She's got freckles on her butt I love her. First thing I'm gonna
do if I get this place is get rid of that damn Dr. Seuss plant in the
yard.
Greg:
I'm out the door to do some last minute scrutinizations of another house before I put an offer on it. If I decide to do it, it'll be the third offer I've put down since I started looking. I'd tell you what happened with the last offer, but why? It'd be as useless as talking about an old girlfriend. "Why did she dump me? Because she didn't like me. End of story."
So my colleague Mike Woo took me aside and counseled me on real estate hunting. He pointed out that if I keep looking at "turnkey" places - pretty houses that you don't have to do anything to - then you're going to have a lot of competition. However, if you single out the one ugly girl at the dance, you might just be fortunate enough to find out that she has a ferocious body underneath that gunny sack. (Yeah, okay, and she has a big brain and a really great personality. Now stop calling me a douche.)
With that in mind, I turned HouseHunt '07 into CrapShackHunt '07: The Search For Curly's Gold. And lo, a pretty decent crap shack didst reveal itself unto me. Cue the biography music:
Born in 1937, this cove-ceilinged, arch-doorwayed charmer got her mascara smudged and her skirt ripped when she got pimped out as a rental property way back in ought-two. And it appears some fast-talking shellback on Cinderella liberty squeezed her soffits and left her with a mother-in-law apartment. Now she's on her own with an extra bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom to feed. Who's gonna help a poor tarnished girl like her?
Me, that's who. Provided the terms are right. So far, the owners are saying yes, we know it's a crap shack and no, we do not care. It takes fitty dollahs to make us hollah. Pay what we're asking or beat it. Truth be told, the comparables in the neighborhood are right in line both quality and price-wise. So I'm going to make an offer that is contingent on inspection, and if she passes muster then it's off to the altar.
I must also say, though, that this whole househunting thing is taking its toll on my psyche. I feel like I actually have to push my jowls up with both hands in order to get myself to smile. Why is that? People say that buying a new house is hard on couples ("I'm in the business of ruining marriages!" moans our agent), but I think I have been not as much of a raging prick as I usually am (Ask his wife. -Ed.), and I think we're getting through this okay. So why all the worn-out feeling with all the frowny-face all the time? I used to love to look at houses. Now I feel that if I have to look at another house I'm going to throw up in my pants.
Speaking of tolls, I helped Aaron move out of his apartment yesterday. Although it was tiring, I had a really great time. His apartment had at least as many fascinating odds and ends and impromtu science experiments lying around as mine did when I was his age. (No, you actually had homemade petri dishes. Remember when you got the flu for three months? And then you found that thing that looked like "a big, fuzzy Jesus coin" under your bed? And then you thought, "oh yeah - I was growing something in some agar and beef base that I put in a jar lid and...that's where that thing went. Under the bed!" You think the smell would've tipped you off. So yeah, Aaron's apartment is pretty much a surgical theater compared to that. -Ed.) It was some hard work, though. We had to call on every bit of our Tetris skills to get his recliner out the door and into storage. For a chair that's made for lazy people, they make it awful goddamn hard to move. (Or perhaps that's the point. -Ed.) The best part was when we took all the garbage to the dump and got to throw giant seeping bags of collagenous goo into a mouldering pit of indescribable horror and domestic filth. T'was fun! T'was!
I gotta run because the realtor is going to pick me up in a couple minutes. I'm really tired of looking at houses. I'm really tired, period. At this point, I just want to buy something so I can lay down in it and go to sleep.
Cheers,
-Thaddeus
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