Let me know if you have any questions...

As a byproduct of following the real estate market since 2008, I know a lot of realtors.  Some I know through friends and other social outlets.  Some i met at open houses and they latch on to me. Often, I get an email from one like this one:

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Icarus:

 I saw your note in Crib Chatter that you're thinking of finding something in the near-northwest suburbs. Like one of these?

Let me know if you have any questions, comments or updates to your requirements.

Sincerely,

ChiTownGal

She sent me a link to her ConnectMLS report which had about 40 listings of various types of houses.  All realtors these days have this package, some software developer made off well packaging and selling this to brokerage firms once the industry finally conceded that typical buyer/sellers are using the internet more than agents to buy houses.

For the purposes of full disclosure, ChiTownGal is the realtor who found me my current abode.  Unlike many realtors who disppear once the commision check clears, ChiTownGal has stayed in touch over the years.

Okay, you asked.  So in letter form, I sent the following back.


Comments:

1) I get these Powered by ConnectMLS reports from every realtor I've ever met since the dawn of time. [At any given time I'm also "stalked" by any realtor I've met at an open house, party or even on the running path, but that's another discussion.] I'm also signed up on ZipRealty, Redfin and use a few other sites to do my searching. Since the MLS became available to ordinary buyers it is rare that a realtor trumps me on a home that is out there.

2) Some of my criteria just isn't codeable and no agent is going to weed through listing descriptions to find me the perfect house -- that's my job.

3) No Agent is gonna review my notes on 40 plus properties. I've made comments like "wow, love this house let's go see it" and "I'll buy it today" and yet no response.

4) take MLS #07912198 this is a fugly looking house. There is no way i would buy it. I wouldn't even live there for free or if you paid me (okay, slight exaggeration). But if I check not interested, it will still come up in the next email when they delist and relist or drop the price $1. There needs to be a Never Show Me This House Again option.

Question:

Perhaps this downtime in the Real Estate Market is a good time for all the realtors to come together and fix some of the things broken in the system.

regards,

Icarus

The Balancing Act between Darkness and Light

Today is the December Solstice, a.k.a. the official beginning of Winter.  The earth tilts 23.5 degrees and all sorts of shenanigans are set in motion at speeds never before imagined.  Since ancient times many cultures and civilizations – is there a difference? – celebrated this time of year. They welcomed the ‘return of the Sun’ because today is the the day with the shortest amount of daylight in the Northern Hemisphere.

The day is also often called the Shortest Day albeit incorrectly since all days are 23 hours 56 minutes retrograde.  I think it would be better to refer to it as the Longest Night of the Year.  It is no coincidence Christmas was placed at this time of year with its 4 part Solstice Series called Advent.  The Winter Solstice has an element of hope. Just as things seem their darkest, Light appears and what seemed hopeless or dead begins to become alive. People need this and the Yule Solstice fills this need.

I use to attend Old St Pat's more frequently and enjoyed listening to Father Cusack's homilies regarding Advent.  Although the masses of Holy Obligation spanned four Sundays, I think I only made it to the entire series once.  Still, they were very powerful sermons. 

Other than my own wedding, I haven't gone to any church in ages, or to OSP in almost as much time.  Overtly the reason has been that we have been too busy with wedding planning and household errands and spending time with the nephew-Monkey before he disappears to Michigan.  But deep down inside, one of the reasons for not setting foot in that church or any of the many that I use to mass-hop is because Catholicism is tainted for me at the moment.

It's one thing when the guy who cuts you off while cursing at you is the same guy you held hands with a few minutes earlier during the Our Father, it's quite another when someone you once called friend deems that you are no longer worthy of being treated with respect, kindness or even acknowledgement.  After all, according to our shared faith, Judgement is reserved for Jesus.  The rest of us are supposed to simply forgive.

The Winter Solstice no longer evokes feelings of How are we going to make it until Spring?  We've learned how to reconcile our fears of Darkness with the science of the 23.5 degree tilt.  And after a certain amount of time of being treated badly, it's normal to decide that you want, nay deserve to be treated better.  Unfortunately, when you go against the status quo and stand up for yourself, those who were on the side of the status quo take objection to you suddenly realizing you deserve to be treated better. 
 
Make a vow when Solstice comes:

To find the Light in everyone
Keep the faith and bang the drum
...
On the longest night of the year
So keep me safe and hold me tight,
Let the candle burn all night,
Tomorrow welcome back the light.
‘Twas the longest night of the year'

Mary-Chapin Carpenter,

Longest Night of the Year

Buffet that was once a Desk that was once a Buffet

Thanks to an overwhelming amount of generosity, we have received a lot of item from our registry. This also means we have quickly run out of room to store things in our cramped condo. Nightingale suggested we could use a buffet for our dining room. As it would happen, my mom has two buffets she is not using.

