The Blog Is Dead (Long Live the Blog)

I can now be found at Spinning In a Miasma: www.spinningmiasma.blogspot.com. Cheers, y'all.

Survey: Desecration or Simply Updating

OK, so we have had this mirror for about ten years. Now I want to repaint the frame, because the salmon/pink color is too Miami Subs. D.Roosevelt says it was created by an artist (David Marsh), and therefore repainting would be desecration. What say you?

Don't Forget The View

The prior post contained a major omission: my favorite new teen rocker band, The View from Dundee Scotland. Here is their hit song, "Same Jeans,"which is about the fifth best song on the record, but has has my foot tapping on many a metro ride.

Quick Notes

Trial prep keeps me from blogging much, but two albums worth mentioning keep catching my ear on the ipod: Modest Mouse (does anyone hear some Talking Heads in there), and John Doe, he of X fame. A Year in the Wilderness is by far the best record by JD since he left X. Enjoy.

No. 23

Last night, I rode home with a trainload of people, a shockingly high number of whom were wearing jersies for the most famous No. 23 playing. By their accounts, he played 20 unremarkable minutes. But they were gratified to see him at all. Few seemed to care that DC won the game, 1-nil. (As with my Nationals, who took two from the Giants this week (and have won 7 games in August already), the team performance was lost in the face of an individual performance . . .)

Someone Call Jimmy Stewart

Sometimes the world can be falling apart and you have no idea.

OK, maybe that's a little melodramatic. But here I was working along today, righting wrongs (at least from my clients' perspective), when this email popped onto my screen:

Company having financial troubles. Not sure if it will survive.

The author -- my mortgage broker -- directed us to email him at home from now on.

Yikes. So, head for Google, and it turns out our mortgage company has been in the news. Its stock tumbled 90% in one day (Friday). It has been having troubles for some time. Today, its CEO announced the company would close Friday.

So, um, what happens to me? I have a contractor who is basically finished the house, and probably would like to get paid.

According to my account manager, there is no money to pay the draw we submitted. The bank ran out of cash.

And now they are closing.

(As an aside, how absurd is it that the only indication of trouble on their website is that they are "no longer accepting mortgage applications." Har.)

I called the customer service line, and the woman answering the phone was, no exaggeration, crying, when she answered the phone. She told me that my customer service agent would be there tomorrow. Somehow, given the news reports, I doubt it.

So, someone call Jimmy Stewart.

During & After

For fun, let's compare the front and back porches during the renovation (click here), to the front and back porches after the renovation: