Houses @ MindSay

Real estate investment news site BiggerPockets.com believes that both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae - the massive federal lending companies - are going to fail and require an injection of government funds.

If that is accurate, then the US may only be experiencing the beginnings of its mortgage crisis, with far worse days ahead for the real estate market as even fewer people are able to secure loans to buy new homes.

BiggerPockets suggests in its analysis that young families starting out today should hold off on buying and look for rental houses in the short term.

We didn't take any pictures of the major damage.  Simply because we didn't go near the major damage and the fact we were detoured around the major damage and accidents. 

 

The first picture is of down trees near someones house.  They got really lucky none of their trees went on their house!

 

The second picture is the back of my van!  It was luckly a clean shatter break!  The bad thing about it was all the glass was IN my van!

 

The third picture is of one of the down trees at the zoo!

 

the fourth picture is a destroyed bean field and the fifth picture is a destroyed corn field.  The bean field MAY have a chance of coming back on it's own but nobody knows for sure!

 

The sixth picture is one of the rural fremont NE fire trucks we followed into Fremont!  That truck doesn't get used much and is usually for parade routes only but they keep it operational when something like this happens if they need more trucks like yesterday. 

 

The seventh picture is someone's house on a country road we attempted to take.  They had down trees all over the place, busted out windows, and all that tin in their yard is from someone's tin shed.  There was no houses near them and that tin lined their tree line and one peice of the tin was up on their roof! 

 

The eight picture is of the Platte River.  Looks real pretty huh!  Well this is a very rare picture of the Platte.  Most of the time the Platte is NOT this high and is full of sandbars.  As you can see it is very high and yes a few sandbars but you are careful you can usually ride a dirt bike, fourwheeler or even walk across the platte in certain areas!  Not this year!

 

The ninth picture is someone elses farm/ranch!  their over all house was okay but their field and picket fence that lead up to their house and their corn field destroyed!

 

The tenth picture is of the detour stop sign!  As you can see it was broken in half!

 

The eleventh picture is not a very good picture but it shows an over turned upside down irrigation system.  Every other field had one like this but this was the closet we could get to one!

 

this has to be the most interesting weekend, not once did i think about school, exams, papers and what-not...

my daddy came for me thursday evening and gianna tagged along... that little runt is adorable, we played mario on the way back, & she was better at it...

friday morning i helped my mother make some good friday food : lentejas, capirotada, nopales con camaron and tortas de camaron!!! yummy!!! not everyone could come over for the noon meal, but they came after work...

my flaca came over and brought neelah, it was my parents first time seeing their great grandchild in person!!! she is so freaken adorable... i went home with flaca and called babe to come over... he brought the dogs and hooch was trying to hump bruce!!! it was the cutest thing cause bruce just laid there, he's too lazy to get him off or anything...

we all went to dave & busters and i was almost winning the bowling match, but for some reason all my balls went to the gutter :( babe and i spent the night at flacas...

saturday morning we went back to his place and drove around looking at houses. omg!!! there were some really nice houses, but once we got there they looked like crap!!! the one that had the jacuzzi was the worst of them all, but the inside of the house was just redone...

we all went to a wedding down in Rosenberg, and it felt so different doing my own make up and all that good stuff. ever since i could remember flaca was the one to dress me and do me up, but i gotta learn how to do it on my own... omg the freaken drive was sooo long!!! it was about an hour and something away!!! we got home around 1 and we were effing tired so we all passed out...

easter was a sad day for me :( i am so used to spending the whole day with the fam, so it sucked... but i guess it's just a part of growing up and living our own lives... we went with the realtor to look at a few more houses, one of the houses was broken into, but it was nice and had an awesome backyard :( our current favorite house is the one with a private pool, the interior of the house was recently redone, so that's cool... everyhouse we went into, the realtor would mention "the baby's room" lmao!!! poor babe...

i finally got home around 5 and my dad was just chilling..i get so emotional when my dad is having a bad day... so yeah we bbq'd for a bit and talked about the houses... my parents are almost done with the kitchen... my daddy has done the arches, so all he has to do is some sheet rock spots and give it a good caulking...

my daddy is awesome!!! babe is coming for me this weekend, cause we got tickets to the O'reily spring nationals...

okay I confess it....it takes a visit by relatives to get me to thoroughly clean the house. we are pretty organized and only have a few areas of entropy at a time but i have a pretty high tolerance for my own dirt like bathtub rings or spots on the floor. but today we both really CLEANED. down on your knees scrubbing in little corners cleaning that you do for a tour of homes or maybe if you are considering selling your home. or in case the queen drops in.

 

 

when i was working full time i was shamed into hiring a cleaning service. I was at a staff meeting and the head of the center  ( a very  borderline MD PhD who was brilliant and cruel but for some unknown reason didn't give me as much crap as she gave others) was taking about her cleaning woman. I said I had this ethical thing about paying someone to do work I could do but didn't want to do.... she countered that I was full of shit, I just didn't want to a paye a livable wage to a cleaning person. so........ the next week I hired someone at a very comfortable for them rate and stopped worrying about toilets and dust kitties etc. to put it bluntly ethics went poof and i threw away the rubber gloves.

