The Daily Diversion Archive For November, 2001

Friday November 30, 2001

Okay, under pressure from various community groups, I must post three more links to fun stuff. I was surfing over at memepool.com and I stumbled on the perfect Christmas gift for the person who truly has it all. You can bet they don't have one of these. OK, that's just completely insane.

Speaking of insane, what do you get when you cross Irrational Exuberance, Japanese pop music, an overpriced graphical tool and WAAAAY too much idle time? You get this.

For the fan of karate movies, this should be right up your alley. Unfortunately, that link has jumped around some, but I think I found a pretty stable mirror.

Thursday, November 29, 2001

Well, as previously noted, I'm updating a lot less frequently these days. We're wildly changing addresses, services and all sorts of other stuff. I've managed to get my site up at my ISP, so now there's probably some confusion as to where my site actually is. Well, for now, it's both places. However, I'm probably going to take my site at home offline this weekend. Just so you all know.

I've been hard at work finding some cool stuff for you all. Try the link on the left in the listening column. It's crazy cool. It will require a pretty fast computer and a fast internet connection, but it's well worth it. It's some crazy spoof of pop Japanese culture. Fun.

If you, like me, love slot cars, have I got a site for you. Click on that link, pick a car, build a track and go race slot cars. Out of control crazy cool.

Since I'm showing a bunch of flash links, I may as well drop a couple more funny ones on you all. If you ever thought alcohol needed some more warnings posted, that link has a few good proposals. Warning: It's probably not appropriate for work viewing. The next one is a violent little morality play centered around an old video game. It's hugely funny.

Speaking of funny, it's odd to not be posting as regularly as usual. I've found that I have stuff now backing up that I want to put on the site. Go figure. I spend a year and a half spewing nonsense, and now I suddenly have something to say. I'll try to do some stuff this weekend.

Friday November 23, 2001

There is a lot of hand wringing from the far left and the far right about this little war of ours. Yes, we seem to be getting what we want. Yes, it won't be over for quite some time. Yes, Saddam, you're next. The far left, holed up in the hallowed halls of academia and elsewhere are voicing opinions that we deserved what we got on September 11th for our being in bed with the Saudis, funneling money to various resistance groups and generally not letting and at the same time facilitating the middle easterners killing each other off.

A word or three on this before I move on. Yes, we are propping up a totally corrupt monarchy in Saudi Arabia with our oil money. The Saudis turn around and give a lot of that money to the disaffected intellectuals in their country to go and spread their disaffection elsewhere. They export radicals in the form of fundy-looney Muslims. They have no free press, and nobody except those in the money stream has any say in what goes on in that country so the only way you can rebel is to go somewhere else and do it. The same goes for Kuwait.

The money from all this comes directly from the thirst for oil this country has. SUVs, plastic everything and asphalt everything keeps us buying oil and by this, funding the useless Saudi ruling class. Our foreign policy in the area is totally driven by our efforts to keep the oil flowing. Combine this with 2 of the last three Presidents (the ones with four-letter last names) being in bed with the oil companies and the Saudi ruling class and you begin to see how people get a little bit steamed at us over there.

What the lefties don't really give much play and what I think makes all the difference in the world, is that precisely none of these "Muslim" countries have a free press. It's kinda free. Their press is free to criticize the West. They are free to lambaste the Israelis whenever they please. Are they able to ask their governments why they can't vote or can't raise a voice in opposition? No. They can't. All the bullshit their press churns out tends to bias their populations against the West, the U.S. and anything non-Muslim.

Now the righties have control of our government. Bullshit like "Faith-Based Initiatives" censorship of any stripe, expanding the powers of the Government to invade our privacy and tax cuts disguised as "Stimulus Packages" are the wages of voting for a Republican. Of course, now that the righties are in for another 3 years, and we FINALLY have a popular war, those that read the Bible before the Constitution are wanting a return to "traditional values." Did anyone else vomit when our President called the newly-created cabinet level position for defending our country the "Office of Homeland Security?" Such semantic froofrau is not only cheap and jingoistic, but it's insulting to anyone who can think. Oh, that's right. We're not supposed to think. The righties want us to consuuuuume and go to church.

Homeland? Doesn't that bring up images of people like the Basques and the Bosnians? Homeland is not a word I would use to describe the U.S. Sure, it is my home. It is my land. Homeland just has way too much baggage hanging on it. That doesn't faze the type of people who would have us all the same. It's a cheap ploy to induce loyalty to the place we all live. To most folks, it's just not needed.

