Closed on the house. Picked up the keys. Sorted old junk mail. Explored the maze-like basement levels. Opened windows. Laid on the floor. Listened to birds. It's ours.

Tomorrow will be photographing "before", a whole lot of measuring, and some exploratory demolition.

I wrote this stream-of-consciousness and haven't edited or condensed this yet. I'm just talking it out, out loud. Yep, I know it's a public post... but I fucked up the other day and I own it... and I'm trying to work out my thoughts here by typing them out. 

Didja ever have something really frustrating  happen, and you vent about it, and once you've gotten it off your chest, you've pretty much forgotten about it?  Like, the act of venting pops the proverbial zit, it heals, and then you're done?

That's what venting is for. And we vent to our pals about stuff. That's one of many many neat things that pals are for. And that's also what blogs are for... and blog pals. :-)

Another thing blogs are good for is for feeling connected to people when you may have a hard time seeing folks. Like, I don't really like thinking about what I'm about to type in this here paragraph because it depresses me, but it's a fact that Matt and I are pretty isolated. When his belly issues started in 2012, we couldn't go out as much. And then what seems like one day in February 2015 the belly issues stopped and were replaced by unspeakably awful anxiety attacks, and then we really couldn't go out any longer. When we would try to go out we'd always have to leave early, so eventually we just stopped going out. The few times we tried inviting people over instead, Matt would still end up having an anxiety attack (I'm not looking for a cause or diagnosis here), so we just stopped inviting people over.  And understandably, people have stopped inviting us to things because they/we just know we'll either have to cancel beforehand or leave shortly after we arrive. So we don't really see people any longer unless it's for a rehearsal or a gig. Matt has friends he talks to on the phone, but I don't really. I also don't have coworkers, and my family all lives hours away, so I am pretty isolated.  I'm not on Facebook, so this blog (and barely Twitter) is pretty much my main  connection to other people. 

I've been keeping an online blog since the mid-90s, since before the word "blog" was even used.  I once had a creepy neighbor discover my old llij.net blog, and he saw me in person one day and told me how close he felt to me because he read what I wrote.  But he didn't know me-- he just knew those teeny moments and ideas I shared.  This spooked me out a bit, and shortly thereafter I switched to LiveJournal, which had the ability to lock certain posts down so only a small subset of people could see it. You could have public posts too, of course, and you could also even lock things to be completely private, for those rare things I didn't want to bounce off any friends but still wanted to immortalize on electrons. :-)

But when you don't see someone very often but you read something they've written, it's logical to assume that what they're written is some deeply-held sacred belief or life philosophy... when it could just be the brain-fart du jour.

LiveJournal ("LJ") got bought by the Russians a few years ago, and since Russia does not believe in https, we all abandoned ship since no privacy could be assured there. OnePostWonder ("OPW") was born, and we've all built a nice cozy home here. It's not as huge as LJ was, but most of my LJ pals (many of whom are IRL pals) made the jump to OPW, so it's good here. (Plus I love and trust the people who built it.)

I've always loved writing, though I know I'm not that great at it. I switch tenses all the time, I change I/you/they prounouns constantly because I write in a very stream-of-consciousness way. And I'm long-winded as hell (plus I start sentences with conjunctions-- heavens!).  But I blog as a way to just shoot the shit, but also so I have a way to work out some things I'm thinking about, and to share some general life happenings. 

Anyhoo, you may recall I wrote a post the other day where I vented about a very frustrating night at a restaurant where an acquaintance's kids (two daughters)  misbehaved and it upset not only people at our table, but also a group of strangers who had to sit in our semi-private section because it was a busy night. I wound up buying the strangers' dinner (nobody put me up to it) because they were in my direct line of sight and I could see how upset they were over how often they were getting bumped into and squealed at by the kids, and I felt the mom (I called her "S") wasn't doing anything to control her kids. Plus, this kicked Matt into one of the worst panic attacks he's ever had, and he left the restaurant early. I had assumed he went to sit and cry in the car (which he always does), but when I got outside after I quickly said goodbye to folks, I found him wandering the far end of the shopping center speaking gibberish and spinning in circles, arms flailing. I wish I was exaggerating. It was really upsetting.

