The Garden of the Blind

In the last 4 months, quite a bit has happened. I haven’t traveled, which would explain the lack of travel logs. I moved once, and have been looking to move again. I’ve celebrated 6 federal holidays, and managed to be in the office for about 3 Fridays. That’s all just boring stuff though.

The big thing going on right now is a house hunt. We want a house. For 3 months, my mother’s basement has been good, especially in the sense that we don’t have to pay rent (or mortgage payments), but the proximity to family and Big Stupid Ugly Stupid Dog is rapidly overwhelming us. Then again, we never planned to stay down there indefinitely, and we are right on schedule to be house hunting.

We started out with a young (sounding) guy who helped my brother-in-law find his house. Since that experience had turned out to be a very good one, we decided to try him out again (we also had not got any response from Jake whenever we asked about his aunt, who is also a real estate agent). At first, working with this guy was quite good. He’d email us lists of houses. We’d drive by and then let him know which ones we liked, and then call him back to arrange a tour. After walking through one house by ourselves (using a keybox code he provided), things went downhill. He stopped returning calls, and had less and less information each time we talked to him.

Finally, in frustration I called Jake Friday night. I asked him again for his aunt’s info, and he said something about needing to verify her contact info. We started watching a movie, and I started wondering if I’d ever hear back from him. To my surprise, about half an hour into the movie I got a call from her. We talked about housing preferences and loan options for quite some time (during which I managed to miss most of the sappy stuff in The Scarlet Pimpernel), and when I got home, there was a list of about 25 houses for us to look at, most of which we hadn’t seen before. Since then, another batch of 43 has come in, this time with about 20 that are worth looking into. We’ve spent an evening visiting homes, including one that our old agent failed to get us into after repeated requests.

So, she’s already far ahead of the old guy in terms of contact and general helpfulness. To quote Casablanca, “I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”