What really chaps my ass is some people are now starting to go after the lefties at the colleges for not preaching the company line. The President's wife had the gall to call out specific examples of quotes from lefties on campus who oppose the war. Then, in an act that surely gives any intellectual in this country the chills, she and her conservative think tank buddies start squawking, "We're trusting these people to teach our children. Look at the dangerous things they're saying!!!!" Certainly the things they said took balls when there are 3,000 dead in Lower Manhattan, but this is what they believe. This is a free country for the meantime and this sort of speech is protected. The voices of dissent are critical for our country to survive. What really bothers me is that they quote specific professors and their institutions in this hateful little rag and to what end? Well, how about a modern-day blacklist? How about a target for a letter writing campaign? How about crazies willing to "help out" the country by eliminating the squeaky wheel? Yes, we'll see how opinionated that commie is when he's looking for a job or when he/she's dead. This kind of hatchet job, by the way, is the way the right has been keeping the left in check since at least the 1930s. The other side of the coin comes when we finally get our "decency hearings" and true Patriots like Frank Zappa slap down the righteously indignant like Tipper Gore. True, Tipper is a Dem, but the "family values" thing is really just shorthand for "we're too lazy to raise our children properly ourselves." Both the left and the right fall prey to this.

In sum, both the far lefties and the far righties are wrong. It's folly in extreme to blame the U.S. and its foreign policy for the 3,000 dead in the World Trade Center attack. The world is not a vacuum or a petri dish where the actions of one can be directly attributed the influence of another. Yes, if it wasn't for our actions abroad, we probably would still have a World Trade Center. The thing is, is that the world's economy, political reality and social settings have so many other variables other than whether or not the U.S. is practicing unfair trade relations, propping up a bunch of corrupt sheikhs, and buying too much oil. Eventually, the crap these loons had been fed caused them to think it was a good idea to fly a passenger jet full of people into a building. Friends, these people weren't religious nuts, terrorists or anything else but crazy as a bag of shit and eels. And crazy happens everywhere.

It's also folly in extreme to run around saying you don't like what someone else has the constitutionally-given right to say. I don't care what you think. I don't care what they think. I care when someone is telling me what and how to think. The President's wife has some nerve to assume that just because most college faculty leans to the left, they are going to have a bad influence on their sons and daughters. Hey, if you raised your sons and daughters to be critical thinkers instead of party animals perhaps you would have more faith in their ability to think for themselves. I ran into several of these so far left they're almost a fascist profs in my days at college. I had this Political Geography guy who was absolutely convinced that the only the world could govern itself was one world government. This is flawed thinking and I thought he was full of shit. First, in practice, a one world government would fail because people are people. People have faults. People can be bribed. People hold affiliations. People think in us vs. them terms. One world government would just institutionalize these tendencies. It is not possible to be totally altruistic. Humanity isn't ready for this kind of faith in a belief. When all humanity is on board with a single ideology, not only will Communism work, but one world government would then be a good idea. Until then, things will just have to be the imperfect way they are now. Second, it takes a certain amount of self-sacrifice to give it all up and live a life less comfortable so that someone, somewhere else that you don't even know and who very well may hate you outright because of the color of your skin can have it just a bit better. Yes, an equitable sharing of the wealth worldwide is a cool idea, but is it feasible? Is Joe 6-pack going to give up his 4X4 pickup just so someone else can have a plow or a hut or a piece of land? I bet the answer is no. The only way anyone will get him to give up his truck is by force. That's fascism. I'm not going to sign the order to take away Joe's truck. Besides, he might have a gun.

The reason for this rant is that I'm scared of our precious civil liberties going down the tubes. There's already precious little freedom of speech what with slap suits (lawsuits filed only to silence an opposing view), the expanding power of our federal agencies, and addled "family values" types who can't seem to keep their kids from watching bad shows on T.V.. Yes, we have a popular war now. Yes, we absolutely need to support our troops. Yes, we have the moral high ground to hoover these morons out of their caves. However, let's not forget it's FREEDOM OF SPEECH that got us into this mess, got us here in the first place, and will get us out of this situation bigger, badder and bolder than when we went in. I'm not asking everyone to be on board. I'm just saying that we all need to remember that we need to remain FREE.