In S's defense, her daughters were super-happy. I think maybe parents tend to correct their kids when they're being skootchy or annoying or hitting, but when they're squeeing and giggling and dancing (OK, and climbing the walls and trying to do cartwheels) maybe you don't worry about it because they're chipper, maybe it's hard to see that as misbehaving. I dunno, that's just a guess... I'm not a parent.  

Anyway, when I wrote that post, I really let loose. I was raw. We had just gotten home and I had finally gotten Matt calmed down and in bed, where he was still punching himself in the head and speaking nonsense words, moreso than usual. It was a particularly awful panic attack (he said later it was one of the worst, if not the worst one, he's ever had), made even worse by the fact that we were so sure going into the night that he wasn't going to have one. We don't get to go out anymore, but that night the stars had this magical alignment and he was actually OK, and we felt normal and hopeful for the first time in a very, very long time. I was so, so angry to have had that taken away... and I was so so angry because I felt that this could have been avoided. 

What do I know.

Maybe I'm delusional and maybe Matt was destined to have a panic attack all along. Why should that night have been any different?  Maybe we're idiots for having hope anymore. 

So I vented. I was frustrated. Not only was I trying to piece Matt back together again, I was also out over $100 for the strangers' meals... and I was annoyed that the strangers never even smiled to say a silent "thank you." Nuthin'.  And then I felt guilty that my friends bought my and Matt's dinners because they knew I bought the strangers' dinners. I wasn't trying to cost anyone extra money! So I was angry, and embarrassed, and annoyed, and sad, and hurt, and crushed, and disappointed. And those were all valid feelings, and I don't feel bad for having them.

But in my venting in my blog post, I did something awful. Legitimately, genuinely awful, and something I feel deeply sorry for.  I called S, the mom of the rowdy daughters some awful, awful things in my blog post.  I was vicious. I was beyond harsh. I used words that may have felt justified in the moment but were absolutely NOT OK.   

It's one thing to hate the behavior... it's another thing to hate the person. 

And the truth is, I don't hate the person at all.  Never did. After I wrote what I wrote, the venting was over, we commented on it here, and bloop-- I forgot all about it. 

Right? Haven't you ever vented about something and then forgotten about it? That's what venting is for.  Once it's vented, it's over. It's a non-issue.  If someone were to bring it up again, I'd say "Yeah, that night was a shit-show," but if I saw S the next day I'd say hello like everything was fine, because everything is fine, and I don't hate and never did hate her.  Sure, I was pissed in the moment, and I reaaaaaallllly wish the night played out differently, and I shot my big dumb mouth off on my blog and let my New Jersey out, but then I got over it once it was out of my system. Humans are wonderfully resilient that way. 

But due to my blog entry, a bunch of strangers on OPW now think that S is some awful human being, though she is not.  (Not that 99.9% of you know or will ever know who S is... but still... that's negativity the world doesn't need.)

But if you don't know me very well, or if you don't see me that often and you read my post, you'd think I was gonna set this lady on fire. You might think, "My god, I've never known Jill to hate anyone like this. This is upsetting and concerning." And I could see why you'd think that, and I wouldn't blame you.  (Sure, I'd hope you'd give me the benefit of the doubt, but I could also understand why you wouldn't.)

And this Benefit of the Doubt thing:

This is where I went wrong, and for what I feel awful: In the moment of blogging, I never gave S the benefit of the doubt. I went straight for the jugular; I chose vicious. I didn't say "I wish her behavior was different," I said "She is a fucking piece of shit." I didn't say, "Man, she had a lapse in judgment that night," I said "She has shitty fucking parenting skills." (or something like that.)  I didn't separate the actions from the soul.  I judged her as a human. I called her such awful things that it could almost even be viewed as an insult to everyone else at the dinner. If S was such a complete piece of shit then everyone else at dinner must be too since they're all friends with her. Only shit likes shit, amirite?

This is not okay. 

To be clear, I don't regret my description of what happened at dinner. It was factually accurate from my viewpoint-- I was watching stuff happen because I could see the whole room from my seat. But I deeply, deeply regret what I said after I described the events of the evening... where I got personal. I called names. I judged. 

As if you couldn't tell, I've been really reflecting on that evening and its blog post and my word choices, as well as my description of the night's events.

