Butterfield Canyon...

A couple of weeks ago Mr. Forsberg, The Incestuous Mr. and Ms. Doherty (Foresberg joke), and I went for a walk from the summit of Butterfield Canyon toward the overlook of the Great Big Hole in the Ground. We started late and had to turn back before we reached our destination, but walking up in the sunset and down in the twilight was really, really pretty. Here are a couple of videos.

Going Up...

Coming Down...

The Next House...

I made an offer on another house. If you follow the link you'll see the listing with pictures. It looks neat from the outside, but inside is truly horrendous. It was being rented, and the renter just split. As Rich and I were looking around we found a note from the owner saying, "Hey, I'm assuming you've left because you haven't paid any rent for a while, but please get in contact with me."

We also found blood smears on the ground next to the stairs down to the cellar and in the cellar a couple of planters with a sunlamp. I wonder what he was growing next to the furnace. Anyway, we kept looking around and found that the source of the terrible smell was two fold. There was a little surprise in the toilet, and a dirty diaper on an entertainment center in the master bedroom. I was in the living room and heard a bump in the kitchen, and I thought someone might be there, but decided it was probably a rat in the cabinet.

A little more searching found a bench warrant for the renter, and it all came together. Anyway, the roof is bad. Its really bad. It will have to be replaced. There were three different places where the ceiling had fallen in because of water damage. Also, there looks to be some water seepage in the cellar stairs. But aside from that, the foundation looks pretty good, and the walls are straight, which is better than I could say for most of the other places I've seen this age, and the yard has some real potential. The kitchen has been re-done, and and the exterior paint, although cracking now was really elaborate. Also, there is some cement work with individual colored tiles. The front fence is really nice, and there are landscaped planters in place of a tree lawn. It looks like the owners put a lot into the place before they started renting it.

The offer I made is significantly lower than the asking price, and though like the other house I offered on, I'm not super excited about the place, if I get it for this price it will be too good a deal to pass up.

We put it in the contract that the seller's got to get rid of all the renter's crap. I hope he does. Literally.

No House for Me...

A couple of days ago the lady who was representing the sellers on the house called up and said that they had higher offers. I was a little confused because I thought she had told us my offer had been accepted. Actually I think she was confused, or maybe duplicitous, and told me wrong. She said everyone got one more final bid, and I raised mine by $6,500, but apparently I got outbid by about $6000 more. That meant the house went for $112, 500. That's still a pretty good price, and I probably would have paid it if they had just been upfront. The only reason that I can figure out that she would have dealt with it this way is if she was really incompetent (the asking price was way too low), or because she wanted to impress the seller by how much over the asking price she could get.

Either way it kind of sucks, because that's two weeks of my rapidly dwindling summer wasted while I waited around for this to work. Not to mention that emotionally it is just a big disappointment. I know that I wasn't that excited about the house anyway, but emotionally I was already kind of moving myself out of here, and down there. The whole thing just kind of sucks. It has driven me to start watching The O.C. on hulu. That's kind of like the bad tv equivalent of drinking. I hope she knows what she's done to me.

Identity...

I have begun this week to study for my Praxis exam. I have to take it before my first two years of teacher licensure are up or my licence will apparently be revoked. I only know this because they told me this at the end of my teacher training. The state board of education has never sent me anything or really even acknowledged my existence. I suppose its possible that my employer never checked my credentials, and that the board never got my info when I graduated. Who knows?

Anyway, I'm studying for my Praxis, and I was reading about Erik Erikson, a Neo-Freudian who came up with an eight stage theory of human development. This is it, coppied from Wikipedia an minimally edited by me:

1. Hope - Basic Trust vs. Mistrust - Infant stage. Does the child believe its caregivers to be reliable?
2. Will - Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt - Toddler stage. Child needs to learn to explore the world. Bad if the parent is too smothering or completely neglectful.
3. Purpose - Initiative vs. Guilt - Kindergarten - Can the child plan or do things on his own, such as dress him or herself. If "guilty" about making his or her own choices, the child will not function well. Guilt is quickly compensated by a sense of accomplishment.
4. Competence - Industry vs. Inferiority - Around age 6 to puberty. Child comparing self worth to others (such as in a classroom environment). Child can recognize major disparities in personal abilities relative to other children. Erikson places some emphasis on the teacher, who should ensure that children do not feel inferior.
5. Fidelity - Identity vs. Role Confusion - Teenager. Questioning of self. Who am I, how do I fit in? Where am I going in life? Erikson believes that if the parents allow the child to explore, they will conclude their own identity. However, if the parents continually push him/her to conform to their views, the teen will face identity confusion.
6. Love (in intimate relationships, work and family) - Intimacy vs. Isolation - Young adulthood. Who do I want to be with or date, what am I going to do with my life? Will I settle down?
7. Caring - Generativity vs. Stagnation - the Mid-life crisis. Measure accomplishments/failures. Am I satisfied or not? The need to assist the younger generation. Stagnation is the feeling of not having done anything that is of value to the next generation.
8. Wisdom - Ego Integrity vs. Despair - Old age. Some handle death well. Some can be bitter, unhappy, dissatisfied with what they accomplished or failed to accomplish within their life time. They reflect on the past, and either conclude at satisfaction or despair.

