Blackcap Blog

Published at 21:59 on 5 September 2014

After a half-year of keeping a close eye on the market, it’s becoming increasingly evident that housing available for purchase on Bainbridge Island breaks down to roughly three categories:

1. Large homes on large lots. More home and more lot than I could ever want or need, in fact.
2. Condos built one atop another, typically in a brutally modernist style (which I dislike) and with all-electric kitchens (I strongly prefer to cook with gas).
3. Townhomes of the sort I would like, but only a tiny number, demand vastly outpaces supply, and I have no interest in participating in a real-estate feeding frenzy that leaves me no time to do due diligence on my purchase.

In short, nothing suitable seems to really exist. Maybe I’ll get lucky and find something, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that any such result depends on getting lucky, i.e. the odds do not favor it.

There’s really no rentals that have everything on my list, but that’s not so important for a rental, because rental housing doesn’t come with the long-term commitment that owned housing does. And there are rentals that have more of what I want than my current rental does. They’re pretty scarce, but one comes on the market about every quarter.

So it’s looking increasingly like the Island is neither a short-term solution nor a long-term one but a medium-term one. That’s about what a better rental that still falls short of what I’d really like is worth.

Still better than Seattle proper; each time I visit, my general impression of Seattle tends to be that I’m glad I escaped that mess, and this impression is particularly strong every time I have to contend with the freeway system there or think about what an onerous budget obligation Seattle is getting itself into with their multi-billion-dollar boondoggle of a highway tunnel under downtown.

Not only will the latter cause taxes to be high (for something I didn’t want built in the first place), but the it will also sap the ability of Seattle to spend money improving its long-neglected mass transit infrastructure. So it seems inevitable that Seattle will continue to be lacking in what a city needs to be a livable place for me in the decades to come.

Thus, despite the advantages of there being more social activities of interest (which does have its temptations), it’s still not the sort of place I’d wish to live.

Published at 10:30 on 14 July 2014

I survived. Actually, the warmth was quite nice — provided I was sitting in the shade doing nothing and wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. The rub is, I was often hiking off-trail wearing enclosed shoes and long pants to protect me from thorny shrubs (of which there are many in that area).

This is the week of a big annual convention put on by my employer. Today’s attendance is being made unpleasant by two facts:

1. The sandals, which I had thought were not provoking my tendonitis, proving that they actually were this morning. (I hadn’t worn them for the past few days, going barefoot when not wearing enclosed shoes, and my sore toe had gotten better all the while. This morning, on the walk from the ferry to the convention center, it stared getting sore again.)
2. The pissy and uptight staff at the convention center, who are continually trying to order me to put shoes on. Sorry, not gonna happen. I’ll be damned if I re-injure myself and jeopardize my ability to lead a weekend hike just to comply with some uptight firms’ prejudice against bare feet. They can take their prejudice and stick it where the sun don’t shine.

Published at 09:32 on 9 July 2014

We’re in the middle of a long run of forecast above-normal temperatures and it’s absolutely delightful to be able to wear shorts and a sleeveless shirt and not feel the least bit cold.

But, there’s a caveat. More precisely, I love the sort of summer weather we have where I live. Which, being on an island surrounded by cool salt water is about five degrees cooler in summer than the nearest official reporting station. Which is Seattle. Which, in turn, has some of the coolest summers of any major US city.

The warm spell I’m savoring involves lows in the 50s and highs in the upper 70s to low 80s. Which in most of the USA would qualify as a cool spell or even a record cold spell for this time of the year.

I’ve never really liked hot weather, and the agreeable summers were one of the things that made this region so attractive to me decades ago when I was getting out of college.

Which makes the pending (or should I say impending) botanical survey near Leavenworth a bit ominous. Highs are forecast to be in the 95 to 100 degree range there in the next few days. Yuck. The survey will be at elevations about 1,000 feet higher, but we’re still talking about highs above 90 most days. Still yuck.

There won’t be much humidity, so it should cool off at night and won’t be as hellishly sweltering as, say, a Chicago heat wave. But nothing can make 95 degrees Fahrenheit comfortable, only somewhat less uncomfortable.

Published at 00:15 on 26 June 2014

Berry season has begun. The blackcaps* and best of all the thimbleberries† are ripening everywhere. Salmonberries have been ripe for several weeks now, but they don’t have the flavor of our other berries.

The wide variety of edible berries are one of the things I like best about this region. Many parts of the country are lucky to have one or two good wild edible berries. I can offhand think of nine types of native edible berries found on this island alone (so I’m probably overlooking a few), plus a couple of common introduced species.

* My namesake; I chose it because the species of blackcap they have in the Midwest is probably the first wild food I remember eating.

† A flavor, which together with the thoroughly non-native durian, I probably crave more than any other.

Published at 13:50 on 30 May 2014

Apropos this, the unit that’s $31K more expensive isn’t even nice. In fact, it’s in worse shape than its neighbor, because it’s been smoked in, so quite literally it stinks. It’s going to need to have all the carpeting removed and a thorough deep cleaning (every surface from the ceiling down will need to be scrubbed) and repainting. The other unit only really needed some de-carpeting.

Even for someone who doesn’t hate carpeting like I do, the fact that it has carpet which was installed in the past few years is irrelevant. Virtually nobody wants to live with carpet that reeks of cigarette smoke, and such an odor is virtually impossible to remove without removing the carpeting itself.

