Author: cdwan

I am about to sell my house and move to Boston, in the middle of a *huuuuuuuge* housing slump (according to the papers).

I spoke yesterday to a real estate professional who assures me that I’m going to lose money overall (i.e: not get my down payment back after I pay off the mortgage) and that I need to hurryhurryhurry to get listed and on the market RightTheHeckNow before Things Get Even Worse. Like, get my shit out of the house this coming week if possible. Oh yeah, all that and she gets 5% of the gross from the sale.

I’m busy, redmed is busy, my garden is in full bloom, there are baby birds in the birdhouse, and we hadn’t planned to move until October. Hurry hurry hurry.

I, personally, am tired of being hurried on multi $100K decisions. I am tired of being “sold” to, and I have no desire to play any sort of market games. I am also a control freak.

Therefore, I am seriously considering going “for sale by owner,” on this one. In the course of this process, realtor or no, ‘ll end up paying thousands of dollars to lawyers, escrow companies, and whoever else. I already *know* these professionals. I *have* a lawyer. The question is whether I’m willing to put in the work that the realtor would otherwise do. This is a considerable amount of work, including document preparation, advertising, and actually being around to show the house. Plus, I’ll be directly involved in negotiations with people who will be pointing out flaws in the work I’ve done to try to justify their lowball offers.

For 5% of the cost of my house (and the ineffable value of scratching the control-freak itch) I’m willing to look into it. That 5%, by the way, is about what I’m gonna lose because the market sucks so bad.

So:

1) Have any of you out there on the internet self-listed and managed the sale of your own home before? What did you think? If not, why not? If so, would you do it again?

2) The question (as put so eloquently by _earthshine_) is not “am I on crack,” but “what KIND of crack am I on? I put the question to you: What kind of crack am I on?

Also:

* Has anyone used the “PODS” storage units? I think they might be a good moving solution.
* Anyone want to rent me an apartment / sell me a house?

Would all my Minnesota friends please report in and tell me that you’re okay?

Thanks. I’ll wait.

Behold my self absorbed whining

I’m an author again.

I’ve tried to track these articles, but it seems that the publisher changes their directory structure every six months or so. I’ve taken to getting the pages in my browser and “printing” a PDF. Those go into a directory on my laptop.

Does anyone else out there have trouble with the “I want a copy of all my publications, even the casual trade magazine ones” problem? Anyone have a decent solution?

I have defeated the best game of all time, on its hardest level.

Go me.

I’ll share this one, but I don’t expect that it will make any sense outside of my own frame of reference.

Meditation

Interesting thought this morning:

Given my spiritual trajectory this year, it’s not impossible to see me off doing some extreme meditative / spiritual practice at some point in my life. The specific example was that of a mystic: Slowly praying and chanting my way up a mountain over the course of an entire day. Whether that’s the Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist variant … or some meditative ritual of my own imagining … might there be any value there?

One popped out immediately: With practice, I have developed the ability to maintain mental focus for perhaps 5 minutes of martial arts practice. That’s sufficient for one extended form (kata), a set of self defense techniques, or similar. When I manage to work out in that mental zone, the physical seems to take care of itself … and my technique is obviously, visibly superior to that when I’m thinking about it consciously. Over the course of my career, I’ve built, lost, and rebuilt the ability to commune with computers for maybe an hour at a time … but that’s taken more than a decade. In yoga, I have trouble even maintaining a 5 minute window before my mind wanders to lunch, work tomorrow, or yesterday’s screening of Transformers. I used to have focus for a whole song, played on the cello … but that’s just totally gone now.

It would be very useful, I think, to have the mental discipline to be able to focus on a behavior … any behavior … even one as seemingly trivial as taking very slow steps up a mountain, for a full day. As justkidding_nr says “if you’re cutting up tomatoes, be there cutting up the tomatoes.” Given how much my performance is improved by achieving a focused or “flow” state of mind in any of the disciplines that I’ve practiced for years … I can only imagine that it would be quite remarkable to be able to call on that state of mind, at will, for any activity.

Of course, once one could be in such a state for a full day, why not do it every day? This might relate to the waking meditation described by sacredangle, or to the lives of the Zen masters.

Until I found a mouse, hiding in the sack of thistle seed
I had not considered
How like a mouse poop a thistle seed appears.

I’ve felt a mighty blog post coming on for a while now … yet it just keeps slipping under the wheels of more pressing commitments.

For example:

* I finished the new Harry Potter. For the record, only a few of my predictions were anywhere close. Good book, good series, it’s done now.

* I went to yoga with my co-worker.

* We’ve had a really productive week here in, ummmm, where am I again? I mean, high performance computing infrastructure, or some such!

* But mostly, I’ve gotten most of the way through the XKCD archives. Go me.

Started the Cherry wine. It’s an interesting process:

the details