Well I now have a plan for hosting the site over the move. Due to the vagaries of how DSL is connected, there will be an unavoidable break in service of at least 2 weeks. Worse, the phone company won't know if my line will be DSL-able until the line is physically connected and functioning. Drag. I've decided that for the month of December, I will be having my ISP host the site. It's unavoidable. What's cool is that not much will change on your side out there. If you hit http://www.tholt.com/ you'll get my site, just like you do now. It will probably be loads faster, but that's because they have tons of bandwidth and my DSL connection only has 256kps up. The bad part is that it will become much less convenient to change the site on the fly. I would bet that updates will come weekly during the month of December, rather than somewhat Daily. I will also serve notice that I'm going to take from December 16, 2001 to January 6, 2002 off. In that space of time, we will be moving our worldly possessions from one house to another, doing some work on the floors in the new place, having Christmas and the various responsibilities that go along with that, and painting the new house. I will not have time to update the site. Hopefully, when I get back to the site, I'll have the servers running at home and life will be back to normal, but somehow, I doubt that will happen.

I will try to post something during that time, just to keep the site fresh, but don't expect a class "A" rant or anything.

I hope to have the coin-o page up and flying by the time I'm back on line and I want to have the web server scrubbed and rebuilt by then as well. I hope I'm not asking too much.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Tuesday November 20, 2001

Today marks the beginning of the 5th year I've owned my house. We are moving in just about a month, so I can say that I'll have owned this house for 5 years and a month when I take a look back. We've endured much here. There's been good times, there's been bad times. There's been unemployment, lean financial times and death in the family. We got married while we were living here, we met while I was living here and we adopted our dog when we lived here. I will be truly sad to see this house go, but we're on to bigger places. It will be nice that when we look at the new place, we will think of this place. It looks fairly similar.

We have a metric ton of stuff to do between now and the 19th. I know I've said this a couple of times in the last week, but I don't' think I'm going to have a lot of time to update the site for a while. Updates have been happening about 3 times a week recently, but that may dwindle to once or twice as time allows. I'm sorry to do it this way, but I don't see a whole lot of free time between now and the move.

The site will, in all likelihood, be down for a spell as well. I'll probably put up a one pager just to let people know I'm down for a bit, but I expect to be back up and kicking before the end of the year. Between getting the floors done in the new place, getting moved in and the whole hectic Christmas thing, I'm going to busier than an Afghan looking for a piece of that 25 million dollar reward for Osama bin Fuckhead.

Speaking of ol' Satan-pants himself, I think $25 million is too little dough. I think a one-time, national lottery to fund a reward for you-know- who would be kinda neat. Tickets would be a buck a shot and the pot would be split between the person who brings bin Laden in and the winner of a drawing following his successful apprehension. I bet the pot would get to a billion bucks pretty damn quick. I'd buy 10, just to sweeten the pot.

Can you imagine it? Something like a 250 million payout to a person or group of people who could probably live very comfortably on 25 bucks a month. The responsible thing would be to divide it even further to stake the future government of Afghanistan's treasury and to create a fund to help out people who lost family members in the bombing campaign. Once again, this would still be tons of cash to a place that just has none. Buttloads of fundy killin' for Allah zeal, but jack doodly squat for money. Besides, with a lottery like this, we can get the conservative jerks to pipe down about spending money overseas. Funny, they don't have much of a problem spending money on ordinance that falls from the sky, but they seem to have a big problem with the simple concept of a welfare state.

I guess I'm ranting, but that's good. I started typing not having a lot to say, and now I'm just running off at the fingertips. Until now, that is...

Monday November 19, 2001

Bonus junk. I stayed up late last night watching Comedy Central and saw what's becoming my favorite TV show: Insomniac with Dave Attell. The show starts with DA finishing a comedy gig in whichever city he's going to prowl around in this week. From then on, a camera crew follows him around all night while he meets interesting people and does interesting things. I make it sound pretty dull, but the show is absolutely wild. Very entertaining.

My wife is out of the house for a couple of days on business, so it's back to being a bachelor for a while. What this means is I get to do all the things I do when she's here, and do all the things that she does that need to get done that she does everyday. Big bonus. The one bonus is that I now have the inclination to catch up with my old buddies. It's not that I'm disinclined to catch up with them, it's just that I usually don't have the time.

Naturally, I called a couple of them up this (Sunday) morning and they're out. Figures. I guess everybody has a life.

It's Sunday, there's not much to do except head out to the garage and toss more stuff out. We're moving to a place with a 1 car garage that's attached to the house. This means that until I can get another garage thing built, I'm out of luck for storage. Bad. Very bad. I guess I'll be tossing out my old cabinets and such. I saved the old kitchen cabinets from when we re-did our kitchen. They've served me well as free-standing junk holders out in the garage, but their time is up. So long, junk. This isn't a bad thing, although I may make it seem so.

