Misc.

Junk drawer post. I have some DS chargers, bulletin board tacks, old McDonald's Monopoly papers, and a few elastic bands in this somewhere...

Ok. First, do you want to hear a nice story about a nice family? They're nice people. They wanted to buy a house in a nice neighbourhood. They kept getting outbid by other families, so they did something different this time. THIS time, they stapled a picture of their beautiful family and a note about how much they will enjoy the house and sent it along with their offer on the place. Not only were they able to buy the place from the seller, but the seller rejected an offer of $10,000 more than this family was offering!

Nice, huh?

But maybe not all of us are nice people. I know I'm not. I'm fat and old and I don't photograph well. I have teen boys and sorry, when I'm shopping for houses and see evidence of teen boys I think loud music and dangerous driving and go somewhere else. My letter would be about yeah, we like your house because it has this one room in which I can corral my autistic child and we can get rid of the metal cage we currently use. That would go over reallly well.

Or suppose the family that bid the $10,000 more than the one that sent the picture weren't weird like me. Say they were perfectly regular people, but they were (egads) black people. Does your opinion change? Is it still ok for realtors to allow people to market themselves as buyers, knowing certain sorts of customers won't get the best deals?

I don't like this story. I know it's supposed to be a feel-good story about a nice family, but I don't feel it's a nice trend. I think if we're going to play this game we ought to at least allow listings that say "young families only" or "no Mexicans." Can we just be honest about it? I guess I will be ok with it if we are just honest about this being the pretty/ outgoing/ nice people with connections or the right ethnicity getting what they want. Nobody should be forced to sell to a given bunch of folks if they don't want to... well... and I'd like to think most people try to set that stuff aside when it's business because it's simply in their best interest to do so.

Next up: time to sign up for Pizza Hut book-it program if you homeschool! Yeah. You like free pizza.

Third... the math dance. We need choreographers to teach us that Gina has four letters. G-I-N-A. I was going to scoff at this outright but I suppose there are some children who learn kinetically and need to sort of move to get those math concepts. I don't know that graduate students and teachers need to do this for a whole day workshop or if they do, how much time they spend with real live little children. I do remember one thing we did when Emperor was tiny was get a long number line out and let him hop back and forth for addition and subtraction. When it was time to learn about adding a negative number, he did get a little bit stuck. But I think past a certain point, you can't learn 3x -2y = 75 with a dance. (If you can, please post to youtube because that really would be interesting.)

And finally, I found this little article in my browsing. I think you can certainly tell someone the chair has a 200 pound weight limit and that there's an extra charge BEFORE someone sits in it. You'd think, though, that smart business people would know there are quite a large number (ha ha) of people over 200 pounds out there. You could get a more durable chair or whatever or maybe even charge every customer a dollar more from now on. Not as a separate charge... just raise your fees to accomodate expenses such as the chair. I'm sure buffets charge a husky teen football player the same amount they charge for my three-year-old to dine and guess which one eats more...