April 26, 2009

2:38 p.m.

Interestinger and Interestinger

I've got the fans on! It's quite warmish up here on the third floor. A few dog days from the coming August have snuck back in time to April.

Nice gig last night; Eagle was able to come down from Vermont, and a few other friends/fans we hadn't seen in ages. Nice sound, happy audience. No train wrecks.

AND, I know you really want to hear about today's House Recon with Realtor. The short of it is, she was very impressed with the state of disrepair, and even speculated that an assessor might say the house was worth nil and that it would be sold just for the price of the acreage, which in today's market would not even be that much. That's all just thinking out loud without further investigation, of course. The house cannot be taken down because it's on the historic register. All this is in our favor.

Our strategy is that she will go in with us when we see it again with Son -- which should be sometime in the next couple of weeks. She and Marc will, between them, negotiate with Son, because he has the house-fix-it-up savvy and she has the realtor-point-of-view advantage. Rose and I will nod compassionately and make appropriate agreeing noises.

The ace in the hole is the trash and hazardous waste that has been dumped in the back of the field since the 60s. She said those fines are astronomical if the EPA finds out, and he certainly would have to clean that up before thinking about putting the property on the market.

Her main concern is that a bank would consider the house unsafe until certain repairs are made -- and you can't sell a house until it's deemed safe. Kind of a catch-22, unless we can negotiate with Son to buy the house for a specific price after repairs are made -- but WE do the repairs in the meantime, as though we've already bought it. It would be contracted, of course, so we wouldn't be risking anything. I very much doubt he'll want to be involved with the house a moment longer than he has to. Girlfriend's mother says he's been trying to forget about it since going back to Kentucky last month.

Anyway, I took my Ohm tuning fork and vibrated most of the rooms, also some walls. I had to do it quickly because I was just following everyone else through and we didn't want to spend a lot of time.

House felt friendly.

Dar was very happy to learn of all this. He said if by a miracle of mojo (those are my words; I put it that way just so I could write "mojo" again) we got the place for sixty grand, we wouldn't have to take out a mortgage. What a sweetie. Then he had to go get dressed up as a rat, because he's in Charlotte's Web right now.

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Eagle called and asked if she could come tonight instead of tomorrow, so that she wouldn't be tired from driving tomorrow. I had a little reluctance and I guess I could have said that wouldn't work for me, but I said okay. I had no plans for tonight anyway.

Well, I guess I'd better straighten up this place a little.