Delusional AND Idiotic

I know that during the Bush years, it's become fashionable to believe what we WANT to be true, rather than what IS true; things like that Iraq really DID have weapons of mass destruction, and that America still IS the greatest country in the world, and that we still ARE #1, and our health care system IS the best in the world.

And that while the value of our neighbors' homes may be dropping, OUR home is holding its value.

Every now and then I receive an e-mail blast from MarketWatch. This was in today's:

The housing downturn has been under way for a while now, so it's hard to
believe that many homeowners could still think their homes are appreciating these days.

Yet a recent survey from Zillow.com found that 62% of homeowners believe their home's value has increased or stayed the same in the past year. They can't all be right: According to Zillow, 77% of homes in the United States actually declined in value during the same time.

"Our survey reveals a wide gap between the perception homeowners have about their own home's value and the realities of a market in which three-quarters of homes declined in value in the past year," said Dr. Stan Humphries, Zillow vice president of data and analytics, in a statement. "We attribute this gap to a combination of inattention and a fair bit of denial that causes people to believe their home is insulated from the woes of the market that affect others, but not them."

In the survey of 1,361 homeowners, three out of four expect their home value will increase or stay the same in the next six months, yet 42% expect values in their neighborhood to drop. Four out of five homeowners expect the amount of foreclosures will increase or stay the same in the next six months, compared with the last six months.

Read more real-estate news in this week's pages, including why it's a good idea to negotiate on commission with your real-estate agent as well as the latest pending home-sales numbers.

A year ago, it might have been understandable for people to be in denial about housing-market realities. These days, to assume your home is somehow immune isn't very realistic -- and potentially problematic if you're planning on selling soon.

-- Amy Hoak, real-estate writer

My house was (accurately, I think) assessed for taxes at a market value of over $450,000 in 2007, based on late 2006 prices. Right now, there about four of the slightly smaller version of my house on the market in my neighborhood. One of them has had nothing done to update it whatsoever and is sitting at $418K, because the owner seems to think that a 100' wide lot on a main street somehow mitigates a house where nothing has been updated and the concrete steps and patio in the back are crumbling. The others are in various states of updating and all are sitting, unsold, at $399K. In the twelve years we've lived in this house, we've replaced the furnace, upgraded the electric service, replaced all but the basement windows, put on a new roof with improved ventilation, new gutters, and new siding. We just had the front steps repaired. Last year we put new carpet in the basement after a flood. We put in a new toilet, vanity, and floor in the upstairs bathroom. But the back steps are starting to go, the kitchen still needs updating, and we're still living with the previous owners' red carpeting in the living room. If I were sitting here thinking that while all these houses are sitting, MINE is somehow special and I could still get over $450,000 for it, it would make sense to cart me off to the nearest psych ward. And yet, all over the country, homeowners who don't want to admit that their homes aren't worth what they were two years ago are thinking that if they really, really, really believe in fairies, they can make Tinkerbell live.

Saturday Home Improvement Blogging: Guilty Pleasures Edition

I'm glad it's not just me.

If you click over to Hoffmania, you'll see right below the title:

OMIGOD. SOMEONE JUST CLICKED IN. Quick - clean this place up.

I know the feeling. I'm a packrat. I'm not one of those pathological packrats that still has pay stubs from 1977 (not even Mr. Brilliant has those anymore) or copies of the magazine section of the Sunday New York Times from the last six months piled up in a corner because I really, really AM going to read them, or all of my toys from childhood. I'm not a compulsive collector of Hummels, cherubs, skulls, pictures of sad-eyed dogs, Beanie Babies, model airplanes or Harry Potter action figures, or cheap plastic ashtrays in the shape of a foot that say "I get a kick out of [someplace]" (though the latter is not for lack of trying -- long story). The closest I have to a collection is a small group of 1920's cloche hats that I actually used to wear until I cut my hair short and they now make me look like Stewie Griffin's head rotated 90 degrees. Every six months I go through my filing cabinet, put everything that's over a year old into a box in the basement, take what's already down there that's over three years old (seven years for income tax records) and shred it. When I go through the mail I throw about 90% of the catalogs and other crap away.

So why is my house always such a mess?