Saturday November 17, 2001

Our buyer stopped by for another look today. We were all too happy to let him have a look around. We paid a cleaning service to tidy up the house a bit and then went out to enjoy the 74 degree mid-November day.

Unfortunately, everybody and their G was out on the street corners, making trouble, looking tough, walking out in the street and doing various stuff a person wouldn't necessarily want a prospective house buyer to see when they come to have a look at the house they just bought. Worse, our neighbors decided to have a get-together on their front stoop all damn day.

Picture if you will: 7 guys hanging out in front of the house next door, boom car pumping out the noise parked in front of the house, various paper sacks being passed around and the noise level from all involved growing louder and louder with each passing hour.

I understand a 74 degree day in mid-November is cause for celebration, but why must there be so much noise? Why?

I guess it's important for our buyer to see the neighborhood at its loudest so they know what they're in for. I just was hoping that they'd get their first taste after they'd been in the house for a while. Is that so wrong?

Yes, I suppose it is.

I had a rare few hours to kill this afternoon after we got back to the house and so I started working on the re-design of this Daily site. The plan is for the Daily at tdd.html to become the target page for coin-o.com. That plan has already been executed as you can see here. That link may not work so well until Tuesday or so. It takes a while for domain names to propagate around the world. Any email sent to coin-o.com will also show up in my inbox now.

Why coin-o.com? When I bought this house, we got an abstract of title with it. It's a large and lengthy tome that with dates that go back all the way to 1851. That's when a treaty with the Sioux (I think...) went into effect that gave settlers legal right to land claims staked west of the Mississippi. Since we're about 3/4 of a mile east of Old Man River, that's when the abstract starts up. Anyway, back in the 1960s, a couple owned this house who also had a business called Coin-O, Inc. I believe they owned a couple of coin operated (coin-o, get it?) Laundromats here in Minneapolis. Well, there are several entries for this couple. It seems that they sold this house a couple of times as a contract for deed or something, so they probably didn't live here for much of the time they technically owned it. Back in the early 1970s, they seemed to stumble on a bit of trouble and the house itself was sold to the business. The next entry on the abstract gives a clue why. Personal bankruptcy. I don't think they got away with selling this house to their faltering business because the next entry on the abstract is a foreclosure and subsequent sale by the Sheriff of Hennepin County. Not good. Anyway, Coin-O struck the humor bone just right, so I checked to see if coin-o.com had been registered yet. Nope. I registered it on the spot. I figured that it was a cool enough top level domain name that I had to have it. That was about 10 months ago, and I'm now just getting around to using it. The idea was to get my DNS server to host it, but I'm not going to get to that project until well after the move. So that's that.

Speaking of the move, remember that the site could be down for a couple of days as we make the shift. I guess it just takes a coordinated effort between my ISP (visi.com), my supplier (qwest) and the phone company to get me hooked back up again. I'll keep you all posted. In the meantime, hit the link to coin-o.com.

Thursday November 15, 2001

Some pictures say 1,000 words. This one only says one.

Yep, that's right. Sold. It was a long, odd journey and one that was way too much hassle than it should have been. Our original buyers had a small problem with their offer. They offered us a non-contingent deal when, in fact, it was a contingent deal. I don't claim to know the specifics, I just know that after wheeling and dealing with these buyers for about 2 weeks, their offer fell through. We just happened to have a backup offer, and so we took it. Enough said.

We got another look at the new house today. It was our inspection and we still love the house. It has a bunch of small things that need to be done, but we are pleased as punch that we have the house.

As for the both of us, we're exhausted. It's been a long 2 weeks of keeping the house clean. It's been a long 3 months trying to get the house ship-shape to sell. The end will be soon.

Speaking of the end, our closing is in the middle of December. From now until about New Year's Day, daily entries to the Daily may be few and far between. We'll be finishing packing and actually moving from now until then so I can bet I'll be busy. This site may also be down for a couple of days because of changing locations. DSL is available (we think) at the new place, and if it's not, well I'll just have to do something different. If I had to place a date as to when I may be off line, sometime between December 17 and December 22 sounds about right. If you tune in between those times, you may not get a website. I'll try to stay up throughout, but I'm not guaranteeing anything.

Monday November 12, 2001

So I made my first compilation tape in about 5 years tonight. It was pretty neat. It was my first PC compilation tape--meaning I used my PC as the source for my cassette tape. My old Sony 3-head deck is still up to the job of producing really nice sounding tapes I happy to report. I'm almost finished paying it off, too. As I was recording cool tunes on tape tonight I was thinking about what the songs meant to me.