And check this nugget out:

There were two moms there; Julie is Kit's mom, and then there was S and her two daughters. The truth of the matter is Kit was behaving just as inappropriately and was just as rambunctious as S's daughters, but I described Julie and Kit as "fine" because I know Julie and I love Julie very much... so I naturally cut her some slack in my judgment. I didn't mention Kit's climbing or cartwheel attempts or windowsill dancing once in that post... because I know Julie is a good person who tries hard, so I didn't throw her under the blog bus.  But S? I don't know her so FUCK HER-- SHE MUST BE A TERRORIST. Whaaaa?  Hey Jill you asshole... YOU may not know S., but everyone else does, and she wouldn't have been invited if people didn't love her very much. So just because you Jill don't know her, maybe you should cut her the same slack you cut for Julie and Kit. They are clearly deserving of slack and basic human fucking decency, instead of coming out guns blazing.

So I've been soul searching ever since I realized what I had done. 

And I really think this is the crux of what sucks with the world and the USA today. So many of us are all so quick to vilify those we don't know... but that person we're vilifying is someone's friend, someone's daughter, someone's sister, someone's mother. Maybe we shouldn't be so quick to "other-ize" people, or to "well they should just"-ize people. It ain't that easy. If they "could just," wouldn't they?

If anyone called any of you the things I called S, whether you made a mistake or not, I'd set them on fire.

It's actually a very very minor subplot-point that I completely accidentally made that post a public post (that I have just friends-locked an hour ago), and S's dear friend saw it and got very understandably upset... so upset that she didn't want to speak with me so her husband brought it up to me.  (S's dear friend and husband were not at dinner; they had heard from other attendees that dinner was a shitshow, and I think it got mentioned on Facebook... but my OPW post was the only place where someone (me!) was vitriolic and horrible.)  I'm not angry at the dear friend who got upset, and I'm not angry at her husband for telling me... and I'm not angry at anyone else who may have seen the post and shared it.  I'm angry at myself.   

I fucked up. I own it. I'm genuinely sorry. I am using this as a learning experience and as an opportunity for growth... which sounds douchey, but I am totally sincere here. 

This is not one of those things where I'm apologizing because I'm sorry I got caught. 

In some lumpy way, I'm almost happy (?) I got caught, because it's forced me to have a VERY uncomfortable look at this thing I sometimes do without thinking about the larger impact it's having.

So while I'm damning S for doing something without realizing the larger impact it's having, I'm doing the same thing like a hypocritical fuckstick. And I've gotta knock it off.  If you wanna make the world a better place ya gotta look at yourself and make a change, yo.

So yeah, I'm not apologizing because I got caught. And I'm not apologizing because people are upset.

I'm apologizing because I'm sorry for judging this person so harshly instead of cutting them some slack. I'm sorry for being a judgy asshole and jumping to the worst possible conclusion without even considering any other possibility. I denied her her humanity. How fucking shitty is that?

Sure, her actions almost definitely caused bad times for me and Matt, and caused other people to have an uncomfortable, awkward, unpleasant night.  But nobody is perfect. You need to separate the person from the actions until you have hard, ongoing, consistent, repeatable proof that the questionable actions are an actual character trait and not just someone having a bad night or a one-time lapse of judgment. We all have bad days. We all make mistakes. We all deserve forgiveness. 

I hope people will extend me the same courtesy. 

I have some apology emails to write.

(This post was typed stream-of-consciousness and has not been edited or condensed.)

NOTE:  Karen Hoofnagle has used OPW to try to get a handle on what she thinks.  I'm going to take a page from her book here.  I'd also be pleased if you have any considered opinions that might help me to clarify my thinking.

Sorry it's so long.

                                                  *     *     *

Were the ABC network executives genuinely offended by Roseanne Barr's tweet about Valerie Jarrett?  Certainly, plenty of viewers were.  Viewers vote with their pocketbooks, and ABC heard the reactions loud and clear.  Barr's comments have been widely condemned as "apalling", "horrific", "disgusting", "bigoted" and "racist".  But are these characterizations valid?  I am not a Rosanne Barr fan and I didn't like the tweet, but I detest knee-jerk reactions, especially my own.  So I'm trying to plow through this, and I'd be delighted if you came along as a navigator. 

Here's the tweet: 

“muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.”

