Nobody Knows Anything

Remember that nearby house whose price I was rather astounded by?

Got home from Thanksgiving vacation yesterday to discover a SALE PENDING sign on it.

Still crazy ’round these here parts.

(The $4.75m one hasn’t sold. Yet.)

So, we were in the security line at O’Hare and I was counting off the bags we’re bringing through and I suddenly thought, Oh crap.

Sophia was clutching a plastic bag, inside of which were the two presents she got at the Adler-Ostendorf family gift exchange: a plastic box of makeup and a tea set complete with checkered table cloth, creamer and sugar bowl, and toy cutlery. Including little toy knives that couldn’t cut butter, but they’re knives nonetheless.

“We have to check the tea set!” I said.

“Oh shit, you’re right,” Darin said.

My rolling computer case, the big one I take on vacations, can double as an overnight bag (for those overnight business trips, natch). We pulled the sub-computer bag (the one actually holding the computer) out and hurriedly shoved Sophia’s bag in. Then Darin left the line and went back to the skycaps to check the bag.

Sophia was very upset, as you can imagine — she has barely let that tea set out of her hands since she got it, and every single member of her extended family was treated to at least one tea party during our Thanksgiving. We tried to explain to her that if we didn’t check the tea set, what could possibly happen is that they take all the toy knives out of it and throw them away, or even worse they take the tea set away permanently. She was not convinced. All she knew was that she wasn’t having a tea party on the plane and we promised she could have a tea party on the plane.

But you know: better safe than sorry.

During the descent into SFO I heard a clicking noise behind me, and I glanced back to see what it was. Another passenger was calmly knitting.

With metal needles.

Huh. Interesting.

“Is the whole ‘no sharp objects’ thing over with?” I asked Darin.

“She would have lost her mind if anything had happened to the tea set,” he said.

I am continuing apace on my Nano novel, although many thousands of words ago I accepted that this was a practice novel and not something that I want to spend any time upgrading into a real novel. When a friend asked if I was at least enjoying the experience, I said:

I am, even though it’s not a keeper. At least, in nothing like its current form. I am doing various things in it, though, like switching viewpoints, and doing flashbacks, and having scenes with multiple people in them that I haven’t done as much in the past. It’s one long practice session!

Currently I seem to be killing off half the character list and setting up the other half as suspects. Almost anything is ripe for comedy, but murder just isn’t funny as far as I’m concerned, the book’s descent into furious black comedy seems to be my way of accepting that not everything is meant to be published. And writing is never wasted: you always learn something from it (or should).

Oh, and next time? Outline.

On the route to Sophia’s school there’s a house that I love to look at every time we walk by it. It’s surrounded by a stone fence, about five or six feet high, with an iron gate on to the street. There’s a giant playset for kids — as high as a two-story house, made out of redwood, with lots of Habitrails for crawling around. And the house itself (the adult Habitrail) is gorgeous on the outside. I looked it up on mlslistings.com, and discovered the house is as big as it looks, with 5500 square feet and more than a half acre of land. I would love to see the Open House on this one.

Asking price? $4,750,000.

But — believe me, I know how this sounds — I can completely understand that price. That house is quite a package A 100-year-old mansion, sitting on a fantastic plot of land, in an enviable part of an expensive town.

The house two doors down from us just went on the market. It’s 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, less than 2000 square feet. It’s beautiful inside, from the photos, with lots of stone work. And apparently it has more land that I would have guessed from the outside, but probably not a bigger lot than we’re on.

Asking price: $1,675,000

Two words: holy. crap.

The above-the-fold in the San Jose Mercury News today was the Bay Area’s current median house prices.

Santa Clara County’s sizzling housing market cooled a little bit last month, but the median price of a single-family home jumped to a record of $714,250, bucking speculation of a downturn or bursting bubble.

That’s a 19 percent increase from October of last year, when the median price was what now seems a modest $600,000.

The article goes on to say that things are cooling down, the market’s reaching equilibrium, the same overnight-craziness isn’t apparent.

On the up side… if you do manage to cash out of a California home, you can go almost anywhere else in the country and buy the side of a mountain.

On the down side… what’s the monthly payment on a $714,250 house? Who the hell can afford that? And how far are people going to have to drive in order to live somewhere affordable? Or more affordable than this, at any rate?

We’re not in this house for the immediate value it holds — we love this neighborhood, love the walkability of it, are happy as little clams to be here and have the kids here.

Which is good because… when things come back to earth, it’s going to hurt. A lot. And we won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.

They’ve cancelled Arrested Development. Or, to be exact, Fox didn’t pick up the back 9 (the second half of the season).

The Talent Show rants appropriately about this decision.