I was startled to find that there has been a song that has been a guiding influence on me since long, long ago. It's been the script for my life. I hadn't realized it until just this evening. There it was, staring me in my face. The plan for my life. No, it wasn't Knights In White Satin (eek!), nor was it Whole Lotta Love (but it really would have been cool if it was...). No, it's a little ditty by The Who called In The City. From the first trombone blats to the fade out at the end, it's been the road map of my life.

I may have mention here before that I had a little scratch-box record player. I was very attached to it as a child. I played my phonics records on it (yes, phonics have been around since at least 1971), and I played the odd collection of records my Mom gave me. The who had a 7" 45rpm record that had I'm A Boy backed with In The City. I liked both songs quite a lot. To this day, I think Keith Moon is a God. I loved the way In The City broke for tiny drum solos. Anyway, the lyrics start: "Come along, into the city where the girls are pretty and you can't go wrong..."

Well, here I am 30 years later, in the city with a pretty girl. How's that for cool?

In house news, we had an open house on Sunday. Thanks to Morgen and Paula for giving our house a look-see. You guys rule. Our real estate agent rules as well. Ralph and Sandy have been giving us top-notch advice. As for our place, I could see this whole selling thing being done by Tuesday. I sure as hell hope so. I'm getting pretty irritated with all the hoops to jump through and demands to meet. More to follow.

In the buying arena, we have decided to go the low route and offer on the Prairie Style house on the East Side of St. Paul. I don't really want to live in St. Paul, and I really don't like the idea of having just a single car garage, but the house is really all that and a bag of chips. Unfortunately, the earnest money is going to put us in a real bind for the next couple of weeks. Real bind. The payoff is an extra $300.00/mo for our war chest after all is said and done. 300 bucks a month is a lot of dough. Enough said.

On the garage front, the Suzuki 850s are no longer. The guy who wanted them finally came and got them. Less mess for me, more stuff for you. I have lots more room in my garage now. My old pal also decided this weekend that he wanted the 500 Titan back and so back to Milwaukee it will go. Yes, I can now see parts of my garage floor. This is good.

Well, I'm off to sign some documents. I've been doing a lot of that of late. Toodle-oo.

Friday November 9, 2001

OK, we've seen some nicer houses lately. Last night we saw a house that was either all or nothing. It was a very nice house. The very thing I think about when I think of Prairie Style in an urban setting. It actually looks very much like our house. The problem with it was, either things were right with it, or things were wrong with it. There didn't seem to be any in-between.

Examples: The wood trim inside had never been painted. Very good thing. There is a 4 unit apartment building next door, 15' from the side of the house. Bad thing. It has high ceilings and an excellent built-in in the dining room. Good thing. It has a one-car garage. Bad thing. It has a fireplace and forced air heating. Good thing. Most areas in the house are carpeted. Bad thing. It has 2 bathrooms and a mostly finished basement. Good thing. The basement finish is not up to the standard of the rest of the house and the carpet down there has got to go. Bad thing.

It's on the East Side of St. Paul in a pretty decent area. That extends both of our commutes by about 10 miles. That's not so good. It's really a good deal for what we would get for the money. That's pretty neat.

Oh, the decisions we must make.

We've been on pins and needles lately for some house stuff. If things go our way, good things might happen next week. We'll see. We're finally done with all the improvements and fix-ups we're going to do. That's nice. It's good to know that we're not going to have to patch and paint any more holes in the walls. That's good. I'm also going to be ditching a couple of bikes tonight. That's a very good thing. By the end of this weekend, we may just have some space in the garage. How cool would that be?

By the way, for anyone that cares, we're having an open house on Sunday between 1-3. That's Sunday November 11, 2001. If you would like, drop by and see our house. Meet our realtors. It'd be cool. We won't be there, of course, but we would love to have your comments/complaints about the house. It's standard procedure, and a courtesy if you ask me, to not have the owners around when showing a house to prospective buyers. So, we'll be off at the Columbia Park off-leash dog run having fun with the dog.

In the meantime, we have some serious thinking to do about the Prairie Palace.

My old pal Barry got a hold of me yesterday via email. There, see? I told all of you that this website would do something for me someday. Barry and I and Nick hung out a lot in high school and the years following. Barry moved to Texas a while back and we sort-of lost touch. It's good to hear from you, fella.

Thursday November 8, 2001

After spending our weekend and evenings since the last weekend looking at other peoples' houses, I'm left with some conclusions. First, other people have a way different opinion about what condition a house must be in to sell. Second, other people are STILL playing by a different set of rules. Third, it seems the less a seller spent on a realtor, the crappier shape the house is in. I guess this is a corollary of my other observation concerning realtors: Greedy people tend to be attracted to the cut-rate, flat-fee realtors.

We've discovered that we've made a damn good decision going with Sandy Green Realty. Sure, we're paying them a fair bit, but the services they've delivered and the confidence they have going into negotiations has been worth every dime. We thank them and would recommend them to anyone.

We've made most of the decisions as to which houses we went to look at. That said, we've really seen some disgusting, terrible, and overpriced dumps. Sunday, we went to a bunch of open houses. The first house, over near Frogtown in St. Paul, was the house of many houses. That is, it looked as if several small houses had been joined together with plaster, sheetrock and tape to make one big house. The whole joint was then painted white everywhere and covered everywhere in the same, boring, and cheap-looking carpet. There was not one bit of unpainted wood in the whole house. Someone had made some tragic decisions in the past, such as putting a shed dormer over the front and rear porches and thereby annexing the area under them into the front and back bedroom. What looked like it was once a front, 3 season porch and been annexed into the living room. The window placement was odd and there wasn't a 90 degree angle in the whole place. Worse, they wanted 200 grand for it.

Whatever, dude.

At least there was no furniture in it.

The next place we went to was this perfectly awful 120 year old house on the edge of the St Anthony neighborhood in St. Paul. It was nestled in between two large apartment buildings that I know from delivering pizza in the neighborhood to be almost completely inhabited by mad partyin' college kids. The house, at one time long, long ago, had tons and gobs of creature comforts and dazzling woodwork. The brochure said, "New sheetrock throughout!" This is not a plus in a house with plaster and lathe walls. The fireplace didn't work, the surround had been painted, where there should have been a grand, 3 window bay window in front of the house there was a blank wall. Up stairs, there should have been a large window or several smaller ones on the front of the house. Gone. I dropped a marble on the floor near the entryway and this house did a nice impression of a perpetual motion machine. The floors were just that lumpy and bent. That marble is probably still rolling. Sure, there were a couple of leaded glass windows, but that was far over shadowed by the general one-bunned look of the place. The foundation was another horror. I didn't look at the outside of it, but the inside of the limestone block foundation hadn't been tuck pointed since the house was built. Ugly. The crap maraschino cherry on top of the crap sandwich with extra crap was the upstairs floors. It looked as if they'd been stained about 3 shades too dark, and in a folly that compares with a two front war for severity, they'd painted the master bedroom floor a perfectly putrid light green.

The punch line? They wanted 200 grand for it.

Oh, my GOD, make it stop, MAKE IT STOP!!!

During the week, we'd made another stop at a house in the same neighborhood as the house on the hill. We had our agent with us and we were really optimistic that this would be a great house for us. The numbers didn't add up, but a lot of the time the square footage listed in the listing is just flat-out wrong or even a typo. This one was a typo. This place had to be 3000 square feet if it was an inch. What an enormous house. It was old, it had charm, it even had a functioning pocket door and picture rails all throughout the main floor. Too bad it was a heartbreaker.

It had 3 finished floors, two kitchens (it had been and was probably still functioning as a duplex), 2 bathrooms and a bunch of other really cool features. Unfortunately, the house was owned and lived in by a smoker. The walls had been sloppily sheet rocked, the ceiling had had blown-on texture sprayed all over the ceiling AND the crown molding, and there was some big problems with a couple of windows.

Although this house was a beauty, it was just not going to be a house for us. The thing that ticked me off was that the owner, the smoker, had chosen a cut-rate realtor. The realtor he had had obviously not given him any advice on how to ready a house for sale. It was dirty in the living areas. There were boxes frickin' everywhere from people in the midst of moving out. Even without the boxes everywhere, there was loose junk in every corner, so the house hadn't even been cleaned. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the basement. There were piles of rusted metal and dusty junk in every corner. The cobwebs were so thick that large parts of the basement were just not worth going into. The biggest problem with the basement was the smell. Not a smell of wet basement or of mold, but of ammonia and shit. This dirtbag had been keeping his dog on a leash in the basement and the dog had dutifully made his area a stinky mess. There was a half-circle of leash range in which there was a sticky, stinky, slippery paste on the floor. No doubt this guy just kept the dog in the basement where the dog had to eventually do his business on the floor. This dirtbag hadn't even made the effort to clean it up. The smell was overpowering. My clothes smelled of it and cigarette smoke when we left. It was oppressive. I've never been more thankful to leave a place in my life. We looked around the property and, as our realtor had said, the guy was in the back yard, doing something in the garage. We continued our look around, and as we were leaving, the owner said, "Well, if you have any questions, just ask."