Part of it is that if I have a choice between doing something fun or straightening up, fun usually wins. Part of it is that I'm often unable to get past "But I might NEED this!" Part of it is all those clothes I can't bear to part with that haven't fit me for over 15 years but I really, really MIGHT fit into them again someday. But most of it is that I tend to live by two simple laws of the universe:

1) "If you like something, buy dozens of them because they WILL stop making it". This is why I still have about six boxes of Ambervision sunglasses in my linen closet (they really ARE good for cutting glare), and why I recently found fourteen pair of black leggings -- in unopened packages -- in my closet. I have a drawer full of them -- some are paint-stained or faded, but I have to SAVE them BECAUSE ZOMG THEY MIGHT STOP MAKING THEM!!! This is how I recently donated a half-dozen linen blazers to the Caring About the Strays thrift shop. Because Chadwicks may one day just stop carrying classic linen blazers (hey, I never said it was rational) and one year I just bought a bunch of them, in a size I no longer wear, even though I didn't wear them then either. Because you know, I may decide I want to start wearing suits again.

2) "Never fail to buy anything that is on sale." This rule actually has its origins in the seminal 1960's book How To Be a Jewish Mother, a book so important to my early development that it is a documented fact that I have, in fact, bought two shirts for Mr. Brilliant and when he wore one of them for the first time, asked, "You didn't like the other one?" This rule is what gives rise to racks of canned goods in the basement, as if it is still 1963 and I am all ready, locked and loaded in the event of Mutually Assured Destruction, and to at times as many as a half-dozen multipacks of toilet paper and paper towels. This last tendency is a family inheritance. When my mother first moved to North Carolina, her house then had a shed in the back yard for which I wanted to have a sign made up that read "The Charmin Building." Pot, meet kettle. This happens because when the A&P puts the 12-big-roll pack on sale for $5.99 and I have a dollar-off coupon, I have to buy it. And if they're going to do this every four weeks, as they are wont to do, you can end up accumulating a lot of toilet paper. BUT ZOMG THEY MIGHT NEVER PUT IT ON SALE AGAIN!! More recently I've managed to fight this one, but I have to tell you that having only 24 rolls in the house for two people still feels like "We're running low."

In case you're wondering, no, I do not have a Costco card. That would be like giving George W. Bush a case of Budweiser for safekeeping. The main reason I don't bother with Costco is that the one closest to me is so crowded at times when I can go that the lines are often all the way to the back of the store, but some of it is sheer self-preservation. Can you imagine someone like me with a Costco card? The mind reels.

Ever since we got the hi-def television set in January, I've rediscovered my addiction to home shows. It seems odd to be doing this at a time when the real estate market is crashing, but then I was always one to discover trends far too late. But one day I discovered the home show to end all home shows: Clean House on the Style channel. I stumbled upon this little goodie on a rainy Saturday afternoon and have been hooked ever since.

The premise of Clean House is nothing new. A team of "makeover specialists" visits a home that makes even people like me look tidy by comparison, talks people into getting rid of stuff to which they're emotionally attached, throws a big yard sale, matches up to $1000 of proceeds and throws in some "gifts", cleans up the house and redecorates at least part of it. It's basically Queer Eye with a different set of cartoon characters and a smaller budget.

The Carson Kressley flamboyant role is handled by one Niecy Nash, a curvelicious black diva with a hibiscus behind her ear whose persona is a walking stereotype of every woman in every Tyler Perry movie ever made. She's sort of like what Oprah would be if Oprah were funny and were a Marine drill sergeant in the bargain. Nash is a familiar face from Reno 911 and is set to headline a sitcom on Fox that sounds like an American Fawlty Towers -- all of which makes me hope she's not planning to give up the Clean House gig. The Thom Filicia decorator role is filled by "designer to the stars" Mark Brunetz, who is less bitchy than you'd expect and somehow manages to work wonders with little money. Then there's a really annoying woman named Trish Suhr who handles the yard sales with a kind of Tennessee-by-way-of-Santa Monica folksiness, and a "go to guy", Matt Iseman, who handles the power tools and is supposedly a stand-up comic, though it's hard for anyone to be all that funny on this show when Nash is around sucking up all the oxygen in the room, and when you see people whose domestic lives are pretty much a train wreck caused by a combination of American overconsumerism and a touch of mental illness.

But the show is highly addictive, and while at home one day this past week I found myself tuning the TV into what turned out to be a Clean House marathon. And in the process I cleaned out my closet, filled up two bags of clothes, one of which is stuff too battered to go anywhere but into the Amvets bins over by the supermarket, and another of stuff to be put out at my own yard sale later on this spring. And that's where Clean House goes beyond just standard feel-superior-to-these-people reality shows. By watching these people crying over getting rid of stuff that you can't imagine anyone keeping, it forces you to look at yourself, and what you're keeping around.

