Having now made the final payment on the temporary modification, and having made sure that GMAC had cashed the check, I called them today to inquire about the permanent modification. I was told it's "under review" and to call once a week to ask about progress. When I asked when I could expect an answer, she said it would be anywhere from two to eight weeks. I asked why it said there would be a decision within twenty days on the letter that came with the temporary mod, and she said that was the best case scenario. I didn't even bother to ask why the letter didn't just say twenty to fifty six days- it's to fool you into believing they will act on it in a timely manner, when you know damn well they won't. They've actually had three months to review it already.

Either way, I can almost guarantee what will happen- whether at twenty, fifty six, or somewhere in between, they will magically discover that all the paperwork I submitted is now more than ninety days old, and therefore useless. It will all have to be re-submitted. Then it will take at least thirty days to review it, eventually leading to denial of the permanent mod, a bill for all the arrears, and eventual foreclosure. Even in the best case scenario- if they offer me a permanent mod, I fully expect it to be a piece of crap (somehow the modified payment has risen from $1500 to $2500, or the difference between the modified payment and the contractual (original) payment has all been added on to the end of the loan as a balloon payment, or I can only buy overpriced homeowner's insurance from some subsidiary of GMAC, or I still have to pay all the arrears up front in order to get the mod- I'm sure they'll think of something.)

It seems like every other week there's another lawsuit against the servicers or the banks, and every time I think, "Surely, surely this will be the lawsuit that finally splits the whole thing wide open. The whole fucking criminal enterprise will finally, finally collapse, and there's no amount of duct tape or AG settlements that can stop it. We'll finally see banksters in orange jumpsuits doing the perp walk- thousands of them. Finally there will be justice."

http://my.firedoglake.com/cindykouril/2012/04/04/big-empty-bag-of-nothing/

Instead the story disappears a couple of days later, the mainstream media never picks up on it, and the looting continues.

By Popular Demand!!!! Well, okay, by request of my friend Doug, steward of this very fine Airplane/Pagoda bungalow, who has been having raccoon problems.

Raccoons are very intelligent animals and they also have hands. If they had access to power tools, we would be in very serious trouble. Fortunately they don't watch TV, and thus have yet to be seduced by The New Yankee Workshop (which I always thought should be called The Joy of Power Tools). They have adapted easily to urban areas, living in dense shrubbery, ivy, storm drains, and so forth. They will happily use your pet door to enter your kitchen and avail themselves of whatever they can find, and they also will climb into your compost bin. I used to have a whole family- one would climb in and start throwing out various stuff that seemed edible, and then they'd all proceed to have a little raccoon picnic right there. This was all at bungalow #2, the first place where raccoons became a real issue.

I haven't posted since "When Life Hands You Lemons" because life has just handed me some. No, not handed- more like backed up a giant truck full of lemons and dumped them on me. At the beginning of March I was diagnosed with Stage IV metastatic lung cancer, which has spread to my liver and my spine.

Before you even ask, no, I have never smoked in my life, either cigarettes or marijuana. Why did they not discover it sooner? Because the symptoms are vague, there's no specific test for it, and even though it's one of the most common cancers there is, very little money goes to research, either because of the stigma attached to it (you must have brought it on yourself by smoking) or because the Susan G. Komen Foundation has sucked up all the available money to make yet more pink teddy bears. Also because the doctors at Kaiser are idiots who refused to take my concerns about the pain in my low back very seriously until an MRI actually showed cancer. Even then, they were looking for lymphoma, which made sense because that's what I had twelve years ago, and I had relapsed into an indolent (slow-growing) lymphoma in 2006. And in their defense, though there hasn't been much that's defensible, why would you look for lung cancer in a woman with no history of smoking?

Because I want this blog to remain my little island of sanity in a world that has gone completely upside-down, I have started a separate blog to keep those who are interested aware of what is going on, so that this blog can remain a Cancer-Free Zone. The new blog is by invitation only. If you'd like an invitation, please send an e-mail to janescancerblog@gmail.com. Please include enough info that I can figure out who you are ( for those of you I may not know personally- fans, Facebook friends, etc.). As for Restoration Comedy, I intend to keep writing here, about windows and linoleum and my continuing struggles with GMAC. Just like I wrote Bungalow Bathrooms  twelve years ago while undergoing chemo for my first bout of lymphoma- it gives me an illusion of control in a world gone completely mad.

Thanks for your support- I hope you will still keep reading Restoration Comedy.

I have been collecting letters to send to the Public Relations office at GMAC- I don't know if they give a damn about bad PR at this point but one should leave no stone unturned (or no stern un-toned- that is a joke for the benefit of some of my old friends...). People signed letters at the benefit and also at the Arts and Crafts Conference, but I thought that those who were not at either of those places might also like to have the opportunity. Now, clearly one could compose a letter of their own, but who has time for that? That's why online petitions were invented. I would certainly encourage anyone so inclined to write their own letter, but for everybody else, I am providing a lovely pre-fab form letter, because the banks SO like to send form letters, I thought we could return the favor. So copy and paste at will, add your own comments as desired, and mail off to the lovely Susan Fitzpatrick (which reminds me of another really bad joke...) ASAP.

February 17, 2012

Re: loan # 0601691236;  2708 Sunset Avenue, Oakland, CA94601

Susan Fitzpatrick

Ally/Global Communications

1100 Virginia Drive

Fort Washington, PA 19034

Dear  Ms. Fitzpatrick,

Modify Jane Powell’s mortgage now!

Jane deserves a permanent modification of her mortgage currently serviced by GMAC. Her historic home in Oakland requires a good steward to return the home to its former glory. A responsible hard working individual who is burdened with a serious disease, Jane should not lose her home to the high cost of her combined medical and mortgage costs.

As a nationally known author on the subject of restoring homes like the one she currently owns, modifying Jane’s mortgage would send a clear public message that GMAC is not just another heartless mortgage company. I, along with many others, am aware that she has spent years trying to work out a reasonable modification with GMAC, and to this point no agreement has been reached.

Step up today and permanently modify her mortgage to terms that will benefit both sides.

Sincerely,

Throw them back and scream, “I don’t want any effing lemons!” If life has handed you a whole bushel of lemons, you could make enough lemonade for a lifetime, assuming you had somewhere to store it, because lemonade uses a lot of water, a lot of sugar, and hardly any lemon juice. In fact, most things lemon, whether lemon curd, lemon meringue pie, lemon sorbet, lemon bars, or lemon drops, use hardly any lemon. (One exception is this recipe for Meyer Lemon Panna Cotta (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/03/14/FD811C81OH.DTL), which uses an entire cup of Meyer lemon juice. And is really good to boot) Like lemons, the setbacks, bad breaks, and awful life experiences that this cliché refers to can be useful in small quantities- they build character, develop empathy, help you discover strength in the face of adversity. But a whole bushel of lemons just dissolves your mental health in acid.

