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Candyce and I had a nice dinner tonight at her house. We were planning on eating by candle light on the back patio, but the sky opened up and unleashed a massive rainstorm. Although we were discouraged that our plans had changed, the steady rain added some romance to the night that we never would’ve predicted.

Now let me talk about the food, because it was damn good. I sliced and toasted a baguette and then layered brie cheese with Granny Smith apples. It was so good that the two of us downed two massive plates full. Candyce picked up two salads from LGO, which are as good of salads as you can find on earth. Throughout the whole night, we sipped a tasty red wine from Trader Joes, a wine that rose to celebrity status because it is so good and so cheap. It earned a nickname of “Two Buck Chuck.” I mean seriously, a whole bottle costs less than a latte at Starbucks. You can’t beat that. For desert, I served lemon gelatto.

Throughout dinner, I couldn’t help but look at Candyce across the table and think about how many guys would like to be in my chair. Candyce is such a beautiful, smart, funny girl. She cares about me and supports me. She believes in me. My life is so good. This is the kind of life I always dreamed about when I was young. I am the guy in my 20s that I always wanted to be.

As nice as tonight was, Valentine’s Day seems like a quaint, shallow occasion compared to our upcoming wedding. And that’s the real reason why I left early tonight. I can’t distract her because she’s planning for a wedding and finishing her senior thesis. So I helped clean up the kitchen and then disappeared out the front door by 9 PM.

I took down this website a week or so ago because I wanted to add a new section of a map that shows where I’ve traveled over the years. This proved to take more time that I thought (just like everything else in life, right?) But I’ve enjoyed adding the travel adventures throughout the years because it helps connect memories in my mind. I have journals from those years, but it’s a different experience entirely to to see the flight paths exploding out of a city.

It’s made me curious about how I could recall other memories. I don’t know, maybe by making play lists of my favorite music at the end of each month. Or have good archives of digital photos or something. Part of me thinks that these are bad ideas because my life would become painfully boring if all I do is spend my evenings trying to record and organize my memories.

Actually, I feel really uncool right now, so I’m going to stop writing and find something more important to do.

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3 hrs later

I remembered that Candyce is having a pre-wedding party at my house this Saturday, so I scrambled around the house cleaning and organizing everything. That was three long, hard hours of cleaning.

It’s Sunday, the second of two precious days when I can get my life together. Monday through Friday are pretty much about work, but the weekends are for me.

Several times throughout today, I tried to figure out all that I feel so accomplished. I always get a lot done on the weekends, but I never feel so accomplished. I work and I work but I never feel like I’ve done enough. But all day today, I’ve looked at the clock with disbelief that there is so much time left in the day. This is a big deal to me. It’s like a dream come true!

And then I think back to my day, and the only new item on the schedule was a 45 minute run around the neighborhood.

• 09:00 Woke up listening to NPR news, got ready for the day
• 09:30 – 10:15 Went for a run through my neighborhood
• 10:30 - 11:00 Laundry
• 11:00 - 11:30 Went to coffee shop and read NY Times Sunday paper
• 11:30 - 03:15 PM Did laundry, ironed shirts, cleaned kitchen, washed many many dishes, moved all framed artwork upstairs, cleaned garage, took out trash, scrubbed bathroom, watched This Old House.
• 3:15 - 4:30 Met Realtor at my old house to inspect the roof repairs I made
• 4:30 - 5:00 Prayed in Chapel
• 5:00 - 7:30 Mass
• 7:30 - 9:30 Watched Suns game at Mac’s
• 9:30 - 10:30 Hung out with Candyce, flipped through 944 and ReadyMade magazines
• 10:30 – now Writing this journal

So maybe I’ve discovered the secret to feeling better about the things that I do. If this is true, then it’s a shame that I dropped exercize from my lifestyle for most of the past 10 years because I believed it got in my way of accomplishing larger goals.

A couple weeks ago I watched two reality shows about buying, fixing up, and selling homes for a quick profit. The first show is a couple years old, aptly called Flip This House. The latecomer to the game on another network is a the same concept with a me-too name: Flip That House. I put the power of Tivo to work and recorded both of the shows.

My house was actually in the final steps of selling, so I decided to watch these shows with a new found knowledge of my own real estate ordeals. Plus, these shows were filmed in the heat of the housing market, and I was interested in the time capsule of emotion and circumstances of the investors.

I would not have had the fortitude to watch a show like that at any point over the last 9 months because there was nobody buying my very pretty house. Watching the show would’ve made me feel foolish, jealous, or mocked by the “profits” that splash across the screen with every upgrade to the home. But I’ve been on a couple reality shows myself, so I know that the creators of the show are selling entertainment, not facts. Things were edited in and out of my life and millions was believed as historical fact. So what I’m about to write isn’t because I’m taking these shows as 30-minute seminars on becoming a millionaire. I’m just comparing my own reality to that of a TV show. With that disclaimer out of the way…

Flip THIS House

This show was interesting to me because it is filmed in Atlanta, a city I lived in and loved for 4 years of college. I watched the housing market there do amazing things after the 1996 Olympics from my dorm window. Plus, the show followed business partners that were livin’ the ATL rapper lifestyle, albeit a more tame, Real Estate version of bling. They had my full attention.

