C’mon-a my house
Have you ever had a break so lucky, you were actually afraid to brag about it for fear God would smite you? No, me neither. And it’s scaring the hell out of me. I’m sure the Acme safe is going to fall on my head any minute now.
Uncle B and I have been house hunting for a decade. We knew pretty much what we wanted, and where. We’ve pored through the listings nightly and looked at dozens of houses. We became known to the local real estate community as “Oh, them.”
We’ve looked at so many houses that were…almost right. But this one had no garden, and that one was in a crap neighborhood, and another one needed a hundred thousand pounds spent on it before you could flush the toilet. We put in a bid a couple of times, but I can’t say with much enthusiasm.
Incidentally, Britain is a fantastic place to be rich. If you have a million or more, you can still buy something that looks like it escaped from an Avenger’s episode. It’s a pretty good place to be poor, too, on account of all the socialism. It’s the mokes in the middle like us what get squeezed like…ummm…gonads in a pair of Levi’s.
Anyhow — long story short — Uncle B found this place that is Goldilocks all over. Set back from the road, decent garden. Walking distance from the town we wanted to live in, but surrounded by sheep fields. Decent size, recently done up (but tastefully, not by speculators). Checked over by a local architect ‘sympathetic to old buildings’ — as the saying goes. JUST inside our price range. Oh, hey, did I mention it’s a SIXTEENTH CENTURY FARMHOUSE?!?
If there’s really such a thing as feng shui, this house is soaking in it. I’ve never been in a warmer, more organic place. It chuckles to itself. It moans in the sun. It gurgles with plumbing. We keep plucking stranded newts off the living room floor. It’s alive with sheep and crows and spiders and little dickie birds.
To avoid distracting this blog from important subjects like penis enlargement spams and booger haiku, I have set up a separate Flickr site for Badger House. I didn’t take as many pictures as I thought, but I was Rather Busy.
Hey, check it out! I’m not colorblind!
November 5, 2007 — 7:24 pm
Comments: 27
Say goodbye to the ass end of a bad week
November 2, 2007 — 11:41 pm
Comments: 19
Meet my new neighbor(s)
Born Tuesday morning at Women and Infants Hospital in Providence: conjoined twins Faith and Hope Echevarria. Video here. These little girls are zipped together from the bellybutton to the breastbone. They share a single heart and liver, so there will be no separate existence for these two.
A pretty example of synchroniwhotsit: my airport book coming out of Heathrow this time this time was Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body. I’ve always had a warm spot for teratology.
I (mostly) recommend it. The good bits are very good. He spends a fair bit of time on genetics and the chemical engines that drive differentiation in the developing fetus. These parts are interesting, but heavy going when you have the attention span of a stoat on an airplane.
It’s an extremely handy book for discouraging your seatmate from striking up a conversation, anyhow. It’s illustrated.
— 5:13 pm
Comments: 9
Everything old is old again
The night was made for love, according to such perpetual sentimentalists as Lanny Ross.
But not according to me.
At my advanced age, the night was made for such prosaic chores as getting to the column you didn’t write during the day.
Unobserved, you can sit around in your shorts, stare at the typewriter and sip hot milk until, touched by inspiration or desperation, you begin to write.
Typical blogger. In this case, Paul Coates of the Los Angeles Mirror, writing fifty years ago. A selection of his columns is currently being republished in the LA Times blog section.
The whole page has a sort of wait…what year is this? quality. Teen gangs. Drug addiction. Rogue cops. Gambling. Crime. Mexicans. The problems and the solutions are all of a dreary sameness. Air pollution? Electric cars. Teen pregnancy? Less scorn, more compassion. Rising prison population? Rehabilitation, certainly not more prisons.
Your humble weasel is just a little younger than these words and has thus spent one (1) whole lifetime reading this exact journalistic blah blah blah. I can’t help thinking…any disease that has hung around for half a century without either killing the patient or getting better has to be both less malignant than the pessimists would have it and less amenable to cure than the optimists tell us. It’s also getting pretty damned old.
I am only a little more web-present in this office than when I was flat out offline for two weeks. But this site inexplicably turned up during a legit Google images search (I find some of the weirdest nuggets that way) and, as the entire page had already downloaded itself, I felt entitled to read the whole thing. Starvation may have made this site more interesting than it actually is. But it is interesting, and if nothing else, the fun period ads running alongside make it worth a browse.
November 1, 2007 — 6:32 pm
Comments: 2