The first is an Old World antique looking buffet. As I love more traditional looking furniture, this would have been a perfect addition to our home. Unfortunately it is very heavy, doesn't go with our dining room furniture and did I mention it's very heavy. Someday when we have our Forever House I'll lay claim to it, assuming I can hire some movers to cart it from Mom's to our place.

The second item is a buffet that my mom converted to a desk many decades ago by trimming the legs and painting it jet black. It has hand carved grooves which she painted gold to create an elegant accent. This one is very light and also just the prefect height to fit under our dining room window sill, which is probably the only place in our cramped condo that it will fit.

Sidebar: Nightingale is planning to re-arrange the dining room to make the new piece work; therefore I anticipate a long weekend of moving furniture back-and-forth in my future.

Because this desk has been sitting in the unoccupied section of my mom's house for many years, the first thing we had to do was remove several layers of dust and spider webs before we could transport it to our place. I recall from my childhood that my mom used two coffee cans to hold a board which acted as a makeshift shelf for the desk. If you look carefully, you might see the circular impression where the cans sat for God know how many years until the desk went downstairs to live with grandma.

After getting the desk/buffet home and into my workshop (AKA the back deck), we looked it over in daylight. It wasn't in bad shape at all and in my pre-DYI days I might have just left it alone -- but where's the fun in that? So I decided that I would simply give it a quick sand to remove any loose paint and rough spots, and paint only the top, sides and legs.

One of the first challenges I encountered was the time of year. It was late fall and by the time I got home, it was often too dark to work on the buffet (not to mention I was beat from a day at work and my relatively long commute in lovely tollway traffic.) The weather also didn’t always co-operate because often on the weekends it would either be too cold or too rainy to work on the buffet.

Finally an unseasonably warm weekend (yay Global Warming) came along and I wasted no time. I removed the doors and the drawer, and with painter’s tape, covered up the gold painted hand carved grooves my mom had detailed a lifetime ago. I also applied some wood putty to the scuffed and scratched sections and wish I had done this a little sooner as I had to factor in time for it to dry before sanding.

After securing tarps on the deck for my neighbors’ benefit, I sanded the buffet down lightly with my craftsman nextec multi-tool and also by hand. Afterwards I used mineral spirits to remove any loose dust. Once I was satisfied that I was done sanding, I flipped the table over to start spraying painting the legs.

In Project Management, we have this concept called Scope Creep. Scope Creep is basically when you set out to do one thing and you end up doing much more than you had planned.  Suffice it to say that scope creep definitely occurred within this project. First, it took more spray paint than I thought to cover the legs, which only left me enough to finish one side of the buffet. 

As I’ve mentioned before, Chicago Aldermen, in their infinite stupidity wisdom, decided to ban the sale of spray paint within the city limits. This had reduced the amount of graffiti by no measurable levels since gangbangers and taggers have cars. It did force me to make an unexpected excursion to the nearest suburb where I could get more spray paint. My fear was that I would lose my window of daylight while navigating Saturday afternoon Chicagoland traffic (read: angry shoppers with vehicles).

You probably can guess where this is going. Even though the first can was a popular brand – Rust-Oleum Ultra Cover semi-gloss -- it was not in stock at the store. Rather than drive around to another store, I opted to pick up a can of regular Rust-Oleum gloss and a can of Rust-Oleum gloss figuring if I ran out of semi-gloss again, the gloss would be a nice touch.

I got back, sanded the now dry wood putty, and finished painting the rest of the buffet carcass. Then Nightingale took a look and decided that I should do the front as well, which meant the doors, drawer and those golden grooves. We figured we could always touch them up inside during the winter months. So it was lucky that I had bought two cans of spray paint as I needed both of them.

  

I changed out the hardware as well using some knobs that we had bought for another dresser. That made me feel good because the knobs didn’t work on the intended dresser because of sizing issues, so it felt like I recaptured the otherwise spent money. My mom even liked the change from flat black to gloss and didn't seem to mind the gold trim going away.  If we decide to repaint the grooves, we’ll likely go with silver to match the new hardware.

Update from the future:  I was doing Furniture Flipping before Furniture Flipping was a thing.  

Cut Throat Island

So Thursday came and it was to be our Big Day of Fun. We had scheduled parasailing in the morning, a half day sail and snorkel tour in the afternoon, and a couples massage in the early evening.

