FITFO

Inspirational song: Teddy Bears' Picnic (Bing Crosby)

Most CU fans are getting really sick of moral victories, that are actually football losses. Our team played their hearts out, owned the offense, but we had no answer for a few big plays when it really mattered. There were moments today, listening to the radio, when I thought these kids had finally figured this whole football thing out. They came back from an ugly first half to lead midway through the fourth quarter, and still they couldn't seal the deal. I'm tired of being close but not close enough. I can't imagine how much more tired of it they are than I am.

I missed Halloween last year. I wasn't feeling like being social for parties, and I didn't even turn on my porch light to hand out candy. This year I was all too happy to see kids in costume come by, but there weren't very many who came down our street. It was a little disappointing. I spent all day creating my costume, and by the time I was done with it, the trick or treaters were done coming by the house. I just wanted one little kid's mom or dad to recognize who I was going for. It was my own fault for waiting until today to start it, I suppose. I was just too overwhelmed by everything else going on the last week to get to it.

It's been a while since I really tried to work out the pattern shapes of a costume from a video. I used to be great at this. Today it took me hours to get the basics, and I still stumbled on a couple key pieces. I never really figured out the collar. I watched the East-West Bowl Rap video about six times, freeze-framing it and sketching what I wanted. I used leftover fabric to form the patterns, pinned to my regular shirt, to try to make sure I was on the right track. It still took me until almost dark to have a wearable product. Maybe by next Halloween I will have the thing hemmed and taken in on the sides so it doesn't hang on me like a circus tent. Is there another chance to dress like a 350 pound running back any time before then? No? Well, fudge.

No More Slum Lord

Inspirational song: Shout (Otis Day & the Knights)

At this time last year, one of my BFFs and her family were about to embark on a great adventure. They were rearranging all of their finances, and taking a gamble with their life savings. They bought an apartment complex in a crappy neighborhood that was poised for major revitalization. (As Denver expands the light rail system to the outer communities, rough areas of town are getting new life, and becoming gentrified.) This apartment complex was... well, let's be honest with ourselves and call it like it was at the time. It was a slum. The place was falling down, the amenities were non-existent (even the laundry room was barely hanging in), and the residents knew they were the forgotten ones. My friends hired a property management company to oversee the daily operations, and they were being told that many of the apartments were getting renovated so that better tenants would move in and pay more money. By late spring, they discovered that the property management was not on the up and up. They were guilty of many levels of gross buffoonery, and they were promptly fired. My BFF quickly found she had no other option but to quit her job and work as a full-time manager, investing every bit of reserves she could find plus every favor she could pull to do the things that the property management company was supposed to have been doing all along. She had to hire contractors to flip the apartments that were offline, get emergency crews in one after another when disasters happened, and she fielded phone calls and complaints and sob stories and every other nightmare that these people could throw at her. She evicted tenants. She met with the city dozens of times. She learned that the city had been preparing the groundwork to eminent domain one of her buildings (before she bought it), planning to knock it down and turn it into a through street. She fought like a mama cougar and got the city on her side, and she showed that her spine is pure titanium. She won.

This is the apartment complex where we stayed for six weeks when we first moved out here. Where else could we go with all the animals, on short notice, without signing a lease? This is the place where the parking lot flooded the day Mr S-P arrived with the moving van. This is the place where one of our neighbors allegedly (I have no doubt it was her, but no charges could be filed) flushed an entire box of feminine hygiene products a few weeks later in an almost successful attempt to destroy the place, out of spite, when she didn't get a good enough response after fighting with another neighbor. On the third night we were there, on the third night in a row that the police were called to the complex, one police officer asked my BFF why on earth she bought the worst apartment complex in Westminster. Her answer was simple: because she knew she could make it better.

