Nuthin' to see here

...we've reverted.
(And, never mind the current circularity. It's the other one that we're going to continue to go forward with. So saith us.)

Seven minutes

That's how much longer my commute would be if I put an offer in on this house. (It would be a low offer. Said house is hideously, laughably overpriced.)

Ok: seven minutes plus the time it takes to walk .4 miles to the bus route, but I don't really count walking time. That's not commuting, right? That's exercise.

Except, of course, if you do count that time, then that puts total transit significantly over the half-hour mark, which I know from being stuck in traffic in Mumbai is the magical number beyond which I suddenly think "my goodness: who's screaming?" and realize it's me.

Honestly, when I started this process, I thought I might be able to get something by the metro, or at least something with a shorter bus commute. Turns out that the market isn't really cooling down in DC the way it is in other parts of the country. Turns out that lots of people live in ~1000 square feet (people: how do you do it?) but we don't really want to be two of them. Turns out -- we discovered from a recent, protracted series of unfortunate plumbing events -- that K and I share an "heir and a spare" philosophy when it comes to required number of bathrooms for a property to possess. Turns out that I'm insanely cheap frugal. Turns out that the closest we can get to a metro and still preserve the quality of life to which I'm accustomed when overseas and someone else is footing the bill is in the 10-15 minute range.

Unless, of course, we get this property. (With a somewhat lower offer. It isn't actually overpriced, but it's been stuck on the market for a while, and I'm frugal.)

I hate condos. I hate giving up a significant chunk of change each month, for no real reason. I hate having someone live on top of me, and to each side. I hate having no outdoor space and no real privacy. I love having a ten-minute commute.

Mental accounting is a funny thing. I cringe and groan at the prospect of paying $350 a month in condo fees, but if you were to ask me whether I'd make an annual lump-sum payment of $4200 to cut my commuting time by two-thirds, have a short, safe, and pleasant bike commute, and be within easy walking distance of shops and restaurants, it'd sound pretty good to me.

But throw in emotive factors, and things get really do get ugly.

The first property is awfully cute. It's on a quiet residential street, on a nice-sized piece of land, and it's quirky. It's easy to imagine spending all summer on the deck, and maybe adding a hot tub in the yard in the winter. It's far from perfect -- each of its many rooms is actually stamp-sized -- but something about the many windows, the greenery, and the solidity of the 1930's structure (my favorite decade for masonry, we've discovered) whispers of la dolce vita.

The second property is a box with stained carpeting.

It is, maddeningly, an almost precisely same-square-feet box as the first property. Two of the bedrooms are annoyingly small; the kitchen is stupidly large. I've plotted out the what-have-we-got-and-where-would-it-go, and it'd work, more or less, with some compromises. But have I mentioned the ten-minute commute?

I'm scared I'm being overly-influenced by the summerness of my reckoning, by making my decision while standing out on the deck of property #1 and listening to birdsong. I think that being overly-influenced by actual, current circumstances is a pan-human shortcoming, but I know that I'm particularly bad at overriding immediate sensory input in favor of future projections. I'll never forget having to quickly pack for an impromptu work trip to Phuket in the freezing darkness of a London January, and discovering, on arrival, that, despite having recently spent two years in Thailand and knowing the score, I'd brought a useless suitcase full of long-sleeved shirts.

I'm even worse at predicting future self-states. I was such a delicate, neurotic sensitive child, that not only did I obsess over what others thought of me, I fretted over how the future me might view the past me. I wrote lots of notes to my future self, pleading for generosity in understanding, and squirreled them away in places I'd hoped I'd soon forget and find years later.

If I take the first place, will my future self be declining social invitations because she can't be bothered to walk to the bus to the metro? Will those extra seven minutes dribble away like water torture? Will she be exasperated to have to get in the car just to get a Saturday morning cup of joe?

But if I go for the condo, will the future me be forever harrumphing over my elephant-footed upstairs neighbor? Or become the subject of community gossip for frequently forgetting to reach for her robe? Or, on the other hand, will she love being able to stroll to Starbucks and Borders or catch the train and be in Old Town in minutes?

Or will she look longingly out to the small patch of shared common space and wish, wish, wish she could just see the goddamn sky?

Note to future self: please don't hate me. I'm trying to do the best that I can.

No such thing as a free dinner

If you were one of the people to whom I have recently given an "Eat This, Not That" book, do NOT, upon reading the section on pasta, say to yourself "tofu-based noodles that are only 20 calories? Holy moly, I gotta try that!"

