Yesterday I did two things not on my daily schedule of activities: visit another house and have a doctor's appointment. Anyway, this is going to be a long entry cause I'm feeling wordy today.

The Routine.

Work has been a little slow this month. With me spending the last three weeks fixing up this paper for the World Space Congress, and then actually attending the event, I seem to have lost momentum on all my work projects. Plus I'm a little disenheartened. Two weeks ago we went to an X-38 Flight Design shutdown meeting (in case you didn't know, X-38 is an escape ship for the space station and is currently my primary project, but officially it was canceled when they decided to focus on building a space station for 3 people rather than 7).

The meeting started with a "Thanks for coming I know a lot of you haven't been working on X-38 for a while..." Which I found tragic, because that's still all I do. To give my management some credit, the reason I'm still working on it is that I am trying to complete a simulation tool that we developed for it that has lots of other applications. Once I have completed the tool and finished testing it with X-38, I will be using it on things (specifically on shuttle/external tank separation and breakup) - so it didn't make sense to stop work on it.

But somehow it just seems silly and pointless to keep working on a canceled project when no one outside my immediate group cares about the results at all.

That said, I only have about 2 more months left of work on it before I can move on. But I am procrastinating, so..

The Doctor.

Let's start with the doctor. I decided it was finally time to establish real relationships with actual medical practitioners in the same town I live in (something that I haven't done really since we moved to Florida in 9th grade). So, I started with a physical (which I had been advised to have by the flight doc anyway, cause I was slightly anemic).

I have to say, I really like people from West Texas, which quite obviously was where my doctor was from. First of all they talk at a breakneck pace, something I can not only relate to, but makes me feel right at home (you'd have to know my family to understand). And they use the word "scotche" (as in "just a little bit", used as "I'll just have a scotche of that apple pie, ma'am").

Anyway, he passed the good doctor test. He was funny though. He asked me what I did for a living and I told him I was an aerospace engineer at NASA. He said "Wow. You're not really what I'd expect an aerospace engineer to be like... I mean, uh oh, I didn't mean to sound sexist or anything... its just that you always picture them as nerdy, softspoken, pocket-protector wearing..."

He he. I thought that was funny.

The House.

I had been warned before we went that the house we were looking at was a foreclosure -- so I knew I was getting a mixed bag. However, it was listed at $150,000 (just my price), was built in 1997 (most of the houses built that recently in the neighbourhoods I'm interested in are out of my price range), and had 2500 sqft (500 more than I usually can afford). And, to top that off, was in a perfect location in the neighbourhood - in the very back on a cul-du-sac, its back yard overlooked a farm field (which will soon be turned into $300,000 homes). So, the point is, if the house wasn't a foreclosure, it should have been offered at around $180,000.

Now, that's how it looked on paper. Too bad I won't be buying it 'cause Hell's Kitchen is probably a nicer place than this one. Let's talk abou the nightmare that was the inside. I know people get emotional when they are evicted from their homes. It makes you wonder, considering the amount of time it takes for a bank to foreclose on a house, why the owners don't just sell it. Anyway, we were the first people in the house (it had just gotten listed that morning, and the listing agent hadn't even been there except to put a lock box on the door.)

So, these owners just trashed the place (my realtor guessed it was a messy divorce). They left all there stuff behind - and smashed it. Poured out food on the floor. Left dog messes behind. There were fleas everywhere. What was once a beautiful piano in the library was smashed to bits. The garage had unstuffed furniture knee deep. Tiles had been taken out of the shower. In one of the rooms there was a whole ripped out of the ceiling. The A/C looked like it had a sledge hammer taken to it. There were clothes strewn everywhere. The smell. The grass was all dead. The said part about it was, the house looked like it had been "loved" before the foreclosure - it had cute landscaping, despite the mess the surfaces under the mess looked like they had been clean before stuff was dumped on it, the walls all looked freshly painted. The owners were the original owners and had paid for little upgrades like a marble entry-way and art niches in the walls. Even though I think I could get the house for $40,000 less than its worth, I couldn't take on the shear amount of cash repairs (just visually I estimated $15,000) that were required to get that house in order. Not to mention, it smelled so bad, I couldn't really get a good look. Apparently the realator is going to have the trash hauled out and it cleaned and de-bugged for future showings. What a nightmare! What makes someone do that to their beautiful house..