Home report

I wrote up a list of homes in our price and size range in the early 20th century neighborhood near downtown that I watch. Here are the houses that are both 3BR/2BA or bigger and under $300k (there is also one in the $300s, several in the $400s and one in the $800s).

• $260k 4/3 (near major road)
• $260k 4/2 (also near same major road)
• $215k 3/2.5 (NEW listing, renovated, purely residential location, 2000 sq. ft., very promising except for some iffy tile choices in the renovated kitchen and bath--I'm interested)
• $195k 4/3 (2800 sq. ft., stale listing, busy street)
• $192k 4/2 (2000 sq. ft., not busy street, lightly renovated, stale listing, non-resident owner, we previously offered about $130k when it was listed at $180k)
• $175k 3/2 (street good, house iffy in parts, stale listing)
• $170k 3/2 (location too busy)
• $170k 3/3 (location too busy)
• $165k 3/3 (originally $272k, foreclosure, location too busy)
• $96k (marginal location, marginal house)

I've highlighted the two listings where I like both the house and the location. As you can see, there's a bulge in the $165k-$175k range--those people have desperately cutting prices lately. It's hard to get the house, location and price to all line up the way I'd like them to, but we're getting within negotiating distance of a home and price we could live with.

Lawn painters

I just got a flyer in my mailbox from a lawn-painting service. "Currently 90% of Texas is under drought conditions. Water conservation is a must!"

Foreclosure

There's a house in the early 20th century neighborhood I watch that went into foreclosure after three years on the market and prices between about $272k and $245k ($272k represents a not unreasonable $100 per square foot). It's been in foreclosure for a while now. It started out at around $200k and has been slowly slipping. As of yesterday, the price fell to $165k, which is $60 per square foot. I don't like the location (and that's true of most of the houses that have lingered on the market in that neighborhood), but this is going to be a very interesting year.

D dreams he is a dinosaur

D told me he had had a good dream, but he was too embarrassed to tell me about it. C, however, informed me that D dreamed that he was a dinosaur. It sounds like it was an enjoyable dream, aside from the fact that the plants in D's dream didn't taste very good.

Workbooks

I forgot to mention that the kids did a lot of Kumon workbooks today. C did mostly handwriting, while D did 16 pages of Grade 1 Geometry & Measurement. D was a bit spooked by the pages dealing with clock time, but he cruised through much of the rest of the book. He did so much that we were able to order him the Nerf Super Soaker that C already has. C meanwhile got a child's coin book from a used bookstore and has been conscientiously filling it with pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. The book has pictures that you complete by adding money. I especially liked the gumball machine and the quarter quarry. I was skeptical of the book when C first picked it out at the store, but it is clearly a treasured possession now.

Justice

Here's some of what's been happening:

• My husband was reading D a book entitled Carbon. There's an entire children's nonfiction series devoted to different elements.
• The kids were asking me about the heat of different flames tonight.
• They were also asking me about googol and googolplex. C was convinced that D had made up the term googolplex. I looked up both terms, and discovered that the inventor of both had been a mathematician's 9-year-old nephew.
• We had some heavy errands today. We went to daily mass, confession, lunch at the faculty club, ATM, library (we picked up the rest of our summer reading swag) as well as hitting a notary office.
• Late this evening, I made an unpleasant discovery. C had left a bunch of little personalized messages in pen on D's bed (it's a crib/toddler bed) that proved impossible to remove without removing the finish from the crib. I explained the awful significance of this to D (he's going to be living with this until he gets a real bed sometime later this year) and he was distraught. I think C was repentant, but D is our little Mr. Sensitive. Also, it's his bed, and he will have to lie in it. Fortunately, it was not an expensive piece of furniture.

Campus improvements

I was just taking my summer stroll across campus to Starbucks. This requires passing by one of the central lawns on campus. For weeks now, heavy equipment has been rumbling there, ripping up roads and sidewalks and endlessly pushing around dirt. Today, however, there are finally signs of definite progress. There was what looked like a sprinkler system going in, as well as multiple trucks of sod rolls being unloaded.