The first thing that made me doubt the authenticity of this show was how little they had to pay these contractors to do work. If the price tag on the screen were real, it’s obvious these workers were more interested in being on TV than getting paid what they are worth. I know this because I could’ve had many “girlfriends” when I was on the Real World and looked like quite the player, but I knew those girls were just gold diggers looking for the spotlight. I also know this because nobody puts all new drywall in a house for a mere $600.

Some of the other workers’ pay was suspicious too. The 3 “day laborers” were paid $200 total for a full day of cleaning up the huge, overgrown front yard. In my neighborhood, 1 migrant workers charges $200 for a day’s worth of yard work. And that’s your basic dude with hand trimmers and a saw. All in all, this house was entirely remodeled for $12,000 which just seems impossible to me. New roof, walls, fixtures, the yard? No way. A roofer recently wanted $500 to do 2 hours worth of work that I thought could be done in 45 minutes.

The first part of the dollar equation makes me suspicious, but I’m just ask skeptical about how the creators of the show calculate the “added value” they splash across the screen with every upgrade. Some things are easy to calculate because home appraisers do it all the time, like granite counter tops. Those are standard luxury items in a home and they know how to price them. But they’re quoting “added value” over things like new paint over the exterior bricks, and it doesn’t even look that pretty. So where’s the value there? And what happens when your bargain labor installs the cheap carpet poorly. No appraiser will factor that as an upgrade, but the TV show always does.

But what I was most disappointed in was how the president of the investment company was cheap. He nickeled and dimed everyone at every step of the way. I understand that you have to watch your money, but you also can’t take advantage of people for your own gain. I’ve dealt with some greedy bastards, and when you are on the other end of one of their “deals”, you know the full story. They act like they’re trying to protect their money from being stolen, but in reality, they’re stealing from everyone else.

Of course I know that the creators of these shows need drama, and sometimes your only adversary is that you are running out of time and money. In reality, when construction is running smoothly and there are no termites hidden in the attic, life is pretty good. It’s the kind of thing you see on American Chopper. They don’t have any real “deadlines.” Nobody is going to cancel their order because the bike wasn’t done in time. They probably already have paid for half of it anyway. But episode after episode is about the bike builders “battling against the clock.”

But if his greed is a reality and not a TV fabrication, there could be greater problems beneath the surface. A greedy real estate investor can forget that there are real people who are buying your homes. They forget that this home is their dream where their family will grow. They’ve worked hard and saved money for this very moment when they get to buy a home. To date, I’ve only seen one episode (last year) where an investor actually had to do structural changes to the home to make it more safe. Every other episode has been the story of an investor making cosmetic changes. I understand that not every house has a villain that needs to be defeated before the investor can sell the home on a clean conscience. And a buyer shouldn’t be so swayed by a pretty surface that they forget to look deep into the home. But a greed is greed, and someone will always suffer at the expense of your greed.

Flip THAT House

The second story was a young lady from LA who did not seem too bright at all. She had no confidence or style. Rather blah. I’m not judging her for the sake of being critical, but she didn’t seem to have what it took to navigate a tough, competitive market. At least the other dude had some charisma on his side which made you believe that not everyone could do the same job.

She bought homes in the LA area, put in new counter tops, moved some walls, rolled new paint, and replaced the yard–your standard fixer-upper to-do list. At the beginning of the episode, she moaned about having to pay $500 to a landscaper to move the sprinklers away from the sidewalk. She looked into the camera and explained that, “set backs like this can make a project tough.” It seemed like a small loss to get all worked up over, considering I had about 20 of those setbacks. But we’ve both been there, so I felt bad for her. But that pity disappeared when she ended up selling the house 6 months later for a profit of $250,000. Yes, she was upset about $500, and ended up making a quarter million.

I don’t have time to consider the quality of work she did on the home and all of that. But I do want to talk about that the TV calculator of profit is that it never factors in real dollars that you have to spend when you sell a house. First you have to pay the buyer’s Realtor 3%, which in the case of the LA house works out to be $27,000. If you are using a Realtor to represent yourself, that figure doubles to $54,000. That’s 1/5th of the profit made off the home already gone. In the negotiations, you can might end up paying the buyer’s closing costs, which can be $5000.

Another reality is the property taxes she had to pay out over that 6 month period, which I would’ve been at least $6000 in California. Then you have to add in costs of electricity, water, the security system, and landscaping fees every month. That’s another $2000 over 6 months. Once the home is in escrow, the buyer is obligated to fix up outstanding problems with the house, like leaky faucets, masonry cracks, and ill-fitted doors. Now in a good market like she was in, most buyers ignore that stuff because they’re happy to be homeowners and don’t want them to sell the house to someone else. But those little things can quickly add up to a few thousand dollars in repairs. So now that $250,000 is down to a less than $180,000. And then you have taxes to pay on that $180,000 because you never lived in the home as a primary residence and you have no loop holes. I don’t know what that would be, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it knocked off another $20,000.

