A Sunday

What is solid up to on this fine Sunday, you are probably asking yourself. I'm making smoked pork neck chili, drinking Modelo Especials, reading the internet, and repeatedly listening to Billy Joel's Cold Spring Harbor.

 Had a visit from a special lady friend yesterday and went out for drinks with friends. Fine times had.

Lady friend and I went house shopping here in the pdx. This process is complicated by two factors. Given that we have no idea where G might be working when she arrives for good, we don't know where to look. I work in what I call South Portland, so any place remotely cool is a bit of a traffic challenge for me. If she lives here too, well then, Southtown living it is. If, however, she was working in the northern reaches, then we'd be happy to live there.

Complicating factor number 2 is that we are not actually going to be buying a house here anytime soon, so we are less shopping for houses than we are shopping for types of houses in neighborhoods we wouldn't mind living in maybe.

 We were heartend by two things - it's twos today! - one, that of the six houses we walked through, we would have been happy buying four of them. That's slightly not fair in that one of them was at the tippy-top of our price range so "we totally would have bought that amazing house we could only have theoretically afforded" probably shouldn't count.

The second thing that was cool was that lady friend and I were in perfect sync with one another. We liked the same things, we hated the same things, we ranked all the houses the same. I was more willing to dwell on the fruitless nature of ranking houses that are on the market a year before we are actually looking to buy, but it makes the eventual move here more realistic, so I backed off.

If we absolutely had to buy a house like in a month or something because I got a job and she was packing the house, we would have bid on a lovely house near Mississippi. It was so great I sort of questioned the price tag because it was beyond reasonable. I described it to the realator as "low" - digression, those that know me may be amazed that I talk to realators now. It is rare, but I am growing - he prefered to describe it as "priced to move." I gave him a hat tip for playing the game, but I'm still not sure exactly why it was low. I would have been tempted to bid above asking and that's where lady friend and I would part ways.

We looked at another great house up in the SW hills. It was modern, huge windows, spacious, beautiful. High side of price range and up in the hills, so a bit inaccessable inconvient maybe for friends to visit. Kind of like up Hendrix for you Eugeneians. We really liked it, but it seemed like a house that people in their mid 50s buy because they don't care about the city and want some peace and quiet, dammit. The tax bill was also huge - solid pays attention to these things now too - because many of the other houses in the neighborhood were seven figure houses, so we have to pay more to be rich types. And for the zoo, the realator explained. I wasn't sure what that meant, but retreating to comfortable ground, I nodded along.

House number 1
House number 2