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It's amazing what a little pressure can do...
We were going to pull the house from the agent at the end of this week. On Monday, the property sold. Like magic.
While it is true that we didn't get what we had hoped for the property - everything is a sliding scale in this crazy economic hubbub - we are more than happy with the price achieved. No money lost from selling the house and moving, and that is the whole point.
When a market is in downturn - as this one clearly is - the aim of the game should be to cover costs or salvage lifestyle. Why move unless you have to? Why sell for a fire sale unless you can't afford to eat or enjoy the house?
We are moving towns, so our choices were limited. But I refused to be hemmed in by anything other than my own hand.
We have our sights set on a particular suburb, even down to a few select streets. Hopefully, if this sale comes off, we will have cash in our pockets to go prospecting in a downward market. Fingers crossed.
It's been months and months, and not one contract. He's bringing the buyers through, they like it, they say they want to buy it and then.... nothing. Is the agent angling for an auction? Can the agent sell in a down market? Is the agent too used to the good times?
Why did I spend $3000 on ads with this man? Why does he want $5000 more for an auction campaign? Why did he just tell an interested buyer that if they didn't buy it today, we would be going to auction next month? Why did he seemed pleased when she said she would be the first bidder? Doesn't he get that she now wants to wait for the auction, to see if she can pick up a bargain?
I think so.
So he is going to get the sack.
Doing this is tricky. In Queensland, there are forms we sign (22A) that states the period of sole agency. It's usually 60 days. You can't do anything with any other agent until that agreement expires. Even then, you have to send a fax or letter to them saying they are no longer required.
It's a hard call. The agent has a history with the property, knows what lengths we have gone to in setting the price, cleaning the place up, positioning it on the market. He has screened buyers. He knows us. Changing risks starting again with a new agent. Building up a rapport, a new set of buyers, a new ad campaign and a new way of doing things.
But that's not a reason not to change.
A new agent has new buyers. A new agent might be closer to our ethical demands. A new agent won't insist on us paying $350 hall hire fee to cover the luxury of having an auction. The new agent will listen to us, won't hold open homes every week so the neighbours can come in a tisktisk about our living room rug. A new agent represents hope.
But will the new agent come across the same problems with a downturning market, bargain hunters and predictions of doom and gloom? Absolutely. It's the buyer database that we want to access. The first agent was pitching far too high - we need more realistic buyers. Ones that want to actually buy the house, not the price tag. Ones that might see themselves living in this house, rather than just renting it. We need buyers to get passionate about the position, the size, the neighbours - this house won't sell itself. It needs someone to fight for it, to educate the buyers about its benefits - to SELL it.
There's a buyer for every house. There's also an agent for every seller.
I just murdered my dog.
Well, not me, personally, the vet did the actual deed. I ordered the hit.
Jesse was a beautiful dog – a border collie cross, with large brown eyes; a pert nose so cute that is she were human people would be asking plastic surgeons for one just like it; a startling white fur collar contrasting against a kohl black coat; and pretty white shoes.
Her fur – not too long nor too short – was the Jenniffer Aniston of doggy dos. She was beautiful.
Her personality, almost from when we first met her, was perky, energetic and so friendly. Completely besotted with humans, she would charge at them with tongue prepared to lick their cares away.
Indeed, when dark times came, she was the constant friend. Always there to pat, or yell at, or talk to, or run with, no further explanation necessary. She’d just look at me with those big, brown eyes and I knew there were bigger things in the world than my pain.
Ours was never the most harmonious of relationships. She was supposed to be a miniature poodle, black. No shedding, no allergy-causing hair. But when my then boyfriend (he’s now my husband) and I walked in to the RSPCA shelter 13 years ago, we fell in love with this soft doll of a dog, the quiet one, at the back of the cage, just lying there, willing us to take her home. Her pink tongue rough on my palm.
So we scooped her up, put her in a box and took her home. She was to be our surrogate child – it was a dog or a baby I had told my partner. Silly, I know. Blame it on hormones. Such a burden to place on a dog.
I had this picture in my head – partner, dog and I frolicking in the sand, weaving in and out of the surf, maybe throwing a ball, smiling, smiling and laughing. Dog beside the dinner table, taking scraps with intelligent grace, no mess, no fuss. Dog on couch, curled into a ball, my hand resting on fur, gently patting, absently sharing comfort of touch.
After the first night of incessant howling, whimpering and simpering (that was just us), and after adopting a sleeping position of one hand in a box, a foot on the floor, and pillow over the head, we took her back to the RSPCA. For hours we sat in the waiting room, considering, pondering. In the end we just couldn’t do it. Love had captivated us.
She came home. That night, she fell off the couch. She yelped like a child and I rushed to pick her up. Her leg askew, licking, nipping, pain. After a while and a bit of a rub, she calmed down and began to play.