That’s still a lot of money, don’t get me wrong. With or without a TV calculator doing your math, you’re gonna make money. And that’s what this lady did. In the closing credits, she stood confidently in her own grand home and shared that it was a “lucrative endeavor.” At the same time, I was both jealous of her fortune, but prophetic with my fast-forward knowledge that this would be the last time she’d mention “lucrative” in this decade. Who knows, maybe I’m wrong. We still have 3 years left before the decade runs out. Maybe there will be a blogger mocking me with the same hindsight from the year 2010.

As for the future of these two shows? They certainly aren’t going to air any shows filmed in 2006. It would look much like my own life. A nice house sitting on a nice street. A for sale sign out front and nobody knocking on the door.

I’ve spent the past several days in Southern California for my buddy Adam’s wedding. Here’s how it went…

Thursday’s Bachelor’s Party

The best part of the bachelor’s party was hanging out with Carolyna’s sylver-haired Mexican father in his garage. We shot pool, listened to music, and talked about cars. Within 20 feet of his garage door were several classics in different phases of perfection: ‘56 Chevy Bel Air 2 door hard top, ‘65 Impala SS Convertible, ‘78 Superbeatle Convertible, and a another mid-60’s GM convertible. It was awesome.

The second half of the bachelor’s party was cigars and video games. I don’t get into the games, so after one cigar, I fell asleep on the couch, only to be waken up every 5 minutes by celebrations of video game victory. Grown men with cigars bobbing out their mouth, swinging a Nintendo Wii controller around their heads in celebration of triumph. By three in the morning my eyes and lungs began to burn from cigar smoke.
Friday’s Night on the Titanic

Johnny, Candyce, and I got a room on the Queen Mary on Friday night. This was quite a treat because the Queen Mary is bigger than the Titanic. There’s really no other way to describe except to compare it to the Titanic. It was glamorous, mysterious, and majestic. But of course, the Titanic sunk, which wasn’t much comfort as I brushed my teeth before going to bed. I peeked through the port-hole window before retiring for the night, and it was a beautiful site: Long Beach Skyline twinkling across the bay. And this was from the fourth or fifth level on the boat, which made me fee like I was in a high rise myself.

Saturday’s Mooning

While we groomsman were getting photographed in front of the church early in the afternoon, a teenager boy jumped out of a Mustang filled with friends and mooned us. I thought it was kind of funny, mostly because he had a hairy butt and he looked really dumb. We laughed at him.

After the wedding Mass, friends and family were in front of the church taking photos, telling stories, and giving hugs. Taking more pictures. It was the perfect scene. I was in the Escalade limo with the wedding party celebrating the new couple when we saw another white Mustang pass by the limo, slowing down the closer it got to the church doors. A groomsman yelled out, “That’s them again!!” In a half-second, three of us shot out of the limo like bullets out of the barrel of a rifle.

I charged up to the guy right as he pulled down his pants and began rotating his butt towards the church. At this moment, my adrenaline turned to anger. I mean, there are little kids here with their family, and this stupidass teenager is could scar ‘em with his hairy butt. So I got up in his face and started barking and threating. Soon there another groomsman behind me backing me up. The mooner’s buddy in the passenger’s seat opened up his door to help out his accomplice, and Bart quickly kneed the door shut: “No you don’t.”

This is where it just got stupid. Mr. Shotgun told Bart from inside the car that he liked Bart’s tuxedo. He was trying to mock us, but strangely enough, it sounded like he was giving a sincere compliment. The girl in the back seat was panicking, her hands in her face. Moony acted cocky and confused, muttering words of confusion like somehow I’d cornered the wrong guy. I barked some f-bombs and he finally got in the car. He didn’t have the courage to peel out. And Mr. Shotgun gave one more insult, which again, came off as a compliment: “You guys look really nice in your tuxes!”

This all went down in less than ten seconds.

Saturday Night Fever on The Big Ship

The wedding reception was on the Queen Mary’s main deck near the front of the ship. The music was great and the party was hoppin’. When I needed some fresh air, I stepped onto the deck of the ship and leaned against the railing to enjoy the ocean breeze. I promised myself I would not say “I’m the king of the world.” I kept my promise.

A car full of us left the party and drove out of Orange County down to Carlsbad. Everyone felt like they had to talk about the wedding because it seemed like the right thing to do, but all I could do was stay quiet and try to avoid getting run over by every other car and SUV on the highway. I rented the cheapest car I could get, which ended up being a Chevy Aveo, just a couple feet larger in length and width than a go-kart. I could feel every bump in the road through those tiny tires. When you are that small and low, everyone is out to get you. Headlights burned my eyes from behind non-stop for two hours. I was in an exhaustion-induced delirium the whole drive. I promised Adam I’d pray a rosary for him, so I prayed my Hail Mary’s in my head.

We finished in Carlsbad. Danny thought Johnny and I were robbers in the middle of the night, so he flipped out. We laughed. I took of my tux vest, stubbed my toe on a heavy suitcase in the dark. I rolled over on a mattress to moan over the pain and fell asleep within seconds.