Barr's tweet is not at all funny to me, but it's not the lack of humor that has caused this firestorm.  If a knee-jerk reaction isn't a good enough reason to be outraged, then how do you contextualize this tweet?  I think I'd say this to Roseanne Barr:

1.  Your tweet is based on your suggestion that Jarrett looks like an ape. 
2.  Jarrett is Black. 
3.  Black people as a group have often been insultingly compared to apes in the past.  (That past includes Blacks being considered as subhuman.)
4.  Your ape tweet about Jarrett isn't about her as Valerie Jarrett.  At least in part, it's saying she is loathesome and inferior simply because she is Black.
5.  That is racist and offensive.

I think you have to have all of #1 - #4 to justifiably get to #5.  #1 to #3 aren't steps in an argument, they're simply statements of facts--but relevant facts.   We wouldn't be embroiled in this story if Jarrett was White, or if Barr had suggested that Jarrett was the result of the mating of an Avon lady and a scorpion.  But is the leap from #3 to #4 justified?  Given the power and pervasiveness of #3, yeah, I think it is.  Especially when coupled with some of Barr's earlier statements.  And once you get to #4, #5 seems to me to be a no-brainer.

So screw you, Roseanne.  I'm sorry about the blameless people who were working on your show and who now are out of work, but I'm happy to say buh-bye to you.  Part of your defense for your tweet (aside from Ambien) was that you were "only joking".  The particular kind of joke obviously falls into the mockery-derision-lampoon category.  And just when I thought I had reached clear sailing, I've find I've got another problem.  Because I have long enjoyed Stephen Colbert, John Stewart and the like.  Let's look at some of their "jokes".

Colbert:  “US Senator and ventriloquist dummy plotting against his master, Orrin Hatch...”

                 “Attorney General and racist Dobby, Jeff Sessions..."

                 "Majority Leader and doll carved from an apple, Mitch McConnell..."

Stewart:  “I believe, and I am being completely serious right now, Senate           Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, is a turtle.”

Stephen Colbert often uses the template above, usually with a picture that fits perfectly with his jibe.  The best of these are often my favorite parts of a segment.  As for Stewart, in the segment above he went on to try to entice McConnell with a leaf of lettuce.

Like Barr's tweet, these quips are rooted in something unkind.  You don't say things like that about people you like.  You don't say things like that *to* the person in question unless you're upset or angry with them.  Even being catty behind the person's back springs from some negative and shared feelings about the target. 

Virtuous souls may judge that such mean-spirited comments are always unkind, and therefore never funny and so shouldn't be made.  I don't think most of us buy that.  Satire, for example, is actually a very useful way to expose problems and deflate the pompous in the public sphere, and satire is going to include the kind of mockery we're talking about here.  So what's okay, and what's not?

Maybe it's wrong to lampoon someone about something that they can't change.  I hear this a lot when the topic is sex or race.  But that's not the issue.  Mitch McConnell can't help looking like a turtle--so what?  No, in my search for some kind of guidelines, the best I have been able to do is this:

*  Don't deride someone who is down, especially if they are down permanently.  Don't deride someone that you have a lot of power over.

*  If you deride someone you know to their face, especially in public, you are intending to hurt them.  The *why* you want to hurt them is another matter.  This goes double if you care about one another.

*Being catty (i.e., deriding someone in your social sphere behind his or her back) might be theraputic for spleen-venting, but it is not Nice.  If you do it a lot, you are not Nice.

What *is* okay might be the opposite of what isn't.  Dodging all of the asterisks above leaves you with an acceptable target for your derision.  Someone you don't like (at least right now) but that you really don't know, and who doesn't know you.   Someone who probably wouldn't hear what you said about them, and wouldn't really be much moved if they did.  These requirements might be the permission slip...but the *desire* to deride in this way (or to enjoy the barbs of others) comes almost always, I think, from the feeling that this person has power over you--that there is some vexation in your life that they are responsible for, and that you can't make go away.  And they just don't care.

So I guess I end up with an acceptable target list of celebrities, public officials, administrators, bosses, and the like.  By this reasoning, I may a valid target for my students' jabs, so bring it on.  Just make sure that the mockery is rooted in perception of the individual, not some hackneyed stereotype of a group.

I'm talking to you, Roseanne.

Tomorrow we're dropping off a year's worth of post-dated cheques and a large bank draft to our lawyer, so it looks like all the paperwork has passed the sniff test on both sides and come Monday we'll actually own the condo. It has been a little nerve wracking.

