How Does Your Garden Grow?: OWW. Amending Soil Hurts

I have complained on this blog many times about my obstinate, heavy, non-draining, angry, rock-filled clay soil. For this year's fall planting season I decided to do something about it. Before planting the 472 tulip, daffodil, pink oxalis and grape hyacinth bulbs that I accidentally bought this summer, I decided to dig 3 big flower beds, get rid of all the dirt and refill the beds with luscious, dark store-bought soil (I ended up planting 646 bulbs in all).

Like every other project I take on, it turned out to be WAY MORE WORK than I had ever imagined. There are 3 flowerbeds, each one is about 3 feet wide, approx. 20 feet long and one foot deep. Each bed holds approximately 1 gajillion pounds of heavy clay. At first my husband and I thought we could knock out the project over a few days. Sure, the digging wasn't fun and I am constantly mortified by how much stronger he is than I am, but we were making progress. Until Lawn Waste Trash Day. The guys didn't even attempt to take our 8 bags of heavy clay away. Instead, they put a big embarrassing neon green sticker on one bag that said "WRONG. LAWN CLIPPINGS ONLY." Blast. Now we had a problem because even though we could dig all day, we did not have the means to haul away 3 gajillion pounds of heavy clay.

I set to work through Craigslist and found some guys who would come out to dig the holes and haul the dirt. They worked for 10 hours digging and hauling. The poor guys didn't even have a pickax, so I let them use mine. Here is what one of the driveway beds looked like before:

and after:


I know it's hard to tell, but a foot down is deep. This is a picture of one of the workers standing in the hole:



This is the "short" bed at only 15 feet:


This bed, which fronts on the street, is longer than the car! Now it's filled with drowned tulips and topped with pansies.

As the guys finished digging a bed, my husband and I started to fill it with large bags of gypsum, soil conditioner and mushroom compost. We do not have a truck or a limitless supply of cash to spend on dirt, so after about 40 bags of dirt dumped into the gaping maw of earth made no dent in the work, we decided to mix in some of the original dirt. You have to use hoes and rakes to mix the compost, soil conditioner, gypsum and clay. It is hard work. We were covered with dirt when we finally came inside at 11:30pm and we were in unspeakable pain. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to peel off soil-caked clothing. It even hurt to lie down.

My only comfort was watching episode 3 of Glee on my Apple TV and drinking tea spiked with vodka (which, by the way, is divine).

How Does Your Garden Grow?: Cercospora Leaf Spot

Seriously, dear readers, I'm about to toss my remaining hydrangea plants into the kindling pile.

You may recall when they were ravaged by mushroom root rot. Out of 9 original hydrangea, 6 of them survived the mushrooms only to be ravaged by something called cercospora leaf spot which also hitched a ride here from the nursery. The fungus doesn't have the decency to just kill the plants, it keeps them in this semi-weakened form where they are 1/2 yellow, 1/2 green and will not thrive or flower in the spring. The disease attacks the bottom leaves, and not matter how many I ctu off, there always new bottom leaves to get spotted, turn yellow, wither away and die. I'm advised to get a high nitrogen fungicide to kill the spores. I really feel like I'm in a bad relationship with my hydrangeas. We both know it's not working; we've grown apart but no one has the courage to just call it quits.

I'm not ready to break up just yet, though. I'm going to get the fungicide. We've fought through mushroom root rot and ravenous slugs, surely we can beat this leaf spot together. But if we can't, I will have ot put on my Dereon jeans, 6 inch stillettos and sing to those hydrangeas: "You must not know 'bout me/ You must not know 'bout me/ I could have another shrub by tomorrow/ so don't you ever for a second get to thinkin'/ you're irreplaceable...."

Witness the slow and dramatic death of a hydrangea with cercospora leaf spot.

Ten Things I Am Thankful For In My First Year of Non-profit Rehab and Gardening

Looking back, I have a lot to be thankful for in my first year of single family home rehab and gardening. In fact, this started as a list of 5, then it grew to 10.