Today was a big day for all of us. We moved out at the end of July, but our friend has been working her ass off every day since then to turn the apartments around. (I mean that literally -- she lost weight with stress, and now that she is radiant in victory, the weight loss looks fantastic on her.) Most of the vacant units are remodeled and her vacancy rate is low now. Most of the problem tenants have moved out. The ones who remain finally recognize the incredible improvements in quality of life and safety. There are security cameras all over the property, the street lights function properly now, and there is a beautiful new iron fence surrounding the complex, preventing non-residents from using the place as a walk-through to bars and quickie-marts. This week, one of her final giant projects has been completed. The parking lot that was an uneven ocean of rubble has been regraded, covered in brand new asphalt, and painted clearly with assigned parking slots. She brought several of us who have been on this journey with her out this morning for the Big Reveal. One of those in attendance was her real estate agent who helped her buy the property. He was absolutely stunned at the progress. He kept saying, "Do you remember what this looked like last year?" He was downright giddy to see it all. I think we were all feeling that way, in various levels. They still aren't luxury apartments, but they are safe and clean, and already renting for more than they did a year ago. Once the light rail stop is open two blocks away, the clientele will come from even higher up the socio-economic ladder. Now, a new property management company is taking over, one who we expect to perform to a higher ethical standard. After six months of hell, I will finally get my happy, fun friend back. I know she's excited to get herself back from that miserable state. Let's all send her congratulations at a job well done. Huzzah!

A Few Minutes of Fame

Inspirational song: Juke Box Music (The Kinks)

Why do songs stick with us like they do? How is it that a three minute experience defines generations, inspires millions of teenagers, and turns up everywhere as a shared cultural movement? You can't say that it's necessarily brilliant writing. Tubthumping did not have brilliant lyrics, but name me one person who couldn't sing along with "I get knocked down, but I get up again" as if they wrote the damned thing? The most inane musical phrases become the most beloved guitar riffs. What is it about catchy tunes that make us fall in love with them?

I want to make one of my three-stanza essays be as popular as a song-of-the-summer one day. Would I have to repeat myself throughout? Form a rhythmic cadence of words? Construct a sentence with a good beat you could dance to? I know I'm capable of coining phrases that stick. My mother still sometimes refers to the feral cats outside her fences as "hobo kittens," after I named them that. Maybe someday I'll progress from assigning nicknames to providing the world with whole short sentences that get repeated as if they have lasting worth. Once upon a time I used to be Mr S-P's best comedy ghost writer, although he sometimes re-wrote my best jokes, not always to their benefit.

Perhaps I should set my goals a little lower. First, I could get a tweet that gains traction, with more than one or two re-tweets. Then maybe I can aim for a blog post that gets read by more than a hundred people--real people, not stat-bots. One of my pieces of flash fiction is still on the front page of Ant vs Whale. I wonder how many people read that, and of those, how many remembered the story once it ended. I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing, and see where it leads me. I know I have the skills. There are days when I look at what I've written, and in the words of bad guy Taggert, I say to myself, "God darn it, Mr Lamarr, you use your tongue purtier than a twenty dollar whore." But I'm a long way from having people quote me like they quote Blazing Saddles. But a girl can dream.

Going Around

Inspirational song: It's My Turn (Diana Ross)

So far, nearly everyone in my class has missed one night due to illness or day job conflicts. Everyone except me and the lady who sits behind me, that is. Now that it's my turn to feel crappy, naturally I feel awful the night before a can't-miss midterm exam. I wish I could take a day or two off, but this is the worst week for it. I have far too many commitments. Plus, Halloween. Maybe I will go to bed early and hope in the morning my stomach is settled.

Until then, enjoy the sight of snow bathing the tops of the mountains. From a distance.