Then I get really, really busy, because I'll only have six weeks to do whatever renovations are needed -- including new flooring, new kitchen, and moving some closet spaces around -- because today we also dropped the 60 days move out notice to the apartment.

I've been squiring my energy lately and antsy as hell to DO SOMETHING and I reckon I'm a gonna get my wish.

Our dryer died about a month ago. I forget if I wrote about this or not.  

Since that happened, we've taken our clothes to the laundromat a few times, did our laundry at my folks' house, and also washed stuff here and hung it outside.  It hasn't been awful. 

I figured our dryer died because it's 20-ish years old. But I also know it's entirely mechanical, so therefore entirely fixable by anyone with half a brain. I've already replaced the belt that spins the drum, so I'm totally comfy fixing stuff.  

My dad raised us to always try fixing broken things. In the worst case, it continues to stay broken. In the best case, you fix it! In the medium-case, it stays broken but now you know how one more thing in the world works. 

Anyway, I know that dryers can die because of a clogged lint pipe, but we just had our lint-tubes totally cleaned out when we had our ducts cleaned a few months ago.  Turns out they didn't clean the dryer lint tube at all. See Exhibit A:

Ummmm... I guess this would explain why our dryer stopped working. Guess I should ask for our money back from the guy who cleaned our dryer vents a few months ago....  It's a miracle the house didn't burn down.

Anyhoo, our friend and handyman Crusher (yep, that's his name!) ripped out the old impacted lint-duct and replaced it with smoove new pipe that is easily accessible and clean-outable.  We fired up the dryer, but it didn't get hot... turns out the heating element burned out (surprise surprise), so I ordered a new one off Amazon which will be here Friday along with a new thermostat (I figured I'd replace it just in case).  So we'll be back to laundrytown by Friday evening. Yay!

But man. It's crazy to think that the house really could have burned down from all that lint. My dad's a fireman, and we know lots of stories of fires that started with a lint-trap clogged a fraction of what ours was.

So please clean out your lint-lines, folks. 

Did you know that you have a dominant eye? I knew this, but had never considered what it might mean for my life.

So... put your arms straight out ahead of you, palms facing away from you, fingers pointing towards the ceiling.  Now twist your wrists inward a teeny bit to touch your thumb-tips together and your pointer-fingertips together... this makes a diamond-shaped hole.  Now find something on a wall about 10-20 feet away and look at it through the hole in your hands (make sure both eyes are open).  Now close one eye. Now switch eyes. Make sure your hands didn't move.  When you closed one eye your hand blocked the thing, right? And when you closed the other eye you could see it through the hole, right? Whichever eyeball you could see the distant thing through is your dominant eyeball.

I'm sure there was an easier way for me to describe how to do that, but okay. 

Anyhoo, this morning I went to the eye doctor-- it had probably been nearly 10 years since I've been there. My prescription has never been all that strong, and it's only ever been for distance.  Even though I only ever was supposed to wear my glasses for driving and for watching movies, I'd just keep them on all the time because it was just easier. They're so weak that they never really got in the way or me seeing stuff.

Today's eye exam showed that my distance-prescription has gotten just a teeeeeny bit worse in 10-ish years... and both my eyeballs continue to have the same prescription as each other, which is nifty.  He asked if I'd resorted to cheater/reading glasses yet now that I'm 47, and I told him that just in the last year I find that if I need to read something I have to take my glasses off and read it with my naked eyes... but I don't need cheater/reading glasses yet.  (Matt owns a pair of cheaters and I only use them if I'm doing REALLY close/fine detail painting for an extended period of time. But general reading and dicking with my phone, nope, still all good.) 

So he asked me how I felt about contacts. I told him I only ever really wear contacts for any gigs where I need to glance at sheet music or lyrics (I keep the sheet music/lyrics far away so they don't block the audience's view-- so my everyday distance glasses/contacts work great) otherwise I don't wear contacts... my glasses are fine for everyday life.   I have a gig where I don't need lyrics/music, I prefer the "psychic distance" having a slightly-fuzzy audience provides.  Proof: The last time I ordered contacts was 2009, and I just used my last pair about a month ago. So I really don't wear them often.

(I brought the empty contacts box with me just so he could see my old prescription, and he said "You just used these? You realize these expired in 2016, right?" Oopsie.)

