Sarcasm with a side of optimism.

More Updates

http://www.real-kidz.com/meet.html

I saw this link on a website that is an offshoot from EurasianNation, which sadly isn't being updated anymore. At first, I thought, what a good idea! But then it quickly dawned on me that these people have NO idea what they're doing. See- the problem with being mixed is that you never know what you're going to get. It's like sticking your hand into a black bag of Mr.Potato-head parts and pulling out random pieces. There's no way to create a "mixed standard", which is partly why there's no true solidarity amongst mixed individuals. Enough of that though.

My run in yesterday with Chipmunk really motivated me to finally throw my resume together. I had an old version of it from March 05 down here, and the new additions upstairs. It took a while to come up with them, but when I finally did, it looked satisfactory. Now I have three pages of bullshit describing myself in the third person, which is how they want it for some reason. Chipmunk is still trying to orchestrate things. He suffers from a Napoleon complex big time.

After I put it together, I ran into Mr.Wendell (one dollar means a snack for me, but it means a great deal to you) who was decked out in a full suit. "TAKE ME WITH YOU!"

So, enough about work or the lack thereof. In other news, Craig has made great progress in breaking down the parts car. Soon, we will have an entire car minus the body in several cardboard boxes on the shelves. We now have a parking crisis which goes into effect promptly on August 1st thanks to some fuckheads and the condo association. It can be argued that we don't utilize our two car garage properly, or that having five cars between two people is absurd in this area. I'll assert that what we do with our space and money is our business.

First, let me point out that the condo association when it comes to voting requires a majority vote, and three out of the five board members are the builder. It's a giant farce from the get-go. The rest of the community constituency is made up of useless, under-educated, big-mouth, bossy PTA mom type characters. The face of the condo association (one of the above) was MC-ing a summer pool party where we had to guess the flags that represented the diversity of our community. They were printed out and taped to the glass of the clubhouse. "Who can name these flags?", she bellows. "What's this one? It's a country."

A country? I'm pretty sure it's the Puerto Rican flag lady.

Anyway, the real estate market in this area has cooled a bit, and now there are for sale signs everywhere. Several in each community, and at least 4 condos in our neighborhood for sale. The signs stay up for a while since people are still holding out on their super inflated prices. Our home would probably go on the market now for $40k more than I paid for it a year ago. When I was looking then, the market was still hot, but not crazy since it was in the winter. I chose my unit because of the two car garage because it was obvious that parking was going to be an issue, especially since some townhouse units without garages only had ONE assigned parking space per unit. That's absurd.

When the market started cooling and they couldn't turn over the properties fast enough, the builders upped the incentives and increased the amount of closing cost assistance, and made the following asinne mistake: they started offering TWO parking spaces to the units w/o garages.

And of course, the single-assigned-space people noticed, and got all huffy about it. So now, our visitor parking is turning into sticker parking, and only those cars with stickers (meaning, those single-assigned units) can park there overnight from midnight to 6am. Aaaaaaaaand that basically means bye-bye parking.

There were parking meetings that were being held for the past two months, every Tuesday. These meetings were not advertised. And, the builder who is on the condo committee pointed out that there were signs posted for them (albeit same day and last minute). When I asked how many people showed up to their meetings in general, she pointed out that there was a "very good turnout". Define very good. Oh, about fifteen people she said. There are 165 units in the community. Assuming that there's only one person living in the unit, you're talking about less than 10% of the community. How can you possibly qualify that as "good turnout"?

Needless to say, that phone call did not go over well. Unfortunately, sane, intelligent people do not participate in these affairs because they know it's a losing battle orchestrated by a circus of idiots. Plus, their time is way too valuable anyway for that.

In other, other news, our coed summer soccer season got cancelled because of too many rainouts. We have been getting thunderstorms almost every afternoon. And if we're very unlucky, we just get thunder and no rain, but it's enough to shut down outdoor activities. Unless of course, you WANT to get struck by lightning. It won't start up again until mid-August, but that's probably not a bad thing since we'll be in and out of town between now and then. I am leaving tomorrow for Canadia (sounds more exotic than Canada) with Craig's family and this is the first time I'm going on vacation with them so I don't know what to expect. I'm guessing that it'll be a good thing though since I don't have control over anything. I will just be going with the program, and sometimes, that's the best AND easiest thing. I will be there until Tuesday, then back at work on Wednesday. Craig will be returning the Sunday after so I have the whole house to myself! Think of all the healthy cooking and exercising and girls nights in that will happen in those days. And, it will be guilt free too! I feel bad a lot of the times because the girls soccer teams I'm on I enjoy, but in the summer, the schedule is compressed, so there are usually 3 games a week, which equates to three nights, and that's three nights of not hanging out with Craig. And then he plays poker on another night, so you get the picture. Then, the past few weekends, he's been engrossed with the car, so I don't really "see" him then either. This will change come August.

And then there's the family Hawaii vacation in August. I have several different ideas about this, but nothing sanitized enough to post. The less I say, the more there is between the lines.

posted by v @ 9:37 PM