Trains: I just got back a little while ago from a model train swap meet held in the parking lot of the All Aboard Model Railroad Emporium in Torrance -- just down the street! I didn't buy anything, though; Shelby will be proud of me. It wasn't so much a matter of saving pennies for the house, although that certainly helped, but more that I'm undecided about what I want; until we get a house and I once again have space to plan a layout and decide what goes into it.
Scout Flips A Switch: Remember Scout's newly-developed annoying tendencies that I wrote about a week ago? Well, they're completely gone now. This week she's gone back to sleeping quietly in her crate, without any problems at all. One night I even started getting ready for bed, and turned around to find her already waiting inside the crate, ready for me to shut her in. We did buy a clicker and began a little bit of click-and-reward training, but we'd barely started before it became unnecessary. With no rhyme or reason, the good dog/bad dog switch in her head just flipped into the "good" position ... but we're not complaining.
Real Estate Follies: We ended up making a backup offer on the Birch Street house, but have received no response -- perhaps our number was so insultingly low that the owners deigned not to reply, but more likely the owners are on pins and needles waiting for the second would-be buyer's appraisal to come back before they decide whether or not they need to bother with us. Maybe they're thinking that if this full-price offer falls through, they can put the house back on the market to get a third full-price offer!
The people on the other side of our most recent offer came back to us and asked if we'd be willing to go to $562.5K, halfway between our original offer and their original counter. Nope, but thanks for your flexibility ...
Yesterday we drove around Pasadena, looking at the outside various houses. Today we'll be going back up there to look inside some of those houses (Sunday afternoon is the big open house time; I guess that historically, people must've liked to roam around and look at real estate after going to church). After the houses, we went to Vroman's Bookstore on Colorado Boulevard and browsed around a little. Out of the independents I've been to, Vroman's is very good, but not the greatest; I'd save that title for Cody's Books in Berkeley, or the incomparable Powell's in Portland -- they get extra points, however, for also having a stationery and pen store a couple of doors down.
We both like Pasadena. It reminds me a lot of Berkeley -- older, with an urban core but not hyperdense, and with a lot of cultural and educational things going on (you can bet that if we live there, I'll be going to some of the Art Center College of Design's "Art Center At Night" courses). It would be a nice place to live, if things work out so that we can.
I just hope that we find something nice (and for the right price!) soon, though -- we're both turning into permanently depressed real-estate-listing-browsing zombies.
Realtor Hyperbole: Looking for houses for any length of time exposes you to toxic amounts of the particular subgenre of English that is the realtor's listing: