Doom and Gloom

Things have been gloomy here for the past week - clouds and showers almost every day - and there appears to be no relief in sight until the middle of next week. May is such a treacherous month. It opens like a flower, soft and beautiful, welcoming you into its bosom after a long, hard winter (yes, I know spring is supposed to start in March but up here you take spring when you can get it) and just when you begin to relax and enjoy the warmth and the extra hours of sun, it snaps to like a Marine D.I. and yells, "Drop and give me twenty, you maggots!"

Twenty days of rain, that is. Luckily, we haven't had any flooding in the area but I understand that in parts of New Hampshire and Mass, the Ark business is picking up. Yesterday, we were given a brief respite as the sun came out for several hours. Of course, after the sun went down the clouds rolled back in and we had our first boomer of the season, with thunder and lightning so close it seemed like a scene from War of the Worlds.

Maybe God is protesting the opening of The Da Vinci Code.

Anyway, I have been trudging through the sog this last week house hunting and all in all, it's been pretty discouraging. We're currently in a duplex and after ten years of sharing a wall and all that goes with it (including cigarette smoke - apparently our landlord rents to smokers but only if they agree to smoke outside. So when they go outside and light up - especially in the spring and summer when all the windows are open - all the smoke floats up and drifts into our half of the building and, well, let me just say that if I wanted to live with a smoker, I'd live with a smoker, you know what I mean?) we would really like to have a free-standing house. Of course, we're not in a position to buy one - not with me being out of work and all - so we're looking to rent (and even that becomes somewhat problematical when the prospective landlord asks what you do for a living).

First of all, let me just say that Vermont takes a back seat to no one when it comes to overpriced housing - both rental and purchasing. Granted, the prices drop a bit as you leave the Champlain Valley but then you are faced with higher transportation costs and fewer amenities. Now, there is a school of thought that says that you're not really living in Vermont if you're living in anything larger than a town - the idea being, I guess, that civilization and Vermont are mutually exclusive terms - but that's a discussion for another post, I think. Ideally, I would like to live outside of the city but close enough to commute to it without major issues, especially in winter. Consequently, our search has encompassed an area up to twenty or thirty miles outside of Burlington proper.

In spite of that, we have found relatively few places that we feel we can both live in and afford. The price range has been from $1000 to over $2500 a month and I've been left wondering just what kind of work a person can do in this area to be able to afford $2000 or more a month for a rental. I'm trying to keep it under $1500 (which represents a 50% increase over what we're currently paying) and it hasn't been easy.

The other problem is that the whole business of renting a place has become such a dog and pony show. In order to qualify for a roof and four walls, you have to run through a gamut of credit checks, references, paystubs and blood samples. Okay, I'm kidding about the last one. I think. Now I understand if a landlord is going to give me the opportunity to trash his place, he has the right to know a little bit about me first. Personally, I think it ought to cut both ways but I seem to be in the minority on that. And when I look at the neighbors I've had to put up with for the last five years - all of whom seem to have come straight from Assholes Anonymous - it seems more than a little petty for a landlord to refuse me because I don't happen to have a job at the moment or because I was thirty days late on my car payment two years ago.

The truth is, as long as you pay your rent on time, it doesn't matter how many times your neighbor has to call 911 in order to get some sleep. Unless, of course, your neighbor is your landlord.

For the moment, each day is the same: check out the listings in the paper and compare with the listings online, call people to make appointments to go see places that look interesting, talk to real estate agents to see if they know of places that aren't being listed, and wait to hear back from people you've already spoken to and filled out applications for. Oh yeah, and at the same time, find a job. It's fun. Really.

One other thing to add to the mix - and you might want to stop reading at this point if you're in the middle of eating - I am currently undergoing my first physical in several years and I can tell you with utmost certainty that there are two words no one ever wants to hear in a doctor's office (or anywhere else, for that matter). Those words are (don't say I didn't warn you!) "Juicy" and "Hemorrhoid". When you add the word "Internal" and make the aforementioned noun plural, you have what I call JIHs, which I have been dealing with the treatment of for the past week. I'll spare you the bloody details and sum it up this way:

Ouch. To the nth degree.