He asked if I was averse to contacts, and I said no. So he suggested we try an experiment. He figured out which eye is my dominant eye, and then did a few tests to see how dominant my dominant eye is... and as luck would have it, my dominant eye is more of a switch. ;-)   This means I'm a great candidate for Eyeball Shennanigans™ -- which means I wear a distance-contact in my non-dominant eye, and I leave my dominant eye nekkid. So if I need to read, my dominant eyeball springs into action, and if I need to see far, my brain switches to my other eye with the distance-lens in it.  Ta-daaaa!

So we popped one contact-lens in at noon today and HOLY SHITBALLS my life has changed. I can see EVERYTHING. It's so cool!  Fuckin' eyeballs, how do they work?

For the record, eyeball dominance has nothing to do with which eye is less-blind or which eye has an astigmatism or anything. It's also not related to your dominant hand. It's just a brain thing.  (My left eye is my dominant eye. Neat!)

#themoreyouknow

(Hi. My name is Jill, and I take 87 years to say what anyone else could convey in 6 sentences.  Go me!)

These are obscenely good, though you'll need one of those air fryers to make them with a reasonable amount of grease.

YOU NEED

• up to 2 lbs of sweet potatos
• 2T per pound, of peanut oil or bacon fat (something with Flavour)
• An excessive amount (1T per pound or more) of some spicy-ass seasoning you love, e.g. Montreal Steak seasoning, or Ms Dash, or sriracha, or Tabasco, or... 
• Any additional salt, to taste

YOU DO

• Wash the potatos
• Mandoline or julienne the potatos to 3mm sticks
• Put everything in the fryer and turn it on
• Every few minutes make sure the sticks are evently circulating, hit them with a wooden spoon if they're jammed up
• Take them out when they are about 50/50 brown/orange, might be 30-40 minutes depending on heat/quantity. Watch them at the end, they go fast between crispy and burny, if you smell a hint of smoke, stop.
• Remove quickly and spread out to cool, let them crisp up by not covering them

YOU WILL

• Be shocked if they last a day

I wanted a cheap, super-portable, lightweight Linux computer good enough for occasionally working at home. Something that would also be small enough to open easily in the most cramped of airline seats.

Many people have found that adding some extra storage to a Chromebook and installing a full Linux distribution it is a good way to get that cheap Linux "light development" machine. And GalliumOS is the flavor of Linux tailor-made for that.

So I tried installing GalliumOS Linux on the Samsung Chromebook 3.

TL;DR: this was not a good idea. There is a major issue that wasn't mentioned on the wiki page. It wasn't very well known or consistently diagnosed until I started beating the drum and other users came out of the woodwork. Unfortunately, still not fixed.

I'm not angry about this. GalliumOS is a volunteer project, the issue is tricky, and nobody owes me an open source rose garden. If I wanted a sure thing, I should not have bought a new model. Linux tends to run best on slightly older computers people have simply had more time with.

So this time around, I posted to the GalliumOS Reddit and asked for personal accounts of 100% happy GalliumOS experiences. And lo, there were many. But the machine that really sounded spiffy was the Dell Chromebook 7310. It is strongly recommended by "Mr. Chromebook," the guy who writes custom firmware to let you boot these machines directly to Linux, without weird startup prompts and a risk of a family member quite inadvertently reverting the whole thing to ChromeOS... arhgh!

Only thing is: it's not available new anymore. And because it's as nice as it is - for instance, you can upgrade the SSD, and it contains a proper SSD, not soldered-in eMMC storage - and is available with several different processors and an excellent screen, it costs a little more.

I decided to leverage the first to address the second. In other words, I bought a used unit on eBay, with an i3 processor. And I am super-very happy with it.

So far everything just works. And it's fast - the experience so far feels zippier than my i7 Mac at work, because GalliumOS deliberately goes light on flashy stuff that slows computers down... but also because an i3 is still a whole lot better than a Celeron. Don't get a Celeron. Just don't.

At 13" it's a little bigger than I initially wanted. But I work from home far more often than I fly. 

Here, I hope, endeth the saga. Except for the bit where I'll be flipping the two (!) Samsung Chromebooks I bought, in my zeal to prove it was a real issue and not just the hack job I did removing the write-protect screw from the first one. Sigh. I think I might donate them to a school. On the whole, I'd prefer getting back 100% of the karma over getting back 30% of the money.