We rang the RSPCA – they said it was probably just a complication of the operation. What operation? She had been desexed the day before we picked her up. But she’s only six week’s old. Yes, we don’t let them leave without being desexed.
Trust is thin on the ground in animal welfare circles. The past has taught them well.
At least we know why she was the quietest little thing in that cage. She was doped to the eyeballs. No wonder she was now so full of jump, racing around the house in a set pattern, wearing a path into the lawn.
She grew. We noticed she had a wet bottom most of the time. Wetter and wetter, we were buying towels for the dog to pee on. It just wouldn’t do. So we took her to the vet, who referred us to the vet hospital. Worry, like which I now know is maternal concern. UQ experts poked and prodded, gave her a barium radium test, we spent thousands. ``She has a loose sphincter, and normally we would sling it to her abdomen wall, but she’s so active I don’t think it would last long. Here’s a script, go to the chemist and ask for psuedoephedrin. Yes, the stuff they make speed from.’’ ``You want us to give our already hyper border collie speed?’’ ``Um, yes. Watch out for personality changes, but that is the best course of action.’’
We tried, and chose the pee. She became an outside-only dog and that was OK.
Jesse was there for our endless house moves, and then the wedding, and the friends and the parties and the houseguiests, and the walks. Always with a wet bottom.
Once, she floated out of our backyard and down the road. It must have been horrific. The weight of the freak floodwaters had smashed our back gates, lifted wardrobes and motor mowers, decimated huge pots full of soil. A neighbour spied her among the rubble, and tied her to a lamppost. Since then, she acted as our early storm warning system. We could tell the severity of an approaching cell just from the tone of her whimper.
She endured the territory-changing event of a child entering the house with joy. She’d treat our human child as a rare gem, sniffing and nose-nudging until the child was old enough to pat her. Then they were friends, one sneezy little girl riding her bike with her best mate Jesse. Slowly, that love turned arms-length, as an ageing Jesse became less tolerant to the energetic whims of a human puppy and that child more allergic to her pal. A mere lick would summon the anithistime from the top pantry shelf.
But still, Jess endured, albeit more slowly. The decision was really made the day we took her to the beach for the second last time. She was uncontrollable, even on a leash. She had changed, who was this dog? When she whipped Lauren – accidentially – with her lead, the doubt began. We persevered. The last time we took her, she almost ate another dog.
Her peeing reached flood proportion. The storms were effecting her more. The night barking could no longer be defeated by an electronic collar. She found it hard to get up. She was so skinny.
After a while, my partner rang the vet. Guilt delayed us – if we decided to kill her, what would that say about us as people? If we couldn’t tough out a little bit more of a loved one’s behaviour, what did that say about us as parents? And Jesse wasn’t doing it on purpose – she was a dog, so how come she had to bear the burden of our failings?
It was the single worst decision to make. It was irreversible. We’d never made an irreversible decision that we weren’t 100 per cent sure about. The closest would be deciding to have a child – but that is adding to the world, not taking away.
We had to do the unthinkable – weigh our love against our lifestyle. We had to quantify our love, actually divide our love into that which we had for our human family away from the love we had for Jess. It was so superficial, we thought, to choose a bark-pee-poo-allergy-bite-free existence over perseverance and loyalty and love.
The vet said she would need an x-ray, more pills and tests. No, we couldn’t go through that again. The vet said she’d have two years left in her, as long as we nursed her carefully. No, we couldn’t go through that. We booked the final appointment. And cried.
We lied to our child – Jesse is now living at a beautiful farm, with lots of room to run around, endless food to eat, and many, many toys. Yes, there are children at this farm to play with her. Yes, I think she might have to fly there, because it’s a long way away. Yes, I think Jesse is excited, too, about her trip. Yes, we can’t see here again because it’s so far away. This was a much bigger lie than Santa Claus. Maybe the farm is what we think Heaven will be like – I certainly hope Jess is there now.
The day she died I gave her a tin of her favourite – red salmon. No common bones for her, thank you very much. I apologised, more for the human race than for the deed I had determined. I am so sorry dogs have to be pets and humans get to decide things like that. It’s not fair. But it’s the way life is. We are at the top of the food chain.
I admonished myself. It’s only a dog. Do you feel the same way about the cows you make die or the chickens or the lambs? No, but they didn’t throw up 10 times around the perimeter of my rumpus room and in the occupied guest room after eating a cane toad. They didn’t vomit in the front footwell of my car the first time we took our new brother-in-law for a family holiday on the coast. They didn’t look at me with those big brown eyes when I was so depressed I couldn’t bathe my baby, and nudge my hand so I had to move.
No more pets. It’s too painful.
