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should we carry through on the nascent idea
Sunday, August 18 2002
Gretchen's parents were in town today, so she went off with them this afternoon to do such things as tour a Manhattan Holocaust museum. While she was out, she'd given me the task of straightening up some things in the house to make it more presentable and apparently spacious. Tomorrow she'd be showing it to a real estate agent to see what sort of money it was worth. This would give us an idea what we could afford should we carry through on the nascent idea of moving upstate to Woodstock. But I was sort of lazy and did only the bare minimum of tasks, something Gretchen pointed out later tonight as I was kicking back with a bottle of beer watching the Wire on HBO.
I met Gretchen and her parents for dinner at Haveli, the one East Village Indian restaurant lacking both Christmas light illumination and Chateau Diana wine. I made the mistake of taking the Q train on the one day it decided to follow the N train route through lower Manhattan en route between DeKalb Street in Brooklyn and Canal Street in Chinatown. But by some miracle I was only ten minutes late.
Dinner with the in-laws went well, as it usually does with this particular set of in-laws. Over shared Indian dishes (and a single 22 oz Taj Mahal beer), we talked mostly about real estate and real estate agents, and how to make strategic use of things that most people consider property defects (particularly ones you actually find attractive). An example is the existence of wetlands, particularly in these West Nile Virus-crazed times. Back in 1976, my parents used the presence of a three acre marsh to successfully negotiate a lower price for their farm. Subsequently, of course, my father did a thorough inventory of the marsh's botany and was overjoyed to discover (for example) such iceage refugees as Pussy Willow and Buckbean. But most Shenandoah Valley property buyers, of course, view a marsh that can't be drained as useless.
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