Made the snowy trek to Toronto. I turned off of the 416 to take a familiar short-cut, but it wound up being slower due to blown snow that hadnt melted or been dealt with yet.

I guess there was a lot of snow last night. Back on the 401, the highway was strewn with various wreckage from a night of low friction road surfaces. Low friction makes vehicles stressed. One truck was so stressed, it was lying on its side in the ditch, in a fetal position. I never thought I would see a huge truck like that in a fetal position. I guess everybody gets traumatized from time to time. A few police and other support workers were on site, providing therapy to the truck - telling it everything would be alright, and that lying down on ones side was a perfectly reasonable act considering the snowy road.

Of course, the police were lying to the truck. Soon after I drove by, I am sure a larger truck hauled the truck away to be slaughtered and fed to some hungry industry. Thats what happens when you disobey orders to carry goods across the country. Theres never an excuse for lying in a ditch in a fetal position - whether you are an 18 wheeler or merely a grocery cart. Either way, the penalty is towing, and death.

After getting to Toronto, I found a rather expensive steak house, and enjoyed a greasy steak. Probably I shouldn't have, but it seems to be a typical human custom to celebrate major landmarks (like selling ones house) with dinners like this. I wont be eating steak like that again for a while. Not without help.

I wonder when the day will come when terrorist-engineered human viruses get released into the wild as often as computer viruses do today. I expect such a scenario is unlikely, if only because that kind of release schedule would require a continuously existing infrastructure to support the terrorists in their efforts. Like as not, what would happen is that by the time they got their second or third virus released, the whole world would have either died, collapsed, or gone completely turtle, which would make it impossible to really go on with such an iterative process.

Interesting fact. It takes tens of thousands (more than 120K) years for energy released from thermonuclear fusion in the core of the sun to percolate its way to the suns photosphere where it can actually escape and "Shine". The sun is so dense, that the photons move at a snails pace until they get to the convective zone. At this spot, it is cool enough and not-dense enough for things to speed up, but then, its also loosey goosey enough for protons to capture and hold electrons too, and that kind of hydrogen is opaqueish to photons, so the final 70% of the suns radii is forced to transmit energy via convection. None of this applies to neutrinos, as they seem to have backstage passes to wherever the fuck they want to go. If we could build a square metre sail that stopped neutrinos dead in their tracks, it would probably explode or carry away half a building in a milisecond once it was turned on. Id love to see a youtube video of that.
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luckytroll: Wearing my old fave hat (Default)
( Jan. 23rd, 2008 02:26 pm)
Agents stormed the house yesterday afternoon. One of them was reasonable, but his accomplice had an unsavory look.

On the phone they hinted that they would like to bring in a client to look at the house. Once in the house, they merely pestered me with how much better they could sell the house if they were my agents. They want 4.5 points, which is more than I am willing to give any agent in the 21st century.1
So I am beginning a newer policy. If you are an agent and you hint you have a client you want to show the house - great. Bring them in and you get 2.5 points. But if you mention this client, show up and try and sell me on your rad repping skillz - and then never bring anyone to my house - then I put you on a blacklist - and you never get a chance to repp for me, ever. I will probably put your name in a list of people who I consider slimy too... just to make the point. In fact, I will post all the reps who made these claims and didn't end up producing a client to show the house to - Ill post the list when we hit the 1 month mark. Agents who bring me a client, they get on the list of potential repping agents if I decide to actually list.

In other news, the actual potential buyer who was sposed to show last night didnt. I understand that this is common. I called back today and got a lame excuse. She may call back this week to reschedule.

Signs are ordered for the open house. Seeing as even intrepid pizza people cant find 18 Greenbank Rd. - These are a good investment.

In other news, the stock markets of the world are deflating like a fart in a wet swimsuit. Bonds are sinking like a drunken snowmobiler on the part of the river where the warm sewage gets pumped back, and gold remains uncannily more valuable than fiat currencies.

Guess which one I switched to back last year?2 Life ain't so bad.

1. Paying an agent more than a lawyer when you can do most of the shopping yourself on the web and with google earth is crazy. Especially for something as simple as a condo or townhouse.

 2. Actually, I went to precious metals when the war started, and bonds when the economy "overheated", and seem to have been dealt a hedged hand now that the stock part is all ugly.
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I am still working my head around the fact that the troll house no longer has a resident cat. Its amazing how much a concept of home can orbit around where one keeps ones cat.  In many ways, I think of the house in Vanier as being home now, because my cat lives there. In relation, I now think of the troll house as being an empty cold place I have no real motivation to visit or stay overnight in.

I think some of the decision to relocate to Vanier and sell the troll house has to do with losing the remaining roomie who actually liked Bagheera. One justification for having a house, and even for having my travel-intensive job was that I had roomies who could take care of the cat. Now that only Art is left in the troll house full time - a man who seems to at best  tolerate if not dislike the cat - I have little motivation to keep the place. Ironically, his dislike of cats will result in him needing to look for a new home - or buy mine outright.

I never thought of myself as someone so attached to cats that I would visit a roomie-punting upon someone for not liking my cat, but on the face of it, this is what is happening. I find the circumstances exceeding strange.

But at the end of it all, my cat is happy, and I should walk away from home ownership with some cash in my pocket - cash that will let me live my dreams
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