Yes, I murdered my dog. Sometimes I hate being a human. But that’s not really because Jesse had to die by my decree. It’s more because while I mourn Jesse not being; I know it was the right thing to do, for my family.
Vale, Jess. Good dog.
I am abuzz with thoughts of network theory, sparked by How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer show on ABC last night. Apparently, Six Degrees of Separation actually works - we are all linked to Kevin Bacon after all. Math heads have found that everything - relationships, brain design, cities, the internet - are all following network theory.
It's a process whereby chaos is calmed by a natural order that shrinks individual bits into clusters called worlds. These clusters could be work groups, friendships, countries - even the way disease spreads.
Critical in these networks are hubs, or people or places that have many, many links - far above the norm. Ergo - if you want to make a network quickly, you find a hub and get that hub to work for you, connecting you to whatever you need. With people, that means finding someone who is linked in to many people to make the best of a situation. To stop diseases spreading, you find the hubs where disease can be spread to lots of people, such as an airport or a particularly sexually active person. Naturally, if you want lots of links to your website, link to a mega site hub like Google or Yahoo or whatever
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Oi youse ripper beaudies... prepare for an educated onslaught of punctuation perfection!
The continuing torture of the English language by school students is about to end.
The Fed Govt (Oz division) has decided to reinstate grammar, punctuation and spelling as a school subject. Thank the lords of letters
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(A tribute to Breast Cancer Awareness month, written by a relative about her experience)
I thought I was doing the right thing. Every year I would book a mammogram, and nervously waiting for the result. ``Phew, passed this mammogram, I am safe,’’ I would think afterwards. I had no need to worry, because I had no family history of the disease.
Then in 2005, I found a strange lump on my collarbone. I went to my GP, who ordered a scan just to make sure. Two days later, I was told the bad news: ``It’s secondary cancer. We have to find the primary
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News.com reports that a Russian girl stabbed her best friend to death with a pair of tweezers.
Really Long Link
"She said it was because she was blonde and advised me to dye mine the same colour," Danilova said. "I replied that being blonde was an incurable condition, not something to aspire to. Word by word our friendship just unravelled."
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September 26th 2008 06:13
I've had it!!! That's IT!!! If one more person says to me that whatever they have experienced is a ``journey'' I will EXPLODE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!! What is it with society? Can't we think beyond reality TV when trying to come up with descriptors? So, here it is, my 10 most hated words:
1> Journey - it is so f not a journey if you don't actually GO anywhere. Idol is NOT a JOURNEY!!! It may be a trip down shit lane, but that's about it. A journey is going from Brisbane to Afghanistan on camel back - not standing up in front of a camera and singing like a broken shingle.
2> Random - OK, so Facebook has a lot to answer for and this little gem is one of them. Random is a selection based on an absence of pattern or qualifiers. Putting a photo of Bill Cosby on your Facebook profile is not totally random, it's just you trying to be retro, which is an incredibly unrandom act designed to express your personality. You are not a black man who redefined American society by showing positive African-American characters on prime time TV, using comedy to deflect social unrest
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September 25th 2008 00:49
AAP reports Skippy The Bush Kangaroo actor Tony Bonner - the helicopter pilot - hasn't received a dime of royalties from new media sales of the show. He's suing the series' maker Fauna Productions. Which begs the question - how does new technology impact on intellectual property rights? Do we need a new model for making money out of creative pursuits for this downloadable age?
Most Australian journalists signed away their right to technology publication royalties back in the early 1990s, $500 one up payment I think, so their bosses can reproduce their content a million times without having to pay extra. Someone working for a Brisbane title can have their work used on a national website, and can't do a thing about it. That includes video and sound productions produced by all journalists. Other organisations who use their copy in printed material are pursued by the Copyright agency, and news houses get nasty when bloggers or websites reproduce their work. Telstra is currently trying to make Newsltd stop using readers' mobile phone video taken at footy matches on their news websites, saying Telstra has the sole broadcasting rights (which they did buy).
Music producers cannot control downloads on new media like they used to, so are missing out on millions in revenue. The RIAA is trying to sue everyone who has done it - including now the lawyer who defends people RIAA is trying to sue Really Long Link - and claimed Napster victim. Sony is about to release a phone where buyers can download for free up to 1000 songs from their online shop
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September 22nd 2008 04:16
Do people generally trust journalists? Why or why not?
The Readers Digest list of our 100 most trusted professions listed journalism just above telemarketers, prostitutes, car salesmen, real estate salespeople and pollies (see list below). What worries me is that journalists are BELOW psychics. If this is taken as a they-are-telling-the-truth-th erefore-i-trust-them o'meter, what the hell is going on?
See
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Comment by Amanda 3
on Finally, a return to grammatical sanity
I'd love to trade links ... if I knew what that meant?