Packrattery seems to come from three basic places: One of them is the Fear of Not Having Enough. This is where the need to have a half-dozen 12-jumbo-roll packages of Charmin comes from, and where parties for ten people where you cook enough for forty come from. The idea of You Can Always Buy More never seems to occur to those of us who have this mindset. Because we're pessimistic by nature, we're certain that there will never again be another sale on Charmin, or that it will snow 47 feet and we won't get out of the house for six weeks, or we'll lose our job and at least if we have all this toilet paper around we can wipe our asses even if we can't do anything else.

Another mindset of packrattery is seen in shopoholism, and its three corollaries:

1) The Fear That They Will Stop Making This Item

2) This Might Come In Handy Someday, and the most dangerous one of all...

3) For Five Bucks It Can Hang In the Closet, which is just another name for Never Fail To Buy Anything That Is On Sale.

The other night Clean House ran a two-hour appalling train wreck in which the crew cleaned up a house in Piscataway, New Jersey that makes me look like Martha Stewart. We're talking being unable to walk through the house clutter. This isn't just packrattery, this is pathology. As the crew set up the yard sale, the three women -- a widowed mother and two adult live-in daughters -- who lived in this mess kept carting stuff they couldn't bear to part with back into the house.

In the course of this show, the mother appeared to have about 27 housecoats -- and seemed to need every one of them. I thought about the 14 unopened pair of black leggings in my closet and about the idea I had the other night, that since the Mainstreet Blues petite-length twill pants seem to fit me really well, I should maybe order a few pair in each color, IN CASE THEY STOP MAKING THEM. And so far (knock on wood) I haven't ordered any more.

The third part of packrattery is Filling the Hole. Now get your mind out of the gutter, because while Filling the Hole is related to shopoholism, it's different in that shopaholism is about the buying -- the PROCESS of acquiring Stuff™, whereas Filling the Hole is about the HAVING of said Stuff, usually, but not always, in the form of collecting. It's about the pleasure of looking at the beanie babies, or the vintage hats, or the teddybears. Even if you can't see them, you know they're there. You're never poor, because you Have Stuff.

All of this is, of course, based in childhood emotional deprivation, and my one beef with Clean House is that even the Formidable Niecy lecturing you about keeping up your nice newly-cleaned and decorated house isn't necessarily going to be enough to make you suddenly forget the emotional traumas of your childhood. And I notice that the show doesn't go back a year later to see how well their subjects have held up their end of the bargain.

But now, after having watched about a dozen episodes of this show this week, it's as if I have these four people in my head as I go through stuff trying to cull out things to sell at our garage sale later on this spring. And if you'll excuse me, I have a basement to go through. I think that since we have four cat carriers and only two cats, two of the carriers can go. And then there are those dozens of 3-prong outlets I bought when we moved in.....

Come follow the remodeling effort

Thursday night I put up the last set of cabinet doors that have to match. When I started this whole kitchen cabinet refacing thing a year ago (as you can see, it's not as if I've devoted every spare minute to it), I never dreamt that putting the new doors on would be the toughest part. Now I have three more doors -- one single door and a pair for a cabinet that has a center stile, so there's none of this trying to get the cabinet brackets screwed in just a smidge tighter so there's no overlap between the doors. I'll put up photos when it's done, as well as the before photos (because I opened a Photobucket account today and already have a Flickr account).

Now I'm just in the paralysis mode of trying to figure out how I'm going to manage the tasks of having the wall oven cabinet and the cooktop cabinet taken out, having a new circuit run for a range, terminating the wall oven circuit, getting a new floor installed, buying a range and having IT installed, and then getting a new countertop. Because the top cabinets look so awesome, I'm starting to think about the "g" word (granite) instead of laminate. For 28 square feet of counter space (less without the cooktop), it might be worth the additional money. As I see it, this probably involves an electrician to do the electrical work, a handyman to take out the cabinets, my fabulous flooring guy who saved our bacon when the basement got flooded last spring, whoever we buy the range from, and the countertops.

But the kitchen isn't the only thing I'm working on, I'm actively working on the new template. Sue me; I'm an Arts and Crafts movement junkie, so it's going to have that kind of William Morris/Greene & Greene/Stickley thing going. I just can't help myself. Right now I'm playing with a three-column layout with both columns to the right. Not sure if it's what we'll stick with, but you can follow the fun and games as I tweak a template to look like B@B here.