1) The extended Homebuyer Tax Credit. For all the people who will be on the other side of those newly renovated houses....keep buying!!

2) My First NSP Closing (more to come)

3) The Development Divas' sense of humor. Sometimes the reality of the enormity of the task we have taken on stresses us all to the breaking point. Still, we manage to smile, or even laugh: "Smile though your heart is breaking/Smile even though it's breaking..." -- thanks, Nat King Cole!

4) Patient family and friends who never complain when I go on ad nauseum about my work or when I spirit them off to look at my properties when we're just supposed to be going to the grocery store.

5) Really great real estate partners. There are a lot of posts here about real estate professionals who are behave less-than-professionally, but our partners (agents, inspectors and assorted consultants) are really a hard-working, fun group of top-notch experts who are driving our program to success.

6) Funny, friendly and unforgettable neighbors. From Rottweiler Phone Neighbor to the great kids on Gopher Pause Lane to all the others who just stop to wave, gossip or demand that I not put a renter on their street, all the neighbors make sure this work is never boring.

7) Our continued safety. I make light of crime, but I know we are all very lucky that we have not had so much as a frightening near-crime experience.

8) The varied decorating ideas I get from touring houses: How about putting roofing shingles inside the bathroom? Rustic!



Or using your kids' hands to spruce up the ceiling?


Or even documenting your love of live band music mural-style?


9) Pansies that don't stop blooming.




10) Smug, home-made, home-grown food.

Meetings: My Kryptonite

Meetings are like my kryptonite. They drop into the workday, and with the sheer power of hot air and wasted hours, threaten to derail all semblance of productivity for the day.

My department of Development Divas (yes we are all women! Holla!) is constantly having a planned or impromptu meeting. There are also conference calls, vendor interviews, vendor coordination meetings and meetings with all of our local three-legged race jurisdiction partners. It's a wonder we can get anything done at all. Add to this that I am a horrible meeting participant. First, if the meeting is too early in the morning (before 10am) I am likely to show up wearing oversized sunglasses and clutching a huge cup of coffee like a real estate version of Rachel Zoe. Second, regardless of the meeting's start time I can only concentrate for 30-45 minutes at a stretch. After that, I start fiending for my Blackberry. When I've checked all emails, Facebook, and maybe even played a surreptitious game of Brickbreaker, then I start planning my next meal, my next outfit, or my next social outing. I start making off-topic stream-of-consciousness observations to myself: gee, her eyebrows look great; where did she get that lipstick; I wonder if he knows his socks don't match; my but she's a loud talker, I can't imagine her volume level when she's actually upset or maybe she's asserting her dominance over us by screaming I would have felt more comfortable if she'd just peed in the corner and marked her territory in that way at least it's not my office; I'm getting a headache; I think I'm hungry; and so on.

After an hour, I become like a fish heaved out of water. I can't stay still; I shift around in my seat; I make excuses to get up and walk around. If it were at all appropriate I would fall to the floor writhing and gasping for air.

Am I the most dramatic personification of Short Attention Span Theater ever or does anyone else agree that meetings and conference calls are life-force-leeching necessities of the working world?

Holla if you hear me!

Legally Blonde/Flippin' Birds

"Legally Blonde" hit the theatres when I was in law school. Elle and her world were absolutely not real reflections of our own, but they were tinged with a heavy enough stain of truth to be a good parody and to remind us to lighten up a bit. The thing I found most endearing about Elle was that she mixed common sense practicality with an innate intelligence. She didn't lose herself in the weeds of philosophical purity; she got the job done with no-nonsense observations: "Happy people just don't shoot their husbands" and "the rules of hair care are simple and finite", hard work and a great pair of shoes. In my acquisition work, I am caught in a schism between opposing acquisition strategies that make me wish for some of Elle's Cosmo instincts that light the path from a wet perm to a murder conviction.

