Like Shooting Fish in a Barrel

Sometimes, Bill Hobbs just sends them right over the plate.  But, awe, shucks, let’s take a swing anyway.  Good practice.

Remember back before Bush, when gas was $1.50 a gallon in 2000?  If I’d had $600 then, I could have bought almost 400 gallons of gas instead of the measly 150 gallons the Republicans and their failed energy policies have brought.

Or

How far does 150 gallons of gas take a beer mogul’s husband in her private jet and is it easier for her to buy that gas today with the proceeds from the Republicans’ ruining the economy and thus making our largest brewery easy pickens for foreign buyers?

Or

Now’s the time to spend your $600 on birth control, while you can still get your hands on it, since the Republicans are rewriting public policy to classify “abortion” as whatever a person decides it is, within “reason,” which means those lovely public health services Hobbs wants you to come to rely on can legally deny you the Pill, because they don’t perform “abortions.”

Or

Did Bill Hobbs forget that he hates poor people who need childcare?

Whew.  That’s good fun.  You should try it.

Third Time’s… Well, It’s the Third Time

So, I put an offer in on the Charlotte Park house.  A great deal less than the seller wants.  But we went out this afternoon with a tape measure and a question, and that question was “How can a 1100 square foot house only show 940 square feet on the tax record?”

My friends, the answer to that question is “Because it’s a 950 square foot house.”

This, we felt, gave us a great deal of negotiating room, even ignoring the state of the housing market.

But we’ll have to see.

We’ve agreed that, if this doesn’t work out, we’re taking a month long moritorium on the house hunting, because I need a little recovery time.

One other Quick Thing I Forgot

My mom has shaved her eyebrows off.  She claims it was an accident, but she’s blind!  Of course a woman whose eye sight is so bad that she has to get shots in her eyeballs to keep them from deteriorating any further is at high risk for having some kind of seeing related accident.  It’s so obvious that a woman who wears contacts and glasses and still has to put things right up by her face to read them is a good candidate for an accident of this sort that it starts to not seem like an accident at all.

I have my eye on her and the second she starts singing “I am just a poor boy, stranger in this town,” I’m getting her straight into rehab or therapy.  Lord knows we don’t need any misguided white supremacists citing her as their inspiration.

Two Quick Things

Well, two and a half.

.5. I was at a meeting this morning and when I bragged on Rachel from Women’s Health News blogging for Our Bodies, Ourselves (at the appropriately titles Our Bodies, Our Blog), there was an audible gasp. It was a little like how Bono’s friends must feel when they’re all “Oh, yeah, Bono’s going to come by and have a beer with us later” and the rest of the people in the pub faint.

1. Over at the Nashvillest, they caught Sheriff Hall making a gaff about comparable cities to Nashville. But the more interesting bit of insight is a little farther down the news story over at Channel Five.

Federal agents told the sheriff’s office to detain most of these criminals and put them on the long path to getting a bond hearing criminals are first taken to a detention facility in Alabama then to Louisiana for a bond hearing.

“The whole process takes about three weeks,” said immigration attorney Sean Lewis.

He believes the long-distance process needs to change.

“It’s a mess, and we’re talking about someone with a civil violation being detained physically,” he said.

2. I don’t mean to be all “Aunt B., Girl Detective” but how could Robin Smith not know who tipped off the TNDems and/or Kleinheider to the existence of her email to the Governor? She sent the email to the Governor, Lisa Lancaster (who’s on the Human Rights Board), Lydia Lenker, and an email address Kleinheider blacked out (see in this post where he says “Read the full letter here.”) This isn’t some difficult logic puzzle. Robin Smith knows to whom she sent the email. Kleinheider revealed the email addresses of everyone the email went to except one person. So, logically, one would assume that was his source, who he’s not revealing. But Robin Smith knows who that person is. So, how can she run around talking about this like it’s some great mystery? Am I missing some important detail here?

Also, I’m going to add a 2.5 to say about Christian’s comment over at Pith, “Exactly.”

Edited to Add: My sources send me this. I don’t know what to make of it, but here it is.

The Charlotte Park House

Okay, so I’m just going to say it.  I love the Charlotte Park house.  It has a front porch you could set a rocking chair on.  It’s got a fireplace (though the Butcher thinks the fireplace is ugly, but I like it.  I think you could do what you wanted with tiling it or whatever and not feel like you were fucking up something important.), which isn’t a working fireplace, but it’s got a chimney, and it’s deep so I think it might be fixable at some point in the future.

The windows are the kind with the three long rectangle panes at the top and the solid pane at the bottom.  The two bedrooms have these old funky light fixtures.  The bathroom is… well, it is what it is, but it has a window over the tub!  Light, natural light, in the bathroom.  It has an enormous dining area and a great big kitchen.  Well, not great big in the grand scheme of things, but great big in terms of the houses we’ve seen.

There’s a basement, with a door you can walk out into the back yard, which is fenced in.  There’s a screened in sunporch thingy just off the garage.  There’s a garage!

There’s only two things I don’t like about it.  One, the basement stairs are scary as hell.  I don’t say that lightly.  I know I’m a chicken shit about stairs, but this one has a gap between the floor and the top of the stairs you have to cross just to get to the first riser.  They are so steep and narrow you feel like you’re really just climbing down a modified ladder.  I could see how you’d get laundry down the stairs–just stand at the top and toss it down–but I’d have to go outside and up the side porch (did I mention the darling little side porch?) and into the house with my laundry.

Well, it would encourage the use of a clothesline, since I’d have to go outside with the laundry anyway.  Can we have clotheslines in town?  Ha, that would be just like Nashville, to have no rules against anything except clotheslines.

And the other thing is the price.

It’s hard because it’s so much better than so much of what we’ve looked at and so you do think, well, maybe that’s the appropriate price for it.  But there’s nothing else in that neighborhood for that price that only has two bedrooms and one bath.  The realtor told Kathy that she has run the comps and that “it was difficult to find comparible houses in the neighborhood” so she ran them for all of Zone 3.

Well, so on the one hand, she’s comparing that house to houses deep in the Nations (which would indicate that house is priced way, way too high), but on the other hand, it means she’s comparing that house to houses in Germantown/Salemtown, and, yeah, if that house were at that price in those neighborhoods, it would be a steal.

But it’s not in those neighborhoods.

I should have taken a picture of Kathy’s face, too, as she’s recounting this.  Those of you who know her know how she goes “Aw, hell, no” and somehow manages to string those words together like one powerful word of dismissal?  That was the look on her face!

“We’ll run our own comps.” She said.

Anyway, so we’re mulling.  She’s going to run comps and look at tax records.  I’m going to sit down with the Butcher and mull, mull, mull.

It’s kind of weird because I love the house, but I know I’m not going to pay that much for it, and I know it’s just come on the market so they’re not likely to take my offer, and so someone else might swoop by and see how cute it is and buy it.  And that would suck, but…

It is what it is.

So, I feel okay about that.