The seller probably thinks s/he is entitled to be compensated for the cost of installing the carpet. That’s not how markets work. If you invest your money unwisely, you can and probably will suffer financial loss. And spending a lot of money on expensive carpet and then smoking inside is an unwise investment: two-year-old carpet that’s been ruined by the stench of cigarette smoke is every bit as much dumpster fodder as dated, twenty-year-old, threadbare carpet.

So it’s almost certainly not going to sell anytime soon, because the seller is sufficiently detached from reality to believe she can get a price anywhere near what she is asking. It’s going to linger on the market for months, either selling when the seller finally accepts reality, or not selling and being withdrawn from the market.

Either way, I won’t be moving into it any time soon.

 

Published at 20:38 on 28 May 2014

Since I missed out on being one seller’s doormat, there hasn’t been anything even remotely of interest come on the local market until this week. Now there’s things of interest, but only remotely.

One is in an area of 4-plex condos that I’d actually jump on in a heartbeat if the right one came up. Unfortunately, this isn’t one of the right ones. Instead of backing onto a pond like some of its neighbors, it backs onto a commercial parking lot, complete with dumpsters. Which means commercial trash collection making enough noise to raise the dead at or before 6AM at least twice a week. No thanks.

The other is actually right next door to the one I linked about in the first paragraph, and is in fact its floor plan an exact mirror image of the other. However, its the interior is nowhere near as tasteful, and the seller is asking $31,000 more for it than his or her neighbor did. Because, of course, it’s almost-brand-new banality and he/she expects to get his/her money back. The latter may happen, but it won’t happen with my money; the only way I’ll make an offer on this property is if it sits unsold for a while, then I’ll make a lowball one.

And frankly, it’s not $31K nicer even if one discounts aesthetics and rates the two interiors the same. It’s about the same age as the other interior. So it looks like this seller is looking for a doormat, too.

Published at 20:20 on 28 May 2014

Once you start getting these in the mail, you are officially “old”.

 

Actually, I’m surprised it took that long. I’ve heard they typically show up before one’s 50th birthday. This didn’t show up until after my 51st.

And I plan on joining, because the AARP is one of the more effective lobbying organizations fighting against proposals to gut Social Security.

 

Published at 09:20 on 22 May 2014

You’ve helped to cement my move out of your city that I made last year by helping to ensure that I won’t be moving back any time soon, thanks to making the sort of housing that would appeal to me illegal to build.

I’ve never really been able to understand this Seattle mindset that there’s basically only two types of housing that residents should be offered: large houses on large lots and apartments/condos crammed up against busy streets. And if you don’t want (or cannot afford) the former (what’s wrong with you, weirdo?), then you deserve the latter. It’s an attitude that befits a neurotic suburb, not a major city.

Oh well, good riddance.

Published at 12:39 on 3 May 2014

I made a strong and generous offer on a condo that actually met most of my standards yesterday. It was not accepted.

So be it. It’s a competitive market for buyers, so I’m willing to make strong offers promptly. I am not, however, willing to be a seller’s doormat.

This particular seller wanted an open-ended rent-back at generous terms (basically, I’d run a slight loss while she was my tenant). If that’s the sort of crap I have to agree to in order to become a homeowner in today’s market, I don’t want to be one.

Mind you, I’m not giving up quite yet. I’m still keeping an eye on the market and will make offers on other suitable properties as they become listed.

But if I keep running into stuff like this, forget it. Ownership is merely a tool, not an end goal. Other tools exist.

Published at 13:45 on 2 May 2014

Here’s some comments on this gallery of photos released by the Establishment media. I hope they don’t add or delete pictures and thereby change the numbering. I suppose I could have mirrored them here, but that would have taken time, particularly if I had mirrored the captions (which are truly required as part of this critique).

No. 3. This is missing the context of what happened. The “superheroes” decided to first attack the protesters (myself amongst them) without warning or any apparent provocation. Note the partial view of the red “superhero” 3/4 of the way up and left of center; he had just charged without warning. The purple one was being tackled before he could likewise charge. I know; I was there. That’s my bicycle in the picture.

No. 7. Note the passive voice, as if the pepper spray suddenly materialized as a force of nature out of nowhere, sprayed by nobody.

No. 15 is actually pretty fair; it talks about “a protester” smashing the window, not “an anarchist”. Yes, there were many anarchists in that crowd, but that march had no political affinity test one had to pass to be eligible to participate in it, and a fair number had decided on the spur of the moment to participate. Absent a positive identification of the individual who damaged that window, and his or her political orientation, it’s not possible to say if it was smashed by an anarchist or not. I assume here that the window actually was smashed, and not damaged in some previous incident well prior to the march; perhaps I am being overly generous in my assumption.

No. 18. A “tussle”. No, he attacked without warning.

No. 22. Note the street sign in the background: 6th Avenue. That’s west of the Convention Center, where the attack pictured in No. 3 took place. The march was heading west at the time. So that photo was post-attack, an attack by the individual being flipped off. Offensive though it may be, a raised middle finger is not a violent act and is in fact protected free expression, and the context in which that gesture was made means it actually showed a degree of restraint (an obscene gesture was made, instead of a retaliatory attack).

No. 31. But why were the media censored? They don’t say. Answer: corporate media have shared their full footage with law enforcement in the past. So their cameras are effectively police spy cameras.

No. 41. This guy looks more “stunned” than “enraged” to me. If he was “screaming” wouldn’t his mouth be wide open? Instead he appears to be biting his lip in restraint.

No. 46. This caption actually appears to be fair. So far as I could tell, the driver of that car was not acting aggressively; it merely got caught up in the march (such things are bound to happen on unpermitted marches). I didn’t like the jumping on cars bit myself. (I also didn’t see much of it; basically this once and that was it.)