I Am Right Here

So far...

--Am disappointed that "The Shrine" has no commentary. I mean...honestly.

--"Whispers" has a commentary, though. Heh. Like I care.

--Loved Jason Momoa's commentary on "Broken Ties," wherein he talks about losing himself in a scene. Ronon is an incredible character, so it's good to hear the actor discussing bringing him to life.

--I'd forgotten what "Ghost in the Machine" was about. And it was just as forgettable the second time around. (Sorry. I never was an Elizabeth fan. And Replicators--with their flat aspect--aren't that interesting in human form. The bug-like ones were pretty cool, though.)

--Favorite scene in "The Daedalus Variations"--when Ronon and Teyla are chatting about how there are millions of alternate universes and whether Teyla is going to worry about the fate of her child (children?) in all of them. See, every once in a while the writers score a perfect hit, even with a tiny scene where nothing much appears to be happening.

--"The Shrine." Moving beyond the obvious (acting, plot, sitting on top of the stargate), the music could not be more haunting.

All for now. On to the next disk...

Rest in peace, you weird genius.

Now that the garden is humming along, I've taken a new interest in spiffying up the fence that a next-door neighbor put up five or so years ago. Reading gardening mags and visiting Gardenweb, you would think that old pitchforks and whatnot are readily available. Like so:

Unfortunately, I don't have access to this kind of stuff. 

However, several thrift shops in the area have tons o' crap for sale so I decided to make the fence thoroughly craptastic by putting up cheap-but-weather-hardy...well...crap. So today I went over to the Unique Thrift Shop in Wheaton...and it was a total crapatorium! I mean, I practically had a crapgasm when I saw how much crapitude I could get for just a few crappy dollars! And some of it even looks good--in a crappy kind of way.

So now the fence looks kind of like the guy who invented Bennigan's or Ruby Tuesday's would do it up if--and this is a big if--they happened to come across the Unique Thirft Shop and its aisle after aisle of total, immeasurable, unbelieveable, and cheap crap.

Below are pix of the fence, which started out tall and brown but now has a load of awesome crap on it with room to spare for more crap to fill in the (hee-hee!) crap gaps.

See? Lots of room for more!

And there's metal things and tiles and funky trays and some wire flowers in a picture frame. All of it nailed up on the fence. Below left is my favorite find. I don't know what it is really.


Just some kind of stamped clay thing.

Whatever.

So the reviews of the new Transformer movie are almost amusingly bad. Actual reviewer quotes:

"...a pointless, messy assault on the senses."

"This is so bad it's immoral."

"...extremely, shockingly, horrifyingly bad..."

"...like listening to rocks in a clothes dryer for 2 1/2 hours."

"It's so loud and relentless you feel like you're in the center of a trash compactor."

"A 150-minute simulation of life in a garbage disposer."

"The visual effects are mind boggling, assuming, after extensive pulverization, you have a mind left to boggle."

"...may cause deafness in some cases."

I dunno. 'Splosions are kinda fun. Maybe I'll bring some ear plugs? Get some popcorn? Or is going to see this flick just a really bad idea?

PS: I hated "The Dark Knight."

Re-Fi bites the dust. Purchased in 1994 for $161,000, the dude and dudette living there did the whole re-fi thing, pulled out their equity, blew through that and now the bank owns their house.

I'm sure you've heard the phrase "using your house as an ATM." Of course, that's only come be used lately. During the boom, when you and I and my cat were getting phone calls and leaflets tucked into the screen door and mailbox extoling the virtues of getting a home equity loan, the going jargon was more like "Your house is a gold mine!" Yes! Pull out your equity (the only small fortune you will ever have) and use it to pay off those pesky credit cards, to give yourself a vacation or a boat.

Thus, with these loans blowing around like snowflakes in a squall, nobody ever had to say no to themselves.

Moving along, below we have another half-million-dollar home, this one with a complicated history. Purchased in 2004 for $300,000, it was sold for $425,000 in mid-2006 to someone else in the family, who promptly transfered the title to a third party. Now that third party is dealing with foreclosure.