Remember when I wrote about the 2 battling acquisition strategies in our camp? There was one school of thought that wanted houses in great condition. These houses would cost a little more, but because they only required light renovations and were in desirable neighborhoods we could acquire them and heavily subsidize the purchase price for middle income families. The second school of thought wanted to leave the almost-ready homes for owner occupants to buy directly from the banks and asserted that the best use for government funds would be to buy houses that no one wanted, fix them up and return them to the market. We thought we could strike a nice balance and pick up houses that would satisfy both philosophies smorgasbord-style. That works in some areas, but not in the ones I am project managing. The market today is an entirely different animal than it was 6 months ago. In a race to cash in on the $8000 federal first time homebuyer tax credit, owner occupants have crowded back into the market. Investors smell the bottom and have come roaring back as well. The houses that are in great condition fly off the shelves like marked down Jimmy Choo slingbacks.

Thinking about all of the houses I have bid on or put offers in on only to lose makes me feel like Elle in Legally Blonde in the scene when she walks into the Harvard Halloween party underdressed as a Playboy Bunny: I'm doing all the right things in an environment that has totally changed and here I am wearing bunny ears in a shark tank. Just last week, I spent ALL DAY touring houses on Wednesday. I spent 2 hours on Friday preparing all of the prices for the 9 offers we wanted to put in. After I sent them to him, our agent told me that we had “missed our window of opportunity” for the week because we had taken too long to put in offers. Why didn't I give him the numbers on Thursday, you ask? Because on Thursday of that week I spent all afternoon touring another county with a different agent. I got her our offers on Friday too. One agent (selling a house that was so clean I could have slept in it that night) said that the Seller was awash in offers and wouldn’t accept anymore. The Seller stopped accepting offers?! What is this? 2005?! Fine. I haven’t heard back about the other houses yet, but our agent gently suggested that we increase our offers to listing price or better.

Surely higher offers would increase our success rate, but HUD’s regulations require that NSP participants pay at least 1% below appraised value. Without an appraisal, we have to rely on comparative market analyses to bid over the listing price and hope that we are still within range when an appraisal comes in. Yes, we do stipulate that if the property appraises for too little, we have the right to back out of the transaction but that makes our offer less palatable as well.

More importantly, if we are losing houses to owner-occupants who just got the deal of their lives, then so be it. I tried to be neutral about where I stood in the first post about this dilemma, but I think it's fair to say now that I am firmly aligned with the buy-busted-houses camp. We have never considered ourselves in competition with owner-occupants who don't mind giving a home a little TLC. However, my fear is that investors might be re-entering the market to buy and hold until the prices rebound. If they do that, the houses will remain vacant or may be rented to people who are not interested in being a stabilizing influence in the neighborhood. Not all investors are speculators with little regard for neighborhood health. Still, some of hardest hit neighborhoods have suffered deeply at the hands of unscrupulous investors and mortgage fraud schemes during boom and bust years (click here for an informative video on how mortgage fraud has destroyed communities in Atlanta, Georgia's West End neighborhood). However, the tightening of the market makes it increasingly more difficult for non-profits to meet the tight timelines imposed by HUD for the use of NSP funds. If you don't use it, you lose it and local governments are rightly exorcised at the possibility of losing federal funds that their neighborhoods desperately need.

No one has written the Legally Blonde version of low to middle-income housing rehab yet. The heroine will wear Puma, not pumps and I suspect she'll know her way around a wet saw (I'm talking to you, Paula and Angela). She'll be able to sweet talk ornery agents, quote mortgage payments off the top of her head, rattle off obscure HUD regulations and secure easy funding from commercial lenders with high loan-to-value ratios. Her love interest will be a struggling British primary mortgage lender with a heart of gold played by Colin Firth.

With the small screen being deluged in reality rehab and design divas, Hollywood has got to give us a development doyenne who is fictional enough to be funny but real enough to inspire. The story could revolve around the protagonist becoming proficient in buying and rehabbing houses in a subdivision where all the streets area named after birds. Her love interest will be a primary mortgage banker with a heart of gold played by Colin Firth. It'll be called "Flippin' Birds" (get it? get it? ha!). All right, Hollywood, start writing. As I wait for the premiere, I'll be stacking up homes that not even the "we buy ugly houses" people want. Sigh. Comic relief, please!