Goodbye, USA?

According to London's Guardian/Observer newspaper, Ford and GM are threatening to pull the plug on all remaining US factories unless the UAW agrees to what would essentially be a 30% pay cut. Reportedly, the automakers are looking to reduce the hourly cost per vehicle from $71.00 per hour to $50.00 per hour. From looking at the article, I'm under the vague impression that hourly pay rates may remain roughly unchanged while employee benefits may be pared considerably. Or, I could be wrong. Regardless, any cuts of this magnitude would be enormous.

I'm also unsure what would be involved as far as "....[the auto companies planning to] move their North American operations to countries in Latin America and Asia where manufacturing costs are cheaper." I can't imagine the triumvirate of Wagoner, Nardelli and Mulally moving their executive offices to China, but nothing surprises me at this point. About a year ago I predicted (I admit somewhat sarcastically) that there would be nothing left of GM in the US except Rick Wagoner, his administrative assistant and a receptionist. Not too many weeks ago I was predicting that some of our country's most iconic companies would move completely overseas. I was somewhat predicting that first company to be Microsoft, but any of the Big 3 could make the move instead. Far-fetched? I sure hope so. I'm hoping someone emails me this blog post 10 years from now and tells me what I an absolute idiot I was for even coming up with the idea.

I know you are all intelligent readers, but I'll point out the obvious anyway. Don't think in any way that the auto company ailments are limited to the city of Detroit. Already, Japanese auto plants here in the US are reviewing their pay structures to bring wages in alignment with lower local prevailing wages rather than with UAW rates. (I unfortunately could not find the February 8, 2007 Detroit Free Press articles or the Toyota memo .PDF file online that describes this situation. Please contact me at carriesnation at that certain hotmail address if you would like more information.)

Lower wages for UAW members will mean lower wages for the rest of us. If the Big 3 decide to up and leave the country, Detroit autoworkers (including finance and IT professionals in addition to the blue collar workers) will be flooding the country looking for employment, further driving down wages. Already, "The median price of homes in the US is expected to fall for the first time since federal housing agencies began keeping statistics in 1950." I have no doubt that Detroit's dubious distinction of having the "...metro-area with the highest metro foreclosure rate" contributed to that forecast.

(This article is cross-posted at http://carriesnation.blogspot.com)

Around the blogroll and elsewhere -- and a word of advice

Driftglass on Republican Treasonal Affective Disorder.

Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers explain why saying any Democrat is better than any Republican and telling other bloggers they suck just doesn't work for them anymore.

Cernig on the Neocon Bait and Switch.

ShortWoman on a bunch of stuff, including a link to AN ENTIRE BLOG DEVOTED TO NORMAL-SIZED PEOPLE!!

This afternoon I found a bunch of photos from our trip to the late and lamented Enchanted Garden in Ocho Rios about five years ago. This amazing place, which alas is no longer open and has been in Jamaican Tax Hell for years now, had an aviary where you could go in and feed the birds. And since there was a photo of conures eating out of my hand, I figured I'd check in on our Official B@B Parroteer. Today Melina just posted a short post and link back to me, which seemed awfully self-serving to link to. But yesterday she wrote about Karl Rove, the retirement of Bob Barker, and Tech Support Hell. And oh yeah -- parrots. And an Elvis Costello song embedded in there somewhere.

How many of THESE things have you told yourself while dieting?

Anyone who lives in this God-forsaken level of reality won't be surprised to find out that the planet named after the Goddess of Discord is bigger than the one that shares its name with a dumbass Walt Disney dog.

Live Nude Modfab! Well, not nude, but live -- at the Knitting Factory in New York City, Tuesday evening at 6 PM.

The day that 40-plus-year-old women can appear in TV series without Botox is the day we can celebrate. Archcrone deconstructs Alessandra Stanley's article in today's New York Times Arts and Leisure section.

Oh, good Lord. The intrepid Pam wades through the sewer of Wingnuttia -- and reports on how out there in Toontown, women's demands are why men leave and create single-parent homes.

Now, here's the advice: If you're attaching cove molding to old REALLY HARD solid pine cabinets, GET A FUCKING NAIL GUN. Don't do what I did and try to hammer in ordinary nails. Or you too will end up ordering edge veneer and hoping it's a) the same color; and b) hides the bumps left from bent nails in the molding.

AARRGGGHHH...