I am a notorious curmudgeon, at least, that’s what my colleagues in Artistic License (www.artisticlicense.org) tell me. Whenever we are introducing ourselves at a meeting, after I say I am a writer and restoration consultant, someone will always add, “and notorious curmudgeon.” Pollyanna I am not. (Even as a child, I thought Pollyanna really needed to get a grip.) We curmudgeons prefer to think of it as realism. In case you haven’t noticed, we are living in a kleptocracy, and our democracy has been replaced by corporate fascism. Oh wait, that’s redundant. It’s what Sheldon Wolin calls Inverted Totalitarianism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism). We have the illusion of freedom, because they still allow us to vote, and distract us with reality TV and iPads (and soon, the upcoming war with Iran).

And speaking of kleptocracy, that brings us to possibly my least favorite cliché of all time: “Life Isn’t Fair.” No, it’s not, but that in no way excuses one from doing everything one can to make it fair. And it could be a hell of a lot more fair than it is. Far too often this saying is directed at people who are demanding exactly that, by people who have benefited from things not being fair, the playing field not being level, the rules being tilted in their favor at the expense of others. 

Yes, bad things happen to everyone. But some people get way more of the bad things and way less of the good. And some people are positioned to lessen the impact of the bad things more than others- certainly rich people get cancer, but they generally have access to the best doctors and the latest treatments, which greatly increases their chance of surviving it compared to the poor person who has to go to the underfunded county hospital. That could be made more fair if we had single payer health care. But the kleptocracy has prevented that.

So don't ever say to me that "life isn't fair." I will hit you

I am on my way back from the Grove Park Arts and Crafts Conference which takes place in Asheville, North Carolina every February. This year was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the conference. We often joke that the Arts and Crafts Revival has lasted longer than the original movement. When the first conference took place in 1988, the revival was still in its infancy, although the seminal Arts and Crafts exhibition at Princeton in 1972 is believed to have sparked the revival, it was not until The Art That Is Life exhibition in Boston in 1987 that it began to take off nationally.

I bought my first bungalow in 1987. I  already knew about the Arts and Crafts Movement. I knew who William Morris was. I knew enough that shortly after buying the bungalow I traveled to Pasadena to visit The Gamble House. I also immediately took out a subscription to Old House Journal, and bought a copy of Rehab Right, a book about how not to mess up your old house, published by the city of Oakland in the 1970s before they became completely enamored of tearing down old buildings in the name of “smart growth” and “density near transit” and the other forms of sheep’s clothing used by rapacious developers and embraced by planners who all claimed to have read Jane Jacobs but apparently hadn’t absorbed much. Ah, I do love a run-on sentence, and the advantage (for me) of a blog is that there is no editor to do away with it. For you the reader that might be viewed as a disadvantage…

Anyway, that was the beginning of my Arts and Crafts adventure. In 1988 I joined the Craftsman Homeowners Club that had been set up by Kitty Turgeon and Robert Rust in East Aurora, home of the Roycrofters. The first Arts and Crafts Conference in Asheville was touted in their newsletter, but since I still had my display job at Macy’s I couldn’t go. The first year I did attend was 1994. By that time the first bungalow had been fixed up and sold, and I was in house #2, an architect-designed Prairie house which I was to lose later that year in a divorce. So the first conference was bittersweet for me.

By that time I knew some of the East Bay Arts and Crafts people, since I was asked to join the committee for the 1993 Arts and Crafts House Tour being put on by Berkeley Architectural Heritage. I freely admit that I guilt-tripped the house selection committee into including my house on the tour, saying it would mean so much to me since I was going to lose it in the divorce. I guess they forgave me because we have all remained friends.

So I went to the conference at least knowing a few people. Nonetheless, I was intimidated. But I was also hooked. Since then the conference has become an important yearly event. I have gone even when ill. I went in the middle of chemotherapy, in spite of everyone advising against it. One year I had food poisoning, and spent most of it in my hotel room. But I keep going back.

When I was first contemplating writing Bungalow Kitchens, one day I had the horrifying thought that if the book was published and successful, I might be asked to speak at Grove Park. Having, as most people do, a terrible fear of public speaking, I nearly gave up on the book right then. (As it turned out, I discovered I actually enjoy public speaking, but that’s topic for another time.) As of now, I’ve spoken there twice, although never about kitchens.

It’s exhausting and intense, but I’ve met such wonderful people there. Contacts made at Grove Park led me to bungalows to photograph for the books, vendors to put in the Resources, and many new friends, who are now old friends. This year both friends and strangers signed letters to GMAC asking them to modify my mortgage- I now have over 100 letters. Arts and Crafts people are absolutely the best.

The benefit succeeded beyond my wildest dreams! We had over 300 people- the line to get in stretched down the driveway. There were people I hadn't seen in twenty years- people I went to high school with, former neighbors, current neighbors, clients, and many people I didn't know, who had seen the story in the SF Chronicle or the Oakland Tribune, or had gotten a forwarded email from somebody, as the whole thing kind of went viral. A good time was had by all. The silent auction was a huge success, and we also had a "Buy It Now" table of less expensive items, and most of those were purchased. I sold quite a few books, including two Linoleum books, which always makes me happy(let's just say the Linoleum book has a very narrow audience...). We're still counting the money, but it was way more than I even thought possible.

I want to thank everyone who came, everyone who donated, everyone who helped out- I have the most awesome, amazing friends that anyone could ask for.  One of the hardest things about the whole fraudclosure/mortgage mess is that you feel very alone, even though you know millions of other people are going through the same thing. The banks and the media have tried very hard to demonize homeowners in order to deflect blame from themselves- we are supposed to feel ashamed of our inability to pay our debts. ( see comment on previous blog entry- nothing like kicking people when they're down)

By the way,  the attorneys general settlement announced last week- complete bullshit. A get-out-of jail-free card for the banks. No one goes to jail, they get almost total immunity from prosecution, maybe a select few homeowners get help (the settlement doesn't apply to loans owned by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, which are the majority of loans). The terms haven't even been announced, so basically they've signed on to a concept, not an actual settlement. Thanks for selling us out, Kamala Harris.

Individual thank-you notes will be going out later- possibly not until I get back from the Arts and Crafts Conference next week. Right now I'm completely exhausted.

The benefit this Sunday is shaping up to be an awesome party. We got a donation of excellent wine, there will be wonderful food, and my friend Terry will be serving up vodka martinis in the "speakeasy" we're setting up behind the fireplace. There were so many silent auction donations we had to start saying no more, and we're going to have a raffle for some of the more amusing items.

The response has been more than I could have hoped for- after the article in the San Francisco Chronicle (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2012%2F02%2F02%2FBU0U1MUBK4.DTL&)came out last Thursday, I have been receiving donations every single day. Not only the money, but also the words of encouragement have been very touching. If you are one of the many who sent money, thank you from the bottom of my heart!

