The Oppenheimer Report -- 1/9/12

About two weeks ago, the logs were delivered for the new pump house, but as I began writing this report last Thursday they still sat neatly piled on our side yard. Thankfully the ground is frozen, because part of that heavy load was sitting atop our septic bed. Bad weather and then the holidays postponed building plans. All the logs were tarped, but snow makes any outdoor building project that much harder, and with the lake effects we sometimes get off Georgian Bay, we were racing against Mother Nature to get this building up. To complicate matters, the sub-zero temperatures of late interfere with the proper operation of the hydraulic equipment on the stacking crane. Thankfully, Friday was mild and they were able to get the crane down our driveway and the logs stacked. This morning (Monday) I awoke to the sound of a chainsaw as our carpenter made a few last minute adjustments to the roof beams and evened out the tails. Memories of the construction of the main house came back to haunt me. People build up here all winter, and in fact, when we began the main house, the builder was talking about enclosing the entire project in one of those heated inflatable structures. That never happened, nor did many other things that builder promised us, but the house was finally built, albeit with many setbacks. I have clear memories of the head carpenter, up on a scaffold adjusting the logs for the roof turrets, in a snowstorm shortly before Christmas. With a three inch long icicle of frozen snot dangling from his bright red nose, he looked down at me with an indescribable look of frustration, and I just shrugged. Custom log homes are hard enough to build in warm weather.

At present there has been quite a lot of activity on my parents’ house in Buffalo, especially considering the season, and with any luck, we might entertain an acceptable offer soon. Before we listed, I ordered a conservative fair market appraisal of the house, because I wanted a realistic benchmark with which to work. We’ve had several offers, and one we are now considering, but one was a real lowball. They say you should not get personal about selling your real estate, but that has proven harder than I expected. People come in and make ill-informed, subjective comments about your home in an attempt to justify their unreasonable offers. In a down market, you just suck it up and expect the bottom feeders, but it’s tough to watch your childhood home being offered to people who have no respect for it’s value. I know I should just shrug it off and leave the aggravation to our very capable agent, but I can’t help feeling somebody is screwing with my memories. When I sold my house in Buffalo, long after moving up to Toronto, I sold it in a soft market. The lady who bought the house was, how shall I put this delicately, an odious, despicable and unreasonable bitch. In retrospect, I was right to cut bait, and I still made money on the house. Nevertheless, when I listed the house, my first home and the one I’d lived in for over fifteen years, I naively hoped the new owner would be good karma. More often than not, the sale of one‘s home is not a pleasant experience. I found myself secretly hoping that the garage, which was becoming a parallelogram and in need of some serious shoring up, would collapse the day after closing. I even entertained the option of helping it along with a few well placed M-80’s.

I’ve got an old friend from my boarding school days who lives down in Vero Beach, and he is one of my most consistent sources of off-color internet humor. “Harve” as we call him (not his real name) sent me one that made me chuckle when I opened up my email this morning. The caption reads: “I opened my window and what did I see?” When I scrolled down there was the moving image of a snowman fornicating doggie style with another snowman, and the caption reads: “F-ing snow!!!” Another winner came to me several days ago in the form of a You Tube link on Facebook, and it was a video of a mariachi band performing Pink Floyd’s famous song The Wall. I saw that video and it made me belly laugh because it reminded me of a vacation I took long ago with my pal Bob down in Cancun. Every evening as we capitalized on the 2 for 1 happy hour in our hotel (“… but senior, you realize that when you order four drinks it is really eight?!”) we were treated to live music by some local Mexican drum machine band playing top forty hits from America. We watched the lovely young female vocalist sing the Beatles tune Yesterday, playing the entire musical accompaniment with one finger on her keyboard, every night for a week. By the end of the week, usually after our fourth or fifth bourbon, we were quietly singing along, waving one finger in the air: “Yes-tah-daay , all ma trouble seem so fah away, now it seem as though they heah to staaay, oh Ah bu-lieve in yes-tah-day.” “Mammaries, Light the corners of my mind…”

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2011 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED