Came across this in my RSS feeds today. Kinda interesting.
Visit www.SpreadPersepolis.com
Persepolis 2.0 describes Iran’s post-election uprising and spreads the
word about Iranians’ historic struggle against repression. Based on the
graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi and edited by two Iranians living
abroad.
I've also been keeping up to date on what's been going on inside Iran thanks to an excellent blog from the National Iranian American Council called niacINsight.
Finally, where would we be without the first rate "reporting" of the Daily Show?
Dropped Little One off today at day camp using the bike. Has to be the most climbing I've done to date with her on the back -- the camp is at Friendship park, which according to Gmaps is at 600 ft elevation. Our house is basically sea level. I've been digging a post-ride serotonin glow every since.
LO is off to a Dodger game today with the day camp. I'm curious what she'll think of it. When I was a kid, I loved baseball and enjoyed going to games with Grandpa. But, I lost interest at some point. I think around the time that girls became more interesting to me :). Anyway, she's been to other pro sporting events (soccer and women's basketball), neither of which really seemed to grab her interest.
Looking forward to visits from Big Sis and Little Sis this weekend!
I know I'm well overdue for updates, but, as y'all know, we've been pretty busy with the house-buying process. Meanwhile, I've been able to ride more consistently lately, and yesterday did my first "recreational" ride in a very long time. Finally did the Tour de Palos Verdes. Well, not strictly, b/c I skipped PV East (admittedly the most difficulty part of the route) and took Western instead. But, still it was a good 38 km and felt great. Here's the route:
Wow, it's 2 am on a Saturday night and I just spent the last 14 hours working on the final project for my marketing class. What a drag. I'll have you know, too, that I have been working on this over the last couple of weeks, so it wasn't like i did it all at the last minute. Just takes time to get it all together at the end. I didn't even bother with the summary PPT we were supposed to post for peer review. Just gotta let some things go.
One reason things were late today was because I decided to go out last night to see Carrie Rodriguez, who played at the Warner Grand Annex. Awesome. Glad I went even if it means getting a lower grade in this class. Man's gotta have priorities. Carrie is so full of talent and has such a wonderful voice. If you haven't heard her yet, you should check out her first solo album "Seven Angels on a Bicycle". Includes great fretwork by Bill Frissell to boot. Unfortunately, he's not part of her touring band. Still, it was a great show.
In the continuing house-hunting saga, BH saw a house yesterday afternoon that had just gone on the market the day before. Cute Spanish style home, well maintained in a nice neighborhood. Here's the listing. Immediately the issue was whether I could come out to see it the same day. Now, mid-week house hunting from 35 miles away is challenging at best, add to that working regular hours, needing to find day care since Schmaz is out of town, and the fact that I have two major final projects for my classes due within a week. So, really, you want I should go look at this place tonight?
We work out a sitter. I go to the school to pick up Little One, only she's not there. WTF!! After a period of panic, I determine she's at the B&G Club ('nother story about why this happened). Head over to B&G Club and drop her off at her play date, and off I go. Hit the 110 at exactly 5:30. House is open until 7 p.m. and I had told the realtor I'd be there between 6:15-6:30. Fat chance now. Nearly get plowed by a semi who was switching into my lane and didn't see me, I guess. Listening to the local NPR affiliate and learn there's a Dodger game at 7 pm, which, of course, is gonna make traffic worse than it already is.
I make it to the house at 6:40. There's quite a bit of traffic of other interested buyers with their agents milling about. Clearly a hot property. And, yes, the house is nice. Among the nicest we've seen in Gdale, though Pasadena had some that rivaled it and were better value per sq. ft.. But Pasadena schools are reportedly very poor. At 1400 sq ft., it's definitely not large. Has a nice guest room off the garage and a decent yard. Talked with agent after walking through a couple of times. The sellers want offers in by Friday midday and they are clearly going to get multiple offers, which translates into the fact it's going to sell for more than the askng $599K. If we are serious about it, we would have to drive back to meet with the realtors tonight and sit down for a couple of hours to write up the best offer we can. Only 600 was our limit and that's already pushing it. As this LA times article details, the buyers' market is a myth for the areas where we're looking.