And THEN, Y'all...AND THEN....

Well, let me just start at the beginning. I buy foreclosed houses. I don't always buy houses that I would want to live in, but houses that someone would want to live in. This particular house falls in the latter category. In my opinion, the floor plan is suboptimal, it needs a lot of work and more vision than I currently have, plus 2 yippy dogs live next door. We had been unenthusiastically going back and forth in negotiations over this house when the seller finally decided to accept our offer. I did not celebrate. But I did complete the rest of the post-acceptance process: ordered a work write-up and an appraisal and sent in the approval form to the County. By this point in the process, we have spent many staff hours and sunk costs into the property. This is also the house that befouled my Calvin Klein suit with spiderwebs. All so that the County can send me a curt email: "123 Crappy House Lane is in a flood plain." Huh?! BOOOO!!! We check for flood plains before we go to all of this trouble, but recent apocalypse floods in the metro area have altered all of the flood plain maps, so sometimes unpleasant surprises do still arise.

I instructed our agent to please pull the offer. We were well within our due diligence period and didn't want to sink any more time or money into this property. Our agent, who has put in far more work on this offer than the listing agent has, completely understood and told the listing agent, who is also the listing agent for another property we have an offer in on, to please pull the offer.

And THEN y'all, AND THEN the listing agent wrote our agent a superstank email and copied me on it (unprofessional!). Essentially, she expressed disbelief that the house could be in a flood plain (like we just made it up; like we'd have to make up an excuse to withdraw during due diligence, you silly woman) and then said that we'd have to have all government inspections completed on the 2nd property she is representing before she'll take the offer to the seller on that one. But here's the thing: that's a crappy house too. I'd have bought it if the seller had accepted the offer, but I'm not going to beg her to take the offer to the seller. That particular house is half-brick, half-cinder block, needs all new everything and is not in what one would call a desirable neighborhood. So boo to you, lady. Now you can sit on both of those clunkers. Let me know how those commissions are flowing.

I'm mostly bitter because her attitude was totally out of all proportion to the slight. Real estate is unreliable and fickle in these times, especially in the foreclosure market. To prove how much up and down we go through in a day, here is my house tally from this workday:

Offers accepted by the seller: 4
Offers accepted and then pulled by the seller: 1
(This was on a house I salivated over; and this is the second time the seller has pulled my winning bid on this house. The second time! But did I stink up the room with my reply? No, I sweetly gave thanks for the opportunity to be turned down again and asked to be held as a back up. Because I have home training.)
Offers accepted and then pulled by the buyer: 1
Net contracts for the day: 2

Real estate thing is a capricious undertaking in a small world, people. No need to get nasty; long memories cement bad reputations.

Post-script: the second house, the one the listing agent created all new hoops for us to jump through, has just gone through a price reduction -- to the price we originally offered. Are we going to reinstate our offer? No. See what ugly gets you? A big steaming bowl of nothing.

I Am Too Pretty For This....

Standing on the porch of an empty and foreclosed house after a government meeting that featured lots of yelling, I am staring at a lockbox that is so covered in cobwebs that I think it might be leftover Halloween decorations. I'm wearing a suit. It's Calvin Klein, people. I don't even like being out here in Calvin Klein. But here I am. Standing on a porch by myself in clear contravention of the boss of me's rules about visiting houses alone. With the time change, it's getting dark quickly.

I feel like I am only kind of breaking the rules since this is actually a visit to a house we are in active negotiations on. I'm only here to make a bulleted list of the upgrades we want that might not be obvious to the person doing the rehab estimate such as new entryway flooring, new cabinets, new bathroom vanity, take down the dated arches in the dining room hallway, etc. I'm still going to be chastised for being out here, but the real problem is this ridiculous spider web. I don't even have a tissue or a branch. And it's getting dark; and there are snoopy neighbors about so I can't stand on this porch forever. I whisper heartfelt regrets to Calvin, tell myself that I am too pretty for this, and work the lockbox through the spiderwebs. What's worse is that I'm wearing a thick tacky lip gloss that reaches out for all airborne debris and plasters it across my mouth. Even though my mouth was nowhere near the door I felt like the entire web was draped on my lips. I am writing this hours later and I am still wiping my mouth.