 

But when I went to part time I didn't feel that I should use money that way and besides the cleaning woman I had first in Bama had OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) and was FANTASTIC. but she had to quit because it was feeding her disorder. My next cleaning woman, Carol, a very  nice jehovah's witness , wanted me to be part of her life and all i wanted was an anonymous relationship with the cleaner to whom I wrote weekly checks. And she was an perfectionistic as Ann, so i thought i could have that dirty a house for free.

 

Anyway I digress. oh hell. why not  digress? I wanted to tell y'all about a writer from the 40's who is great fun and sort of invented the modern spy novel.. Eric Ambler. My husband introduced me to his novel a Coffin for Demetrious and as you read it you can just imagine Sidney Greenstreet saying the lines.  it's fun to find a new/old writer who might be less formulaic and writes well.

 

all of this is to do anything but return to cleaning for "los hespuedes" I still have two toilets and two bathroom floors to go.  We have five toilets in this house. do you think it excessive? (I won't clean the studio  toilet--- no one but Abs and i see it.) but before I sign off I wanted to mention that the section of the Lewis and Clark trail that heads north from Cannon Beach is stupendously beautiful although lots of ups and downs and some scrambling and LARGE mucky areas after every rain. but it goes through old growth Sitka spruce forest and every now and then opens to amazing views of the pacific. This is where we saw a bald eagle preening itself in a half barren pine. very very very nice.  and then we stopped in a little gallery and bougt some art to add to our wall of western photogrpahers in the den. 

 

speaking of photographs.... the mindsay blogger paviel does gorgeous work at very reasonable prices and he has begun to sell his work.  I bought one and it's hanging over my desk in the kitchen.  so check him out and get the link to see more of his work. and make him sign it, he might be famous one day.

Two days ago I found a well thumbed paperback in my grandfather’s library entitled Xanadu: The Computerized Home of Tomorrow and How It Can Be Yours Today! This very interesting book was written by Roy Mason, Lane Jennings and Robert Evans and was published by Acropolis Books in November 1983. The literature documented a foam house! Imagine - a house designed and constructed almost entirely out of polyurethane foam.

When I went online to learn more about this amazing structure I was surprised to discover that it was demolished on October 7-10, 2005. It seems the future has come and gone and left behind only a foamy memory.

 

Architect Roy Mason built the house in Orlando, Florida. It consisted of domed pods that he constructed by spraying polyurethane foam onto removable molds. The quick-setting material apparently hardened in a couple of days, forming perfect seals around the doors and windows which were set directly into the foam. The resulting structure was said to be so well insulated that it required only a quarter of the energy for heating and cooling as a similar-sized conventional house. 

 

But Xanadu's most revolutionary features were tucked away inside the foam shell. It was crammed with every electronic gadget imaginable. "No one's really looked at the house as a total organic system," said Mason in 1983; he was also the architecture editor of The Futurist magazine. "The house can have intelligence and each room can have intelligence."

 

Xanadu's kitchen, for example, was equipped with dietitian programs that could plan and prepare well-balanced meals for all family members depending on their height, weight, sex, age, and levels of activity. If you came home from a busy day at work and informed the computer-dietitian that you skipped lunch and nibbled on a candy bar instead, it would prepare a supper based on the nutrients you missed. An “auto-chef” moved food from the refrigerator to the microwave oven to the dining table, and computers kept track of the grocery inventory so you know what to replace. The auto-chef even regulated the ambience of the dining room to match the meal, adjusting the lighting and background music to complement a Mexican dinner, for instance.

 

Some of that food was even grown by the house itself. Xanadu had a built-in greenhouse. Naturally, a microcomputer monitored the watering of plants, artificial sunlight, ventilation, humidity, soil content, and the shutters and awnings.

 

So what happened?

 

Well although the house apparently drew crowds of upwards of a thousand people a day, nobody was impressed enough to order one for themselves. The rooms were too small and the plumbing was never that good. Apparently tour guides began to start making excuses in the late 1980’s and the frequency of complaints increased as the micro computers inside grew more and more outdated. When mold appeared inside the domes the whole installation became very smelly... It was finally closed to the public in July 1996 and a family of squatters made it their home until 2001. Actually police complained that they couldn’t keep the vagrants out - they could literally break and enter the structure in a dozen different places.

 

Today polyurethane foam is everywhere – it’s in the walls and ceilings of our houses, inside the mattresses that we sleep on, in our sofas and car seats and even funky shoes are constructed out of foam these days. Nobody seems surprised at seeing things made entirely out of foam anymore. Perhaps that’s because Zanadu, the foam house, was the grand innovative experiment that made all these other applications seem commonplace.