Note the many satellite TV dishes on the roof there. The people who own this house tried to solve their various money problems by re-zoning it all by themselves, and making it into a multi-family dwelling, each "apartment" with its own dish. So the people in the basement had their own dish, and the upstairs folks had theirs and the family in the living room had one, too. Anyway, the County came by and told them to cut it out, so now the house is empty.

A lovely home on my street was purchased in 2005 for $450,000 by a guy who planned to rent it out to two families, one of which would live upstairs and the other in the basement, where he installed an electric stove.

Of course, a single-family home is called such for a reason and the County got on his ass when a neighbor complained. Unable to pursue his brilliant two-family idea, the guy is renting to some other family members. It's only a matter of time before the owner defaults. This house was probably the loveliest one on the street, with a beautiful garden that has been untended for four years and has become a weedy mess. The previous owners knew the buyer was going to try to rent it out, but they agreed to sell to him because he offered them $1,000 more than anyone else.


Our last house of the day is another Casa de Nada, since it has nothing planted around it. Forgive me my snobbery, but, frankly, I see no reason to own a single-family property unless you are willing to put at least a few shrubs around to keep the bricks company.

Purchased in 2007 for about $450,000, the house went back to the bank a few months later. The bank turned around and sold it for $415,000. Either the owner is trying (and utterly failing) to rent it, or he's walked away his mortgage.

The problem with trying to rent a $415,000 house is that to cover the mortgage and taxes, the renters have to pay far more than they would for a standard apartment ($2,500 to rent this house vs. about $1,600 to rent a three-bedroom apartment).

So, while purchasing a property intending to rent it is not a terribly bad idea in general, doing so during a housing bubble is idiocy, especially when so many rental units were available due to so many people with no money moving out of their apartments to buy houses that they couldn't afford.

The records aren't clear about how this house came to be foreclosed upon. The State's real property search site indicates that the present owner (soon to be ex-owner) acquired the property in deed only, without giving an actual purchase price. However, she got it from a person who owed $8,000 to the electric company. Whatever. They all sound pretty sketchy.

The woman, Ms. N, bought the property at the end of 2006 and foreclosure proceedings began less than two years later.

The road to ruin for Ms. N is a long and twisted one. It begins--at least as far as the online judiciary records are concerned--with the then 24-year-old suing someone for paternity, child support and so forth. 

Ten years later, Ms. N, who apparently married her babydaddy, filed domestic abuse charges against him and did the whole ex parte thing a few months after acquring the house. Okay, so he's gone and, next thing you see show up is liens against the property, and then finally--ultimately--foreclosure with the present owner's address a P.O. box far away. Lord only knows how her kids are doing.

Words to the wise: If you are in an abusive relationship and have young children, it's probably best not to buy a house. Rent something until your life settles.

But I guess the bandwagon stirring up dust all over the neighborhood was too tempting to resist joining. Husband beating you? Buy a house! Feeling depressed? Buy a house! No education? Crappy job? Credit card debt? Buy a house!

Okay, our next house is all KINDS of crazy! Check out the front view:

This is (or was) a fairly typical one-story brick structure with three modest bedrooms and one bath. Its story is so complex, I had to write down the property records and then arrow in the court cases and the county prosecutions for housing code violations.

The morons who ruined a perfectly nice family home purchased it in 1992, well before the boom, for $119,000. Domestic problems ensued in 2002 and then divorce procedings began in 2004.

The guy signed over the property to the wife in 2005 or 2006.

And guess what? Why live in a small house when you have all of that "equity"? I mean, seriously! Why not McMansionize it and be the envy of the neighborhood? And the money that doesn't go into the renovations can go to cars or maybe pay off those huge credit card bills. Yes, having some value attached to your home--even if it's not based in reality--means never having to say "no" to yourself.

And double guess what?  The ex-wife borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars against the property.

Here's another pic:

She decided to put on a second floor and some other room off the side. Single mom who does not speak English (read: probably not making very much money), has more than one kid, is getting almost nothing in child support. Yeah. And some bank thought it was a good idea to lend her the money. Riiiight.

The contractor took off the original roof and framed up the second floor and did, well, all of the stuff that you see in the pix. Before a new roof went on, however, the woman failed to pay the contractor. So they packed up their toolbelts and bolted, leaving an enormous mass of construction debris around and a house with a second floor, holes in the walls and around the windows--and no roof.

Anyway, the county stepped in, citing the absent owner for about a hundred things. Rats, debris, tall grass, garbage lying around, etc.



They also ordered the owner to put a roof on the place. Eventually that happened, but it was too little too late. The house has been condemned. As I walked around it taking pictures, I noticed the smell of rot. As the Tyvek house wrap peels off a little bit more with every storm, it's easy to think of the woman as a victim of unscrupulous lenders. And she probably is.

But tell me: One woman's greed, one bank's push-me/pull-you home equity loan, and who is really suffering?

These people: Her next-door neighbors, who have to look at the woman's idiotic mistakes and the bank's irresponsibility every time they walk out their doors. The woman and her kids moved out a long, long time ago. For them this house is just a bad memory. For the neighbors, it's something they have to live with 24/7/365. See how lovingly they're tending their properties? How much do you think their homes are worth with such a horrid testament to the real meaning of "housing down-turn" just steps away? Worse, what does it take out of their souls to work all their lives for their little pieces of land and a comfy places to raise their familes, and have to see (and smell!) this condemned property all the time?

More pics of this dreadful place:

This is the door to the side addition. I could tell it was a door only because the knob gives it away.

Window stuck in the wall, unfinished with enough space on either side to reach an arm right inside the house.

This isn't the result of bad luck or some unforeseen misfortune. The mechantions involved were crimes of commission--greed, greed, and more greed!--that will haunt the neighbors and, eventually, all of us in one way or another for a long time to come.

On the news they're always asking "Has the market reached bottom?" Look at these pictures and tell me what you think. The first morgage and the second one are in default. Who's going to pay for that and for how long?

The first house on today's Tour de Foreclosure takes us to a busy street, a major throughway between the even-bigger Connecticut Ave. and the huge Veirs Mill Road.

The story of how this home came to be empty goes like this:

Purchased in 1999 for $149,000. Sold to a Mr. G in 2006 for $415,000. That's [gets out calculator] $266,000 profit in only 7 years. Since the house had an unrectifiable problem--situated on a very busy street--it did not become stratospherically expensive. But still. Using the traditional 1:3 ratio--which I'm positive was not used when the bank handed the ARM to the buyer--an annual income of almost $140,000 would be needed in order to afford it. Even if the buyer put 20% down (about $85,000 As if! Srsly.), he would have to be earning about $100,000 a year--and still be house poor.

And, when the auto-erotic asphixiation of getting into this house was all said and done, nothing could change the fact that, gee,  it's on a really busy street. How would you like to work your ass off all day long and then come home to a house that rattles from the traffic going by 24/7?

Okay, well, it's not the owner's problem anymore because the foreclosure was finalized about three weeks ago. Now it sits empty. Most banks in this area are still living in a freaky dreamworld because homes like this are on the REO listing for $375,000.

Next up is a house up the street from mine, purchased in 2004 for $340,000, sold in January 2007 for--get this--$478,000. Yep. A cool half-mill for this baby, all three bedrooms and one bathroom of her. Straight away, the new owners built this crazy-ass fence, probably trying to hide from the prying eyes of people wanting to see who was stupid enough to buy such a meh house for so much money. The fence starts and then stops for the driveway. Starts and pauses again for the front walkway. Then it starts up and goes for a little while until it reaches the corner. At which point, it gives up the ghost and succumbs to chain link.

Meanwhile, we have a yellow house with white trim and a couple of shrubs and, oh yeah, a garage. Big selling point--not! Still, this is one of the nicer abandoned homes in the neighborhood, so I'm hoping that some caring neighbor-to-be makes the bank a nice, normal offer and that the bank accepts.

Anyway, the records show that foreclosure was initiated against the owners exactly two years after they purchased the place. Two years. So it's not like they lived there for 20 years and someone lost their job or a divorce happened or anything like that. No, they just bought a house--were given a loan for a house--that they couldn't afford.

The grass was super high until last Saturday, when some guy came along and mowed. Now there's big huge clumps of dead grass, which would make great compost. I've been thinking about going up and bagging up some of the grass--but then my kids remind me that that's pretty creepy.

Next is a personal favorite. I call it La Casa de Nada (The House of Nothing):

This lovely example of suburban living has exactly nothing growing around it except for the typical weedy mess known as a "lawn." (Which isn't so bad, really. Nice lawns screw up the Chesapeake Bay.) At least this lawn is mowed, courtesy of the bank that now owns the house.

Anyhow, sold in 1989 for $150,000, this house was sold again in 2002 for $250,000 and then, amazingly enough, was snapped up by a brainiac for $430,000 only three years later! Fast forward three years, and you have an empty house of nothing.

To fully appreciate how nada La Casa de Nada really is, here's a picture of the back:

You would think that in the three years between the time the dudes bought the house and the time they moved out, they would have planted a flower or a shrub or something. Maybe they couldn't afford shrubs. I've got an Endless Summer hydragea in my garden that cost a cool $40. So, okay, maybe plants were too dear.

The signs taped to the front and back doors say that the house has been "winterized" and that anti-freeze has been poured into the toilets and down the sinks.

This house is literally in my back yard--on the next street over. I've been looking at it on my walks, thinking about that sunny yard and how nicely flowers of all kinds would grow there. The other houses on the street have fabulous gardens, so the neighbors would celebrate IAmRightHere Day every year if I bought it, fixed it up and then sold it for a decent price to a nice family that took care of it. From just a glance around the perimeter, it needs a new roof, new windows, siding to go over the old asbestos stuff, a new kitchen, etc., etc. Someone paid $430,000 for this dump. Can you believe it?

Our last house is nestled between some cute homes on a quiet, shady street.

It was purchased in 2006 for $450,000, ten times more than the previous owner paid for it in 1974. The seller must have laughed all the way to the bank.

It's not a bad house, so don't let the 2-foot-high lawn fool you. The holiday wreath on the door gives away how long the house has been vacant. Still, a 1,500-square-foot house for $450,000? This is the insanity of the housing boom, which has left a swath of destruction here. I mean, sure, some people can afford a $450,000 house. But everyone? Yet there they were, snapping up this house and that house, outbidding other prospective buyers, climbing over each other to cut their own throats. Yes, yes, I know that home ownership is the American Dream. But that's assuming that you can afford the house you're buying--which, by the way, is something that the banks should have been thinking about before they sold the entire country down a river of derivatives.

When we were buying our first place--a little 700-sq.-ft. fixer-upper--the sale almost didn't go through because a mistake on my credit report showed that I owed Sears $200 for a sewing machine I'd purchased a couple of years before then. I had to go to Sears, show them the cancelled check, and get them to fix the error. So if a $200 speck on my credit report was almost enough to dump our home purchase, how is it that people who 1) speak no English and 2) have no money and 3) are not expected to acquire a lot of money in the near future are handed almost a half-million dollars? People are stupid, yes I know. But the banks? The guys in suits with shiny shoes and business degrees? How stupid were they?

Breakfast: Brownies, cake

Brunch: 3-egg omlett, biscuits, bacon, fried potatoes

Snack: Chocolate bar, potato chips

Dinner: Don't know. Left station before doing more damage to self

god doesnt like me much. he has given me carpel tunnel syndrome. oy. i guess those house pix really ticked him off.

ps--typing w/one hand sucks.

Back in the good ol' days, say 2001-2008, homes in my area shot up in value to a level (of stupidity) not seen before. Lately I've been driving around the neighborhood, taking pictures of homes that look abandoned and cross-checking their status against public sales/foreclosure/code violation records that are now a mouse click away on the Web. Let's visit a few:

( Home? Castle? You Decide! )

Have completed all of the very hard work on my list this week:

1) Cut down two dead Rose-of-Sharon trees--one of which literally fell over when touched. Also, climbed and cut down piece by piece very large, tangled patch of live Rose-of-Sharon trees.
2) Weeded back bed, south bed and corner by water barrels.
3) Made funky-looking string-and-poles thing to keep wildflowers from falling over.
4) Planted evening primroses and butterfly weed.
5) Planted dead nettle.
6) Planted yarrow.
7) Wildflower seeds coming up on south side of house.
8) Sprayed Weed-Be-Gone over fence into neighbor's yard--again.
9) Cut back native azalea AND dug out the horrid thorny bushes that grew up under it. Oh, yeah. Those thorns are, like, so much fun.
10) Planted straw flowers, cosmos and marigolds for some annual color. (Something ate the marigolds, however. Huh.)