As I walk into the house, I remember that there is no electricity so if I close and lock the door for security, I'll be standing in the dark. I hate foreclosed houses. I go back to my car for my flashlight, see the work gloves which I foolishly left in the car during the cobweb battle and go back to the house. I switch on the flashlight, close the door, and the place suddenly wreaks of wet carpet. Every room now seems to have been recently occupied by squatters. Why are there branches on the floor in one of the bedrooms? Who left clothes in the bathtub? My bravado is melting away into swirling visions of me and my Calvin suit being tortured to death over long days in this stinking dark house. Ack! I started to walk more quickly and make my rehab declarations out loud in an effort to make some noise and to remember what to write down when I was back in the safety of the car, "New flooring in the downstairs hallway, all new light fixtures, clean up the ceiling in the hot water heater closet, all new interior doors..." .

Back on the porch, I felt more secure but I was faced with the trauma of replacing the webby key in the lockbox. Oh, Muhammad Ali, I am too pretty for this.

Crime is Cramping My Acquisition Style

You can probably tell from some past posts that when I have a few hours available, I will sometimes hop in the car with my HUD key, list of addresses and GPS to take quick tours of 5-7 hours at a time. I find this is an efficient method of reviewing houses because it doesn't require me to spend time calling listing agents and begging them to grant me access to their properties and it doesn't require that I coordinate my schedule with several other over-committed people so we can go out as a group. I can just go, check out the houses and go home to play Deal or No Deal with HUD. Easy.

As usual, it seems as though things can never remain very easy for very long. A spate of random shootings is putting the cabosh on my impromptu solo viewings. A co-worker sent an email with 4 or 5 scary headlines about random shootings to the CEO and copied the Development Divas. Our director immediately replied that we were all banned from visiting houses by ourselves. I argued that although the shootings were unexplained they were not particularly random -- what was some dude doing shuffling around in front of a gas station at 2:30am anyway? That's certainly not when I do my house hunting. Also, when I go look at houses by myself I lock the door behind me instead of leaving it wide open as so many agents do. With her patented "Toddlers" argument style from the Great Pool Debacle of 2009, my director told me that locking the door was of little utility because if someone has been squatting inside of the house then I wouldn't be able to make as quick an escape if the door were locked. Preening from that tautological victory, she then laid out in detail the unexplained double murder last year of 2 on-site agents at a new subdivision in the metro region.

I don't take these dangers lightly, but statistically it's more dangerous for me to drive to work every morning than to go see vacant houses alone. So I told her I'd think about it. She said she'd tell my husband and see what he thought about my risky behavior. I exploded, "He's not the boss of me!" Sometimes the most juvenile response is just the most appropriate.

That evening, I told my husband the story. At the end, when I was expecting support, he just blinked and said, "You do realize that she actually is the boss of you, right?"

Smack down.

I told my boss about my husband's reaction the next day. She dissolved into laughter and did the cabbage patch right there in my office. I'll be safe, but I'll be salty.

CONFIDENCE: Thank you, Muhammad Ali

Usually when I am feeling low I like to think of \lyrics from "Sound of Music": "I have confidence in sunshine/I have confidence in rain/I have confidence that spring will come again/besides which you'll see I have confidence in me!"

But yeah, this whole work overload/nervous breakdown thing is getting to me. So I had to turn to a slightly stronger character for inspiration: Muhammad Ali. Whenever I feel like the world is closing in, all eyes are on me; all accusing fingers are pointing at me; I'll never close on another house again and my perfect little birthstone will sit vacant forever I just channel The Greatest. And he says:

"There's not a man alive who can whup me.
I'm too fast. I'm too smart. I'm too pretty.
I should be a postage stamp. That's the only way I'll ever get licked."

Hells yeah. I AM too smart. And too fast. And too pretty. I will buy houses, make them desirable, safe and code-compliant. And I will SELL THEM. And then the USPS will have to put ME on a stamp. Because that is the only way I'll ever get licked.

Back to the grind. I have 15 offers pending. 2 houses under contract and about 70 houses under review in 3 jurisdictions. I closed three condos in an unNSP-related program on a Friday evening 2 hours after everyone else had left the office. I am overseeing the resale of 11 condos in that same program and marketing 11 more for sale. I closed refinancing on 3 houses and need to arrange financing for the 2 I have under contract. I am helping to organize a meeting about a county's code rewrite, a roundtable with a Congressman and am assisting in the sale of a multi-family property. But I'm feeling pretty good. I may just float like a butterfly...and sting like a bee.

The Enemy is Me

For instance, a senior associate called me into her office one afternoon to go over some documents. I brought the documents with me all paperclipped because the partner we were working for hated staples. After making me sit in her office while she finished her personal call for 20 minutes, she grabbed the documents from me, threw back her head and started cackling, “Ha, ha, ha, you’ve never worked for me before. I hate paperclips!” all the while ripping off the paperclips and throwing them around like confetti. “Hate them! Hate them! Hate them!”

I kind of just stared at her blankly because this kind of nonsense was par for the course (and actually quite mild in comparison to other antics) in BIGLAW during my tenure there. But the point is this: I just had a similar experience but the crazy person was ME!! An inspector brought me beautiful full color rehab reports on a few properties to review, but as I started to sift through them I realized that in his haste to give me these beautifully packaged reports he put the pictures for House A with the report for House B. I just started laughing, took the reports apart and starting flinging the report covers and bindings around my office. Now I slip on plastic report covers as I move around my 10x10 office.

I think the stress is getting to me.

3 Jurisdictions + 3 Launches = 1 Exhausted Project Manager

Warning: My frustration level is about THIS HIGH. So, if reading someone ranting and raving, complaining and whining on a Friday is not your idea of a good time, check me next week when perhaps I will be a little more Mary Poppins because right now I am feeling more Ursula than Ariel.

Today's Calculation of Frustration: 3 Jurisdictions + 3 Program Launches + 2 Stroppy Bureaucrats)/2 Well-meaning Micro Managers = 1 Exhausted Project Manager on the War Path.

No sooner than I write a post about liking workaholics that I darn near have a weeklong nervous breakdown from work overload. And a real estate agent we work with to buy houses just called to see my "workaholic" and raise me a foreclosed home tour from 3pm to 8pm on Monday night. I folded.

As you know, we were finally given the go ahead to get started buying houses. And about 2 weeks after getting the "clear to launch" our local government partners have already jumped out of pocket, starting running around the room and generally riding herd. They were requesting face-to-face meetings and calling before 10am with idle threats. Please, if you want to effectively threaten me, wait until after 11am. Before then, I can only sort of listen and nod with the vague understanding of someone whose mind is still in the morning mush stage.

Now I have had time to absorb all that has happened. And here are my generalized responses:

Dear Jurisdiction 1, you have a lot of nerve. You have given me a sliver of the toughest, most crime-plagued neighborhoods in the city with a housing stock that is older than the Union itself and asked me to turn it around in the blink of an eye. With 5 dollars. You are delusional. You have also requested that I only sell, not rent, the houses. Oh my dear sweet partners, I would love to take you on a daytime tour of these neighborhoods where an unfamiliar car draws young men out of their houses, where young women are actively marketing their wares and where a news van just hangs out waiting for the next story.