Elementary Education

Inspirational song: ABC (Jackson 5)

Want to feel humbled? Sit down and do long division for an hour when you're tired. My phone and iPad were on chargers upstairs, and I was just too tired to try to move and sit by one to do my homework. It took some doing, but my longhand math was right all throughout. Unfortunately, in one of the problems I put in the incorrect variables, so I did miss that one. Meh. My homework is self-graded. The only way it will negatively affect me is if I make an ass of myself and admit it on Thursday in class. I don't see that happening. We have our second mid-term. Plenty of other opportunities for self-humiliation (when we go over the questions that everyone missed).

I woke far too early to be studying this late at night. I dropped my car off at the dealer early this morning, so they could fix the side mirror that dangled and wiggled as I drove all along the highway to the dealership. To date this car has been relatively inexpensive. I haven't had to pay for much beyond patching tires after I drove over nails. This is our first real spendy day with the blue bullet. I had to leave my little car with strangers overnight, and I don't like being parted from it. But I can tell you that trying to drive with the side mirror flopped over on one side like a cat begging for attention makes driving in heavy traffic much more difficult than one would expect from the mis-alignment of one small reflective surface. Boy, did I need it over the last few days.

I'm going to keep all my pictures from today under wraps until later in the week. They're part of a multi-stage project, an epilogue from early this summer. I'm telling the story of someone else's triumph. You'll like it.

Investment in the Future

Inspirational song: Anticipation (Carly Simon)

I'm really not sure what day it is, what year it is. When I drove around this evening, I traveled through time more than I did through space. Memories of my youth were coming at me so strongly, clearly. I could have sworn that this evening it was the night of Christmas, and I was a passenger with my older cousins, driving around in Oklahoma City, bored, after the holiday gatherings were winding down. I could hear my oldest cousin criticizing my immature taste in music, I could see incandescent, colored lights twinkling through frosted car windows, and I felt young, with the entire promise of my life still ahead. All this from the way the light was striking old red brick houses, from old songs playing on the 70s channel, from the heat coming out of the car vents. Then, to confuse my sense of time and space even further, I pushed myself into the future, to starting out as a fledgling real estate agent, getting to take people through all of these houses I was zooming past. I pictured myself going into those pretty brick houses that intrigue me, shaking snow off my boots before I enter a house, getting to satisfy my curiosity about the view from the other side of the windows.

I can be rather flighty and fickle, and my opinions about what sort of house I'd like to have change with the seasons. I will get to house hunt for years, without ever having to pack up a single cardboard box. I'll get to pretend I'm buying one of these places for me, and in my mind, I'll get to arrange furniture, repaint walls, rip out carpeting. Yet I will never have to expend the effort to do any of it. I just get to have fifteen minute fantasies while my clients are doing the same thing with much more on the line. What fun this is going to be. Don't spoil my good mood by reminding me how much work it will be to make a living in this business, driving and touring and writing contracts and making more phone calls than my socially awkward mouth can stand. I'm choosing to anticipate the good things and gloss over the hard parts right now.

I never imagined that a yard as small as the one I have now would be as much work as it is. While the Mr was putting up another eight feet of fencing this afternoon, I started hacking away at one of the giant columns of intertwined clematis and Virginia creeper. I hate cutting down flowers I like while they are still actively blooming, but I know for certain that growing weather is coming to an end, possibly as soon as tomorrow. It is going to take us a long time to get the three clematis towers cut down to the base and dug up. We're moving them to the back fence, so that some day we can renovate the back patio. Some of our projects are years in the future, like the patio, but the (literal) ground work has to be laid now. Soon Murray will have a clearer shot at his back door, without tangling vines grabbing his wheels, and that's the best reason to start now with these plants. No one has maintained them in years, and as I snipped and pulled, I uncovered a mess that just ended up looking like a giant bird nest, one big enough for me to sit in. I promised myself that from now on, I'll cut them to the ground every year. It will pay big dividends to invest a little time in them then, but I have a large downpayment to make on them right now.

Study Break

Inspirational song: Tom Sawyer (Rush)

Ah. I was so excited to be done with my homework a day early. I did all three chapters over the course of the day, and all the study questions are neatly worked in my notebook, in purple ink. I thought I was ready to turn out the light and head to bed. Oh, right. Blog.