Today's to do list is pretty light:

1) Weed north bed.
2) Divide coreopsis and tx pieces.
3) Get husband to buy and lug home two bags of mulch. If I'm lucky, he'll even carry them into the back yard.
4) Spread mulch.

Good and special news for this year: Have real compost in compost bins!
Bad news: Compost infested with large ant colony, which went into full attack mode when I harvested compost from the bin.

I generally stay outside until the insect repellent stops working and/or I run out of caffeine-free iced tea. This works pretty well, actually.

The printout gave the patient's age as 105, which I was certain had to be wrong. Or, if correct, the patient most certainly was a skinny, blithering, blind, deaf, and woeful person in a nursing home.  The oldest person I had encountered up to then, ambulance-wise, was 97. And she was dead.

So we get to the apartment in an independent-care establishment and sitting in a chair is a woman who looks maybe 75. She's got all her teeth, a full head of hair, is hale and hearty and doesn't need to wear glasses. She has a wound on her shoulder from a fall 14 days ago, which has now grown infected and is affecting her arm and hand. Instead of the usual five-foot-long list of medical problems and prescriptions, her son says she suffers from hypertension for which she takes a single med.

I asked the patient, "How old are you?"

She says, "Everyone asks me that."

"My printout from Dispatch says that you're 105."

"It's correct. I am 105."

"Wow."

And she laughed, revealing that not only did she have all of her teeth, none of them had fillings.

Calls this day included a 16-year-old who had tipped the family Corolla on its side while going only 15 miles per hour (Don't ask. It's physics stuff.), an unemployed young man who just found out hes a babydaddy and who was barfing from stress, a woman with a piece of chicken stuck in her esophagus, and some other call that the rookie sitting up front never got us to because he directed us to the Other Side of the Freakin' Planet.

Great day. Now I'm sore as hell.

At this year's fire department banquet and awards ceremony, I was presented with a coveted Unit Citation for outstanding performance in the line of duty for a car wreck the occurred about a year ago. My driver, Heather and I responded to a minivan on its side with an unconscious elderly woman and her son inside. The woman had lost consciousness while the son was drivng and, in his distraction, he'd bucked the right front tire up against a tree trunk and the minivan tipped over. Minivans are kind of famous for doing this, by the way.

The rescue squad guys got the woman out after futzing with the Hurst tool and cutting the front window out, etc. The medic unit people took the woman, who eventually regained a pulse. I have no idea how she ended up. Heather and I took the son, la plus collar and backboard.

Frankly, this wasn't the most extraordinary call ever, but it got me thinking about all of those really challenging situations that went unnoticed. Such as...

The Fire at the Nursing Home!

It was a broiling hot day in the summer of 2000. I was at Sta. 21. We were understaffed, so when they banged out a 21 box--a fire in our first-due area--I jumped on with the engine crew because there wasn't anyone around to drive the ambulance.

When we got to the nursing home, we found the propane-fueled A/C unit in front totally blowing. I stood there for a few seconds taking in the fact that I really belonged to a fire department and that sometimes we really do get to see flames. Then I went around the side to help the staff evacuating the home's residents.

I found total pandemonium. CNAs were practically throwing these old dudes and dudettes into the parking lot. Nursing home folks don't spend a lot of time outside and, what with temps in the mid-90s and the sun beating down, these delicate people were wilting as fast as spinach in boiling water. So I directed the CNAs to move the people under the trees. They didn't seem to get what I was saying, so I proceeded to move about 30 wheelchaired people into the shade.

