It’s snowing outside! Like the little kid I am, I’m ready to get up and go out to play.

Last night, Alexei and I went outside to prepare for the snow. We actually didn’t have many preparations to do, but ever since I took him out on the deck after dinner a few weeks ago to look at the night lights, he’s taken a liking to playing outside in the freezing cold darkness. Anyhow, he saw me get the snow shovels out of the shed and decided it wasn’t fair for me to have all the fun. We peeked in the windows and saw Mama, put two baseballs in the middle of the yard to get covered with snow, and visited our small park in the side yard.

Why, pray tell, am I up and at ‘em so early on a Saturday morning? The snow woke me up. Of course, it may also have had something to do with the fact that I couldn’t find any warm pajamas to wear last night, so I donned my big red fuzzy-bear. It was too warm for me in there, so I didn’t sleep under the covers. This was all fine and dandy until 20 minutes ago when I woke up shivering.

Back to the snow…on my way home from work last night, I heard on the radio that this snowstorm is the biggest one to hit the DC area since records have been kept. I suppose it’s still a little early to say whether it will fully materialize the way it’s predicted to or not. Still, the snow of the century is something worth getting up early for. Even if all I do is write a blog post, roll over, and go back to sleep.

Speaking of posts, this site gives the appearance of lying fallow. That is true to a certain degree, but at the same time I’ve got an impressive backlog of half-baked posts just waiting for me to spend a little time polishing them up. It’s a drag when life chortles along fast enough that there’s barely time to live it.

Owen baby (as Alexei calls him) is in the process of returning to dreamland. Either that or having a bowel movement. It’s kind of hard to tell — the sounds are the same. He was just a very happy boy for this most recent feeding. I’ll have to check with Anastasia when she gets up, but I think that this is the longest he’s gone between feedings, a whopping 5 hours.

All told, there’s a bit of a silver lining to me at this juncture in time. A month ago, I welcomed my second son, Owen Nikita, to this world. Nearly two months ago, I closed on my first home. Work is interesting, in spite of my perpetual behindness. I’ve got the best helpmate around, and she’s pretty on top of that. Surely, I am blessed. Granted, the upstairs is under construction, I don’t have money for the mortgage yet, the kitchen drain leaks in the basement, insurance may not cover a good junk of Nikita’s birth, and so on and so on. I’m wearing my rose-tinted glasses and plodding forward with a smile on my face (and a gnarly beard on my chin). This blanket of snow is just the icing over it all.

Anastasia and I have rented the entire time we’ve been married. It is a two bedroom apartment on the second floor of a quaint corner house in one of the best parts in Takoma Park, MD. All things considered, I am quite happy that we opted to rent it. Even when you love your apartment and get along well with the landlady, there comes a time to move on to something different.

That time is not quite yet for us, but we have been looking. For whatever reason, we both rather like the Takoma Park area. While the housing market is alive here, things tend to be a bit pricier than we can swing at the moment. As a result, we’ve been looking at foreclosure properties. There is one in particular that I’ve fallen in love with. Alas, it is going on auction this afternoon.

I have never actually been inside the house, so I shouldn’t say I’m in love. In fact, reading through some of the details, there is probably some significant things not to love. Namely, there is mold damage in the basement. Where there is mold, there is some sort of water leakage. The house itself is situated on a hill, so it is not unthinkable that when it rains, it pours, or at least trickles, into the basement.

Depending on the extent of the mold damage inside, it still seems like a sweet deal. There is a little home office for me, there’s a nice backyard, open kitchen/dining room area, and three bedrooms. What’s not to like? Well, there is location. It misses the Montgomery County line by two and a half blocks. I imagine that could effect resale value. But it also means the permit process for any renovations won’t be as arduous, I am told.

Comparing this cookie-cutter type style to other houses in the vicinity, it becomes even more apparent that this really is a diamond in the rough. The house two doors down is currently on the market for $330. It is in much better condition, but with a little bit of elbow grease and some tools, there is no reason why my imaginary first home couldn’t shine too. A similar house a few streets over just sold for just under $400. I particularly like how a large opening was knocked in the wall between the kitchen and living room.

With our current financial means, anything we buy will need to be a fixer-upper. If we restrict our market to the Takoma Park single family residences, this fixer-upper will need to be in fairly sorry condition. My current fave really has potential. So whoever is about to buy her later today, I wish you the best of luck. You’ve really got a nice piece of real estate. The equity might not be sweet yet, but with some sweat, it’ll surely shimmer.

One final piece of trivia on the fishbowl house: it was winterized on my birthday last year.

Women are amazing creatures, ain’t they?

The first day of this new year found me needing to work a little bit. While Anastasia and some of our friends were playing games in the afternoon, I was clicking away on my console in the room next door. Despite my best effort, I wasn’t ready to go ice skating with everybody at seven.

After much cajoling, I convinced the wifey to go ice skating without Alexei and me. The stipulations were that we show up to watch them skate for a little bit, I could not totally ignore Alexei while working, I could only work for 10 more minutes when we came home, I would not wake up really early the following morning, and, here’s the kicker, that I watch a movie with her after Alexei was in bed. Not too bad, huh?

The ice skating was fun. Now the rink was a bit ghetto, but not too shabby for the $4 price tag including rental. With Alexei nicely nestled down, we started to decide what to watch. She wanted to watch an episode of Mad Men. I was OK with that, but she originally said she wanted a movie. We discovered one we hadn’t seen yet — Definitely, Maybe.

For ten minutes or so I think she was into the movie. Then as the main character started reliving his romantic past life, she tuned out. I think it was more because of all the innuendos and inferences that needed to be made for it to be funny. Background knowledge is an amazing thing in other words.

As we sat there, finally she closed her eyes (after her head had been on a pillow for maybe ten minutes). I asked if she wanted to go to bed, and off we trundled…50 minutes into the movie.

I played the role of good husband and didn’t say a word, but inside I was cracking up. A few hours earlier that evening, I was the tired one who didn’t want to watch a movie. At gunpoint, practically, I had agreed to watch one with my wife. And here we were, stopping early because she fell asleep!

I just googled Becca Lilly to see if it has one “L” or two for the son’s post. The top hit was this Washington Post mini-series about the last year or so of her life. I didn’t read through the whole thing, but a good chunk of it. Having to go through something like that, as a parent or a child, is outside the realm of what I can imagine. But as I read the article, I was trying to imagine the Lillys I’ve interacted with. It gave me a new-found not respect, but something like that, for them. (The Lilly’s live kiddy-corner across the street from us. For those of you who didn’t click on the above link, one of their daughters died several years ago after a nasty battle with brain cancer. The nearest children’s park to where we live is named after her.)

Granted, my interactions have been limited: Today, Alexei and I saw Sarah, the youngest child (a high school senior), walking their dog Lady on our way to the park. Occasionally I see Joe in front of his house or visiting with our landlady Joan downstairs. Lady spends the afternoon with Penny, the landlady’s dog regularly. During the summer I stopped by their house and helped Maureen to get all their computers online wirelessly. Come to think of it, I was supposed to go back and help them again, but got real busy and still haven’t found the time.

You know what? Through all of those interactions, I treated them just like normal people. Now that I know a bit more of the inside scoop and what they’ve been through, they are still people, but elevated. For Pete’s sake, they just held the 12th annual Becca’s Run at the beginning of the month. There are many unknowns if I ever found myself in their shoes, but I can tell you one thing for sure, I wouldn’t be having a 5k run every year. That takes some real chutzpa.

In the words of Randy Travis:

Your heroes will help you find good in yourself
Your friends won’t forsake you for somebody else.
They’ll both stand beside you thru thick and thru thin
And that’s how it goes with heroes and friends.

So, that’s on one side of our apartment….now onto the more racier side. Close your eyes and imagine with me for a moment. A red sheer curtain. Low lighting. A first floor bedroom. Non-ugly high school girl. It’s dark outside. Et cetera.

I don’t consider myself a peeping tom, but sometimes things do cross one’s vision….and sometimes one’s wife’s vision notices things crossing your vision and suddenly your vision doesn’t work so well any more.

Like us, the “racier neighbors” rent. It is a mother with her daughter. It seems like they moved in at the beginning of the summer. It just so happened that Anastasia, Alexei, and I went to the National Zoo on Father’s Day and bumped into them there. From all I can tell, they’re perfectly normal people. A single mom with a teenaged daughter can appear rough around the edges and yet be totally grounded.

In summary, I have two neighbors. One is a hero, the other a harlot. The thing I find quite interesting about this post is that if my neighborly vantage point were different, if I knew them more than transiently, I may have been able to paint totally opposite pictures. Is that bad? Good? Does it matter?

For now my feeling is that everybody has things they wish others didn’t know. If suddenly the curtain were opened and everybody knew these sequestered secrets or if industrial strength cardboard permanently covered all window openings to keep the punks out, the person I know would remain the same. My opinion of them may likely change, but they will most likely not.

Read one way, it seems like I’m saying that other people only exist as the reflection I see of them — a very nice and ego-centric view of the universe. Yet when I get up in the morning and ready myself for the day, I’m not really looking at myself, just a reflection in the mirror. Maybe it works the same way in life. That is, as I go about my business others see reflections of the real me. The cumulative image produced by all these reflections is what actually defines me. In other words, I am not who I think I am, but who others see.

This is obviously much more convoluted than I set out to be. My neighbors are cool people. You should come and visit them sometime. Don’t forget your binoculars!