I'm keeping this short because the floor in the green bedroom still isn't done, and that's where we're putting the Silent Auction stuff, so I gotta keep sanding! Of course there's always time for linoleum:

I am normally a woman of impeccable taste. My 1905 home is decorated in a style befitting its craftsman architecture. I own many objects that are beautiful and well-made. But all this tastefulness has a dark side, as I also harbor a fondness for objects that are surpassingly tacky. I believe my mother is to blame for this. When I was a child, she and her three best friends would get together for their birthdays, and vie with each other for who could come up with the worst gift. The gifts received by my mother that particularly stand out in my memory included a gold painted plaster bust of Charles Lindbergh, a ceramic tree trunk lamp with squirrels hanging on it, and a crocheted Mason jar cover with a ruffle. From these parties also came the rule I still follow regarding the acquisition of tacky objects- they must be cheap. Back in the 1960s the limit was a dollar, eventually raised to five dollars to allow for inflation. Even now, I won’t pay more than twenty bucks, no matter how worthy the item. Another rule is either I or a friend must actually go to the place the souvenir is from- no buying over the internet or picking them up at yard sales.

Obviously I can and do indulge this passion for tawdriness around my home town, but it’s much more fun to buy tacky souvenirs while traveling. The gift shop full of local crafts and food products is not where you’ll find me- I look for the cheesiest, neon-lit,  tasteless T-shirts-in-the-window store I can find. Lately, however, it seems that wherever I go, tasteful souvenirs have taken over. I have to search harder for something appropriately awful, because it can’t just be any old tasteless souvenir, it can’t simply be hideous- it has to be amusingly hideous.

I started with snow globes. Not the nice glass ones on a wooden pedestal, but the cheap plastic ones- clear on the front, blue on the back, with some local landmark molded out of plastic inside, highlighted with badly executed hand painting. It was important that it have the name of the place or the attraction on it, and the more snow inside the better. Bonus points were awarded for offbeat shapes (treasure chests, bottles, the belly of a plastic alligator), or if a perpetual calendar was built into the base. But snow globes had a few problems as a souvenir: sometimes they leaked in the luggage, and if it was an extended trip and more than a few had been purchased, they began to add a little too much weight. And now they have been banned from carry-on luggage by the TSA. The final straw came when snow globe manufacturers switched from actual three-dimensional molded scenes inside the domes, to simply printing the scene on a flat piece of plastic. I demand a little more effort than that. Plus there was a trend toward glitter instead of snow- not that glitter is always wrong- in a snow dome from Las Vegas or Graceland it might be highly appropriate.

Another thing I like to buy is postcards, a popular souvenir for more than a hundred years. It used to be easy to find “Greetings from (name of place)”, the ever-popular jackalope, the fur-bearing trout, and of course, the giant fruits and vegetables on the back of a semi-truck or railroad car. But I always liked postcards with photos of things that weren’t particularly scenic: a freeway interchange, a factory, a shopping mall. One of my prized postcards features a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit ) train silhouetted against a sunset. These days, perusing a postcard rack for something tacky is discouraging, since they all seem to be filled with beautiful, tasteful photos of the local scenery with nary a jackalope in sight. Occasionally a tacky one still pops up- in Arizona it’s usually possible to find some version of “toppled saguaro squashes car”, and in many places there is some version of a falling-down shack labeled “(name of place) Vacation Home.” Still, the spread of tastefulness can be discouraging.

Then I discovered floating pens, also known as “floaties”, “tilt pens”, or their official name, “floating-action pens.” This is a ballpoint pen in which the top half of the barrel is clear and filled with mineral oil. A background scene is printed inside the barrel, and a piece of plastic film with something else printed on it “floats” in front of the scene, and moves as the barrel is tilted. This allows, for instance, a sailboat to move across a lake, or, in a pen I bought in Mermphis, the disembodied head of Elvis to cross in front of the gates of Graceland. I consider the floating pen to be the perfect souvenir, as they fit easily in a purse or pocket, weigh almost nothing, cost approximately three to four dollars worldwide, plus you can actually use them, while most souvenirs just sit and look decorative. I’ve actually been known, when booking a flight, to take the one with a layover in an airport I haven’t been through before, just in the hope of finding a new pen. Sick, isn’t it? All proper floating pens are made by the Eskesen company of Denmark. Peder Eskesen, a Danish baker, first perfected a way to seal the barrels in 1946. The pen components are made in their factory in St. Merlose, Denmark, then parceled out to be assembled at home by villagers. Their earliest pens tended to feature women or men who appeared to be wearing bathing suits, until the pen was tilted to reveal their nakedness. They eventually branched out, and now it is possible to have custom pens made for yourself or your company, provided you are willing to order the minimum amount of 550 pens. In the last few years, knock-off floating pens made in Hong Kong or Italy, identified by their fat plastic barrels (Eskesen pens are generally narrow), have made inroads into Eskesen’s market share. These pens are garbage and tend to leak, but more and more souvenir outlets seem to be buying them, an unfortunate turn of events. Still, over the last twenty five years, I have managed to amass quite a collection of Eskesen pens. Someone once asked me where I got refills for the pens when the ink ran dry- I had never even considered the question. When one runs dry, I put it away and get out another one. I’m pretty sure I won’t run out of ink in my lifetime.

My most prized floating pens include one from Berkeley Systems, featuring the famous “flying toaster” from their screensaver, and one from Chicken Boy, once a fried chicken delivery service, whose mascot was a man with the head of a chicken, and later the name of a very fine catalog company in Los Angeles, sadly no longer in business.

Now it is true that I have also returned home with such fine tacky souvenirs as jewelry made from lacquered moose turds, jumping and squeaking rubber lobsters, and salt-and-pepper shakers in the shape of Mount St. Helens (they sit on top of each other, and when you lift off the salt the pepper is the shape of the volcano after the eruption). But the piece-de-resistance of my collection is a shrine from Paris. It’s a lavender metallic clamshell outlined with multi-colored Christmas lights. The base contains a drawer. The clamshell contains, not the crucifix or Virgin Mary that would be appropriate to a shrine (though these were available), but instead, a gold plastic Eiffel Tower. I’m unclear what sort of relic of the Eiffel Tower one is supposed to put in the drawer. Still, I consider it the best $13 I ever spent.

It’s not as though it isn’t still possible to find tacky souvenirs. I simply worry about the spread of tastefulness into an area of life where tastefulness isn’t warranted. Therefore, I urge everyone to buy tacky souvenirs wherever you find them, because if you don’t, they may not be reordered.

I've made a separate page for the February 12th benefit with a photo of the house and the invitation. And we have a sub-page for the Silent Auction! (Click on Save the Bunga-Mansion Benefit above and the Silent Auction page will drop down.) Only a few of the items are listed so far, but more donations are showing up every day. In addition to the items shown, we have four Posters from Bradbury and Bradbury Art Wallpaper, THREE design consults (one from yours truly, one from Debey Zito of Debey Zito Furniture and Design, and one from Michelle Nelson (some of her design work is featured in my article in the current Old House Journal: http://www.oldhouseonline.com/fireplace-ideas-for-bungalows/) Keep checking back as new auction items will be posted daily.

There should be an article in the San Francisco Chronicle later this week. Also, if you missed it, the article from Sunday's Oakland Tribune: http://www.insidebayarea.com/oakland-tribune/ci_19791304

Also, if you plan to attend the benefit, please RSVP. I know it's annoying, but we'd like to have a vague idea of how much food and drink we might need.