Some of the reading involved in this class makes me feel like my face is too heavy for my skull. It keeps trying to slide off, pulling my eyelids down over my eyes as it goes. I used to think that I was very interested in property management, because I'd rented out houses that I hadn't been able to sell, and I used to work in that capacity for my grandfather's trust, collecting rents, evicting ne'er-do-wells, and making insurance claims on his properties, on behalf of my mother and uncle after they inherited the lot. Reading about property management, with the memories of my BFF's property management nightmares of this year fresh in my mind, cemented the conviction that I really am not as into it as I once thought I was.

It was beautiful here today, and between chapters I decided that going outside to fetch and carry for the man while he attached pickets to the skeleton of the fence between our house and our young neighbor's. The previous fence came down more than a week ago, and all of our dogs have been thrilled to play in the bonus yard next door. Every day I've had to call them back from over there, when they chased squirrels and extended their opportunities to bark at alley traffic. I am fairly certain they snacked on the spent grain from our neighbor's beer brewing. And once the fence seals off the access, one or both of us will need to go clean up after the dogs again.

This stretch of fence is taking longer to hang, because the Mr bought three inch wide pickets instead of five, to more closely match the rest of the neighbor's existing fence. Had I been at that planning meeting, I think I would have lobbied for the wider pickets like we have on the back. They go up much faster (like 40% faster, if you catch my drift). Somehow I was convinced to sit and pull the staples and price tags out of the bottom of each board, the least fun job in all of fence building. Or am I just fooling myself? Is there any fun job in fence building? Let me go get a brush and some paint, and tell you how much fun this all is.

Winter Prep

Inspirational song: Up on Cripple Creek (The Band)

How many of you playing along at home correctly guessed answer B) It will be too snowy for Mr S-P to climb any fourteen thousand foot mountain in Colorado on October 24? Award yourself five points.

I tried to offer that information to him without saying that he shouldn't try, or that I would be mad if he did. I just waited and wondered whether it would be too snotty if I said I told you so. He did take a nice snowy drive in the mountains, and he sent me a lot of beautiful pictures of the southern mountains. I kept my told-you-sos to myself. If he hadn't been so obviously tent-bound on this trip, I might have been jealous for some of the places he went. But then, I know how little I like sleeping on the ground, and I know how quickly I slip into panic attacks when I'm a passenger in his vehicle on sporty mountain roads. It's best that I stayed home.

I swapped out my container pots on the porch. I dug up the Gerbera daisy and wave petunias, and stuck them in a smaller plastic pot that I'll winter in the garage, by the small, south-facing windows, along with a lot of my more tender plants. I don't know whether I'll be able to keep everything, but it will be worth trying. I bought several things when they were on clearance weeks ago, as the garden centers were winding down for the year. I got a teeny tiny spruce tree, a spreading juniper, a small arborvitae, an ornamental kale, and several small mums. These seemed appropriate for November and December plantings (I'm assuming the mums will die off), and I'm hoping they live through Christmas. Really, I'm hoping they live a lot longer, but as long as they make it for holiday decorating, I will be good. I am, however, regretting the idea that juniper would make for pretty porch decoration. I'm wildly allergic to it, and my hands still hurt whenever I wash them.

It was chilly last night but it did not actually freeze. I got a preview for how poorly that gigantic front window will fare in winter. It was covered in fog this morning, dripping condensation all across the inside. I was told that replacing that window was priority number one for this fall, but oddly, it hasn't happened yet. Neither did the man who gave us a quote on the new garage door ever send an email so we could place an order. I'd just like to do what we need to do to seal up and insulate this house before real cold weather hits. Now I'm not sure that will happen. Ah well. There's always plastic and tape.

