I’m realizing this last string of posts is starting to resemble Ricardo Semler’s “The Seven Day Weekend,” if only for their titles. I can’t speak for the content, since I still haven’t gotten past the second (or third?) chapter. There needs to be some better time management taking place in my life so I can actually do the things I’ve resolved to do, one of which is reading that book. If only I could absorb the material through osmosis. If I could, I’d be a much more knowledgeable person right now, since I’ve got what I believe to be a fairly diverse book collection. I don’t have a ton of books, but I think what I have are good books. Of course, I can’t say for sure. I’m going on the reviews that I’ve read for the most part, since this last book is just one of a series of books I’ve resolved to read but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

So we were having a conversation last night while cooking. We’re about forty minutes or so into boiling a pot of water when it dawned on me why the water was refusing to come to a full boil. We have a propane (or LP, or whatever it’s called) stove. We ran out of propane three months ago, once again in the middle of cooking. Looks like we’ll be filling that puppy every three months, not every year like the single woman who lived in our house before us claimed she filled it. I gather she didn’t do much cooking. In fact, having lived in this house for eight months, we’re really trying to figure out what exactly she did do. She certainly didn’t clean the windows (well, not REALLY clean them), and it’s pretty apparent that she didn’t have much of a problem with her cat pissing all over the place, particularly in what’s now my home office. Incense helps.

The house was in good shape when we moved in. I complimented the seller at closing about the condition of the place, and she said it was really clean when she moved in. The translation of this is that she bought a house, lived in it for roughly two years, did absolutely nothing during this time, then sold it for about a sixty grand profit. Now that the real estate market seems to be correcting itself, we probably won’t be seeing much more of this type of thing. I can’t help but feel a little annoyed, sort of like I paid some woman a $30,000 a year salary for taking up space for the last two years. The least she could have done was clean the cat piss.

We’ve been talking about starting a reality show, “Reality Real Estate” or something like that. We’d basically be doing the real estate thing, except we’d say what we really feel about how these people are living. So when we walk into the overpriced place with a pile of garbage in the living room blocking the fireplace, we may refrain from belittling the homeowners directly, but we’ll have plenty to say as we drive away. Considering the state of things these days, there should be no shortage of material. The upside of the show could be those real gems being sold by people who actually take pride in themselves and their property. Maybe each show could end with a successful sale of one of those, to buyers who really appreciate what they’re getting, a genuine win-win situation all around. Despite all the horror stories, these deals can and do happen occasionally. I know, because our own deal went smoothly. Sure, eight months down the road, we’ve got a few gripes, but it’s really not so bad. The gripes are minor at best. The other side of the show could be highlighting other agents and their full range of colorful personalities. With 26,000 or so agents on Long Island alone, that could be a whole show in itself.