It's Not Tundra

Some thoughts after flying across the country to move. You try to teach your kids good manners,but sadly, the rest of the world doesn't want to help... The behavior on commercial flights has changed since my father insisted on a coat and tie to fly coach. It is not well known that Lindbergh flew his legendary trans Atlantic flight togged up in white tie and tails. Memoirs of barnstorming pilots would include passages about flying biplanes in top hat with his platinum tipped walking stick doubling as an especially dashing aileron control. Sad to say, these standards no longer apply even to first class cabins, let alone steerage. Please allow me to offer a few humble suggestions to make air travel a more pleasant experience. Do not berate TSA employees for their lack of speed. Most of them are honest, caring, hardworking people dedicated to ensuring our safety. The rest are mildly retarded and may cry if confronted. Such behavior will result in a cavity search and proper standards of...

They rolled me out the door and into the ambulance. CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! [1] And we were off to the hospital. Which luckily was right around the corner. Except… There had been a fire in downtown L.A. that day and the emergency room around the corner was full. Here’s the deal: There have been a couple of scandals in L.A. emergency rooms. Little things like, oh, people DYING while waiting to be taken to see a doctor. Partly this is because emergency rooms have been closing, leaving the remaining emergency rooms to take care of the overflow. A lot of this is uninsured people looking for basic care or letting things go until they HAVE to go to an emergency room. [2] And people keep coming to Los Angeles, compounding the problem. Luckily, when they wheel you in on a stretcher bleeding from places you’re not supposed to bleed, you tend to get attention. That and we were carrying my wife’s insurance. But the face remains that there was an emergency room less than a mile away...

About a week later we had another showing. Ingo was really excited about this. It was a guy we’ll call “Mr. Fifteen Percent” who was looking for a house for his ex-wife and child. Ingo was unsure about the details, but this seemed the perfect house. They were divorcing and they wanted to stay near the school down the block. Only two people were PERFECT [1] for this tiny house. And a little kid ---- how much time would they spend in the one bathroom! Hell, there would hardly be any pile up at all [2] ! He seemed REALLY interested, but… “He said it was priced fifteen percent too high for the current market.” Fifteen percent? Where do you come up with a number like that in conversation? Ten percent, twenty, sure. But fifteen? Does your coach tell you to give a hundred and ten percent or a hundred and fifteen [3] ? “Should we talk about it?” “Not yet. It’s too early,” Ingo said. “We’ll let him think on it. But I really think he was ready to write and offer for five-fifty.” ...

So we asked Ingo to give us at least forty-five minutes notice before someone came over. That way we could keep the house in a decent state of readiness and could do a quick vacuum/Fabreeze spray and not get surprised in my underwear. It never ceases to amaze me how many people do things last minute. When I was doing a little acting, I almost never got a call to go to a casting session a day or two in advance. It was always a ten AM call to be across town at eleven. Occasionally they’d call the day before [1] . I mean didn’t they KNOW they were going to have to cast something at least a week in advance? Did they get to the office that morning and have three phone calls: “We need a cop, a mechanic and a Pope and we need it cast before noon!” But everyone seems to do things at the last minute and operate at a def con 9 level of panic on a regular basis. It may keep the growth hormone running, keep wait down and make sure your adrenal glands never get too bored, but it sure is a p...

Gravy was a part of the family. A fat lazy part of the family who would cuddle up next to you, would assassinate me if it meant more time with my wife and was a total whore for a piece of banana, but a part of the family [1] . After re-reading that description, he actually sounds like my brother. And you can’t leave a part of the family behind. No matter what Connor thought. “If we give Gravy away,” he said, “We could get another bunny. Or a dog. If we got a bunny and it was young, it might let us hold it.” “YEAH!” Lauren said. I confess, that I started this in a playful manner saying, “You know, if we gave Gravy away…” never dreaming that they’d bite. See, the BIG problem with Gravy was the holding, lap-sitting issue. He’d come up next to you. He’d snuggle himself up close. He’d nudge you. But he did not like to be picked up and he didn’t like to sit on anyone’s lap. To be sure, part of this is God’s fault, because he made rabbits prey and therefore chances are when ...

If we’d had a stand-up guy like Tripper from the start, not only would we have been out of there much sooner, the family would have been under a lot less stress for a prolonged period of time, the kids would have started school at the beginning of the year, we would have had a decent amount of time to look for a home, we would have been able to drive across the country… AND we probably would have done all that with a hundred thousand dollars more in our pocket. Seriously. The first week the house was up someone offered a five hundred and Ingo laughed it off. The house was RIDICULOUSLY over priced for seven months. I have a part of that. Patricia has a part of that. The SoCal real estate market has a huge part of that. But no one owns a bigger piece of that than that piece of feces Ingo . [1] To begin: We’re not freakin ’ Realtors . It’s not out job, our career, our expertise to know how to price and get houses sold. Now, more than a year later and able to watch ...

“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...

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...

I took off for the afternoon and Tripper took care of the inspector guy. He called me about two hours in and said there wasn’t anything big to worry about, but that the guy was going to be there about an hour longer than expected. When I got home, it was dark. Patricia and Lauren were off at a Girl Scout function [1] and I had the boy with me. I took a look through the house and you could tell things had been moved. Tripper called me as I walked through the house to make sure everything looked okay. He told me that he had to wait for the final report, but that nothing looked too bad and he’s be over later when they delivered the report to him. It was after five and I had to get dinner started. Connor was working on his homework. I turned on the lights in the backyard and noticed that the faucet was dripping. There were two faucets in the backyard – which seemed excessive for such a small house. One was over in a corner by the kitchen and was not only a faucet, but had, for a w...

Ingo Inept, Realtor Ordinaire, told us he was making the jump to a new firm. “This could work out well,” he said. “Remember how many people we had coming through at the start? New listings always do better. Well, because I was taking your listing to a new company, I could get a new MLS [1] and it would be a fresh listing at a new price.” And what price was he thinking? He leaned back and chewed on the earpiece of his glasses [2] . Five hundred and eighty nine thousand dollars. I really had to wonder how you go to a price like that on something as big as a house. My instincts would be to go for round figures, or at least fives. Ingo liked nines ‘cause it gave the impression of a bargain [3] . I didn’t care. If that enough of a drop, I wondered. He continued chewing his glasses. He thought so. Yeah. Like he COULD think. “And if we don’t get anything at that, we’ll drop it again. It’s a volatile market.” Well, no it wasn’t. “Volatile” means explosive and unpredictab...