The temporary modification papers arrived on Friday. It started out, "As your loan servicer, we are committed to working with you to help make your payment more affordable." Translation: " We don't give a damn about you but we need some good PR." The second paragraph goes on to say, "At this point, however, it is important for you to understand that you have not yet met all of the qualifications for a Permanent Modification. In order to qualify, you must first comply with the provisions of this Trial Period Plan. We will then evaluate your qualifications for a Permanent Modification." Translation: "You're obviously a deadbeat, and we're going to see if you can pay on time for three months, even though you'd been making the real payment on time from 2006 until quite recently. Besides, it will give us time to get the foreclosure ready to switch into high gear when we eventually deny you the Permanent Modification, which we will do, based on the fact that a) you don't make enough money, or b) you make too much money, or c) whatever other reason we can come up with."

So the Trial Period payment will be $1493.91. This includes an impound for taxes and insurance, because impound accounts are a profit center for the servicer, as they get the use of your money for most of the year before they have to pay the property taxes or the insurance. And also, you know, us deadbeats can't be trusted to pay our own taxes. But whatever. It's certainly more do-able than $2600, which is the real payment. Of course, when eventually they deny the Permanent Modification, as I fully expect they will, they will immediately send a bill for the difference, plus an previous arrears, late fees, and any other fees they can think to tack on (The Annoying Deadbeat Fee? The How Dare You Call Us On The Phone Fee?), which will all be due and payable immediately. Since few people are able to pay all this at once, or they wouldn't need a freaking modification, they can then go on with the foreclosure they've wanted to do all along.

But I will play their little game. And save money for a lawyer.

Thanks to all who have sent donations- the response has been awesome. We're getting a lot of excellent donations for the silent auction, and hope to have that page up soon, as well as a list of supporters. It's going to be a very excellent party.

Also, the press coverage begins: http://www.insidebayarea.com/oakland-tribune/ci_19791304

I know my house is excessive. Even though I call it the bunga-mansion, I’m not sure it really qualifies as a mansion. But it is a very large house (3800 square feet). Clearly when Jesse Matteson built it, he was part of the 1%. The Matteson’s had servants (how many is unknown)- they were housed next door in a house he had built in 1903, on the other side of the tennis court. Finding out about this cleared up a question I had when I first bought the house- why was there no maid’s room or other servant quarters in the house? The Matteson’s were clearly part of the upper social strata in Oakland- their garage-warming party in 1906 was written up in elaborate detail in the society pages of the Oakland Tribune.

I could still use servants- or some kind of paid help. Even after being subdivided, the lot is still 10,000 square feet, and a gardener would be extremely useful. Right now all the fruit trees need to be pruned, but it’s a choice between that and working on the floor in the green bedroom, or finishing the kitchen, or replacing another part of the roof, or replacing the rotted wall at the front of the porch, or fixing the slant of the back porch so that water drains better, or putting stain on the new shingles on the back porch, or epoxying some rafter tails, or fixing the gutters, replacing the non-matching downspouts, painting the ceiling in my bedroom (it’s sky blue- I have woken up every morning for nearly ten years and thought, “I hate that ceiling.”), etc., etc.

A cook would be nice too. I don’t get home from work until after seven, and by the time I fix something to eat it’s often nearly eight. Like all single people my dinners tend to the “chicken breast and a salad” school of cooking. Sometimes I just don’t have the energy and end up eating a bowl of cereal.

I do have a housecleaner. Don’t start throwing mental tomatoes- yes, I am financially desperate, but she only comes for four hours every other week, and it’s the only thing keeping me from killing my housemates, because they are all messy. I’ve become a slob too, more from stress and lack of time, because actually I really can’t stand clutter.

An administrative assistant would be nice, too. Someone to do my Quickbooks data entry, answer my e-mail, do filing, keep track of where the hell I’m supposed to be at any given time- that would be awesome.

The 1% have no idea how easy their lives really are. It makes me furious when some overpaid hedge fundie starts talking about how hard he works and how hard it is to make ends meet on $500,000 a year.

So yeah, as some troll commented on an earlier post, I’m just sitting around in my mansion eating bon-bons and whining about how hard my life is. I don’t even like bon-bons. Hell, I don’t even know what bon-bons are.

Every time GMAC tells me they have all the paperwork they need, I don't believe them, but I can never get them to cop to it. Instead, two or three days later I get a letter asking for something else. The latest they wanted was IRS Form 4506T- this allows them to order  copies of my tax returns. I did, of course, send them a tax return in the original packet, but clearly I must have cooked the numbers on that one, conspiring with my tax preparer to do so. (Well, she is my sister.) Anyway, I called them today to make sure they received the 4506T, and to ask if they needed anything else. "The application is complete," said the GMAC rep (still not the mysterious and elusive Nicole Nesby). "That's what you told me on January 4th, yet two days later I got a letter asking for the 4506T, as well as for the three separate months of Profit and Loss statements, which I had already sent," I replied. More checking. She comes back to the phone, says, "You're scheduled to start a temporary modification on February 2nd." "What?!!" I said, "No one has said anything to me about a temporary modification."  So it turns out that once again they sent a letter instead of calling, and it was mailed last Friday, thus it is not here, due to the MLK holiday.

Don't get excited- this is all part of the game. The idea behind HAMP (Home Affordable Mortgage Program) is that if you faithfully paid the temporary payment for three months, you would then get a permanent modification. Except it's not really permanent, it only lasts five years, and I'm not at all sure that anyone really knows what happens at the end of that time. That was the theory- here is the reality. You pay the reduced payment for three months, or six months, or a year, or however long the servicer wants to dick you around, and then, at the end of that time, they announce that you don't qualify for the permanent mod, and by the way, here's a bill for all of your previous arrears, plus the difference between the modified payment and the original payment, and that totals, oh, twenty thousand dollars or so, and it's all now due and payable in a lump sum. Oh, you can't pay it? Well, then we'll just have to start foreclosure proceedings, which is what we wanted to do all along, because seriously, the thousand dollars we get from Treasury for doing a modification doesn't even cover the coffee we have to give our employees to put up with all you deadbeat homeowners whining. The fees from foreclosure are at least twenty times that, maybe more. Everybody gets screwed in a foreclosure except us- the homeowner, the neighborhood, the city, the county (well, we were already screwing them out of billions with the Mortgage Electronic Registration System- we just have to go on pretending it's a big proprietary database that is very complex, in order to cover up the reality that it's just a giant Excel spreadsheet that no one is checking for accuracy).

Needless to say, the benefit is still on. Response has been awesome so far. I am trying to get a page up listing the auction items, but it may be a few days, since tomorrow I'm having a tooth extracted, and I'm thinking I won't be good for much after that. There are some who think I'm not good for much anyway, but those people are not my friends. My friends, in fact, are totally awesome.

Help noted author/community and preservation activist Jane Powell save her landmark home from the Bank!

Our friend, Jane Powell, needs your help. She’s behind the 8-ball--a chronic and expensive disease, a major fixer for a house, and underwater with a huge mortgage with out-of-reach monthly payments, that the bank refuses to modify. But if we all pitch in, we CAN make a difference!

