Wow, I've reached over 1000 hits today! In just over a month! Granted, I'm like 50%+ of those, since I'm too emotionally insecure to take off my own IP address off the counter and watch my numbers plummet, but still, I'm totally thrilled and touched that that many people have checked out what I have to say (or more accurately, I guess, what Annie has to say!) Thanks y'all!
So, house-hunting . . . first off, you can only look at the same exact listings online in your price range so many times in one day before your mind starts to melt and you start to think of looking for listings in even crazier places than Herriman, like Tooele. Anywhere to find new listings! Fortunately, we were able to go out with our realtor to check out a couple of these places that had become my new online best friends.
There was one listing in particular, the one that started it all . . . when I first saw this listing online it was like, "Wow, maybe we should move," and it was basically the catalyst for this whole crazy outing to search all the available homes in the South-Western Salt Lake Valley. Anyway, we were heading there first. I seriously expected a near spiritual experience. The house and I would see each other, and it would be like we were being reunitied, having not seen each other since the pre-existence, when we'd vowed to find each other again. And I would know. Know what, you ask? That this was the house; that it wasn't completely stupid to be looking at a new home the same week that the entire economic system on which we rely was being bounced around like a little pink rubber sphere in a game of paddleball. So anyway, we get there before the realtor. No major revelations yet. I'm a little disappointed, as I look at the house and think, "That's, um, okay." But, we check out the cute little park and playground within spitting distance of the house (well, I can't spit that far, but maybe a REALLY talented spitter, who can spit about 60-70 yards). Annie is so thrilled, and tell us, "I like this house Mom, it's cute." Sure, the vacant house has a dying lawn, but some TLC (and lots of chemicals & weed killer) will have that good as new and green and lush next spring. I'm starting to get myself psyched again. Then, making what I'm sure was the best impression on my potential new neighbors, we start looking in the windows. Holy crap. These people were slobs. Did they leave in the middle of the night, while being hunted down by the mob? There's stuff EVERYWHERE. They left an ironing board? On the kitchen floor? Then our realtor gets there, and we head inside. Freaked us out. I mean, I currently live with a two year old who is known to smear her own feces all over the bed, but nothing prepared me for the condition of this house. Torn apart. Walls kicked in. Cabinet doors ripped off. All of the appliances gone. ALL of them. Completely trashed. Scarily trashed, like a biker gang composed of a dozen demonically possessed teenagers on PCP went to town on it. We were shocked. There was trash and left behind possessions in every room. Apparently the former occupants were not in on Liz's non-book-club, 'cause on the completely stained and disgusting carpet in the middle of the otherwise empty master bedroom was an old reclining chair with the book "The Proper Care & Feeding of Husbands" by Dr. Laura Schlessinger sitting on top of it. I was excited though to see we could be the proud owners of a large early '90s big screen TV, a "Thomas the Train" movie, a sewing machine built into its own table, a bunch of scrapbooking supply order forms (not actual scrapbooking supplies though, unfortunately) and a pair of old boxer shorts. And some nice baby pictures of some very attractive children. Oh, and four bottle of olive oil in the basement. Of course, we'd have no freaking oven! As you can probably tell, this was not measuring up to my expectations.
The next house we went to wasn't nearly as bad (short of actual nuclear war, I can't see how you'd explain two homes in one neighborhood being in such extreme states of disrepair). But, it was more expensive (apparently it costs good money to convince the former residents to actually take their stuff with them) and had a completely unfinished basement -- where the family pet, apparently an evil resurrected dog who'd been buried in an old Indian burial ground and arose to reek havoc on the world, had eaten all of the insulation in the basement that it could reach (the pet had to be of the living dead variety, or the amount of insulation it ingested would have surely killed it.) There was dog hair everywhere, and cigarette butts littering random places. Oh, and broken glass. In the driveway, in the garage, in the kitchen, in the basement. Lots and lots of broken glass. So, that was pretty much it . . . here we are seriously thinking that we would probably never speak of house hunting ever again.
Then, on the way home, we decided to stop and look at just one more house, one I'd found a listing for just a few hours before we left on this little adventure, so we didn't have an appointment so we could actually go in and see it. First off, we turn into this nice looking neighborhood and there is a giant park and playground. Looking good, but we'd been sucked in by cute parks before! We drove past a bunch of gorgeous homes, then turn a corner, and here is this adorable house with an amazing yard. It's twice the size of our current yard, with a giant swingset, huge patio and a basketball court. Plus a lot of grass for running and playing. It was perfect! We didn't get to see inside, but if they took care of their yard like this, chances were the inside didn't look like a warzone. And had at least a couple of your basic appliances. We put in immediate and desperate calls to our realtor, saying, "Find out about this house for us, 'cause we LOVE it!" We'll see what happens . . .
(Sorry Jessi, this post is gonna sound really deja vu-ish to you, but dude, I can't come up with mildly (and I do mean mildly) clever things to say about house hunting twice in one day, especially on my current lack of sleep, so I pretty much copied and pasted a bunch of our email from earlier. (Minus the crazy stalking stuff, like I'm gonna put that out there in the world for anyone who hasn't put in the time & effort to hack my gmail account!))
You know I think my college professor who said I had a love affair with the comma was obviously overlooking my deep and unnatural realationship with the parenthesis.
Because of my extreme lack of sleep (and it now being 11:30PM, a time I get dumber anyway), I double checked with google that I had the correct spelling of the singular form of parentheses. There I found some random blog entry entitled "Singular Form of Parentheses" . . . where a comment was left saying, "You are near the top of “parenthesis singular” search in Google. Thank you for your brilliance." I have now made it my goal in life to write something that not only gets me listed at the top of Google on a topic as important as this, but for commenters everywhere to recognize, then hail, my brilliance. (So far I can't seem to make it on the first page of Google results without at least 4 well picked keywords . . . although, I did get a hit from the U.K. the other day on the search "guilt Greg Ellie." Random, but someone found me on Google! Probably pretty disappointed, much like the Google-searcher from the Ukraine who found me looking up "Shannen Doherty." You think with as much as there is written about her on the web, I wouldn't even make it on page 8,487 of search results off my one little mention of her name on my Tori Spelling post. Holy cow, I am rambling at a frightening pace! I am even more tired than I realized! OK, I'm going to sleep now . . . wake me up when Conference starts!
Edited to add: I'm apparently the go to website about Shannen Doherty, I got another google hit from the Netherlands for her name this morning. These people must be so disappointed when they get a 'Mommy Blog' instead of hot gossip or racy pictures.
No comments:
Post a Comment