matching tracksuits

I often wonder what L is going to look like when she’s older — three, seven, ten years old. Once she reaches three it will be easier to guess what she might look like five years later.

At five months, though, it’s fairly difficult to imagine what she might look like as a little girl rather than an infant.

But sometimes, when her expression is just right, there’s a little glimpse.

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Memorial Day we took the girl and the babcia for a hike at Graveyard Fields. A short, easy hike: probably less than 4.5 miles all told.

Along the way, new flora continually caught J’s eye. “What’s this?” and “What’s that?” and “Is this X? It must be!”

“Nie wiem” became the phrase of the day, renewing (for about the 100th time, at least) my desire/resolve to learn more about plants.

L “met” a young lady named N who, despite being two months younger, was significantly smaller.

And of course we took lots of pictures of the Girl.

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The Creation Museum recently opened in Kentucky.

DefCon provided an informative guide about the errors of young earth creationism. Entitled “Top 10 Reasons Why the Universe, the Sun, the Earth, and Life Are Not 6,000 Years Old,” it’s available at the DefCon web site.

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The girl has begun reaching for things. For anything. If it’s in her field of vision, she’ll put out her little hands and try to grab it.

The other day, she grabbed a glass of water while we were eating dinner and turned it over on K. First time, certainly not the last.

And so, for the first time, I proposed making pre-planned video. “Just go around the apartment and hold her in front of things,” I asked K.

The results are at YouTube.

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It seems the Poles are taking a page from Falwell’s book of idiocy:

A senior Polish official has ordered psychologists to investigate whether the popular BBC TV show Teletubbies promotes a homosexual lifestyle.

The spokesperson for children’s rights in Poland, Ewa Sowinska, singled out Tinky Winky, the purple character with a triangular aerial on his head. (BBC)

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A kid who has gone from completely ignoring authority figures to complying but with a huff and a puff and an expression of disgust has still come a long way. A kid who has gone from cussing out staff when upset to merely walking away while being spoken to has begun developing coping skills.

I worry that some of our kids, despite the tremendous progress they made, will encounter less-than-perfect people in the world that will see their shortcomings and nothing else. They’ll be completely unaware of how far he/she has come and punish him/her in some way for lack of perfect social skills.

This possibility arises from the fact that the skills we’re teaching the kids are so basic that we don’t even notice when an adolescent uses them: eye contact; maturely disagreeing; accepting no. It’s the societal norm, the baseline. These socials skills are to normal life what reading is to majoring in English.

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Long ago I found a video of Russian kids doing some really unbelievable tricks. Watching it, I thought, “Dang, that looks a lot like Poland.” The ubiquitous boxiness of Stalinist architecture is the same throughout Eastern Europe, I guess.

It turns out, some lad in Jablonka, K’s home, village discovered the video and, apparently impressed, learned some tricks and made a video himself called “Tricks by Buma.”

• The fairground is a matter of meters from J’s family’s home.
• The shots at the end were filmed at the entrance to K’s high school.

Small world…

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Our realtor told us at the outset that she didn’t want us expecting to find the home of our dreams this first time out. Rather, she said that we need to be looking at the areas and determine which area of town we’d rather live in. Many people buy houses they love without checking out the area, and then they find that the services they want and need aren’t available or aren’t nearby. So they wind up with a house they love in an area they hate. The first step, then, is not to find a house, but to find an area.

Yesterday, we found the area.

And we thought we’d found a house. But it’s amazing what a night’s rest will do for your perception of a house.

Contestant One

Didn’t make much of an impression — little enough impression that I didn’t even take a picture.

Contestant Two

In a historic district, walking distance from two parks (!!!), Contestant Two had a lot going for it from the beginning. It was was a fairly attractive house, with plantation shutters and picket fence in the front.

The interior was pleasant enough, with a somewhat odd upstairs bedroom — the chimney goes through the middle of the room, dividing it almost in two. Pleasant enough, though requiring some work. “I love it,” K said. “It’s okay,” I thought. Until we went into the “basement.”

Duct tape on a foundation wall can mean only one thing: the owners are trying to hide something. The fact that it’s painted indicates that they’re really trying to hide something.

And then the back of the house: siding clearly put on by a less-than-professional. It’s fairly clear that there’s water running off the roof and into that siding. Which means one thing: water damage. No — it means two things: water damage and mold.

The final negative factor: it was literally covered with trees. Not good for a roof; not good for affordable insurance. At that point, it was decided. Add to it all the age and the possible problems with wiring and plumbing, and, despite the good location, the final verdict was a definitive “no.”

We left the city-proper and went to Maldin.

Contestant Three

First impression — standard brick ranch. The house looked good, but nothing spectacular. And then we saw the backyard: huge, wooded, landscaped — in a word, amazing. A couple of kitschy “water falls,” but nothing that couldn’t be removed.

Once we walked in, I thought, “Okay — this is a house worth spending some time in, checking out, really looking it over.”

The kitchen/dining area was open, with a fireplace in the corner. Opposite was the living room. Immediate thought: “Tear out the wall dividing them and what an amazing space!”

Downstairs, a real basement — no quotation marks required. Half of it was finished as a family room. The other half: man cave. Clean, cool cinder-block with a new furnace — everything screams, “Workshop!”

The price is great; the location is perfect; the home is an amazing first-home. And, after the first two disasters, I think, “Hey, there is good stuff in our price range!”

Contestants Four through Seven

It was all downhill after Contestant Three, but we looked further.

Contestant Four: lots of potential (with an amazingly large backyard, too), but requiring a lot of work. Porcelain tiles as a kitchen counter-top treatment just makes you feel like you’re cooking in a bus station bathroom.

Contestant Five: with roads on three of the four sides of the lot, it was a definite “no” before we even got inside.

Contestant Six: no! No! A thousand times no! The Portokalos-style fireplace just was so hideous that I ran screaming from the house.

Contestant Seven: What a kitchen! What an interior! What train tracks five-hundred feet away! What a flood plain! What a disappointment! (View larger picture)

Contestant Eight

Contestant Eight had a lot going against it from the beginning. Far, far north; on a semi-busy street; few trees.

Then we stepped inside, where it became obvious that this was a case of “Flip this House.” However, as my father said, it was more like “Flop this House.”

At first, everything seems decent. New appliances; new tile floor — which goes all the way from the kitchen, though the dining/living area, down the hall.

And then a close look at the kitchen counter revealed a few things:

• The house-flipper had never done any work like this before.
• The flipper had never even practiced before doing it for real.
• The flipper thought all who looked at the house would be legally blind and not wearing their glasses.

Words do not do it justice, so I present “Counter-Top Edge”

Add to it the fact that the hardwood floor in the living room was finished in the ever-popular Spill-and-Smear style, we decided to give it a pass.

First house hunt behind us, we learned a lot about what we really want and what’s optional.

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We’re about to begin the process of looking for a home in Greenville. When we did it in Asheville about a year and a half ago, we were heading out with entirely different thoughts. We knew that the prices were completely disproportional to our income (particularly since I was working as a teacher’s aid in an EC classroom), and we were just hoping to find something in our price range.

In said price range, we found

• a place with major cracks in two of the four foundational walls, allowing a whole corner of the house gradually to sink into the earth (Price to fix: too much to contemplate);
• a place that was in such bad condition that it honestly had no lock on the front door;
• lots of condos, with association fees upwards of $100;
• some pre-fab homes;
• a few double-wide trailers (which we didn’t even bother looking at); and,
• assorted cottages slightly smaller than our apartment.

When we began looking at real estate in the Greenville area in the same price range, we were shocked — and that’s one of the reasons we decided to move there. You can still get a house for well under $200k there! In fact, there are two-bedrooms listed for under $100k!

That’s like driving by a service station and seeing the price of gas at $1.89. (Which in the south does happen — it just means the station closed several years ago and was simply abandoned.)

We’ve sat down and made a list of wants and needs.

Non-negotiable

• Price: [redacted -- same as in Asheville]
• Location: east side of town, but more importantly, in a location where houses sell fairly easily
• Minimum ft² 1,300; ideal, 1,500-1,700
• Big kitchen, open to living area (not cut off from where the action is when entertaining)
• Minimum 2 bedrooms (if 2 bedrooms, must be partly finished basement; otherwise, 3 bedrooms)
• One and a half bath
• Not on a busy street
• Not in a new house crowded into a new development with no trees
• Minimum 0.3 acres

Preferred

• Close to a park
• Garage and basement
• Trees in the yard
• Deck/patio

Would be nice…

• Brick
• Fireplace
• Hardwood floors
• Front porch

The most pleasant thought in all of it — that L will have a backyard to play in.

So tomorrow we begin our hunt. It’s kind of exciting, looking for a house with the intention of buying, as opposed to looking at houses with the hope of finding something affordable that’s not a complete dump…

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Several times over the last few days I’ve come out of the apartment to find a congregation crowding around a water drainage grate at the corner of our parking lot. It seems that a pregnant cat crawled into the drainage system that runs through our complex and gave birth to her kittens there. Except for times of rain, I can’t imagine a safer place.

Recently, an industrious woman decided that she would try to get one of the cats. So with some difficulty (I would imagine — I wasn’t there and didn’t see this part), they pulled the heavy iron grating off and the lady got down into the dry drainage inlet.

But she couldn’t get a single kitten. Imagine that. And so, finding no success, it was time to get out, with the help of K and others.

And once out, it was necessary to put the grate back. (It’s from seeing this from the balcony that I made the reasonable assumption that the ladies got the grate off in the first place with “some difficulty.”)

Apparently, the Humane Society has been notified and they were unable to do anything; the neighbors are obviously unable to do anything; and I’m left wonder what all the fuss is about. Wild cats have survived throughout millennia. These kittens seem to be getting resourceful genes — they’ll fare just fine, I’m sure.

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