This post is a combination of three updates, one written on the 13th, the other two days later, and one written just now.

May 13

I’ve been hyper because I have no sense of a proper level of service from the Realtor. I feel like she’s been slow. A couple properties I said I was interested in have gone off the market. Our first showings are Tuesday; my first contact with her was last Tuesday. Is this typical? Is it Toronto? Is she just terrible? Well, I told her there’s one place I’m keenly interested in, and it will be accepting offers Tuesday; the day I expect we will see it. If we lose a chance to bid on it because the Realto has been sluggish I will be Very Angry (tm). 

I feel like this is a stupid amount of money to pay for a post box. On the other hand, there is no place on earth quite like Church/Wellesley in Toronto. So maybe it’s worth it. And tbh it does represent Our life savings. I should not be embarrassed about (just barely) being able to afford a downtown condo at 50 years old. We’re blue collar people, though, doing white collar work. The poor don’t rub off so easily. 

Still the voice shouts about a mobile home somewhere semi remote, and a quiet, simple life. I think perhaps I’ve had that, though, and it wasn’t very fulfilling. Time to try living large and social. Doing and being. Plenty of time to be laid back when you’re six feet underground. 

I’d really rather not have to extensively renovate a vintage unit, but if I have to to get into a good building at a price we can afford, I will. I am guessing no one runs up 4x8 sheets of drywall on the elevators though. 

Today was walking with my sweetheart, just a stroll to Parkdale, coffee at Abbott, then home via the waterfront. A little sun touched but it was a lovely day.

May 15

Monday morning my irritation with our "realtor" was at the breaking point, so I sent an email to a local-ish broker named Trish who I found on the gayrealtynetwork.com site (yes this is a real thing that exists). The message said, "hey, this is the service we are getting, is this what we should expect or is there something we're missing out on?"

Five minutes later, I got a response saying like, "no, that's bullshit, what's your phone number, I'll call you." So I replied and she called straight away, obviously giving breakfast to a small child in the background, and clarified that the Toronto market requires a much higher level of service, and for whatever reason, we weren't getting it, and -- if we'd like, she could shuffle her appointments around to take us to look at properties that very morning.

So I said yes. And she made it happen; within three hours she drove us out, and we went and looked at our two top picks. She was really good, giving her professional opinion about suitability, giving us insider info about the buildings, things we weren't looking at, things we should look for, etc. Like: what's the vibe you get from the security/concierge in a condo? You want someone professional, yet friendly. Not someone rude or icy, not someone just marking time.

You also want a building that's had, or having, major maintenance items (roofs, chillers etc) handled out of the regular budget. You want a board that's willing to undertake significant upgrades to lighting or windows, if the cost/benefit is there. You can't be afraid to pay for things if they're worthwhile. A condo building needs to be managed proactively. You want one with mostly owners, not absentee landlords. She also buttonholed a resident in the elevator, asked him how long he'd lived there: 20+ years. Did he like it? He sure as hell did. Because people who live in a building will either love it and they want to talk about it, or they hate it and they want to talk about it.  

A good broker will also give you solid advice about what you should offer for a place, factoring in other units in the building, what kind of discount you should expect for a unit based on the renovations it's had compared to others, compared to similar units in other buildings, etc. She gave us a very clear idea that the unit was well priced -- that the asking price was reasonable. 

So the only thing remained was to decide if we wanted to put an offer in, and we did, this morning. She made sure to reach out to the listing agent and build up a rapport, to make sure that she could feel out what the sellers wanted: max dollars, quick close, what. We learned that they were not even living in Toronto any more, and likely wanting to just shed the property ASAP. Which, we're fine with -- we don't have anything to sell, we did that last year.

We decided to go in at about 1% over asking -- remembering that the asking price was very reasonable -- if there was a chance of competing offers, but by the deadline of 7pm no one else had registered so we went in right on what they were hoping to get, very happy to pay that amount of money for that amount of condo.

And at about 9pm or so, they accepted and countersigned our offer! So, assuming no fuckups with the close, on June 4th, we'll own a little slice of Toronto near the corner of Jarvis & Wellesley, exactly where we want to be. Basically, ground zero in Toronto's pride neighbourhood.