Weekend? What weekend?

Well, it's Sunday night and Mr. Brilliant and I have just called it a weekend on two straight days of aggravating, back-breaking, seemingly endless work as we clean up from what I fear is just the first of many 9" rainfalls as climate change continues inexorably while Karl Rove tells Sheryl Crow not to touch him.

At first it was kind of fun, with me shlepping armloads of vinyl records and cassettes and VHS tapes upstairs where Mr. B. spent most of yesterday with his back encased in ice after ridding a 13 x 24 room of sopping wet carpet on Friday, so that he could decide what to keep and what to throw away.

And by the way, if anyone wants a vinyl copy of Bruce Springsteen's Greetings from Asbury Park, Jefferson Airplane's Volunteers, or the highly collectible recorded-at-the-wrong-speed Billy Joel debut Cold Spring Harbor, e-mail me. It's yours. In fact, if there's anything on vinyl you've been looking for, let me know and I'll see if it's in the pile now in the garage waiting for household cleanup day.

But as we pulled more stuff out of the family room into the laundry room and the industrial tile floor that I thought was intact started showing ominous signs of curling up at the tile edges, I knew we were in for a long haul. So much of today was spent building metal racks to put audio equipment on for the time being and prying up floor tile. The good news is that there are no caged alligators underneath it, but there are some settlement cracks (which are to be expected) and some nasty rough spots where someone put down a lot of leveling compound which has now turned into soggy clay. But the good news is that the more tile we pull up, the less damp it smells, which makes me think that there was some nastiness under there dating from Tropical Storm Floyd in 1999.

Of course this is also a good opportunity to trash the 1970's vintage bar that we will dismantle next weekend and the audio rack that's been falling apart for years and dates from an old boyfriend's condo back in 1982, before I even knew of Mr. Brilliant's existence. So while I'm spending like a drunken sailor, might as well reward Home Decorators Collection for sending me catalogs all these years and buy a new audio cabinet and a decent liquor cabinet. The removal of the bar will also give me a nice corner for yoga and other workouts. Then of course there's the patching of the ceiling from the Infamous Squirrel Invasion Caper and the World's Ugliest Kitchen to finish dealing with, and it never ends.

Good thing we have our health, though I suspect both of us will feel more like 100 than like almost 52 by tomorrow morning.

After the Flood

Things at Casa la Brilliant are begining to settle down into organized chaos, as opposed to OHMYGODWHEREDOISTART chaos. Yesterday Mr. Brilliant took the day off and spent the morning in performing carpetio destructo in the basement, while I wept at the tragedy of it all. I mean, after all, yes, the carpet WAS a 1970's rust-colored tweed, but it was also still in near-perfect condition and that lovely foam padding -- the padding that was the main culprit for the ever-worsening mildew odor, was SO nice and cushiony under the feet. Actually, I fib -- I wasn't weeping at all, because by that point all I wanted to do was get the stuff out of there. So now we have a patio full of moldy carpet and foam padding, and today we'll stuff as much of it as possible into plastic trash bags and take it over to the DPW yard. Hardly a "green" thing to do on a Saturday morning, but we don't have a whole lot of choice.

Then of course there's the matter of packing up the remaining four tons of books, DVDs, home-recorded VHS tapes, and half-empty liquor bottles from parties long forgotten that have been sitting behind the bar for between 10 and 20 years because we are not drinkers but it seems a shame to dump a perfectly good half-bottle of gin down the drain even if it is fifteen years old. Both Mr. B. and I tend towards packrattery, which gives me somewhat less moral authority when I try to say things like, "You haven't watched those few episodes of Alexei Sayles' STUFF since we moved in ten years ago, what makes you think you're going to ever watch it again?"

Then there's the what-to-do-with-the-vinyl-records problem. Obviously original monaural copies of Meet the Beatles must be kept for archival purposes, but we also have not one, not two, but THREE copies of Waiting for the Electrician Or Someone Like Him, and what about the vinyl copies of recordings we have since purchased on CDs? Do we keep them or toss them? The horror of vinyl records is that they tend to mean something to their owners, and while I dispensed with my copy of Joni Mitchell's Blue some time ago, because it was the album that most underscored what a wretchedly unhappy adolescent I was, Mr. Brilliant remembers his own youth far more fondly than I do, so his collection is a reminder of fun. And so these mass-produced mileposts of our lives either remain snugly ensconced in our house, to be picked through and discarded after our demise as if we were some kind of downmarket Charles Foster Kane.