Erikson believed that you had to understand and embrace both poles of each stage (ie - Intimacy and Isolation for the 6th stage) for it to come to the final conflict that would resolve the stage for you, at the end of which you would have the proscribed virtue or power.

So I was trying to figure out where I went wrong, and I was thinking about stage 4, thinking about comparing myself to others for self-evaluation. I did that for a really long time. I think that was the primary concern of my teenage years. It became an obsessive-compulsive thing. I have this great memory from the early days of my relationship with Cami when I was constantly trying to measure myself up against Peter, and she finally got tired enough of listening to it that she cracked and said rather sharply that she didn't care and didn't want to hear anymore about Peter. Its a fun irony.

I guess I'm thinking now that I didn't "go" wrong. I just had some conditions that screwed things up, the same as anyone else I guess. I had anxiety-attacks that made me rate myself very low compared to my peers in that 4th stage, and that dragged it out. I think I was going through stage 5 starting at the beginning of my 20's, really because of religious mis-conceptions. I was happy with my identity until then.

I'm banging away at stage 6, through depression and anxiety. I've got isolation down. I guess I just need to figure out intimacy, then I can have a crisis experience. Its tempting to believe in that, but I'm not sure I do. If I'm reading it correctly and Wikipedia isn't lying, according to Erikson I must have had these climactic crisis experiences to conclude each stage, but I don't know if I believe it. I spent years trying to force a crisis that would get me through this Love stage, and I think to a large extent I've stopped believing that there is any one climactic moment. I don't disagree with the idea of moving through the stages, but with the idea that the climaxes come.

I think more realistically that one day I'll look back and see that it happened somewhere out there over a period of time and I'll go, "Huh." And that will be it. It will be less like an hour long tv drama than like geology. Huge, largely indeterminable periods of time that only have just enough in common to call them ages. At least that's the way I'm feeling these days. Kind of sucks then that we're hardwired to look for narrative then, huh?

The 4th of What?

So I didn't realize it was the 4th of July, but their are a lot of fireworks going off, so I kind of figured it out.

Anyway, here is a Google SketchUp of the house I might have bought. Where this is a short sale the bank has to approve the price the sellers have accepted. I don't know how long that will take. It could well be 6 months where I wait patiently and they finally say no. Not fun.

So, this is done from memory, but I think it's pretty close. I could be a little off on the size of the rooms, but I'm correct on the square footage of the house. The main floor is 696 sq. ft, and there's a dug out shelf basment that is big enough for laundry and a little storage.

This upper floor is about a hundred or a hundred and fifty square feet bigger than my apartment, but it actually feels smaller because of the way its laid out. If you have any ideas on how to fix it let me know.

Watching the videos that Nathan and Miriam sent of their new house kind of makes me embarassed. I'm realizing more as I've been trying to buy a house how much money I don't make. As it is this would be totally impossible if I were trying to support a family.

I watched the pilot on Hulu of a new show coming next season called Glee about a teacher who takes over his school's glee club. The big conflict in the episode is his wife telling him she's pregnant, and he decides he has to grow up and get a real job, so he gives the school his two weeks notice. A bit to close for me.

The truth is that most of the teachers in my school have second jobs or spouses who bring home the bacon.

Funny Things, But Sad Too...

I don't really like it when people email me in association with everyone they know to tell me about the funniest thing they've ever seen for the moment, but here's this.

Its from a website where they guy digitally removes Garfield from the comics. It makes Garfield funny, but also changes the focus to how sad John's life is. What's worse is that as I was laughing uncontrolably I started to realize how much like John I am becoming, just with the dignity not to get a cat to assuage my loneliness. Funny.

There was this site too, to which people send awkward family photos. It had this lovely picture.

Browning...

Well, my offer was accepted by the seller. Now on to the bank. I can't really decide if I'm happy about it. I think I am. Maybe. The house just doesn't have much character. There's another house I saw in a worse location for $28,000 more, but it captures my imagination. According to Rich I can pretty much get out of the deal anytime up to signing the loan. We'll see what happens. But I've definitely got to get rid of the rose bushes. That's the first thing.