Reading: Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword

Moving: raining, nope

House: My first trip to my house since it became my house is tonight. The only thing the rain prevents is the videotaping of the house: not enough light, and I can't tape the outside.

17 May 2000: House

Monday the 15th RDC had the final walk-through before the closing Tuesday the 16th. The seller was there Monday and she was much more pleasant than either of us had ever experienced before.

When we first saw the house, I only registered that it was a manila brick house in the snow before we were on the porch, where the first real hint about the owner came from a note on the door asking visitors to remove their shoes "because the hardwood floors and carpeting don't like mud and snow." This didn't concern me, because she's trying to sell the place, so it should look as good as possible despite hordes of strangers trampling it.

Directly inside was the first clue. In each room, others followed.

• On the left wall of the living room, which she used as a dining room, was a bookcase filled with two complete sets of Stephen King, one in paperback and one in hardcover, both in chronological order, and other shelves filled with Dean Koontz, whose titles I am not familiar enough with to tell what state of order or completeness they might be.
• On the right wall was a wood-burning fireplace in whose ashes we saw bits of paper and no wood at all.
• In the dining room that she used as a television room, a "This house protected by Smith and Wesson" bumpersticker graced the chrome and plexiglass entertainment center. There were four televisions altogether for two people in three bedrooms.
• The smaller of the two bedrooms was painted and carpeted an unbelievably hideous shade of mint green.
• Because the larger of the two bedrooms used to be two separate rooms, it has two closets, neither of which could accommodate the length of dresses.
• In the kitchen, a Peanuts strip was taped to a plastic basket. Charlie Brown contemplated giving the little red-headed girl a bottle cap to add to her bottle cap collection, but someone--Linus? but he's not that mean--said no one has a bottle cap collection, so Charlie Brown threw it out. The plastic basket was full of bottle caps.
• A cupboard was full of canned goods, precisely aligned and in alphabetical order by flavor of soup or species of fruit. Another cupboard was bare except for a few bags of lentils, beans, and rice.
• Burned papers and plentiful canned and dried food: she had been preparing for Y2K.
• By this time she had come upstairs and was telling us about the DEtroit REDwings, THE best HOCKEY team in THE world.

Conversation didn't improve. She was a freak.

At the end of that house-hunting day, our first, my favorites were the dykes' house and the freak's house. I liked the lesbians' house because I liked them, at least the one we met. She was watching "An Ideal Husband" in their periwinkle-blue basement tv room. They had framed their children's artwork on the walls. They were only moving because they were adopting another little girl and needed another bedroom.

You buy the house, not the tenants. I kept that in mind when the next day we went to see the freak's house again, without her there.

We went over it much more carefully this time. There had been another brick bungalow in Platte Park, a more interesting neighborhood, that cost 20% less, but, as our realtor pointed out, we could put the different into the Platte house and it wouldn't turn out as well as this house in City Park South, an up-and-coming neighborhood.

It is livable right now. Its main floor's walls need to be painted, and RDC would like to redo the kitchen but can live with it, and has two bathrooms.

Sunday we met it, Monday we scrutinized it, Tuesday we made an offer and were accepted. That was the beginning of April. I haven't been back since. RDC accompanied the inspector, did the walk-through, and perhaps went another time.

Yesterday we closed and today the house is ours and today, May 17th, I shall return to the house for the first time since April 3.