Ok, here's one: What the fuck is wrong with you?!? Can't you clean this place up? You should see our place. You could eat off the floors. How about: Why can't you take care of your dog? If you don't have the time, give it up for adoption, you jerk! Finally: Why the hell did you go and waste our time like that? You want 200 grand for this? You will be lucky if it isn't condemned.

So, to summarize, we've found that there are big differences in how people prepare their houses to sell. We've seen everything from junk everywhere to empty. Most places we've seen seem to have way too much stuff laying around. How am I supposed to imagine my stuff in here if there's way too much of your stuff laying around? It seems that a lot of people just decide to sell their house and put it on the market. Kinda like most folks would call and make an appointment at the dentist. Not much thought went into the decision, and not much effort is put into cleaning the place up.

I'm not amused.

Monday November 5, 2001

Dammit.

Dammit, dammit, dammit.

We didn't get the house on the hill. A suspiciously timed offer that matched ours minus the contingency has us trumped. That damn place sat on the market for 5 months and someone grabbed it out from underneath us.

Dammit.

Surely, ours is the next in line if the other offer fall through, but that's not likely. To say we're disappointed is a bit of an understatement.

Dammit.

In other news, we've already showed the house once. There's not been much action this weekend, though. The weather's been really nice, so I imagine that folks haven't been doing too much house shopping. We were out on Sunday morning, but we found pretty much what we found when we were out looking before. Lots of houses that were too small in nice neighborhoods, and lots of decent houses in marginal neighborhoods. Nuts.

I promised you all a link to our listing. Here it is on Edina Realty's site .

If you want to look at the flyer, here it is.

Friday November 2, 2001

We're on the market. I'll have the MLS number and a link to someone's description of the house as soon as I can get it. It is official, sometime last night, our agent pressed enter and we were officially on the market. We have made an offer on the house on the hill as well. It's about noon on Friday as I'm writing and I haven't heard anything, but that doesn't mean anything. We're still hoping for a quick sale.

Relief, more than anything is what I'm feeling.

On the other end of the spectrum from relief is Bud "The Antichrist" Selig. Forget Microsoft, the DOJ should go after MLB to revoke their monopoly. The reason for this assertion is that MLB is very seriously thinking about a "Contraction." This would be the opposite of and "Expansion" wherein MLB adds a team to the league. A contraction will take one or two teams out of the league via a buyout. I bet you can guess which team they're thinking about contracting out of existence.

If you guessed The Minnesota Twins, you'd be right. Teeth clenching anger is the sort of reaction I get when I think of this proposition. All the owners are for it, because then all the bigger, more moneymakin' teams wouldn't have to share revenue with their poor, broke pals, The Twins. The quality of play will go up, they say, because there will be less spots available to players at the big league level. All they have to do is make Carl Pohlad a very lucrative offer to go and get lost.

All this, because we're not the type of city to foot the bill for a place for business to do business in. It seems that there's some kind of drive for a new stadium about every other year here. It seems that the Twins of late can't put together a winning season in the same year there's a reasonable offer on the table for a new stadium. Tom Kelly's now gone (sad thing, this...) and the "small market" Twins have pretty much got no shot to field a competitive team on a limited budget. Ironically, they didn't do themselves any favors with the rest of the league this season by kicking ass all over everyone with bloated payrolls with the lowest payroll in the majors. I'm sure that got a few owners steamed. Sure, they went into the tank in the second half, but that's the breaks.

I've said before that the Twin Cities would probably be better served by a couple of AAA teams like before the Twins came around. I've also said that I would be sad if the Twins left for some reason. Causing them not to be, however, is simply unacceptable. I don't care if it's a business decision. MLB is always trying to pull at our heartstrings and involve the fans emotionally. Well, a bad reaction to a team being ended is the wages of this sort of thing. If the Twins are "Contracted" then I shall avoid Major League Baseball for as long as it takes for my feelings for the game to return and for as long as it takes the nausea to go away when I think about it.

The funny thing about this whole situation is that it pretty much hinges on whether Carl Pohlad wants to get run out of town on a rail. He knows that if he goes through with this, then Norm Fucking Greed of the erstwhile Minnesota North Stars will look like a squeaky-clean Boy Scout compared to what his public image will be. He knows that his family name, Pohlad, will become an expletive and become synonymous with things like greed, idiocy, cheapskatism, traitorous behavior and rip-off artist. I know I'll be saying things like, "Don't go pohladin' me mano." to a friend who isn't giving me my fair share of something. "Don't be such a pohlad!" my wife will say to me if I do something terribly inconsiderate. "I wouldn't do business with them again. They were all a bunch of pohlads." would be something I'd say about a particularly awful contracting company that overcharged me for substandard work. I think you get the picture. Carl Pohlad will have to consider his sons and his business affairs before he makes this weighty decision.