Do NOT, upon wondering why the whole world hasn't therefore embraced shirataki noodles, conclude smugly that hoi polloi do not like tofu and you do and therefore all will be well.

And, if you must purchase said noodles, do NOT cook them into a tuna casserole, if tuna casserole is was your favorite comfort dish.

And, if you must cook with said noodles at all, do NOT think afterwards, as the thick rubbery slabs sit indigestibly in your stomach, of that scene in Maria Full of Grace in which she prepares for her first trip as a drug mule.

Shirataki: when your diet compels you to eat latex.

Ecccch.

Where things stand from where I sit

Note to self: when re-launching the blog, make sure you have time to re-launch the blog.

What can I say? The wedding-singing business has been pretty active lately. Y'know: spring, and all.

On that note: for reasons that I suspect we'll get into via a series of Lost-like flashbacks, I've been about ready to quit the biz. Today, I received a personal thank-you letter from the Chief Wedding Singer (Her Reigning Crooner) herself, for a massive recent connubial event that was slightly more logistically demanding than the moon landing. I know the letter was drafted by some flunky on a lateral level to myself and signed by autopen and that, HR-- er, CWS, was probably never even aware of its existence. But, still: warm tinglies, and pretty much right when I needed them.

Next crisis: real estate. A long, long time ago, on a blog much like this, I publicly pondered a property. I didn't buy it; I should have; someone else did; I haven't seen anything remotely as appealing; and I desperately need this process to be over. Comparing apples to oranges is pretty much my least favorite decision-making activity. I can create a Toeplitz matrix of price, square feet, distance to metro, need to change trains, good urbanness, bad urbanness, good suburbia, bad suburbia, gentrification tell-tales and p of noisy neighbors and contemplate it to the exclusion of any other profit-making or life-enhancing activity. Seriously: I have eigenvalues for stacked vs. full-size washer-dryers. K is spending much time and ingenuity trying to convince me that the real estate problem does not harbor a unique solution, but to no avail. My brain has two settings: indifferent, and obsessed.

At the moment, I've made the momentous decision to essentially give up on DC proper, which puts me back where I started a couple of months ago. (And the reason? After much variable-crunching and cognitive kilowattage, it came down to this: DC is icky.) I'm seriously contemplating two properties, both of which are flawed and somewhat unlovely, but neither of which is likely to depreciate. How flawed? Well, DC residents, you tell me: (1) it is worth it to live within house-shaking distance of the 2 AM CSX train through Alexandria for affordable access to Old Town? And, (2) is it crazy to contemplate putting a master bedroom in a half-assed and uninsulated (and, probably, unfinishable) garage conversion just to get 1300 square feet in Ballston?

I find these questions depressing. And hugely time-consuming. But we'll be back soon.

ps MS IE users: does the blog look sort of like a colonial hornbook to you? I think we might have a bit of a kerning problem.

Looking for something?

Here's the thing: we're back, but our archives aren't.

I am, if I understand the new workplace guidelines correctly, free to be snarky, punchy, and, even, if only occasionally, mordant...as long as the topics are completely, utterly, and 100 percent content-free.

I was, don't get me wrong, initially bummed about this dilemma. On the one hand, the anti-authoritarian 12-year-old within me -- which is, actually, most of me -- bristles both at the constraint and the injustice. On the other hand, paycheck. Even if I tend to regard my job as rather peculiarly dead-end, I still don't necessarily want to get, as it were, cul-de-sacked.

And then I thought: hey, waitaminnit. Content-free? I could do that. In fact, I usually do that.

And so, here we are. For now. I mean, we'll see how it goes.

If you're still trying to get into a certain other blog: there's nothing behind the curtain. The password-protect is a temporary measure, while I figure out how to safely export and preserve those entries, and after that it'll come down entirely. That blog is no longer being updated, with or without content.

This one is a work in progress. Is it aesthetically displeasing? I think it is, a bit, and will keep tinkering (anyone know how to get underlining out of a blogroll widget? Ug-leee, and not the simple fix you'd think Ed update: oo, I think I got it ). Feel free to make other layout suggestions.

More reader input requested: I'm still going to need to talk about my job, though I'll need my best Eastern European techniques to do so (and please don't get me started on the irony). Thus, I'll need a stand-in career that I can actually discuss, in order to talk about what ol' Napoleon and Snowball are up to, if you catch my drift. Ease of metaphor is the primary criterion. Potential for humor is a close second. Contenders?