Jane Powell is probably best known for her informative, witty, and passionate writing about restoration and renovation--the big picture philosophy behind preserving historic bungalows and buildings of merit in general, combined with nuts and bolts expertise.

Her best-known books include Bungalow Kitchens and Bungalow Bathrooms, in addition to countless articles for The Old House Journal, American Bungalow and other publications. Jane has given lectures around the country and actively participated in preservation efforts locally, including serving as President of Oakland Heritage Alliance.

All the while, Jane has been battling lymphoma, pitted against the well-documented problems of the expensive, difficult health care system. Her part-time job qualifies her for coverage by an HMO, but Jane can’t afford many of the additional out-of-pocket medical expenses. 

She acquired Sunset House in 2002. This one-of-a kind Arts & Crafts treasure from 1905 came with years of deferred maintenance. Jane succeeded in getting Mills Act protection for the house (and some property tax relief), but she’s obligated to make ongoing, expensive repairs.

Jane has been trying, with all of her writing and persuasive ability, to get a loan modification, even lobbying representatives of GMAC, the lender, in person in Washngton, D.C. But the bank just demands more paperwork, and stalls, as Jane falls behind in her payments....

Keep Jane Powell and Sunset House together! It’s tragic that so many people have been separated from their homes by heartless banks and lenders--let’s make a difference on this one! Here’s how you can help:

ATTEND: A fabulous event at the “Sunset House” Feb. 12, Sunday, 2-5 p.m. This house was featured on the 1996 Arts & Crafts House Tour sponsored by Oakland Heritage Alliance and the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association, built by architect/contractor Jesse Matteson for his own family. Sunset House was the cover story of the Nov. 2006 American Bungalow magazine.

Hosted bar, good food. Silent auction with objets d’art, consults, autographed books, massages, and fine collectibles. Check out the Restoration Comedy section of Jane’s blog, JanePowell.org, for the latest auction items. Cash, checks, or credit cards accepted.

Live entertainment: Sharon Knight (Celtic-inspired music--to hear a sample of their music & for more info, go to: http://sharonknight.net/music-neofolk-romantique.html), and other performers.Surprise guests.

Singles $25/couples $40 (no one turned away.) Sunset House, 2708 Sunset Ave., is east of Fruitvale Ave., at Lynde and 27th.

MAKE A CALL OR WRITE: Jane has been involved in negotiations (fruitless so far) with her lender, GMAC Mortgage.  Tell the bank to modify her mortgage to reflect the true value of the house and reduce her huge, and unaffordable, monthly payments.

GMAC contact info: Nicole Nesby ("relationship manager")                             1-877-928-4622 (option 5, then ext. 236-8552)                                                                1- 866-709-4744 (fax)                             

P.O. Box 780                            

3451 Hammond Avenue                            

Waterloo, IA 50704-0780

GMAC's CEO: Michael A. Carpenter      

200 Renaissance Dr.     

Detroit, Mich. 48265

GMAC Public Relations--ALLY

Gina Proia, VP/Chief Communications Officer

(646) 781-2692

MAKE A CONTRIBUTION: Contributions to help Jane with her mortgage can be sent directly to her at 2708 Sunset Ave., Oakland, Ca. 94601. Or click on the DONATE button to your right.

TELL YOUR FRIENDS/ASK FOR ENDORSEMENTS/LEND YOUR NAME: Oakland Councilperson Nancy Nadel; Becky and Michael O’Malley, Berkeley Daily Planet Editor and Publisher, and Lesley Emmington, Save Strawberry Canyon, are early supporters of the ad hoc Friends of Jane Powell group. Sign on!

For more information, and to RSVP, Robert Brokl/Alfred Crofts, (510) 655-3841, broklcrofts@earthlink.net.

Press contact: Ralph Kanz, (510) 535-9868, rkanz@sonic.net

Finishing the floor in the green bedroom has become critical, since I can't rent it in its current state, so tonight when I got home from work I went up and put another coat of shellac on it, making three coats so far.  It's actually not as orange as it looks in the picture, but it is blotchy. I have looked for some explanation of why Douglas fir gets blotchy when you sand it, but so far that remains a mystery. In any case, I think of it as patina.

The date for the house benefit has been decided- it will be Sunday, February 12th from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. There will be music, food and drink, tours of the house, and a silent auction. Admission will be $25 per person or $40 for couples, but no one will be turned away. The official announcement will be posted here soon.

Well, as expected, GMAC requested more documents for the loan modification. First, they wanted a Profit and Loss statement with ONLY business income and expenses, and only for the last three months. Here's the deal- like many people with sole proprietorships, I have my whole life in Quickbooks. This is wrong, as my sister, who has done accounting for many years,  likes to point out.  So besides the income from books, lectures, and writing, my P&L also has rental income from my house, my employment income, the generous donations to the house made by relatives, friends, and readers, etc. To have it all in one place works for me, but apparently not for GMAC.

I spent an entire afternoon re-classifying all the stuff not directly related to the business, and duly faxed in a new P&L, along with more bank statements reflecting the rental income (with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against me...). Yesterday I called to make sure they had received the fax. They had. But they still couldn't deal with the new P&L- they wanted it broken down into three individual months. My suggestion that they might have mentioned that little detail when first making the request did not go over well.

I have ostensibly been assigned a "relationship manager"- I was even given an actual telephone extension for this person. Yet I have never spoken to her, and whoever answers the phone assures me they are on her team, but I am starting to think she is imaginary, kinda like the guy you get when you call tech support who tells you his name is Chris when you know damn well it's Sanjiv. So far it seems exactly like the same customer service roulette I dealt with the last time. They are all very nice, which merely makes me suspicious.

In other news, some friends have gotten together to put on a benefit for me and the house (the two are kind of inseparable)- they're calling it "Friends Don't Let Friends Lose Their Houses." It will take place the first or second Sunday in February, here at the house. There will be food, entertainment, a silent auction (possibly to be accompanied by an online auction if someone can get that together). Still in the planning stages- I will post updates as things progress.

And some lovely end of the year linoleum from the 1937 Armstrong catalog (sorry they're sideways- didn't have time to rotate them properly)

Today marks the the day in 1863 when Frederick Walton invented linoleum. I assume December 19th was the day he actually took out the patent. He invented a really great product, though he was apparently not much of a businessman, as he didn't defend the name, and fourteen years later, lost a court case regarding the use of the name "linoleum", which thus became the first generic term ( to be followed later by escalator, kleenex, and jello).

Sam Walton, on the other hand, started Wal-Mart, now the world's largest retailer. The net worth of Sam Walton's heirs now equals the combined net worth of the bottom 30% of Americans. That, in a nutshell, is what is wrong in this country.

But in honor of Frederick Walton, today's festival of fabulous linoleum.

I spent yesterday cleaning the gutters. Luckily my roof isn't that steep so it doesn't involve ladders- instead, I sit on the edge of the roof and scoop debris out of the gutter with a special tablespoon, left to me by the previous owners. The reason for the tablespoon is that the gutters are rather narrow. They are the original redwood gutters, and except for being badly patched in a few places with other pieces of wooden gutter whose profiles don't match, they are in remarkably good condition. Usually I hang Christmas lights from the roof at the same time I'm doing the gutters, but I'm not feeling terribly festive this year, not to mention I can't afford the electric bill for the lights.

It's kind of a tedious job but what I realized while I was up there is how much I enjoy working on the house, taking care of it. After I finished the gutters I pruned some redwood branches that had grown too close to the roof, then went inside and sanded the floor in the green bedroom some more. If I hadn't had to stop for dinner, I probably would have kept going till midnight.

In other news, GMAC has received my loan mod package, and they have actually assigned me a "relationship manager", as promised. They said to call once a week- apparently they're not allowed to call me- something to do with my bankruptcy. I expect the requests for more documentation will now begin.

At least I finally got my car back.

Also, I was contacted by someone with a BBC radio show- they want to interview me about linoleum!

Today I sent my second loan modification package off to GMAC. It took me more than a month, with help from my friend Alison, to assemble it. It has the loan number on every freaking page. We put it in a notebook with tabs for every single document and an archival photo of the house on the front. It was accompanied by a suitably humble hardship letter, which Alison had to rewrite for me as she felt mine was too snarky. Really? Moi? Gist of her letter: "Please, please, please give me a loan modification and I promise I will pay it faithfully forever and ever!" Gist of my letter: "You destroyed my income, my retirement, the value of my house, and my sanity- the least you can do is give me a fucking loan modification!" My mother was fond of saying, "You can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar," to which I usually responded, "Why would I want to catch flies?" One might add, if you really want to catch flies, dead meat works much better than honey, but I digress. We went with Alison's version. We also included, for all the good it may do, a copy of the chapter about my house from Nancy Hiller's book, A Home of Her Own, as well as a copy of my C.V. (that's Curriculum Vitae- a fancy form of resume on which you get to list everything you've ever done. Used mostly in academia, it makes you look far more awesome than you actually are.) We'll see what happens. According to the GMAC website, they will assign you a "relationship manager" for your loan mod- maybe this means it won't be another round of "whoever answers the phone at customer service" roulette.

There was a lot of discussion about whether to include the CV and the book chapter- would it make the house look too good? Would it engender sympathy or disgust? Would it make the application stand out or would it cause it to be rejected simply for not fitting into their stupid parameters? Eventually I decided the whole thing is a crapshoot anyway.

In other news, thanks to contributions from viewers like you, plus a small royalty check (buy more books!), I have managed to scrounge up enough money to pay the property taxes, which are due this week. The "donate" button is to your right- even small amounts are welcome!

And, of course, linoleum.

Wrote most of this about six months ago, but it still applies.

Lately I have been pondering greed. Possibly this is because we are in the midst of union negotiations at my workplace, and I am on the negotiating committee. Possibly it is because of a recent comment by John Stumpf, CEO of Wells Fargo, to the effect that foreclosures are good for the economy because they provide jobs (For whom? The “customer service” reps who give you the run-around and lose your mortgage mod paperwork? Robo-signers? Oh wait- I know! Law firms!Lender Processing Services!) Or a less-recent (and underreported) comment from Jamie Dimon, that "Giving debt relief to people that really need it, that's what foreclosure is." Or perhaps it was the news that many corporations pay no taxes, that oil companies are making record profits, etc. etc. etc. You may choose your particular PTB outrage of the day.

Rich people are not like the rest of us, but they think they are. I’m just talking about regular rich people here- people with only a few million. The obscenely rich are a whole other story. But I have seen the regular rich up close and personal, because I married into a wealthy family. The marriage didn’t last, because rich people will bail out if the going gets even a tiny bit rough- though they will often pay you to go away, which is what my ex-husband did by offering three years of alimony that he didn’t really have to offer. But the short time I was around his family gave me a clear view of how the rich really are different.

First of all, let me say that being rich is awesomely great. And we weren’t even very rich. But my husband had a trust fund (a tax dodge by his rich grandmother- this was inherited wealth, so she put $2 million in trust for each grandkid, and they got the income). The trust income was $125,000 a year (in the early 90’s). The trust investments were carefully chosen so that we never had to pay income tax on any of it. Money just showed up in our bank account every month. Having been impoverished most of my adult life, this was a revelation. Most people, even middle class people, know on some level, whether conscious or unconscious, that they are only a few paychecks, a bad diagnosis, or some other catastrophe away from losing everything. Even if you don’t listen to it, the little voice is always there in the background, saying, “What if the car breaks down- how will I pay for it?” “What if I lose my job?” Will I have enough to pay the utility bill this month?” Even if you have a decent paying job that seems secure, you will find yourself ordering the cheapest thing on the menu in a restaurant, and wondering if you’ll have enough money for retirement.

I can assure you that rich people never worry about any of these things. If the car breaks, they take it to the mechanic, or they buy a new one. They pay the utility bill as soon as it arrives, instead of the day before the due date. They buy raspberries out of season. For a few brief years, I got to cease worrying too. You have no idea what a relief it was.

Once I was driving around in Piedmont, a wealthy suburb totally surrounded by my home town of Oakland, with a friend. We were looking at garage doors (don’t ask-it’s a long story). We had stopped in the middle of a wide street to look at an interesting garage door. A Mercedes pulled up behind us. I motioned the driver to go around- there was plenty of room. She didn’t- she just sat there. I motioned again. She honked. My friend and I were both like, WTF? Eventually I pulled over to the curb and she finally went around, giving us the finger as she went by. I realized at that moment- rich people don’t go around obstacles, obstacles are naturally expected to get out of their way.

This level of expectation is normal for rich people. Rich people do not wait in line. Rich people expect service in stores or restaurants to be not just competent and polite, but obsequious. And they get very angry if their desires are thwarted in any way. Also, rich people never, ever apologize. Even if they’re wrong. Even if they know they’re wrong. They never take responsibility, ever. They don’t have to- enough money will buy you out of almost any consequences the world might throw in your path.

Money can’t buy happiness, but it CAN buy you a remarkably stress-free life.

Which brings us to today. After the economic melt-down pretty much destroyed my writing career, and with it, my ability to continue paying $17,000 a year for health insurance, I was desperate enough to take a low-paying retail job because it offered health insurance for part-time work. The premiums are much lower, but they still eat up a third of my take home pay. I figured since it was part-time I would still be able to write. Wrong. At four days a week it might as well be full-time. For standing on a concrete floor nine hours a day I am paid the princely sum of $12.05 an hour. My take-home pay is less than $1000 a month.

The store I work in was unionized by the IWW in 2003. We are negotiating a new contract. Back when I was rich, and could afford therapy, my therapist used to say that everyone has their own reality. This is certainly true in the contract negotiations. In the owners’ reality, our average wage of $12.39 an hour means we are the highest paid fabric store workers in America, and that they offer health insurance (albeit with a completely unaffordable $2000 deductible) to part-time workers, and we get three days paid time off every year, means that they are practicing “humane capitalism.” Their business grosses $2 million a year, wages account for only 18% of that, making us wonder what the hell they’re spending the rest of it on. In their reality, we have “the ultimate part-time job”, and apparently we are all supposed to have extremely lucrative other jobs to make up the difference.