The Change

Inspirational song: Alone Again Naturally (Gilbert O'Sullivan)

While I watch the extreme, record-setting weather happening several hundred miles south of me, I am enjoying all the changes happening this week. We had two solid days of steady, soaking rain, and suddenly it all felt like the autumn I wanted and needed. The leaves are coming down, coating the roads and lawns, the sun is aiming from a much lower angle in the sky, and it looks and feels like I've been craving. I dragged a bunch of flowerpots in to the living room in anticipation of the first frost of the season. I didn't get everything inside, but then, it's only supposed to get to 34 tonight out here. I can enjoy these dropping temperatures now, but you can be damned sure it won't amuse me come April when I'm ready to put all my plants back outside and can't do it.

A month ago, Mr S-P was trying to figure out when he could fit in a climb up one of the fourteeners (mountains over fourteen thousand feet for the flatlanders) before it was too cold and snowy to go up. Our schedule was unyielding for weeks, while he worked to get his land ready for the winter, and we prepared for company here. He decided he would go this weekend, weather be damned, and we both watched as the high country put on its white blanket for the first time this week. The closest fourteener is Longs Peak, but he said that one was not a good candidate for this sort of weather. Instead, he went to one of the collegiate peaks. He stopped in to take down his tent on the claim, and see how well his teepee held up in the first snow. The teepee was a good idea to protect his stuff, but he really should have taken the tent down the last time he was there. I'm looking forward to a little snow, but I can say in all certainty that I'm glad I'm not tromping around in the back country right about now. I am not ready to drive in snow yet. I'm going to have to face that inevitability sooner than later, and possibly very often during an el Nino year.

Until then, don't mind me, I'm going to be curled up in a blanket this weekend, enjoying the first real test of our heating system. Anyone want to bring me a mug of hot chocolate?

Middleman

Inspirational song: Don't You Want Me (Human League)

Another trip north, another highly educational evening. We managed to derail the conversation in class at almost every single turn, but it ended up being the night we learned the most thus far. We were supposed to cover primarily mortgages and the rules of financing, and we covered every tangent from what happens when the lender is a no-show at closing to dressing appropriately for your client, whether that puts you in bespoke suits or jeans and flip-flops. A few times over the last week or two, the homework has overwhelmed me, and I've wondered what I've gotten myself into. Oddly, just as the pace of the class and the volume of information has begun to accelerate, the more I feel like I'm getting a handle on all of this knowledge. I'm still going to have to study my ass off for the exam, to remember things like "In Colorado, how many days from when the public trustee posts the Notice of Election and Demand does a homeowner in default have to get current on payments and late fees before his equitable right of redemption expires and the property is sold?" (Answer: 110-125 days on residential, non-agricultural properties, and 215-230 days on agricultural properties, I think.. I need to consult my notes on that second time span.) But I do think I'm absorbing this material well, and I believe that I'm going to survive in this business.

Our instructor is putting together a proposal for a continuing education class for brokers on the 2016 changes to the Colorado contracts, and he gave us a heads up about some of the big details to come. For example, by federal regulations, everyone used to get a HUD-1 statement that laid out exactly what every closing cost would be, down to the penny, the day before closing. There is a current transition to a new required statement of the same thing, now due six days before closing. This and the other changes are most likely going to serve to extend the average time to closing from around 30 days to as much as 45. It may make it more difficult for people to only move once, out of the homes they are selling and into the new ones they are buying. There may be an unavoidable delay between the actions. Where does that put people? Will we see dates of possession move out well past the date of closing? In an attempt to protect the consumers, we may see a lot of things that actually make the process of buying and selling less smooth than it already is.

Our instructor warned us that some of the new laws will make it that much harder for a seller and buyer to handle this transaction on their own, leaving out the licensed broker middlemen. I'm conflicted by that. This means that I will have more job security, but it might not translate into customers and clients who appreciate that my involvement is necessary. We shall see how that plays out, once I'm fully licensed and learning the ropes. I can't wait to get there and find out.