One of the contradictions of being on vacation is the tug of war between structure and unstructured. You're supposed to be on your honeymoon without a care in the world. At the same time, you want to make the most of it and to do that, you kinda have to give some thought to planning your days so that you can fit in the activities you want.

It's hard enough to balance that on your own, but when the people you rely on to help you are actually working against you, it takes on an added dimension in crazy. Each morning, Sugar Bay provided a sheet of daily activities that are going on at the resort. Looking at the sheet I saw that they had free introductory scuba lessons in the pool at 10 am that morning (Wednesday).

Had I looked at the sheet from Tuesday when we arrived and compared it with the sheet from Wednesday I would have seen that many of the activities repeat. This wouldn't necessarily prove the scuba was every morning, but it would have been more reliable than the method I did employ.

When trying to plan our activities, I asked the Tour Chick (Missy) if the scuba class occurred every day. She said she didn't know. It struck me as odd that she worked at that hotel every day and she didn't know about the scuba class. I mean she sells scuba tours. Wouldn't that be a great feed into her business? One of the reasons people opt to skip scuba is because you spend half the tour getting day certified.

"Hey take the free lesson at the pool and then come see me, I'll set you up with a tour where you get to see so much since you'll already have a head start."

Anyway, Nightingale didn't want to risk missing our parasailing tour. We decided to just sit by the pool, have some rum drinks as soon as the bar opened, and wait for our tour. Of course that didn't stop me from talking to the scuba dude, lets' call him Jeff. Jeff looked about 50 but was probably really in his 60s.

No one had shown up for today's class and he said that if he doesn't get any takers by 10:15 he gets to split. I asked Jeff if we would have time to take the lesson and then make it to the beach by 11 for our parasailing lesson. The beach, which was 100 yards away. "I don't know," he said. "maybe, maybe not."

Okay then. You give lessons every day and you don't know if it will take longer than an hour to show two people the basics of scuba. Really?

Finally around 10:50 we go over to the beach and even though its a small beach, it occurs to us that it would be very possible to be in the wrong spot since all we know is to look for a green boat that says parasailing tour on it.

Fortunately there is a guy from the hotel working the area and he tells us that we should look for a green boat that says parasailing on it. Excellent! With such great customer service like that I wish we could stay another week.

Half an hour goes by and we do not see the boat. We ask Captain Helpful if he could use some of this fancy 20th century technology like the walkie-talkie in his hand or the cell phone clipped to his belt to find out about the boat. Turns out, it was delayed by the Coast Guard.

We were starting to get worried that our para sailing would not finish in time to get us back to catch the boat for the half day snorkel & sail. Turns out we had nothing to worry about.  The para sailing doesn't take long, especially if there are only two people going. 

Sidenote: one of the crew members looked like Sawyer from Lost.  I kid you not.

What we learned is that a lot of people on this Island are very cut throat. Not everyone, certainly not the para sailing crew, or the snorkel crew (see future posts) or even the Snuba lady, but a lot of the people who broker these excursions seemed to have a look out for themselves attitude that contridicted the concept of "On Island Time."

Instead of helping each other out, they are trying to prevent one another from taking any of their customers away.  Because we signed up for two events with Missy, you'd think she could let poor Jeff teach us to scuba in the resort pool for an hour. Or you'd think Jeff would let us go parsail since that shouldn't take anything away from him. Instead of working together, they all seem to be islands of their own.

Hotel Amenities and wrist band blues

Even though it was a long day of flying, my lovely bride -who shall heretofore be known as Nightingale -- arranged our flight times so that we would arrive at the resort in time to actually make some use of it. We arrived late afternoon which gave us enough time to get a late lunch, take a swim in the pool and enjoy many a tropical drink.  Our only other option would be to arrive so late that we really would just have enough time to grab whatever grub we could scrounge up and then pass out for the night.

The downside to this was having to fly Spirit, an airline that charges for bags whether you check them or carry them on. In hindsight we should have checked them since the difference was $4 per bag, but Nightingale was afraid the airline would lose our bags and we'd have to go a few days without a change of underwear.  While the reflex might be to think: This is a problem on your honeymoon how? The truth is, it is a major pain to be without luggage when you are thousands of miles away from home.

When we got to the hotel, among the orientation info they gave us was something about sand mites. Nightingale panicked and wanted to buy all the bug spray in site. Of course bug spray and sun block are jacked up at the hotel store.

