The Real Estate Agent

This afternoon I met with a real estate agent, Mike Mendenhall, who, like the mortgage broker I met with a week and a half ago, was recommended to me by a former cow-orker.

As with the mortgage guy, Mike turned out to be knowledgeable, professional, and easy to like. He filled me in on many of the details of closing a home purchase here in California, and we of course discussed what I want in a home and where I'd like to live. He sounds quite practical in sizing up the floorplan of a home (general layout, how much space stairs and hallways take up, etc.) and the location. All-in-all I left with a good feeling about working with him.

Apparently the way that house-hunting works today is that he sets me up with a feed of listings which gets e-mailed to me daily (actually, even more often than that). I can check out the location on the Web, then go drive by myself if I want to check out the area, and contact Mike directly if I want to see the place itself. He's already set me up with a feed, and the 100 or so listings I've received seem to include a number of places which seem like the kind of place I'd like in an area I'd like. Actually, there are many which are probably worth seeing, but even so, there were maybe a dozen which grabbed my attention from just the extended listing on the Web. Which is a good thing! I imagine a year ago I might have seen, what? Two?

Mike recommended that I draw up a list of about 20 places in different locations to go drive by soon, to get a feel for many different areas and perhaps spot some that I want to go see right now, and at least to eliminate some areas that don't interest me. So I want to draw up a list tonight and tomorrow and go after work tomorrow to do the drive-bys. Here's hopin'!

I'm feeling pretty optimistic about finding a place. Now we'll just see how my optimism withstands first contact with an actual home...

I noticed today at the grocery store that TV Guide this week is spotlighting the upcoming Star Trek series, Enterprise, with a number of promotional photos for the series. I didn't buy the issue, but I did thumb through it.

My reaction?

Holy cow! The outfits look just like those from Babylon 5, especially its spin-off, Crusade! Heck, Scott Bakula looks disturbingly like Michael O'Hare in his early-series B5 role as Commander Sinclair! Plus, it seems just basically lame that they're going so far out of their way to avoid having the outfits and sets look anything like those in the original series. What's the point of doing a prequel series if you're not even going to give visual nods to the original series?

It looks like the usual array of people-who-have-yet-to-show-they-know-what-Star-Trek-is-all-about are producing Enterprise, so, naturally, my hopes for it are low. Maybe I'll watch it... maybe I won't even bother. I'm more interested in J. Michael Straczynski's new B5 project, The Legend of the Rangers. At least I actually care about what happens in the B5 universe... I lost my sympathy for the denizens of the dull-as-dirt post-cinematic Star Trek universe about a decade ago.