lot of hassle and possibly a bit of money.

These are second perhaps only to the Mr. Clean magic eraser, the existence and magnifigence of which makes me wish that I were some sort of celebrity so that I could do a gratis endorsement because this invention has saved me at least a grand in painting and generally just leaves me in awe.

Tonight, we went once again to the house we’ve put an offer on, to get a look at the attic that we were previously unable to get into. The attic has precious little storage space, but that’s not so bad because the basement has plenty of room to be built into family space and to include a big storage room that would comfortably hold more than my current attic will hold. Our brother-in-law came along with us tonight to look around. He worked for a while as a supervisor for our contractor uncle, so he knows better than we do what sorts of major boo-boos to look for. Unfortunately, as we were walking around out back after looking at the basement, he noticed a large crack in the foundation that had escaped our attention. If I recall correctly (I was too freaked out to remember to snap a picture), it ran vertically for maybe four feet and then shifted over a couple of inches and ran vertically again for another foot or two. In other words, it wasn’t just cracked mortar (which a stairstep pattern might have indicated) but was evidence of cracked cinderblocks. We’ve already turned away from one house because it had a “repaired” cracked foundation. You just have to wonder how one can really repair such a fundamental problem confidently. If you know a local structural engineer who works pro bono, let me know.

It’s going to be very hard to turn away from this house. I tried to go to bed two hours ago but can’t sleep because my head’s spinning over this. I glanced over around 50 houses in online listings tonight and found none that measure up to this one. We’ve got a question in to the owner’s realtor about the history of the crack (she says she didn’t know about it). I guess it’s possible that we could amend our offer to require a foundation assessment and repair, but I’m awfully skittish about purchasing something with this type of flaw, both because it freaks me out in the short term and because it’s the sort of thing you have to disclose when trying to sell in the long term. So we’ll see.

In selling news, we had people look at our house on Friday and Saturday. I can’t really express what a raging pain in the ass selling your house is. First, you have to actually do a thorough cleaning to pretend to potential buyers that you’ve lived the last X years like a civilized human being who wouldn’t dream of, for example, just squirting a big circle of dish soap around a bunch of ants to corral them rather than addressing the actual problem (e.g. mopping the floor to eradicate whatever invisible food trail brought them in to begin with). Then, once you’ve put on this charade of having lived a little less like a savage than you’ve actually lived, you have to actually continue to live less like a savage because you could get the call at any minute that somebody wants to come poke through your underwear drawer and turn their nose up at your beloved abode in the next few hours. This means making your bed (a stupid practice if ever there was one), vacuuming daily, worrying about what window your two-year-old has smudged or what food she’s smeared on her kitchen chair, dusting — get this — dusting your fucking plants (!), wishing you had never used your kitchen sink because the water that naturally spashes from time to time has caused the wallpaper the previous owners foolishly installed to curl up a little (shhh, don’t tell anybody), having to call the plumber who spilled some purple gunk that’s impervious to all cleaning materials right in the middle of your kitchen floor to ask him for the phone number of the witch who knows a hoodoo spell to get this crap up, actually having your vacuum cleaner break (I think a pin or sprocket fell out of the power switch, which now waggles back and forth loosely rather than toggling with a click) and writing a baleful and near-grovelling note to Eureka asking for some kind of help because you’re losing hair over how much money you’re already hemorrhaging and you really don’t want to blow another $100 on a new vacuum cleaner when you just bought this one a couple of months ago, burning through about seventeen very large candles a week so that people don’t have to smell your own dead skin or that of your pets (until you move out — muwhwhaahahaa), and finding excuses not to spend much time living in the home you love anymore because you for damned sure can’t leave behind any sign that any human being currently lives or ever has lived in your home.

Ahem, so we had two viewings this weekend and were on alert for a possible third one. The first viewers thought our home overpriced for the lack of upgrades, compared to the other one-story homes in our subdivision. The only other one that’s not low-balling does have wood floors, but it’s also got powerlines sparking (I imagine) in the back yard and is very nearly under the weaving road that goes by our subdivision. Plus I hear it’s haunted. They don’t call it the old Marswell place for nothing. This is my insincere but embittered wish that if the first viewers buy that home, some careless driver finds himself crashing through their living room on their first day in their fabulous upgraded new home (it has laminate flooring throughout). (We have a fence and a better yard, for criminy’s sake.) The second viewers had a more favorable opinion of our house but were early in the home-buying process. The possible viewing today never materialized, and we lived like higher mammals and burned candles and stood stock-still and barefoot on our tip-toes in one spot all day and locked our child in a stain-resistant box for no good reason at all. Our realtor offered this evening to go ahead and do an open house on Sunday. So if you’re in the market, ignore that stuff I said about living like savages (is it too late to claim artistic license?) and come on by. If you’re not in the market but are curious about my living circumstances, I guess you can show, though I hope you won’t dillute the open house and will bring an interested friend, at least.