One of my tasks is to send emails to both the listing agent and buyer’s agent on MLS listings requesting additional information about that property. I send tons of these emails every day. Sometimes I get emails back from a Realtor asking me not to email them anymore. However, I can’t keep track of people’s names, so I always suggest they add my address to their spam filter to make sure I won’t annoy them in the future.
This afternoon, I received this reply: This house was rented not sold – that should be pretty obvious from the data you are looking at
I bristled.
I pulled the MLS listing back up.
I replied: Forgive me for annoying you.
Listing shows it sold 06/30/2010 for $140,000. Public records says 07/19/2010.
Kindly add me to your spam list so that I don’t annoy you with future inquiries on comparables my appraiser utilizes in his appraisals. A non-reply is much more polite than the snippy, sarcastic reply you provided.
Thank you,
I try to be polite when what I cannot say is “FOAD.”
Shortly thereafter, I received this response: I am soooooooo sorry – I will eat humble pie. I had another similar e-mail about a property rented and I confused that address with your request. Again – eating humble pie and many apologies – I know your job is not easy. Regarding your questions I’ve answered them below
Go figure. I told someone to FOAD and they apologized to me.
Of course, I sent my own apology back for being curt. But I appreciated the apology, as I hate receiving rude emails just because you’re having a bad day.
I finally downloaded my cell phone pictures so I can post up some of them. These are sights I see on my runs.
Snake on a fence.
View of the lake from the bridge looking toward the airport. The bridge is my favorite part of the run. It’s so pretty, and there’s usually a decent breeze.
View of the lake from the bridge looking away from the airport.
I frequently run past this house and it always has one massive truck parked outside. Recently, the trucks doubled. Because one doesn’t harm the environment quite enough. Rumor has it, this is the same vehicle Ashton Kutcher drives. I’m sure it gets amazing gas mileage.
Wow. There’s a report out now regarding the butter beer they serve at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios.
A glass of butterbeer from the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Orlando Resort’s Islands of Adventure theme park has more calories than a Coke, but less sugar, according to personal finance site Wallet Pop.
The lab found that a 14-ounce serving had 200 calories, 42 grams of carbohydrates and 29 grams of sugar.
According to Coca-Cola, a 12-ounce can of the classic soda has 140 calories, 39 grams of carbohydrates and 39 grams of sugar.
I don’t care.
When I go to WWHP and have $9.50 to spend on Butter Beer, I’m not concerned about how many calories I’m consuming. For crying out loud, I’m at an amusement park, sweating in the Florida heat, and I don’t care about eating or drinking healthy. Give me a break!
That said, I really prefer the Pumpkin Juice over the Butter Beer, and will spend my $6.25 on that instead.
I’ll be going back to WWHP soon. It’s almost not too hot and not too crowded to do so.
August 23rd, 2010 at 06:37 pm by wRitErsbLock in Torture
Boring running post. Move along.
I had a near perfect run this evening! I’m so pleased. I’ve had back to back to back to back lousy runs for several weeks, like three weeks, I think. My lower left leg has been bothering me quite a lot. Not shin splints. I’ve been stretching and stretching and stretching, twisting my ankle round and round, trying to work the lower muscle, trying to work out the pain I’ve been experiencing. Also, I’ve altered my running route. And I think that was key. By cutting out the five roads, approximately .75 mile, that are very sloped (high in the center, and slopes to the gutter on both sides), as I’m absolutely certain that stretch of road(s) is the cause of my leg pain, I allowed my leg to not be stressed out so badly by the slope. Also, I missed most of my training last week, so I’ve had plenty of days of rest, so there’s that.
Anyway, since I’ve cut out the sloped section of roads, I’m no longer running around the lake. Instead, I’m going up and back along just half of the part of the lake I like to run around. It’s slightly more boring, but at least it’s not sloped. I really can’t believe what a difference it is for my leg to not be running on the slope. (Yes, I tried running on both sides of the slope, and my leg did not like either slant.)
