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THE LAST DAY IN PARADISE

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“ Isn ’t it cold there?” She asked me. “Colder than it is here,” I said. I was standing outside my son’s Third Grade classroom in Woodland Hills, CA [1] , waiting for him to let out so I could put him in the car and drive twenty minutes to wait outside a motel for my daughter’s middle school bus. I was talking to one of the other mothers. I say “other mothers” because many people think I’m a real mother – but perhaps the context is a bit different. “Does it go below freezing there?” She asked. We were talking about the fact that my house was on the market and I was moving my family out of Los Angeles, likely close to my hometown of Buffalo, NY. “Well, sure. I mean, it snows. It has to go below freezing.” She looked at me for a long time, obviously cogitating over the my weather report. “Don’t you die?” “Sorry?” “If you go outside and it’s below freezing --- don’t you die?” I like to tell the story of when I was working in Montreal. The first day I was there the...
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Home Inspection, Part Two

Tripper and I went over what the inspector had found. Nothing huge. But it’s continually amazing how different people in the same profession can find different things wrong with a house that you’ve been living in for twelve years and you never knew. We knew that the plumbing was part copper/part galvanized. This was common in L.A., especially in houses that had been remodeled once or twice. You want copper plumbing, but you don’t want to rip the walls out. The problem is that if the correct connecters aren’t put on, it turns into a chemistry set and REALLY starts to corrode in a process called electrolysis – which I thought was hair removal. We also knew that the crawlspace attic was clean – because we never went up there and it hadn’t been opened since the last house inspection. The guy who’d inspected before we bought told us it was a great storage space --- which we could have used, but with an opening in the ceiling the size and shape of a box of corn flakes, I couldn’t see h...
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Home Inspection -- The Final

“Well, she’s worried about this beam…”, Tripper said, continuing on about the apparent danger in the garage. “Stuff’s been up there since before the Martin Luther King Day Earthquake, Tripper,” I said. “The only time I went up there was to pull a door down to see if I could fit it on to take the kids’ door with us.” “What?” “We’ve been measuring their height on the door since they could stand. Seemed like a good thing to take with us.” He looked through the papers on the house sale agreement. “I don’t think we have an exclusion on that.” “It wouldn’t work,” I said. “The door didn’t fit and it started to seem like too big a thing. But the point is, I pulled the door down and nothing fell.” “Well, we’ll have to get it looked at.” “The agent’s trying to screw us, isn’t she?” “Well, she’s…” “It’s okay. Just say it. We’re in a corner and she’s trying to take advantage of us.” “They’ve got someone coming out to look at the garage. Okay?” I knew he was serious, be...
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