Then this one CNA raced out of the home rolling a giant wheeled easychair with a guy in it whose foot was dripping blood a mile and minute. I said, "Hey, why's his foot bleeding?" She said, "I don't know," and left him. So I checked out the guy's foot. In her haste, the CNA had rammed the wheelchair against a doorjamb and lopped off the guy's big toe! It hung there by a little skin and nothing else. The guy was totally Alzheimered, so he just sat there, not paying much attention to anything. So I bandaged the guy's toe and moved on to...

Mr. Butternut the Violent Dementia Patient!

Mr. Butternut had wandered off and one of the CNAs came up to me and said, "Mr. Butternut's wandered into the street!" And, sure enough, this old guy in a bathrobe was toddling over to one of the fire engines. He seemed passive enough, so I went and took his arm. "Let's go where it's shady, okay?" I said to him.

But Mr. Butternut didn't want to go. He really, really didn't want to go, as evidenced by the big smack upside the head he gave me and the extended string of swear words he used, which would have made a sailor blush. He even got ahold of my hair and tried to wrestle me to the ground. I thought, "Oh, joy! I'm being taken down by a 95-year-old!" Eventually one of the orderies pulled Mr. Butterworth off of me and took him to the shade.

Back in the parking lot, the CNAs had finished evacuating the building. The guy with the lopped-off toe had started bleeding again, so I got down and bandaged like crazy, which finally staunched the flow. The head CNA came up and asked me what I was doing. I said he had injured his toe and needed to be transported to a hospital for additional care.

"Let me see it," she said.

"Well, it just took me forever to get the bleeding stopped, so just leave it alone."

Not appreciating the meaning of "No," he grabbed up my scissors, cut off the bandage and, blam, the toe flopped hither and yon and the bleeding, of course, recommenced.

"Oh, he needs to go to the hospital!" the idiot said.

"I wasn't lying," I responded.

I used my single O2 tank to give folks toots when they looked particularly blue. Eventually an ambulance showed up and they took the toe guy away. The fire was extinguished and the old folks were taken back inside once the smoke cleared.

In the bright light of ten years of experience, I see how truly messed up this situation was. The CNAs were spilling people out of their wheelchairs in their panic to get everyone out. I don't recall an ambulance crew showing up in the parking lot until I pulled aside the Incident Commander and asked him for one. A lot of firefighters on that fire should have been sent to help with the old folks. Instead there was some bullshit between the career guys and the volunteers and who got to take the hose and whatnot.

When everything finally wound down, I went to the canteen and got two cups of Gatorade, downed them straight away, and then threw up.

Oh, yeah, that was a day. So I got a Unit Citation for a fairly routine call, and the nusing home fire? I'm the only one who remembers it.

My kid's high school was shut down today because of a suspected case of swine flu. About a month ago, a quarter of the school was sick with regular flu and, geez, nobody said a thing.

This pandemic thing is much more interesting than the economy and the wars. And it gets you out of school, too!

Bet you a dime I'll be taking lots of panicky people to the hospital on Sunday.

I was watching “House Hunters” on HGTV the other day, trying to relax and not think about the economy. As if.

The purchaser was a young woman who had been struck by lightning a couple of years before and as a result decided to buy a DC condo because…I don’t know. The link between being struck by lightning and purchasing a condo wasn’t made all that clear.

She was approved for a loan of about $440,000 and had saved about $50,000 to put down. The realtor took her to one tiny place after another but nothing was suitable on account of the market being overpriced. Add to the half-million loan a $500-per-month condo fee and you have the makings of a disaster.

Eventually the realtor showed the woman a $560,000 condo that was, of course, perfect in every way.  That’s when I sat up and said to the TV, “Don’t do it, lady. Don’t do it!”

And the realtor said to the woman, “This area is experiencing something of a Renaissance, so you know your home will appreciate.” Slick! Tell a client that the overpriced condo is going to become even more overpriced.

The woman got on the phone and did some sort of money juju to get herself a larger down payment or else a bigger loan, but the place was clearly beyond her budget to begin with and, with the additional $540 monthly condo fee…I rest my case. She bought the condo and is now probably ruing the day she ever set foot in it.