I went early tonight. I usually run around 7p, as I like to watch yell at the tv hour, more commonly known as the six o’clock local and six-thirty national news, and because I refuse to go out until my thermometer drops below 90. Tonight, it was only 84 at 4p, rose t0 86.6 as the clouds cleared, and I headed out around 5p, while my husband cooked a wonderful coconut curry shrimp dinner.
Tonight, I was aware of my lower left leg, but it was not hurting. It was like the shadow of an ache, remarkable more for the lack of pain than any actual pain. And, I punched up my ratio. I’ve been walking 2 running 1, except for Saturday’s five miler in which I walked 1:15 ran :45. Tonight, I did 1:1 for the first 23 or so minutes. That brought me out to the bridge, which is about a mile and three quarters from home (or two miles, if you ask my neighbor). I ran up the bridge to try to push myself, then walked for four or five minutes, which took me up to the round about where I turned around and headed back home. On the return trip, I didn’t quite keep to a 1:1 ratio, but I was pretty close to it.
The weather was nearly perfect. It could’ve been a good ten degrees cooler, but since it’s August, it was pretty close to perfect. 86.6 when I started, 84.4 when I finished, a fantastic breeze off the lake, and plenty of shade.
I ran 4 miles in 1:00:16 and an average of 15′03″/mile, and I’m very, very pleased with that pace.
It’s been difficult getting back into this running routine, especially training on my own. Yes, my mom is training with me, but we’re not exactly in the same state, so while I have great moral support and motivation as she calls me daily to make sure I’m running, it’s not the same as running with TNT.
Added bonus: since I got back from my run a little after six instead of my normal time of a little after eight, I got to have some wine with my dinner! My husband has been drinking without me lately as I can’t drink before a run, and when I get home, it’s too late. So hooray for wine with my coconut curry shrimp dinner!
We get sucked into the home improvement shows on weekends. If we’re not careful, we’ll sit for hours and hours watching these shows, and miss out on living life. Right now, it’s Holmes on Homes.
My husband got up off the comfy chair and went into the empty bedroom (the next room to be de-textured).
He: We could probably drywall in there.
Me: ::HUGE SMILE:: (as I’d much rather drywall than de-texture) So, Lowes then?
He: It wouldn’t be that big a project.
Me: I’m going to grab the sledge hammer and go ape shit in there so you can’t back out on the drywall plan.
He: It’ll be that way for a while, then, since we can’t buy drywall any time soon.
Instapundit has a post up in which one of his readers (not that Chris Farley) talked about the benefits of his children graduating high school in three years instead of four.
My son is going to graduate High School in three years – not because he is a genius, but because he can arrange his schedule to fit in all the requirements and credits in three years. Anyone at his high school can do it. That’s at least one year of tuition increases avoided. When he finishes High School, we are sending him to the local community college for two years. It is very inexpensive, will give him a chance to mature and will allow him to explore different subject matter prior to choosing a major without wasting a lot of time and money. Two years for about $5K total and then he can transfer pretty much anywhere he wants. It is much easier to get accepted to a school as a transferring Junior than fresh out of high school and he’ll have plenty of money between his college fund and a few small loans.
I’m always worried for the kid when I hear they’ll be graduating high school prematurely. You will recall I turned 16 in March, graduated in June, and went off to college in August. Sixteen was too young to go off and live in a dormatory, even at my small, religious college. I had no real study skills to speak of, as high school was a complete joke (despite attending one of GHWB’s thousand points of light schools). And no self-discipline, either. It was too much freedom for me to have at the age of sixteen.
Of course, Farley says his son will attend community college for two years. I think that’s an important decision. My mom should have had me attend CCCC for a year or two before shipping me off to an away-from-home college. I likely would not have been a C student my freshman year, nor failed Chemistry, with my mom somewhat supervising me still. Although, truth be told, mom lived in another town a few hours away at that time in our lives so she could work, and only came home on the weekends, so it would’ve been perhaps more caustic an environment given stories my older brother has hinted at about his time of living alone. But I certainly would’ve not come away with as much school loan debt if I had attended CCCC for a year or two. I feel like I’ll never get my school loans paid back.