And then there's the books. I used to work for a major book publisher, so I had a fairly large assortment of books I never wanted to read, and a few that I have to keep only because my name appears in the acknowledgments. And I have a very dear friend who buys books, reads them, and then passes them on to me. Her house, I might point out, is immaculate. I've discarded many books already, but it was definitely time to get rid of the kind of 1960's crap that we know we'll never read again -- books like The Greening of America and the collected works of Richard Brautigan. Still, this leaves a few hundred books to be packed up, because yes, I probably WILL read The Stand again at some point.

The rest is just sort of general household effluvia -- clothes waiting to be ironed, springform pans purchased at Dollar Days at the A&P, the extra Paint Stick I keep around for the next big painting job I do, old photographs of seventeen trips worth of Jamaican sunsets and the 1986 Mets tickertape parade, tools, and other assorted Stuff That I Might Yet Use.

But the carpet is mostly gone now, so the basement smells merely damp instead of like something rotting down there. Yesterday the new vanity for the upstairs bathroom was delivered in two manageable boxes as expected, rather than the 250 pound skid that UPS Overnight had told me it would be. And to further add to the day's productivity, the awesome shop-at-home flooring guy I'd found on Angie's List showed up right on time, and I ordered some lovely taupe tweed glue-down commercial carpet for a very fair price.

Today the sun is shining, and temperatures of 75 degrees are predicted, and the dryout continues.

Mildew, mildew everywhere

After three days of unsuccessful attempts to get a cleaning service out to deal with our soaked basement carpet, it's time to resort to desperate measures. So this morning before work it's going to be just me, a utility knife, and a strong back as I move furniture and hack up what used to be an old but still in excellent condition carpet into manageable pieces so that the mildew smell doesn't extend any more to the main floor of the house than it is already and turn into toxic mold.

Note to cleaning services: If you're not going to be able to come out in a reasonable period of time, at least have the decency to say so. One of them "put me on the list" and they're "working their way up" to my area but "can't say when" they'll get here, another "put me into the system and you'll get a call within 24-48 hours", a third and fourth don't even pick up the phone but instead have voice mail take the calls -- and then don't respond, and the fifth guy said he could come out on Friday but said I should just remove the carpet and get it out of the house.

And as the mildew smell gets stronger, I've come to the conclusion that this is the only thing to do. I have a local flooring guy coming out tomorrow who would remove it, but how many more days will it be till he gets here? And how much mold might develop in the meantime? So this morning my blogging time will be taken up hacking up this poor, defenseless wall-to-wall carpeting that has done nothing to me but cushion my feet during step aerobics for ten years and is guilty of nothing other than being a 1970's rust color and having the misfortune to have a foam pad underneath it during a storm that brought 9" of rain in 24 hours. And while doing it I shall cry at the injustice and futility of it all.

But meanwhile, if you don't have Times Select, go read Bob Herbert's column about Cho Seung-Hui today over at Welcome to Pottersville. As Republicans continue to insist that gay marriage somehow threatens them and solidify their control over women's bodies with the new conservative Supreme Court, Herbert's discussion of Cho's hostility towards women and psychosexual issues and how such issues are common threads in this sort of mass murderer is food for thought.

So....were the big-screen TV, the Escalade and the new kitchen worth it?

I've taken a fair amount of ribbing from certain quarters about my little piecemeal kitchen pseudo-renovation. Way back when housing prices were at their highest, a co-worker nagged me relentlessly to just take out an equity loan and spend the $50,000 - $75,000 it would cost to REALLY remodel the kitchen, instead of taking two years to reface the perfectly intact and solid pine cabinets, deal with all the hot-and-cold-running people required to reconfigure a few things, put down a new floor, and then decide if a laminate countertop will suffice in the Age of Granite, when isn't putting granite over refaced 1950's-vintage cabinets sort of like putting a Blackglama mink on a street hooker?

But we didn't succumb to the Siren Song of the Home Equity Loan, and that leaves us far better off than many NJ homeowners:

Need some cash?

If you're like a lot of people, you've found that what's in your wallet is nothing like what's in your house.

As wages stagnated and real estate prices doubled in the first half of this decade, homeowners discovered their home was their best credit card.

Refinanced home loans, home equity lines and second mortgages have become the way to pay for Hummers, high-tech kitchens and vacation cruises. The interest rates are usually lower than the rates on credit cards, the interest paid is tax deductible, and there's been a lot more cash available in house equity.