Rehabbing for neighborhood stabilization reminds me of gardening. Although I may think begonias are beautiful and have a deep desire to have them in my garden, if I just plunk a few down in my hard, weed-choked soil and walk away, they will die. I have to prepare the ground. I have to pull weeds, mix nutrients in the ground and make sure the plant will have the right sun/shade mix so that it will thrive. It's the same with scattered site rehab. We do not have enough money to buy out entire blocks or neighborhoods and change the very nature of the soil, so we have to choose ground to sow that is somewhat ready for planting. I drove through neighborhoods earlier this week that were heartbreaking. Most of the houses were abandoned, vacant, boarded up or in deep disrepair. It was in the middle of the day, but no one seemed to be at work or at school. There was a sense of listlessness and isolation tinged with menace. What am I supposed to do over there, dear readers? Buy 3 of the 10 empty houses I can see without turning my head? Let's say I could get them rehabbed without having to replace everything in the house multiple times due to theft. Now they are ready for sale. Who will buy them? In my town, lucky "urban pioneers" get robbed when they are not at home; the unlucky ones are assaulted in their homes, pistol whipped in front of their children and then robbed by roving bands of dysfunctional and untethered young men. The jurisdiction is apoplectic about the possibility of renting the houses, so what then? Shall we let them sit empty for 12 months or more? Is pretty blight better than ugly blight? I think blight is blight. Here is my suggestion, Jurisdiction 1. Let me work in a slightly wider sliver so that I can get into neighborhoods that are actually tipping point neighborhoods and not tipped over neighborhoods.

Dear Jurisdiction 2, please do not tell me about how I need to be buying more houses more quickly when you have a 30 day minimum approval period for acquisition. It is not 2008. We are not the only people out there buying houses. There is no such thing as a 30 due diligence period in a residential home sale. That sort of nonsense just kills deals. The banks could care less that we are a non-profit working with the county's NSP program. You may have heard the phrase "money talks, bs walks." It's still true.

Dear Jurisdiction 3, bless your heart. You are so in earnest to get everything right with crystal clear "processes" that you will ne-e-e-e-ver get started. Never. AND because you are passive-aggressive, you COLD IGNORE the emails I send you that contain clear-cut action items in them. Action items that we previously agreed to. I have spent/wasted about 35 hours hunting for houses, putting in offers on houses, sitting in conference calls and meetings and writing 11 million different lists and spreadsheets for you. I am all out of effort in this relationship. I need you to put your back in it, too. Until you can meet me halfway, I am putting you on ice.

So yeah. Working for governments is like being bound up in red tape, dropped into the English Channel and being told to swim for the shores of Calais. Fast. Or being in a 3 legged sack race -- too many limbs, too close together with too little coordination. We get to the finish line, but we don't get there quickly and after making so many stumbles on the way to the goal, our hair is a mess, our clothes are filthy and the people who opted out of the race (the investors) went and ate all the cake while we we were madly hopping about the fairground.

On days like this I feel like a flailing swimmer, flapping about in the ocean with a life jacket on spending way too much energy just to keep her head barely above water. Add to that the fact that I have been having fond memories of my former life at the law firm when at 8:30pm I would be preparing to order a sashimi dinner on the client, here I am digging into my bottom drawer to make saltine and peanut butter crackers. It's a lifestyle choice that I consciously made and through all of the irksome obstacles, I am much happier here in this ocean of hyperactive ambitions than I was there in that cesspool of dashed dreams. But still. No one told me I was signing up for a 3-legged race.

How Does Your Garden Grow?: Indoor Plants Growing Like Weeds and an Update on the Outdoors

Hello dear readers. Today's post is the promised update on the progress of my indoor plants. The paperwhite narcissus bulbs are sending roots down and sprouts up. They grow so fast that they make me a little nervous. I highly recommend paperwhites for a super easy indoor growing project. All you need is a container, rocks and water. Easy! I'll post more pictures when we have blooms.

The pumpkins are reaching the end of their capacity, I think. I read up on growing pumpkins and apparently they just love full sun. Way to sell the seeds in October, Target. I've been keeping them inside to try to simulate as much warmth as possible, but I don't think I'll be seeing any "great pumpkins" out of these seeds. It was fun for $1, though.