We’re in such a hurry for kids to grow up, but trust me when I tell you sixteen was too young for me to be living in a dorm.
I look at my step-daughter. She’ll be fourteen in just a few weeks, and she’s starting eighth grade on Monday. What a different life than the one I was living, as I was a junior when I was her age. I was taking SATs and ACTs and looking at colleges, even though I was two years away from being able to get a driving permit. All she has to worry about is boys and makeup and the lead singer of her favorite band. I envy her.
Granted, some kids are better equipped than I was to handle the responsibilities and pressure of college at a young age. But I think my mom steered me in the wrong direction.
As I sit here in my dead-end, crappy job, lamenting making so little money, I can’t help but look back on decisions that were made when I was in high school, and think we chose poorly.
Which shall be nothing at all like Dave’s musical interludes, you know, since he discusses music and frequently posts videos to the songs he’s writing about. No, this is nothing at all like that.
My husband has made an agreement with himself that he will come home from work and sit down for an hour each day to either draw or write. This is a great idea. I wish I had the creativity I once had. However, since he’s in there writing, I figured it was a good time to sit down at my piano and learn some music I’ve been butchering on occasion. Afterall, I do greatly enjoy playing the piano.
Today, I had the brilliant idea to grab my iPod to listen to the song I cannot find sheet music to. It is, perhaps, one of my all time favorite songs, and I feel a bit cheated that I was only introduced to this song about three or four years ago… about a year before I attended my first Styx concert, where the monster was created in me. One of my favorite songs (because, really, who can narrow it down to just one song when there are so many genres, and one can clearly have favorites in every category) is Castlewalls by Styx. The middle of the song reminds me very much of the middle of Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.
Let me back up a bit. My parents had my older brother and me take piano lessons our entire childhood. I think I took nine years of lessons, and he took eleven. Jason is amazingly talented when it comes to the piano. He can sight read anything. And apparently, as kids, any time I graduated to a new lesson book, he would go through and play through all my songs, which no doubt made me throw a temper tantrum, as I was prone to temper tantrums. I think the idea was that we’d be in separate brands of lesson books so that I would not just be learning the music he learned two years before me. But that plan failed, since he would play all my music anyway.
As a result, while I can in fact read music, I have always played by ear… with music in front of me. Which is to say, if I don’t know how a piece of music is supposed to sound, I can’t really play it. I lack the self-discipline to learn to play the music by just reading it. I’ll download the song so I can hear it, and then begin learning to read the music.
Back to a few minutes ago… I put on my iPod and selected Castlewalls (which is an amazing song, I urge you to find it, even if you’re a Styx hater, as it’s quite something), sat down at my piano, closed my eyes, and began playing along with my iPod. Fairly well, I think, considering I had no music in front of me to guide my hands.
This made me pull out all my music to see if I have a composition notebook in this mess of books and sheet music. Because it is my intention to go ahead and write down the music for Castlewalls so I can pencil in more than just the melody, and eventually have a passable version of the song to play for my enjoyment. It will actually be a pretty monumental task, but I have the skills, so why not?
And as I pulled out all my music, only to not find a composition notebook (never fear, internet is here!), I realized I have quite a lot of choral music I may never use again. That’s because until 2005, I sang with the Bach Festival Choir. Of course, before that, I minored in music, which is to say I took enough music credits to keep my music scholarship. I’m now going through my music and boxing up my choral music. I don’t sing operatically anymore, and don’t anticipate doing so any time soon, so those scores can be in a box instead of taking up valuable space in my piano music box.
And because I’m quirky this way, I’m listing my choral music below the fold. Also, it might come in handy someday to have it compiled. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to Pereiraville! I'm wRitErsbLock; I'm a runner who lives in Central Florida. Make yourself comfortable, comment often, and try not to spill your wine. Enjoy your stay!
Most photos on this site were taken with my Nikon D40.
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Welcome to Pereiraville! I'm wRitErsbLock; I'm a runner who lives in Central Florida. Make yourself comfortable, comment often, and try not to spill your wine. Enjoy your stay!
