Yesterday we looked at our usual twenty or so houses all over the city. out of them, about five fit our needs, and one was quite appealing indeed. Unfortunately, it’s located away from the optimal areas we’d prefer. This is no particular obstacle, however.

Of greater cause for deliberation are three factors, all turning on size. The lot size is quite small in comparison to some of the other homes we looked at, and the house itself is only a few square feet larger than our current apartment. There is also, disappointingly, no basement.

Despite these issues, we’ve decided to bid on the house after discussing another candidate that offerred a better regional location with large outbuildings on a big lot, but also no basement.

This will be our third offer.

I think, now that we have been doing this for a couple of months, we are getting close. Each time we go out we have seen several houses that are really quite amenable.

I have passed the road test portion of my driver’s license certification and between the time I began to write this sentence and the time I write this word they shot my license photo.

On Monday I will celebrate the first of many Drive Your Car To Work Days.

August 28 will see Brian Wilson performing Smile live at the Paramount, and I must miss it. For those of you heroes and villains who like vegetables, it seems probable that you know what to do.

Manuel notes the pleasing fack: SJ is back!

Huzzah for Paul Frankenstein’s Boingage!

(FWIW, he says it’s a bubble and we should keep renting, citing Hong Kong and Tokyo as historical precedents.)

The next table at Bill’s:

“You could have, like, an organic S&M website!”

Barring a change in circumstances, we’re passing on the house.

Our offer was pretty aggressive and intended to spark a negotiation, but the counteroffer was not responsive enough. We could go to a second offer, but given our sense of uncertainty about the vicinity have opted not to pursue it.

Following last night’s West Coast wide tsunami alert, I was pleased to spot this inspired teaser on the front page of today’s P-I .

Just finished Janet Malcolm’s gripping and sympathetic Someone Says Yes to It ,which begins as an overdue exegesis of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans before veering into a sympathetic portrait of the writer and her technique, concluding with a bang-up tale of academic intrigue. Alas, the piece does not appear online that I could uncover.

It appears in the New Yorker issue dated June 13 and 20, 2005.

The piece communicated to me what two years of intensive art historical information failed to regarding Stein’s appeal to the moderns, and as it was surely intended to, awakened a personal sense of interest in the famously hard-to-read writer’s work.

Saw my folks off to the airport today; then Viv and I drove all over town running errands, the most important of which was getting a new power supply for her iBook. A rocking chair crushed the insertion tip in an unexpected side effect of having houseguests.

I very much enjoyed our holiday with my parents, more so than the last Christmas we spent with them, four years ago in Washington DC. I’m surprised that so much time had elapsed. We’ve seen them about twice a year over that whole period of time, often at Thanksgiving and midsummer. At any rate, in many ways, it was one of the most satisfying holidays that we’ve spent with them, although my work schedule meant we did not have as much time with them as we might have hoped for.

They arrived the Monday before Christmas and spent the night. Originally, they’d planned to drive over to Yakima, their hometown, that afternoon. We insisted that they use our car instead of renting one. As we discussed the plans, I realized that they were planning on crossing a notoriously snowy mountain pass on the winter solstice – the longest night of the year. Without telling them, I mentioned to Viv that we should plan on their spending the night that evening.

As it turned out, their plane was delayed due to snow back east and their flight didn’t come in until about 10pm, so it was good that we’d prepared.

They drove over next morning while I was at work, and returned here Thursday morning, just in time for me to take everyone out to dinner at that venerable Seattle institution, Canlis. Viv and I ate there for our first anniversary or something and it is one of our most memorable dining experiences. The holiday meal that we had this past week was certainly tasty but nowhere near as inventive or memorable as that which my wife and I shared in bibulous romance back in the day.

We asked our old dear friend Spencer to share Christmas Day with us, and happily, he was able to do so. I haven’t had a chance to post all the pictures yet, but I’ll pick a choice few.