It also wouldn't surprise me that if he does accept MLB's offer, someone may start poking around how Mr. Pohlad came to acquire the remains of the public transportation system in the early 1950s after the mob looted it out. There had to be something funny about that deal.

Of course, I wonder just how wise it is for our fair state to be involved with an organization as broken as MLB. With Bud "The Antichrist" Selig at the helm, it's kinda like King Lemming in front of all the other Lemmings running towards the cliff. I'd have said that it was like the wolf guarding the chicken coop, but the chickens could be construed as innocent in that metaphor, and the other owners certainly are not. MLB is broken. So broken, in fact, that the only way they can think of to get themselves out of the pickle they're currently in is to pull out of smaller markets. Stupid, stupid. stupid. Perhaps it is time for the Twins to go, after all.

For all of you that have read this far, your reward is now some geek speak. Sorry. For those of you that care, I usually write this column during the week in vi. On the weekend I use FrontPage to tweak the formats a bit and to make it easier for me to cut and paste large amounts of text so I can add it to the archive files. I then back it up and get on with other things.

Thursday November 1, 2001

"I live here?!?"

We had our house professionally cleaned yesterday during the day. The sentence above was what I uttered as I walked through our front door. I'm sure our house now looks like every other house that's being shown to potential buyers. Clean, spare, sparse, and frighteningly uncluttered. There's no reminders that real people live here. Well, at least at first glance. I'm sure that if one looked hard enough one could find dog hair, the odd scrap of paper and whatever else that said, "Humans live here."

I sure hope this ordeal is over soon.

The Yankees have tied the Series in another close one. If it weren't for the dinger, both of these teams would still be playing their first New York game. I still have to go with Arizona when it comes back to Arizona. They'll have to beat Schilling and The Big Unit, and neither of these guys are going to blow it. Sorry, Yankees fans.

We had quite a few trick-or-treaters last night. I was surprised that we had so many, but I guess the folks in our neighborhood were avoiding the malls and sticking to the (relative) safety of our neighborhood. All went well on the evening until about 9:30. Sarah was out in the back yard with Boo and I was fooling around with the PC. I heard her call my name. The windows were open because it was pretty warm last night. I heard her yell, "Call 911!"

Oh, shit.

I ran out to the balcony with the phone to see her pointing to the south. There, behind the house three doors down was a plume of flame about 20' high. Yikes! I was on the phone to the dispatcher and gave the location. In an odd bit of foreshadowing, the dispatcher said to call him back if the situation changed.

Well, I hung up and instantly things started to blow up inside the fire.

Swell. (dialing) Just 9 what 1 we 1 needed...

"Minneapolis Fire Dispatch (wow, they've patched my number through to the MFD automatically. How trick...)"

"Ah, yeah I just called about a fire behind blah and I just wanted you to know that things are now blowing up inside the fire." Said I.

The dispatcher dispassionately replied, "That's the garage fire behind blah. OK, if anything changes, just call us back."

Well, it wasn't a garage fire. Some brainiac set fire to a gigantic pile of leaves behind that particular house. They don't have a garage, so no structures were threatened, but it was pretty spectacular. The leaves in our area are pretty dry and they burn really well. As you might expect. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that some enterprising punk set fire to the pile or some careless shithook tossed a butt into the pile. That's the sort of thing you get in a neighborhood like ours. I'm not saying that these don't happen elsewhere, it's just that in a neighborhood where a lot of folks aren't playing by the rules, there's more opportunity for things to go wrong.

It's not cool to rake all your leaves off your yard into the street. Up here, it's a sport. It's not cool to rake all your leaves in a pile and then leave the pile unbagged at the edge of your property. It's not cool to toss butts out the window, but I see it all the time around these parts. That there happened to be a pile of leaves under the butt when it landed just meant that someone was being a NUB (Not Using Brain), or just didn't even give enough of a shit to look where he/she tossed a butt to see if it was likely to start a raging blaze.

Of course, it could have been deliberately set, but again, when people don't supervise their children from the time they learn to walk, well, who's to tell them that setting fire to a pile of leaves isn't such a great idea.

I'm hoping we're going to hit the market tonight. We'll see.