A Place For Our Stuff

Well, with two ankle-biters on the way, Lidia, Maggie, Minnie, and I have officially outgrown our humble abode. We moved here in September of 2000 and it's been a wonderful nest--I walk to work in under five minutes, we're minutes from the ACC, great restaurants, a major movie theatre, and of course, the Silver Snail comic book shop.

Hell, we live mere seconds from the...er... more "colourful" areas of Queen Street West and I've yet to greet the day and find a wino sleeping in either of our front stoop chairs, or nick my toe on a discarded crack pipe (unclaimed doggie doo-doo, however, is another subject...). It's also Molly's last home, before we lost her in 2005, and the (near) birthplace of Maggie, whom we discovered as part of Star's litter on a hot August night only a few months later, just two units down. But while there's time and the sun is (reasonably) shining, it's time to get rolling on the real estate front. As in "All Quiet On..."

We called our real estate whiz--whom I'll here-on-forth refer to as, imaginatively, "Laura S"--who found us our current address after many months of hand-wringing and brow-furrowing--to pick her indefatigable brain as to what would be the perceived current value of this property, and two, how to even begin the seemingly impossible synchronious act of leaving one property for another (I think it involves string theory and the CERN particle accelerator, but I'm not sure).

Laura S remembered the curtains and the red walls on the main floor, which I took as "oh, so you didn't change a damn thing in eight years?!" (really, you should see them--they're nice curtains) and quoted us a pretty handsome figure as to what she thought the current turbulent housing market could command, post U.S. subprime woes.

Oh, the flood of jargon! Listings, CMHC fees, interest rates--all too grown up for me...I wanted to excuse myself and slink into the rumpus room to take Nico through a few more missions through Liberty City (will that reference mean anything years from now when the youngsters are reading this?)

And thanks to the onslaught of those home-porn reality shows on every other channel, it's not enough to simply stick a "for sale" sign on the front lawn any more and await the offers. Now, it's all about "showing"--that is, dressing the joint up for presentation, feng shui, Wyndham Hill CDs, and all that jazz. My head hit the pillow with a vision of some prissy guy who looks like Otho from "Beetlejuice" sniffing indignantly at my framed movie posters and collection of foreign Stephen King translations...