Even though there is a lot of activity going on indoors, the fall continues to be an interesting time outside as well. I am in the process of amending the soil in approx. 180 sq ft of garden beds in the front yard, planting 646 spring bulbs (tulips, oxalis, daffodils, grape hyacinths), a wildflower garden and other assorted bushes and flowers for a spring and summer show.

I'll leave the tales of fall planting pain and misery to another post, now let's take a look at some planting that has been successful. I bought a raspberry plant from a local nursery a few weeks ago and it has been producing like a champ. Check it out:

I also have a little knock out rose bush out back. Its cohort died because this full-sun loving plant apparently doesn't actually love full sun. ANYWAY, I thought that after the 3 blooms it put out all summer it was kaput for the year, but then I noticed this itty bitty little bud.

Finally, during the summer I ordered 50 late-blooming mum plants. My husband was incredibly supportive, helping me to dig 3 50 foot long trenches on the rocky, hard clay hill in the backyard. For a week in July (when the plants arrived) he and I toiled and dropped big pools of salty sweat on that hill to get the mums in the ground. He installed sprinklers to keep them watered and then the summer sun burnt every single one of them to a crisp. Seasoned gardeners all said I was crazy for having planted them so early, but what reputable nursery sends live plants out of planting season? After being angry about the mass die-off for about a month, I forgot about the mums. And then one day, one miraculous day, there was inexplicable color on the dry, weed-choked hill:

A few of the mums, 13 of the original 50, survived! And are in bloom!! Crazy! This is a shot of a row of 5 or so mums that have bounced back. I wanted to have 3 rows of 50 mums dotting the hill in the backyard, but this is lovely and I will take what I can get.

Don't Let Your Mouth Write a Check Your Work Ethic Can't Cash

I have a secret confession: I like workaholics. To be sure, I complain constantly about their incessant emails and phone calls; how they always have a new idea, new project, or some other fresh hell in which to enmesh me. I am surrounded by workaholics at work and at play. The people I volunteer with seem to be driven by obsession; my work colleagues send emails at all hours. But blast it all, those crazies make me better. Push me harder. And make sure I am never bored. When my Facebook friends can't find anything good to post, Twitter is quiet and Gmail is a grayed-out graveyard of read emails, I can always count on my workaholic colleagues to keep things jumping with calendar requests that I will pretend I didn't see and tersely worded missives about passing deadlines (I send most of those, but whatever). Sometimes I feel like my job is like the final weeks of a political campaign all the time -- there is always an emergency, we never stop working, we are supposed to look and act professionally while being tired, hungry and loopy, and we really think we are going to change our corner of the world. There is an essence in that kind of environment that carries an energy all its own. It is difficult to convey, but it is real.

How-and-the-ever, please please please do not fake the funk. Because acting as a developer gives me lots of opportunities to hire consultants, I am constantly bombarded with people who do a lot of jaw-jacking about all the work they do when they should be using that energy doing the work. There are a lot of big talkers in the real estate industry, like in any other. I have a contractor who constantly tells me that he can move faster getting the work done than I can get approval for it. Unproven. His work is beautiful, but he dilly dallies in getting me estimates and puts the wrong address on his invoice (let me tell you something, if I were lucky enough to be able to invoice someone for something you had best believe that my mailing address would be correct). There are other contractors who promise the moon but can't seem to locate pictures of their work or references. Bureaucrats who need that paperwork now(!!) only to use it to provide adequate pillow stuffing and inspectors who dazzle me with jargon and long histories of their storied careers; then I get the report and it's WRONG.

Sigh. I am not a tough customer. I dole out the benefit of the doubt long before it is earned. True, I am an email refresher and a follow-up caller. I might also send an email to follow up on my phone call because WHERE ARE YOU WE ARE CLOSING TODAY. In my defense, the better our consultants perform, the better we look and everyone goes home happy. So understand, if you tell me you are the bomb, I will be expecting explosions. Don't let your mouth write a check that your work ethic can't cash.