Our reality is somewhat different. Most of us don’t have lucrative other jobs, most of us are single older women, most of us have been through foreclosure, bankruptcy, divorce, or widowhood. We are hanging on by the skin of our teeth. Those who do have other jobs are basically working seven days a week. I realize there are people who are far worse off than me. But I also realize that if the world’s wealth were distributed evenly EVERYBODY in the world would have an income of approximately $100,000 a year. Think about that- how much stress would be removed from your life if you were making $100,000 a year? Especially since a recent study showed that happiness pretty much levels off at about $70,000.

Whether in local or national politics, we regular citizens are always fighting for some tiny slice of the pie- some little piece of the social safety net, some tiny amount to go to some worthy thing. We have been led to believe in scarcity- if we get that tiny amount then some other worthy person or project doesn’t. Here’s the reality: on a groaning table in the back room there are hundreds of pies, more pies than anyone can possibly eat, pies that the 1% use to have pie fights while people are starving. While out front they try to convince us that we need to fight to get a tiny sliver of the one pie because that’s all there is. The Great and Terrible 1% Oz has declared it so. But we’ve gotten a peek behind the curtain- and we’re not buying it any more

No doubt you're all waiting to find out what happened with the car. Or not. Whatever. Well, the car was totaled by the insurance company (meaning "this car will cost more than 80% of what we deem to be its value to repair, therefore we don't want to repair it"). So I could either take some amount of money they were offering and use it to buy another car, or I could take a lesser amount of money and they would give me the car back as salvage. I briefly considered taking the money and buying another van ( I do miss my van on occasion- generally those occasions involving 4' x 8' sheets of plywood)- that lasted all of ten minutes. The truth is, I love my car, and I wanted it back. So I took it as salvage, and the body shop is fixing it. It's still going to cost me about $600-$700 out of pocket.

Meanwhile, because one of the rooms here at the bunga-mansion is currently empty, and the selection of potential tenants is, shall we say, underwhelming, I decided that this would be the ideal time to finish finishing the floor, a project started about three tenants ago, I think. When I bought the house, this particular room had wall to wall carpeting and painted-over wallpaper. The carpeting was the first thing to go, the wallpaper was next. Under the wallpaper was the original green tinted plaster, albeit with lots of white spackle over later holes ( those have been touched up with watercolor so now it's all more or less green. The floor was covered with what appeared to be brown paint, but after a few solvent experiments, it turned out to be tinted shellac. So I started removing it with alcohol. This was fairly labor intensive, so I ended up just doing a two foot strip around the outer edges, then I covered the rest of it with an area rug. But the areas that had been stripped had no finish except some residual shellac, which wasn't very protective, especially because tenants aren't known for the gentle ways they treat other people's property. So this seemed like an opportunity to get some real finish on ALL of the floor.

Now, if I had money, I could have just called the floor people and they would have done the whole thing in two days for about $400. Or I could have rented a floor sander. However, I've seen enough softwood floors messed up by people who thought they could do it themselves- an out-of-control drum sander with 40-grit paper on it can turn a fir floor into something resembling a roller coaster in record time. So I'm doing it with an orbital sander- slow, but little danger of ruining the floor. It's taken me two days to sand about a third of it with 60-grit paper- still have to go back over it with the finer grits. The shellac gums up the sandpaper, so I've taken to scraping the majority of it off with a carbide scraper first- also a bit labor intensive. I think I'm going to finish the floor the same way I'm doing the kitchen cabinets- several layers of orange shellac with a couple coats of polyurethane on top. If it were just me here, I might dispense with the polyurethane (all the floors were originally shellacked- there's a closet downstairs that still has the original finish), but with tenants, you kinda need something that can't be immediately ruined by water or alcohol.

One other thing- only a few blog posts in and I already had my first troll! Gist of her comment: "Stop whining and write some more books." Yeah, 'cause I can just whip out a book in my prodigious free time.

A new book that features my house (and me) has just been released by the Indiana University Press. It's called A Home Of Her Own, and features the stories, and the houses, of women who have formed a deep and abiding bond with their homes. It was written by my friend Nancy Hiller, with wonderful photographs by Kendall Reeves. Nancy is a wonderful writer- she made my life story sound much better than my actual life! And I found the stories of the other women fascinating, and occasionally heart-wrenching. Nancy has a piece up at The Huffington Post about the book:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-hiller/a-home-of-her-own_b_1025970.html

Nancy has her own blog at  http://ahomeofherown.wordpress.com/

Check out the comments on the Huffington Post entry if you are amused by cluelessness.

I'm a big fan of Matt Taibbi's writing- I often find myself thinking, "Damn, I wish I'd written that!" Now it's true he can be a bit over the top, but hell, I've never been exactly all Elements of Style myself. In the latest Rolling Stone, he finally figures out what Occupy Wall Street is really about:

"If you think of it this way, Occupy Wall Street takes on another meaning. There's no better symbol of the gloom and psychological repression of modern America than the banking system, a huge heartless machine that attaches itself to you at an early age, and from which there is no escape. You fail to receive a few past-due notices about a $19 payment you missed on that TV you bought at Circuit City, and next thing you know a collector has filed a judgment against you for $3,000 in fees and interest. Or maybe you wake up one morning and your car is gone, legally repossessed by Vulture Inc., the debt-buying firm that bought your loan on the Internet from Chase for two cents on the dollar. This is why people hate Wall Street. They hate it because the banks have made life for ordinary people a vicious tightrope act; you slip anywhere along the way, it's 10,000 feet down into a vat of razor blades that you can never climb out of.

That, to me, is what Occupy Wall Street is addressing. People don't know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: FUCK THIS SHIT! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values."

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-i-stopped-worrying-and-learned-to-love-the-ows-protests-20111110#ixzz1dSxSD9Xc

Most days I feel like the mole in a game of Whack-A-Mole- every time I stick my head up somebody hits me with a mallet. Personally, I'd like to hit Lloyd Blankfein with a mallet. Actually, no- what I want is for the one-percenters to suddenly find themselves (permanently) living OUR lives- destitute, homeless, no job (or crappy job with an abusive boss), no health insurance, no hope of things getting better, no help to be found because they don't "Qualify"- not poor enough or too poor, don't fit the guidelines somehow, or the program has been de-funded.

Know why I am no longer eligible for financial assistance from Kaiser? Because according to their "guidelines", I would have to have spent over $4800 on medical expenses last year IN ORDER TO QUALIFY FOR ASSISTANCE.  You see, the health insurance for which I pay $360 a month and for which I have to work four days a week for $12 an hour has a $2000 deductible, which I obviously don't have, so essentially I am paying for really expensive catastrophic insurance. But I'm pretty sure that if I could somehow afford the deductible, I wouldn't need the financial assistance. But according to Kaiser's reasoning, I would need to spend over twice the deductible in order to get help.

Know why I don't qualify for food stamps or Medicaid? Because I dare to still have money in my IRA. I want Lloyd Blankfein and all his little friends to be having that life- the one the rest of us are living.

Still, there's always linoleum.