The 36 hours of the title of this post was how long it took from talking to Trish on Monday to having an accepted offer. Which is only slightly more time than it took our first "realtor" to respond to our initial contact email with an incorrectly gendered reply. We asked Trish if that was her fastest deal and she said, no, 4 hours. 

To be fair -- I've been doing research on real estate in Toronto for well over a year. Learning where we want to live, what good buildings are, how much space we'll need, what we might have to renovate, it's been hundreds of hours of research. From viewing our first units to nailing the deal down in 36 hours is kind of an orgasmic frenzy, but that in no way discounts the tremendous amount of foreplay it took to get to that point.

I don't expect any further drama with the transaction, other than handing over $$$ at some point, and promises to regularly hand over more $, but that's just the usual house buying shit. 

I always kind of viewed the apartment as living only "kind of" in Toronto? It's always been removed from the places where things happen. On a subway line, but not really near anything. And certainly not permanent. Not holding us here, not being roots. Well, now we've got roots. I think we're here to stay. 

And you can bet we've been over that dozens of times before signing papers: do you want to live here? Is this the place for us? We could buy a remote cottage, we could buy something in St John's, we could live quietly, go into semi-retirement. But that's didn't feel like living. We've been living quiet hermity lives for decades. 

I think while we can, with the time we have left on this planet, we should shine brightly in a big city, where we don't have to pretend to be people we are not, just so we don't get glared at by judgy conservatives. It will be so much healthier.

May 22

We've got a lender; we'll be paying an effective 10.5% APR (including all fees, mind) to borrow what remains after our down payment -- for just one year. It's kind of usurious, but on the other hand, we still have no income. One way or another, though in a year we'll be able to secure a real mortage from a real bank. Condo fees and taxes in, it's a little like paying a 50% larger rental payment for the next year to live where we want to live, in space we can control.

We judge the extra 50% worth it in order to get what we want, where we want, before real estate does anything stupid in this area. And if, next year, we have to take money out of the RRSP (a tax-deferred investment like a 401K) in order to have enough equity to qualify for a bank mortgage, we'll do it.

Old ladies have ways of doing things that seem silly or dated or whatever... but ya know what? These old-lady ways WORK. 

Like, I have this great sweater-dress that I wear with tights or leggings, but I'm always yanking on it because sweater + leggings = sticking to each other.  What's a girl to do?  Wear a (half)slip. 

Slips?! But those are for old ladies!

Yeah, but ya know what? Old ladies aren't pulling on their damn dresses all day... because the slip just fucking works. 

I jumped on Amazon to buy two half-slips (insert joke here about why didn't I just buy one whole one instead-- herpaderp), one black and one cream-colored... and instead I discovered a magical thing called "pettipants," which is a floofy slip but with leg-holes so your thighs don't touch. And I wore it under my sweater-dress and over my leggings for Mothers Day and sweetwoundedjesus it was magical. I was comfy, the dress looked great, and I didn't have my hand up my arse tugging and unsticking myself all day.  

Old ladies. They get it.

Some Other Old Lady Stuff that I'm Using and It's Working Great:

1) Washing my hair once per week, if that... otherwise I just slap conditioner on it and rinse it out. (Some days I just chuck on a shower cap and don't wet my hair at all. They're really onto something with the not-daily-hairdo. Boom. Done.

2) Cleaning my house with stuff like a vinegar solution, borax, baking soda, etc.  It's cheap, it works like a mofo. Boom. Handled.

​​​​​​3) Oil of Olay. I'm talkin' the OG OoO... the shit just works. Smells like Nana. Boom. Addressed.

4) Cold cream to get your makeup off... even impossible stuff like waterproof mascara and that liquid lipstick. Boom. Fixed. 

​​​​​​​5) Those pillows that go between your knees when you sleep. HOLY CRAP, what a godsend! Without it, my hip is screeeeeaming in the morning. With it, happy times.  Boom. Finito.

6) Bathtub handles. OK, I don't have a bathtub/shower handle in my bathroom (yet), but whenever I stay in a hotel with one I'm much happier. Should probably get one.

7) Toppik for thinning hair. No, it's not the scalp spraypaint of the Ron Popeil days... these are little fibers that you sprinkle on and they really fill in the slightly sparse spots. They're not gonna make a totally bald person look like Fabio, but it is amaaaaazing. Really works. For men and women. Boom. Fixx0r3d.

So, there you have it.

Any other old-people hacks that work for you?