I don't have to work today

A three day work week. It's good to be me. A realtor picked me up around 10:30 today and we looked at a couple of properties. One was in the Soma area and it was okay, but it had that irritating enclosed balcony/den feature that is popping up a lot and pisses me off for a couple of reasons. First, it detracts from flow of the suite making the transition between the bedroom and the "juliette balcony" choppy. Second, it cuts off the living room space and I honestly don't think I could've fit my furniture in to the space allotted for the living room - and I don't have abnormally large furniture! So that one was a no go, unfortunately.
Then we headed down to a place near the Science World. Wow. I would guess my realtor is my age, maybe a touch older. She is petite like me. I really like her, actually. She's quite green, so she hasn't mastered the shyster realtor talk yet. Anyways, we're walking around Main and Prior and I'm pretty sure we're going to get shot. We pass the Ivanhoe and I said, "Yeah, I've been there" and she looked at me and said, "Why?". I replied that it hadn't been my choice, I had been with some people that wanted to go, so we went in. I do believe that you could get a beer for a dollar (this was about ten years ago) there and a man tried to sell me a block of cheese that he had ripped off from Safeway. I politely declined and then indicated to the idiots that I was with that I would like to leave before I was stabbed with a screwdriver. So what I'm saying is that it was a rather unsavory area.
The suite itself was nice. It had a good, open layout with concrete floors and floor to ceiling windows. The selling realtor was there and this guy did have the shyster act down. The suite viewed onto a large open field and I asked who owned it and what was going to be developed there. He said Provident Health owned it and a hospital would be going in. He said that was a positive and would add to the diversity of the area or something equally stupid. Um, it adds to the noise and traffic congestion if that's what he meant by diversity. I asked him how often the garage had been broken into, which he didn't like. He said it had been broken into a few times, but nothing recently, and that he didn't know of any garage that hadn't been broken into. I did not tell him the story about how, when Michael and I were living in Kerrisdale, we received a phone call from the police at 5am one morning telling us that someone had called in to report that the trunk on one of our vehicles was open. We got up, thinking someone had pried it open to steal whatever they could. We got to the car and yes, the trunk was open. And yes, Michael's golf clubs were still there. We closed the trunk and went back to bed. Anyways, this suite was priced the same as the Soma one, so one of them was not like the other.
Now I am home and they are working on the exterior of my building! It's only been six years! I'm pretty excited that they're fixing up the place. I do like looking around Vancouver at new and heretofore undiscovered (to me, at least) areas but you know what I really like? Coming back to Kerrisdale. Kerrisdale rocks. I am seeing a condo here tomorrow morning, but I can't afford it. I'm going to offer 25k less than the asking price. I'm not sure the realtor will even entertain it, but I've got nothing to lose.
Failing that, I'm moving to like, Smithers or something.