The numbers are staggering. New Jersey homeowners borrowed $183 billion on mortgage refinancings and home equity loans from 2003 through 2005, the peak refinancing years, an Asbury Park Press analysis shows. Some homeowners may have refinanced more than once in that time. Nonetheless, that's enough to pay for all the fast food meals in America this year or to run state government for the next six years -- tax free.

But now bankers and economists worry some homeowners have overspent like families at Disney World. Default rates on mortgage loans are rising, and real estate prices are falling as higher interest rates have made loans less affordable.

[snip]

James F. Brown, a Spring Lake Heights mortgage banker, said demand for loans that effectively provide cash from house equity has been so high that he has, in recent years, tried to persuade people to borrow less money and not put themselves in so much debt.

Brown, 52, a 24-year mortgage industry veteran, said he's failed to dissuade a single borrower.

Brown said he recalls the days when people tried to actually pay off their mortgage and have a party to burn the paperwork. That's not a modern-day attitude, he said.

"People are sitting back and saying: 'Tell me how much equity is in my house, I want to consolidate my debt, and I'm not worried if I ever pay my house off,' " Brown said

Perhaps it's because there are so many people who have paid so much for their homes that the idea of paying it off is simply laughable. We were lucky enough (or smart enough) to buy at the bottom of the market in the mid-1990's, refinance three times as rates went down, and resisted the call to use home equity to buy more luxurious cars, or vacations, or home improvements.

My immediate area hasn't been hit all that hard by the falling housing market as yet, largely because most people who had hoped to get out before the crash pulled their homes off the market when they couldn't get peak price. Even so, I would guess that prices have fallen about 10% for houses like ours. No, we don't have a bit-screen TV and a home theatre, and a spanking new kitchen with cherry cabinets and granite countertops, and we still have the ugly red carpeting that the previous owners obviously spent some money on, because it is wool and is only now, 40 years in, starting to show serious wear, and most of the money we've spent on the inside has been on maintenance not improvements. But at least we probably won't have to deal with this:

You are in trouble if John Bittel calls you.

If Bittel contacts you, it means your mortgage company is ready to throw you out of your house.

Bittel, of Stafford, is a property investor. He buys houses from people who can't pay their mortgage loans, or he buys them at foreclosure. Then he renovates the houses and either rents or sells them.

Bittel admits he and other investors may look like vultures to those who don't understand the business. But they play an important role in the real estate market, he said.

"Even a vulture has a purpose," Bittel said after one sheriff's sale last month. "He cleans up the mess."

[snip]

The man whose job it is to represent lenders at the Monmouth County sheriff's sale auctions, at which foreclosed properties are sold, said he sees a lot more trouble coming.

That's especially true for owners of large, suburban homes who bought during the boom times, have since run into financial trouble, and now are dealing with a declining market, said real estate broker Dennis Kessler, the lenders' agent in Monmouth County.

"We're seeing more foreclosure action at the top of the market than at the bottom," Kessler said. "You see a lot of people who can't sell their homes, and they're really extended out."

[snip]

Many homeowners in trouble during a real estate downturn attempt to rent out their houses in order to cover the mortgage. That won't work for many this time, Kessler said.

"You can't rent a McMansion that's worth $800,000 and has $20,000 a year in property taxes," he said.

[snip]

Dennis DeBernardis, 57, of Freehold, a property investor and retired New York City police officer, sat motionless after a sheriff's sale in Monmouth County last month.

He had researched the loans on the properties and driven by the houses, but never raised his hand once to offer a bid.

"There's no equity in these," he said. "What's coming through is these interest-only, balloon mortgages, no-money-down loans."

The scene has been much the same for investors in Ocean County.

"Look at these judgment amounts — they're huge," said Bittel, the Stafford investor, as he slapped the sale list. "That house has a $254,000 judgment. It's only worth $200,000. Look at this one in Brick: $500,000 to buy it today. Forget it."

After a while, Bittel and other investors predict, the banks will have to start unloading properties for whatever price buyers will pay.

When that happens, real estate prices in general will drop, since those sales will be used as comparisons for homeowners who put their homes on the market, Bittel said.

...though we will not be immune from the fallout from a huge rash of foreclosures. And that's what's so dangerous about the current environment. No matter how careful you are, no matter how frugal you are, no matter how much you resisted the calls from lenders at the beginning to buy more house because you qualified for more, the calls from lenders through the years to tap equity, no matter how long you waited for new siding and windows while you methodically saved the cash -- when houses on your block start sit unsold at sheriff's sales and become boarded-up, bank-owned properties, well it could make the Great Depression look like the 1990's.