I went to see the doctor this morning (thankfully, he was running late — I was running around like a maniac this morning trying to get the kids ready to go and get Simon to preschool before my appointment, and I ended up being late) to check on the progress of my thyroid meds. He had the results of my last blood test, and my TSH is at a much better level. It was 4.x when I got tested in May, which indicates a low thyroid; it’s now around 1.1, which indicates a much healthier level. And on every scale he was measuring me on, I’m evidently doing better.

Except one. Exercise is still wiping me out. I mentioned my two-hour run, two-hour nap pattern.

He said, “You’re doing too much. You’re overexerting yourself.” He shook his head. “Most of my patients I have to plead with to get some exercise. You, I have to tell to do less. Only thirty to forty-five minutes a day.”

I told him I wanted to do a marathon next year. He’s a former marathoner. He understands.

“It’s going to take some time for your body to adjust.”

Well, doing shorter runs throughout the week and suffering one long run/one long nap seems okay for the moment.

Update: My friend Rob IM’d me with, “I want your doctor!” A doctor who tells you not to get exercise…excellent, Smithers.

I got up this morning before the alarm clock, with only a little help from a shout down the hall — “Daddy, I’m scared!” “Okay, then come down here.” “No…” — and I got on the road as soon as it was twilight. I ran for two hours, by myself, sans iPod Shuffle, which is some kind of record for me. No conversation, no music. I can’t do running as meditation though: my brain goes a mile a minute, even as my body is going considerably slower.

The only problem I had with the run was this odd pain I get in my right hip. I describe it as being in the ball-and-socket of the joint, but to be honest, I don’t know what it is. It’s not the IT band problem I’ve had. And it always hits about the same time in a long run, 2/3 in. A little stretching seems to have taken care of it, but it’s a problem I’d like to solve before I hurt something.

I came back to the house and started preparing for the family brunch we were hosting. I made coffeecake muffins (two words: tas. tee.) and Darin made the French scrambled eggs and Mitch cooked the bacon. I also made drinking chocolate à la Café Angelina, of which a person could only drink about 2 or 3 ounces before we needed to get out the syringe of adrenaline. (Even the kids didn’t want seconds.) We gave Scott and Christy their (slightly belated) wedding gifts, and Scott and Christy gave the kids some gifts they had for them.

The guests left, the kids vegged on the couch watching “Batman: The Animated Series”, and I did the first load of dishes.

And then I fell unconscious for two hours. As I always do after a longish run, or a hard run like the Rodeo Beach run Rob and I did a couple of weeks ago.

What is the deal? Isn’t exercise supposed to give me energy? If I schedule two hours for a morning run, I’d better schedule two in the afternoon for a nap, because around two p.m. all my systems shut down. “Warning! Warning! We are Code Fade-to-Black!” I like that I have managed to work up to doing a two hour run (which was about 10 miles), and if I can figure out what the deal is with my hip, I’d even like to try to go further. But I can’t just pass out for an entire afternoon every time.

I’m hoping this is a phase, that eventually my body will adjust to the slightly more intense level of workout I’ve been putting it through of late (changing my thyroid medications was, I think, a big help).

Well, the words are there — I’m a little ahead of “schedule” (having done slightly more than 1667 words a day), but the title of my journal entry today (I keep journals about my writing as I write in MacJournal) is “WTF is the plot of this book?” There’s a major coincidence in the setup of the book that I thought would resolve itself in some surprising and interesting way, but no resolution has showed itself — in fact, what the plot has done so far is tie me in knots and leave me nowhere to go. So I sat down to work a few things out before I continued to write, because apparently I’ve written enough today to be “ahead.”

Of course, if I redo the plot, theoretically I’d have to toss a bunch of pages. But this is Nanowrimo! And you don’t toss a word, you just put a note in saying, “Fix this in the future” and you keep on writing.

I know I said I would outline. I did. I’ve said it multiple times, I’ve discussed this with writing friends, I know that having worked out the plot ahead of time would free me up to just write. (I’m not one of these people who thinks outlining kills spontaneity and creativity. In fact, I think it frees you up to write as creatively as you want, because you know where to go and all you have to worry about is the actual writing.

Next time, I am totally outlining. I mean it.

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I just listened to WriMo Radio (the weekly podcast) and evidently Week Two is well-known as the location of “the wall,” so I’m hoping that that’s all this is. They also use the metaphor of “climbing the Himalayas and meeting the Yeti” which seems like an unnecessary, though hilarious, metaphor for the feeling.

I was reading something the other day — possibly about Baby Freebird — when I said to Darin, “I miss sleeping with the babies. I mean, I know that after a while it made me crazy, but I miss listening to them breathe and cuddling with them.”

He nodded. “And that’s one of the reasons why some families end up with four or five kids.”

Strangely, Simon has crawled into bed with us every night since I said this, and I’m pretty sure he was nowhere around when I did.