Reading: The Professor and the Madman

Moving: ???

26 March 2000: Houses and Oscars

RDC and I looked at houses. We drooled. We dreamed. We did not despair. Next Sunday we're doing it again, with a broker and a letter of intent.

And then we came home and I went to HAO's to watch the Oscars. Dana was dubious about our resemblance in her recent photo and RDC didn't see it either. So I probably am insane. But then the other votes started coming in. PLT asked if she was my stunt double, then later amended himself that it wasn't so much any physical resemblance (especially around the mouth) but that the expression was dead-on Lisa circa 1986. I'd asked HAO before I wrote the entry if she saw the resemblance but she'd never responded, so I asked again last night, and she said absolutely. Then I had to show HPS, and she, who neither knew me in the late '80s nor ever saw pictures of me from that era, said omigod yes. So there.

Houses. Houses in neighborhoods. Houses in up-and-coming neighborhoods. Good grief. We looked at one house in Potter Highlands, in Northwest Denver with a large Mexican-American contingent. It was sweet, with a handkerchief front yard bounded by a white picket fence and a reasonable back lot. The owner, navigating us around the large-screen televisions in every room, showed us how he'd removed walls to open up space and let light in, and those were good improvements. In the backyard, another of his improvements was to lay concrete slabs over all the annoying grass and to murder two big trees. I would have to gaze out on skeletal stumps. Nope.

So we retreated to yuppie-ville, up-and-coming Gen-X-er-ville, Washington Park.

RDC and I agree on few things in life. He would tell you that I am the bigger cover-hog, but he's wrong. I would say he usually cuts a pie in his favor, and I might be wrong. Among the things we agree on are what we'd like in a house:

• A good neighborhood. I want to know my neighbors, human and canine, by name, and to stop and chat over a weekend mulching project. I want kids drawing hopscotch on my front sidewalk. (I am fairly sure this last is not a priority for him.)
• Interesting architecture. Genuine Victorian, genuine Craftsman, or fake Tudor. Or, if built more recently, good fake Victorian and good fake Craftsman.
• I want a couple of good trees and enough space to plant tomatoes and basil and violet iris.
• He wants a contemporary kitchen.
• Not a lot of grass and no restrictions about xeriscaping (there are covenant communities in Denver--which, OMFB, is on the high arid plains--that forbid xeriscaping).
• Two bedrooms, maybe three.
• It would be hard to adjust to only one bathroom again, but RDC thinks we could manage on 1.5.
• We would both love a gas fireplace.
• And since I'm asking, a hot tub, please, Easter Bunny.
• Good furnace, new roof, low crime, ya ya ya.
• Some kind of cat-shooting allowance such that if any cats, feral or pet, hunt my birds or my squirrels, I can stun them with whatever alcoholics are given such that drink makes them ill. Except that pet cats don't hunt for hunger but for the hunt, so the taste of prey wouldn't matter. In which case I could just brain them into dizziness and then bell them, neck and foot, and put big Elizabethan collars on them and shave them and dye what fur they had left and otherwise humiliate them and then the same for their owners.
• A dog.
• For Blake to like the dog.
• An alternate universe in which Blake would like a dog.

We also looked at the neighborhood where Überboss lives. It's close to Broadway, which might be freaky, but it would mean we could walk to lots of used bookstores and the Mayan cinema. It would also mean Überboss would have much more convenient cat-sitting, as I pointed out to him Monday. (Right now he has someone come over from way over near University.) He is intrigued with this possibility. Talking about house-buying with CoolBoss Monday--she lives in Boulder where you can't get a thing under $300K--I said loudly, right outside Überboss's office, that he had offered us a down-payment in return for guaranteed nearby cat-sitting. I can dream.