Requiem for a Squirrel

Well, for those of you who were following the Saga of the Wayward Squirrel, the mystery of What Happened to the Squirrel has been solved.

Last night I finally managed to sort of patch up the ceiling where Exterminator #1 -- the crappy one who came out, tossed bags of Contrac all over the place and charged me three hundred dollars -- had tried to nab the squirrel with a net and then decided that since he didn't want to leave a havahart trap and then have to pick it up, that our problem was a rat. We're going to have to pull down that entire section of ceiling and put up new tiles, but that's for later on.

So tonight I decided it was OK to let the cats back downstairs. After all, it is now three weeks since the sounds of frantic squirrel stopped and there was no smell at all, so I figured however the little fucker got in, he must have found a way out.

Twenty minutes later I decided to check on how Maggie the Idiot Cat was doing downstairs and make sure she hadn't noticed the duct tape holding up the ceiling tiles, and there she was, crouched next to one of the bar stools with what looked like a largish grey dustball in front of her.

It wasn't a grey dustball.

Feeling in danger of having a technicolor yawn of chicken and carrots come up, I managed to get upstairs, bolt the door to the basement, and freak out. I had barely managed to compose myself when Mr. Brilliant walked in the door after yet another 14-hour day door to door, looking exhausted. Now, how can you ask someone to dispose of a dead squirrel after they put in a 14-hour day and commute home from New York City, the rat capital of the world?

You can't.

By this point, I was starting to feel like Marc Maron's experience with Possum Christ, only for some reason when it's happening to me and I tell it, it's not nearly as funny. So after spending about a half-hour trying to get my shit together enough to do this, I headed downstairs to do battle with a dead squirrel.

The poor thing looked so pitiful, and I ended up walking aimlessly around the laundry room, sobbing and looking for a box to tip the thing into and a stick to nudge it with, because Maggie hadn't quite dragged it all out from under the bar. Finally I got a paint roller extender and a cardboard carton and went to work. And wouldn't you know it -- the damn thing had dug its claws or something into the carpet and it wouldn't move. So I started freaking out again and went back into the basement, muttering dire things and wondering how anyone actually works as a funeral director. I found a dustpan and resorted to the pancake-flip to get the poor creature into a box, thence to a bag and out to the trash, where of course it now has to wait till Friday because our trash pickup was this morning.

So the only question is whether the thing starved to death or if it ate any of the rodenticide, and if the latter, whether Maggie ingested any of it. I didn't see so much as teeth marks on the corpse (not that I looked very hard), so it's highly unlikely, but I'm going to call the vet in the morning, just in case.

And now I have to watch something stupid on TV to get the image out of my head or I'm going to have squirrel nightmares all night -- something like, oh, say, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, which seems always to be on.

But that's where my Squirrel Story ends, because I am sure as hell not going to check the trash tomorrow to see if it came back to life -- the Jesus of Squirrels -- to lead all the animals killed by their own stupidity into the light.

But I still think POLAR BEARS are cute

OK, I give: Squirrels are not cute. They really ARE fluffy-tailed tree rats. I may even rethink the braking-for-squirrels-playing-chicken.

Here we are, two weeks to the day since a squirrel found its way down our chimney and ran around inside our basement ceiling (and much of the basement too, from what I can tell from the footprints and the knocked-over bottle of vodka, which means it was an alcoholic squirrel to boot), and there is no sign of Dead Squirrel Stench anywhere. This is of course good news; it means I don't have to pay a guy $1800 ($2200 if I want him to take down the old ceiling instead of doing it ourselves) to replace the basement ceiling to get a corpse out of there. But it does mean that either the wormhole in physical reality into which our late cat Wendy used to occasionally disappear really does exist, there's a Squirrel Transporter somewhere inside the ceiling, or somehow the motherfucker managed to find its way OUT again. But how? Climbing the chimney? If that's the case, why couldn't he have scooted back up again BEFORE I spent hundreds of dollars on a ripoff exterminator?

You know what's even worse? Mr. Brilliant swears he saw a very thin squirrel with a mangy-looking tail missing much of its fur (which is the kind of tail I saw on this thing when it was inside the fluorescent light fixture) in the backyard....yesterday.

Good thing the chimney's capped now.

I hate squirrels.