People in big cars

The other day, I was driving down a fairly busy street in my city, behind this guy driving some sort of SUV (like an Expedition or something huge like that) and he totally took the side mirror off a car that was parked on the street! He didn't even stop, hell, he probably didn't even notice. I just hope his car got some sort of scratch from doing that, otherwise, he'll never know the difference. Seriously - why do you need a car that big? He was all alone in that vehicle, he wasn't even towing anything. Ug. Makes me so annoyed. (cartoon from www.grinningplanet.com)

Buying a house is a nightmare

Some of you know we were in the process of looking for a house and actually found a decent one in Portland. However.......

Buying a house is a nightmare mostly because you search forever and find a house you agree is nice enough to live in, in a good enough area, and even though it has some cracks in it, as long as the seller installs a radon mitigation system, fixes the hot water heater so it's not a bomb and bolts the toilet to the floor, you are still going to go through with the sale. However, the seller and/or the seller's agent then decides to be a TOTAL ASSHOLE and refuses to negotiate with you any further. So then you try to terminate your contract and you basically have to sign all these forms that you will never go after the seller to try to get the money back you paid to have the structural engineer come out to tell you that even though the cracks in the foundation go all the way through, the house is still structurally sound; even though if you knew the seller and/or seller's agent was a LYING P.O.S. when they told you they agreed to your terms earlier, but instead they totally didn't, you never would have had the structural engineer come out to the house anyway and would have terminated the contract right then and there.

Fuckers.

On the upside - who needs to be saddled with a mortgage at this point? We can save so much more money by renting and then we can afford to buy something we REALLY like. We might even be able to go sweat out asses off during a stage of the Tour de France.