What is most interesting about this episode, which was filmed a couple of years ago when a monkey could get a loan, was that if you deconstruct it, you get a pretty good idea of how the housing bubble worked:

--Lemming-like people saw a hot market and low interest rates and decided that they, too, wanted to dive head first into an empty swimming pool.

--Realtors and banks conspired to get people into homes with Option ARMs, Alt-A loans and, of course, subprimes. People who went with conventional loans thought that their low interest rate would save them, except that an overpriced house is an overpriced house and nothing will ever change that. Now that the house has lost 30 or 40 percent of its supposed “value,” they’re still stuck paying for a house that’s not worth near what they paid for it.

--The media jumped into the fray with “House Hunters” and “Flip This House” and other shows that fed into the whole gotta-buy-now mentality.

I’d love to see where those TV home buyers are today. Have they walked away from their properties, leaving the furniture they bought on credit behind? Are they still in residence, trying to justify writing that $3,400 check every month when they could be renting the same place for half that much?

The only follow through these shows give is just after the big move-in. The new owners have gone on a shopping spree and bought new furniture, done up the bathrooms and kitchen, and whatnot. They always say that they are deliriously happy with their new place.

But that was then and now is now. I hope someone will show how these people are faring now that their ARMs have recast.

Don't know about you guys, but Craftsman-style homes are my faves! Connor Trinneer has put his on the market. Go check out this gorgeous place right HERE.

Everyone needs to go rush on over to cakewrecks.com for some fun and also to get an appetite going for whatever crap you're making for dinner tonight. (Personally, I cooked up a couple of pork chops and a wild rice/apple/walnut salad.)

To help you keep your weight down, instead of pouring through one hysterically funny post after the other (and they are hysterically funny) you can go directly to this post for a look at some fantagorical stargate cakes!

With my ten-year membership anniversary coming up in a few months, I'm considering ways to serve in the fire department without actually riding apparatus for a while. I'm thinking of making instructional materials using PowerPoint and videos. Could be the start of another fun hobby!

But I am getting a little old for the whole ambulance thing. Stuff hurts, I get tired more easily. Whatever. We'll see.

Gloriously beautiful out yesterday. Went on two calls, the first to a sick person and the second to a car crash--Nisson hit from behind by a big-ass Cadillac SUV. Damn, but no one needs a Cadillac SUV, and they do extraordinary amounts of damage to normal-sized vehicles. Anyway, the SUV's driver was all standing there not even asking about the two women in the car he hit, both of whom went to the hospital. He's an ass.

On the garden front, have planted impatiens and some other lovely pink annuals in the garden. Weeding is such a huge job that next year I'm hiring some dudes to squat in the sun and pull weeds all day while I plant things and hope that they live. Last year's day spells killed off the blanket flowers and some of the tickseed. The coneflowers are coming back, however, as are the hostas I transplanted, and the Endless Summer hydrangea. Thank goodness about the hydrangea, since it cost $40.

Today I appeared in District Court as a witness to a car accident. To my utter surprise the guy at fault not only showed up, he pleaded (Pled? Plead'd?) not guilty!

Silly man.

The judge swore in the guy, me and the police officer who responded to the crash.

I got to testify to what I saw and so forth. The judge asked which corner I was standing on and I said, "I'd have to draw you a picture because I don't know southeast from northwest without a lot of Mapquesting." He directed me to a whiteboard, where I diagramed the intersection and where the at-fault guy's car came from and where the vehicle he hit was. I'm so glad I wore my little peplum jacket and nice jeans, because the 25 or so people in the court were watching me.

The guy's take on things was that his light was green (wrong!) and that the other car "came out of nowhere" (heh) and that he didn't see it until it was right in front of him. He said he had some pictures, but they were just shots of the damage to the two cars saved on his cell phone (lame!).

Whatever. The police officer mentioned that both cars had significant damage and that a one-year-old child was in the vehicle that the guy struck.

Thus, the judge ruled the guy was guilty and fined his ass and put some points on his license, too.

And that was my day in court, much more entertaining than all of the other times I've been to court, which were for Unpleasant Things.