We opted to buy the bug spray but hold off on the sunscreen since Nightingale had some small tubes that didn't get confiscated at security -- remember the not checking our bags because we feared losing them? We thought we'd make it to the Kmart on the first or second night.

Wednesday we tried to book some activities but the ones we were interested in did not have enough other people interested so it wasn't worth the vendor's time to do them. We decided to go into town instead. We did find a shop that sold pearl bracelets at a ridiculously low price, at least according to Nightingale so I think we got some xmas shopping done. We failed to go to the Kmart or the duty free shop at this juncture.

We did go to the fancy restaurant at the resort, which was included in our all-inclusive package. It did not live up to its hype. We believe the service lacked because we were wearing those blue bracelets that said "we are part of the all-inclusive package."  Our waiter took our order and brought our food but never really checked up on us. We wanted more wine but got the impression that would require an order from the governor. 

After talking to other guests and putting two and two together, we figured out that there were several factors working against us.  First, it was off season, which means that there isn't a full staff to bring all the drunks their drinks in a timely manner and as such, you do risk becoming sober while waiting for the next round to arrive.

Second, the all inclusive package requires everyone to wear these wrist bands which apparently labeled us as non-tippers.  The thing about this is it is a self-fulfilling prophecy: you give bad service, you won't get a tip, and vice versa.  A real chicken and egg whocamefirst. 

To give you an example of how bad it was, Nightingale asked for some coffee with dessert.  Most places I've been to, be it a fancy bestro or a greasy spoon diner, the server will ask the other people at the table if they want coffee as well.  Because it takes just that much effort to bring two cups of coffee as one.  I thought about asking for one once he brought Nightingale hers but opted to behave myself this time.

Learning Curve and Long Day of Travel

Well it's official: The months, weeks and days have dwindled down and now Icarus is married! My blogging was rather infrequent to begin with and now because of some events over the last year, or so, I've become even more inconsistent.

Because Mrs. Icarus had schedule issues with work and school, our original plan was to take a minimoon after our wedding followed by a longer honeymoon next spring.  the minimoon would have been a 3-4 day/night trip someplace warm, tropical and hopefully all inclusive.  Then in the spring, before starting her new job, we would go to Europe for a much longer vacation.  Ironically, because I changed jobs this summer, we didn't have the luxury of a lot of vacation time for me, so our plan got changed.
We went to the US Virgin Islands for our honeymoon because someone forgot to renew her passport in time to go anywhere else that didn't require a valid passport and a handwritten letter from those who signed the Patriot Act.  What was going to be a few days turned into a 5 day trip in the event we don't get to go anywhere else for awhile because of babies,or the economy, or babies, or future douchbag bosses. 

One part of the plan we did stick to was not leaving for our honeymoon right after our wedding.  From talking to others, we learned that having an extra day to just sleep in, relax and decompress was a good thing.  Unfortunately, we chilled out too much and didn't get to packing until late Monday night.  This made for some bad packing decisions.
Our airline charged for bags, both carryone ($46) or checked in ($50). Out of fear that a bag would get lost, Mrs Icarus decided that we should carry our bags on.  So we didn't pack things like sunscreen and bug spray which we can get rather cheaply and in bulk here in the midwest.

Tuesday we caught a very early flight with a layover in Ft. Lauderdale. We decided to kill some time in the only bar in our terminal -- probably in the entire airport -- and have some expensive cheeseburgers and beers. As luck would have it, a dude sat next to us and started chatting us up. Turns out Jason lives and works in the Virgin Islands. He is a bar tender at a bar called the Greenhouse.

When he found out we were married, he bought me a beer. MR I was still working on hers.I'm a cautious bystander, friendly but not too friendly. I figure if someone is trying to get to know me, it cannot be for any good reason.

Jason did give us some good advice. He told us about the Safari Bus, which is much cheaper than taxis. He also clued us in on the Good Morning/Afternoon/Night greeting that some locals seem to adhere to. It is probably more prevalent outside the resort we were at. He mentioned a K-mart but was distracted by something we didn't get the exact location. He actually was sitting a couple rows ahead of us on the airplane, chatting up his nearby seat mates before he passed out from sheer exhaustion.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Screens do more than just keep out the sun

Even though I'm getting married today, I thought I'd take a quick break to post an update since I have some time to kill. One of the projects I had to work on this summer at my mom's crapshack was to build some custom screens for her basement windows.



Cedar 1x2

 So with some of these (left) and one of these (below):

Miter Saw

These screens don't really serve any purpose except to make it a little harder to look inside the basement and make the outside look uniform.  Okay, I guess that is purpose enough.

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