If I wasn't so busy worrying about other stuff, I would have seen it coming. No, not the other car (though probably that too)- no, the insurance company. Because, as we all know, insurance is nothing more than legalized extortion. Yesterday they towed my car off to the body shop, and I went and picked up the rental car. Today I thought I'd look at the claim online, maybe find out how long it would take to fix the car. Now I should have known damn well they weren't going to fix the car- the car is nine years old, and it's got 100,000 miles on it. Sure enough, the estimate to fix it is $4200, so they're declaring it a total loss. Now, they haven't actually offered me anything yet, but I can guarantee that what they offer will not be $4200. I am sure they will subtract the towing (no doubt they called the most expensive place in town), then go on to subtract the previously cracked windshield, the bald tires, and the fact that it hasn't been washed in six months. (I have a gravel driveway- makes washing fairly pointless.) If you Google "total vehicle loss", like I did, you'll find out they have a million ways to screw you, and to fight them will take more time and energy than most people have. For starters, the minute they make you an offer, no matter how bad, they only have to pay for the rental car for another three days. I believe that would qualify as coercion. But not in America, where the corporations run wild and free.

Now, there are those who will say it's just a car. I expect those are the same people who would say the bunga-mansion is "just a house." Well, to me it's not just a car. It's the only NEW car I have ever owned in my entire freaking life- the only one where I got to pick the color I wanted (and I was really clear about that if nothing else- I was having the aubergine one and no other). I generally don't care about cars, viewing them mostly as a useful tool. That was until I saw my first PT Cruiser- the only car that has ever made me go, "Ooh- I want that!"

So I can see my life for the next few days/weeks: back at work at the fabric store, spending my lunch (half) hour and my breaks on the phone arguing with the insurance company. Swell. I just want them to fix my fucking car. I just want GMAC to modify my fucking mortgage. I just want my life, and the lives of everyone else in the 99%, to STOP SUCKING!

Okay, I swore I was gonna avoid whining. Even though I'm really good at it. I was gonna save the "my life sucks- here's why- I am the 99%" for the Tumblr page devoted to that. But that was before.

Earlier today, I was driving on the freeway, on my way to pick up my friend Josh's appliance dolly. It's good to have a friend who owns an appliance dolly. Hell, if I could afford one, I'd probably get my own. Anyway, I needed it because the basement fridge died, and I was going to pick up a used fridge I'd found on Craigslist.

So I'm motoring along, and I'm about to take the ramp that leads from 580 to 80, when I discover (too late) that some guy in a Toyota Camry has come to a dead stop on the off-ramp. Needless to say, though I slammed on the brakes- I ran into him. Pretty hard, actually- I was surprised the airbag didn't deploy.  I'm fine- the guy in the Toyota is fine- and frankly, the Toyota doesn't look like it was damaged that much. But the Toyota's bumper has pretty much destroyed most of the front of my car.

I won't bore you with the gory details of having the CHP push me down the off ramp (my car would no longer start) or the two hour wait for the tow truck. But almost all I could think of while I waited was, "Shit, I can't afford this." I have car insurance- and it has a $500 deductible. I've been driving around with a cracked windshield for more than a year- I can't afford to replace it. My tires are all bald- I finally bought a used one to replace the one that got so bad you could see the steel in the steel-belted radial.

So there's a blog out there called WTF Is It Now (http://maruthecrankpot.blogspot.com/)- and that's pretty much how I feel most of the time. This is what it's like to be one minor disaster away from everything spinning completely out of control.

So I will put the $500 deductible on a credit card (and thank God I have a credit card again after bankruptcy). And thank God my sister sent me money to renew my AAA membership, which I had allowed to lapse, or God only knows what it would have cost to have the car towed.

More whining later. Linoleum now-Armstrong linoleum rugs 1919.

The bunga-mansion looks glamorous from the outside. Even parts of the inside do. Other parts, not so much. The photo shows my dining room, currently the finishing space for kitchen cabinet doors (that I haven't worked on since July, but that's a whole other story). Why am I doing this in the dining room? Because I have no garage and no basement. Why no garage? Because it was torn down in 1952, when some previous owner of the property sold off a piece of it, and someone built this really ugly apartment building on the sold-off piece. The site of my garage is now part of the apartment building's driveway.

The apartment building is about twelve feet from the north side of the house, and their front doors, living room and bedroom windows all face the side of my house. The building resembles a very long double-wide mobile home, if mobile homes were covered in beige stucco. It's a four plex. When I first moved here there were a lot of bad tenants, including a meth dealer, and one apartment I swore the landlord only rented to couples with domestic violence issues. The tenants have improved slightly in the ensuing years, thank God. It is my fervent hope that one day there will be a miracle and I will be able to buy it and tear it down, and then be able to rebuild my garage.

The garage, by the way, was built in 1906. I know this because Matteson had a "garage-warming" party, which was written up in elaborate detail in the Oakland Tribune. Until I got this latest set of archival photos, the only picture I had of the garage was the photo from the Tribune article, which was a photocopy of a microfilm of the newspaper, courtesy of the Oakland Library. Matteson was an early adopter, as we would now say- not many people had an automobile in 1906. The garage-warming party took place only a few days before the 1906 earthquake. Apparently neither the house nor the garage was much damaged, or else the damage was repaired, since they certainly looked okay in the 1910 photos.

Today I am painting a client's family room for fifteen bucks an hour. I so enjoy working seven days a week.

And, of course, the linoleum of the day.

I was thinking I'd just put up a linoleum pattern, because I don't have much to say, my brain having turned to oatmeal after spending a day waiting on clueless idiots in the fabric store where I work. But I do have something to say. If you want to make your own Halloween costume, then freaking LEARN TO SEW! Don't you people watch Project Runway?!! Sewing is cool- even for guys! You can do many wonderful things with a hot glue gun- making a ball gown is not among them.

Of course, if you actually KNEW how to sew, then you would also know that three days before Halloween is NOT enough time to make an elaborate costume! Or were you fooled by watching too much Project Runway? Those people are professionals- of course they can make something in a day.

The linoleum (okay, technically it's felt-base, not linoleum. Don't know the difference? Then buy my Linoleum book!) is a 1948 Congoleum rug.

This is my house, circa 1910. Jesse Matteson, the man who designed and built it, owned a lumber yard. He lost the lumberyard in a recession in 1908. He managed to hold onto the house until 1912.

I lost most of my income in the economic crash of 2008, one hundred years later. Unless there's some sort of miracle, I will lose the house to foreclosure in 2012, one hundred years after he did.

Those who caused the economic crash have not been punished- indeed, they have been rewarded. Last night, citizens of Oakland who were peacefully protesting this very thing were violently set upon, tear-gassed and beaten by our own police department- the same police department that has so few officers they won't even show up if your house is burglarized. The amount they spent on police overtime probably would be enough to pay off my mortgage.

I was hoping my first blog post would be a little more cheery, especially as I've named the blog "Restoration Comedy." I'm just not feeling very humorous at the moment.

More to come about how you can help save my house, nicknamed "the Bunga-Mansion" by my friend Paul Duchscherer. I'm not giving up without a fight.