I walk around the area to get a better feel for the location, since it's not one I'm really familiar with. Flat, quiet, people actually walking around. Good signs. Elementary school in walking distance (I'd done a little research on the schools, and at least in the conventional sense of test scores and parent reviews they seem quite good). Walk over to Kenneth Village about a mile away; a mini-strip of boutiques and french bakery. Kind of like a very, very small version of Montrose. Walk down to the main drag on Glenoaks Blvd. Nearby library branch. Check out the local grocery store. Lots of Armenian and Russian products and that jibes with the fact that all the other people looking at the house were Armenian and most the people I saw walking around were too. So, is it a livable area? Yes. Is it as nice as Montrose? Definitely not.
Left the place at 8:40 pm and it took me 40 mins to get back to San Pedro. Talked with BH about it, looked at the numbers again, and looked at other things on the market in the area. Pricey area -- lots of homes pushing the $1mil mark (though, of course, much larger, so not really comps). BH likes the place, but she's also not head over heels, and the numbers don't add up.
This is gonna be a long haul. I don't know that I have the nerves for the sort of hectic decision-making involved. I mean, I just find it next to impossible to make a $600K decision based on a 20 minute inspection of a house and a 1-hr. walk around the neighborhood. I spend more time investigating a $100 car stereo fer chrissakes.
Seen lots of houses in the last few weeks. Can't say we've been blown away. The long and short of it is, the market is still at a level that it is really beyond our means to get something we'd really like, and I don't think it'll ever come down enough. So you have to compromise or stay out of the market. Then the big question becomes what do you compromise on, and here is where Better Half and I probably have the biggest divergence of opinion. I'm all about location. I can live with a house that is not perfect as long is it's livable and the location is good. By that I mean, good schools nearby and a walkable neighborhood. Today we saw what absolutely fits the bill in my opinion. You can see the listing here. It is just a block away from THE best part of all Glendale, the Montrose strip on Hononulu. It's got all the good schools. The catch is the house is old and undoubtedly needs some work. How much and how soon we wouldn't really know until after an inspection. But for BH, it's a non-starter more because of the layout -- a feng shui thing. The layout doesn't bother me at all and I think you could still do a lot with the place to make it more comfortable, but location you can't change. Dunno if we'll ever find something that suits us both. Pretty darn sure we'll never find anything in this area (known as Sparr Heights) at this price again unless the market were suddenly to collapse (and by all indications, it seems to be picking up again).
We are finally making some serious movement towards buying a home. Just seems like if we're ever going to get into the market this is the time to do it. To that end, we've interviewed two real estate agents so far (thanks to Middle Sis for the referrals) and got an preapproval letter from a lender. Credit scores checked out, so that was nice. Still, it's gonna be tight b/c, while interest rates are definitely low, the lower house prices everyone reads about really depends on areas. Yes, prices are down, but not so far down that we comfortably be choosy. Good areas are still more than likely beyond our means. We're looking up towards the Gdale neck of the woods, assuming that Better Half's gig is about as good as it's gonna get for her and I can switch gigs eventually with more ease than she can.
I'm trying not to get sucked into the vortex of what could be all-consuming activity. Today already I found myself spending way too much time looking at listings on Redfin instead of getting other work done. I do hope we end up finding something that we really like.
Follow up story on losing teeth. Little One finally decided to put a tooth under her pillow for the tooth fairy last week. I placed a fiver under her bed and she got a pen from her mom. Normally, I wouldn't give so much, but since there were two teeth and they were the first two, I thought it would be okay to be a little extragavant. My mistake.
Later in the week she lost a third tooth, this time in the bottom row. So now she has that classic gaping smile. It's very cute. As it happens, she lost the tooth at the B&G club. She was bummed about that, but I suggested we could either write the tooth fairy a note about that or we could "make" a tooth out of paper and put that under the pillow. This made her happy.
In the end, she put one of the other teeth she had lost under the pillow (she had requested the tooth fairy not actually take the teeth, so we didn't). This time I put 2 bucks under her pillow. And guess what? She was disappointed that it was only two bucks. She figured a tooth is worth more than that. Unfortunately, we didn't have time this morning to explain to her the rationale for $2 for the third tooth vs. $5 for the first two teeth. In any case, she decided she'd rather have her tooth back (this time we did take the tooth) than the $2, so she wrote a note to the tooth fairy saying she'd trade the $2 for her tooth. It was very funny and very cute.
Not sure why I do it, but every once in awhile I end up pickin' a fight I know I shouldn't bother with. The latest one is with an instructor for one of my current classes. We were given a group assignment that really should have been an individual assignment, as it in no way lent itself to meaningful division of labor. Be that as it may, my group produced the required paper and PPT presentation on the ever-so exciting topic of a comparison of the collection development policies of two college libraries. (These policies serve as guidelines for what the library purchases, who does it, and what eventually gets weeded out).
We received very quick turnaround time for the grading. Normally this would be welcome, however the feedback was limited to saying that our analysis was "good" and all other comments referred to mechanical issues such as proper APA format and some grammatical errors. But what stuck out for me was a comment on one of the parts I had written in which the instructor said it was not a complete paragraph. (You can find the exact paragraph in question at the end of this post).
While it is a short paragraph to be sure, this struck me as odd since it seems to satisfy my understanding of a paragraph. Normally, i'd let it slide, but the lack of substantive feedback on the assignment and the overall empahsis on some nitpicking mechanics chafed me. I read over the paragraph again. I checked APA to see if there was some rule about the length of paragraphs (there isn't; they simply note that a paragraph should be characterized by unity and cohesiveness). I looked up in Strunk and White, who had this to say: "As long as it holds together, a paragraph may be of any length." None of this should come to any surprise to anyone who has decent training in writing (I like to think my education in this area has been above average).
So, I emailed the instructor to express my disagreement. And I know it's stupid b/c she's got better things to do, and I've got better things to do, but, you know, it bugged me. I tell her I concede it was brief, but not incomplete, and I cite the above mentioned texts. She writes back saying she disagrees. Her rationale: "A paragraph should have at least 3 sentences." Really? Is this second grade composition? I'm thinking to myself, c'mon now, you can do better than that.
I write back saying it looks we'll just have to agree to disagree, but for the record where is it written that a paragraph has to have at least three sentences? Her answer: "It goes back to years of education and old Voyages in English grammar books and being taught that all paragraphs require an opening, middle, and ending sentences at least. It's most likely before your time." Turns out I was right about the emphasis on elementary grammar school texts, as that turns out to be exactly what "Voyages in English" is. Puhleez.
It's all kind of ludicrous. No doubt she's not happy to have me question her evaluation, and I understand that. At the same time, I feel if she's going to correct my writing, she ought to be prepared to defend it. I've let the conversation stop at this point, as I don't see any point in continuing it and the only response I could have going forward would be too snarky. But, I'll keep writing two-sentence paragraphs where I see fit.
Here's the paragraph in question, along with her comment.
Evans and Saporano(2005) suggest the purpose(s) of evaluation should be made explicit in collection development policy documents, as different purposes will call for different techniques (p. 63). Neither[JMK1] Chapman nor Saint Mary's heeds this advice.
The day I am finished with this degree cannot come soon enough. I am so looking forward to the time when I can come home from work and spend time with my family or friends or just do whatever the FUCK I PLEASE and not have to bother with some inane busy work that does not in any way improve my skills as a librarian.
