Babble

As you may have gathered by the lack of posts referencing travel, entertainment, dining or anything else that requires spending money, we’re largely still enjoying the abstemious life, courtesy our two extra mortgages. The Madison housing market remains woefully slow, along with the rest of the nation, and while there are a number of interested buyers for my condo, they all have a place to sell before they can buy mine, and they’re not having much luck either.

Meanwhile, prices continue to drop. For reference, when I purchased my condo in 1999, I couldn’t find anything worth looking at for under $100,000. Today, there are 2,125 condos for sale on the MLS in Dane County and 169 of them are under $100k, nine years later. And some of them are surprisingly nice… desperate owners slashing prices just to be rid of the burden. Tough competition for the determined-but-not-quite-desperate (yet) condo seller.

In an attempt to reach a new audience, I have made some changes. When my contract ran out with Jenny Swain, I decided to try Madison For Sale By Owner, which effectively allows you to put the commission you would have paid to your agent into a lower price for your buyer. At 6%, this is substantial… after the FSBO listing fee, marketing costs and attorney’s fee, I can drop my asking price by $10k and still potentially end up with a similar (or better) bottom line. The downside of course, which is huge, is you’re no longer listed on the Madison Listing Service, which is how many, if not most, homes are eventually sold. You’re also tasked with all the marketing and open houses, which I actually enjoy, but it does take some research and time. I’m going to give this a go during the real estate “down” months (Nov - Feb) and may return to Jenny in the spring if I don’t have any luck… we’ll see.

In the meantime, check out my groovy new marketing materials:

• My listing on Madison FSBO (try to ignore the teal color, not my call)
• Photos of the condo on Flickr
• Printable flyer (PDF) - print them out, post them on bulletin boards, wrap your Christmas gifts in them… all help is welcome!

I also get to hold my own open houses, Julie style. This Sunday’s will feature the New York Times’ chocolate chip cookies, (1-3 p.m., you know you want one) and I’m contemplating a week-night showing, with wine. Might as well make the best of it… feel free to stop by and have a cookie.

Gotta get me one of these.

Big excitement in real estate today for the Vilas household! Matt and I are both having open houses — Matt’s house is featured on the front page of the “Homes” section of the Wisconsin State Journal, and it’s my first open house on the FSBO market. Please help spread the word. More details can be found here:

• 213 Center Street, Mount Horeb, 12-2
• 7537 Widgeon Way, Madison, 1-4

Ha, I also just realized they’re now the same price.

I love Halloween. I like clever costumes, I really like candy and I am inexplicably drawn to tiny pumpkins. This month — and particularly this week — have been a bit on the rough side, but after a pumpkin carving contest/housewarming party at Matt & Dana’s last night (Krazy won and Schroeder took second), a healthy dose of Halloween candy this afternoon, and a bit of decorating a couple hours ago, I am giddy with anticipation (and possibly sugar) for our first trick or treaters tomorrow night at the new house. (Matt plans to put on his firefighting gear to answer the door so I joined him in the professional theme.) Heh, I amuse myself to no end.

Just returned from yet another Wondrous Wednesday lunch. Blue sky, autumn leaves and a nice 2-mile walk to the farmers’ market off the square. I’ve written about this experience before, but thought I’d elaborate on my lunches now that I’m on the 3-mortgage, “lunch-under-$25″ plan. Specifically, we’re talking lacto-ovo-vegetarian lunches in the State St. area. And that’s $25/week, in case you were wondering. I can hear both Schroeder and JeffO making the throw up noise as (if?) they read this, but given the whole economy is going down the toilet and we might all become vegetarians, I’m considering myself ahead of the game. Read on….

Top 7 veggie/cheap options in the area, according to Julie:

• Potbelly’s cup of the soup of the day or vegan soup (served daily) with oyster crackers + oatmeal chocolate chip cookie: $3.68. For a bit more ($4.29) they have a variety of large sandwiches - I like the toasted PB&J on whole wheat.
• Mediterranean cafe: There are a number of items here for $5 or less. Try the humus & pita, the soup with rice, or my fav, the Med sandwich. Their tabouli is also excellent.
• The Dandelion food cart which, I’m happy to say, is relocating from its current location on MLK Blvd to Library Mall, just steps outside my office. Awesome AWESOME food, and for the budget-conscious, $3.25 gets you a bunch of steamed, seasoned veggies and a peanut butter cup for dessert.
• Slightly off State St., but with unbeatable lake views in the summer, is the Memorial Union. Der Rathskeller has a create-your-own-custom sandwich bar where it’s pretty difficult to make a veggie sandwich that costs more than $5. My favorite is the egg salad with romaine lettuce on wheat with extra pickles and Dusseldorf mustard. The price varies with the cashier but it’s usually around $3.75.
• Ian’s pizza has two locations within a mile and a decent-sized slice of cheese (or pepperoni) pizza is just $2.00. A large assortment of other veggie slices are available for $3.00. Or, for $3.50 (sm) or $5.50 (lg), you can get a salad of mixed greens and 3 or 5 toppings, most of which are locally grown. For the price, it’s arguably the best salad in town.
• Einstein bagels. While not the healthiest option, the egg & cheese on an Asiago bagel is delicious. And $4.01. There are also of course a variety of bagels & cream cheese options, if you happen to like cream cheese. -bleh- Also, not to be missed next-door: Espresso Royale’s $2 any-size lattes every Wednesday.
• Lastly, Noodles. The prices there have skyrocketed in the past few years, but you can still get a bowl of buttered, seasoned noodles for around $4, which happens to be my favorite.

For those not selling homes in a depressed market, a dollar or two more will get cha good veggie and even vegan options at Sunroom Cafe, Amy’s Cafe and Qdoba. Bon appetit!

As I get ready for yet another exciting weekend of organizing, cleaning and prepping for an open house (Sunday 11-1, please buy my condo), it makes sense to bring you news of people with lives more exciting than mine. Thus, the sibling update:

JenO and Anil were both in Madison for Cathy Strey’s wedding a couple weeks ago and we had fun going out to dinner, eating our way through the farmers’ market and making pizza. She’s now back in Portland for half a second, but soon departs on a little 8-flight jaunt for work that will take her to Anchorage, Thailand (Bangkok) and the Philippines (Manila). So she’ll put on a few miles. Fortunately her 15-hour trip back from Manila is only 10 minutes long. Taking into account those handy time changes anyway.

As for my little brother JeffO, he celebrated his golden birthday last week on the 30th. Kinda. Between trips to England (where he hung out with his Exec MBA friend Sasha in Brighton, took in the United game in Manchester, and wandered about London), and his imminent departure for uh, Iowa, (for a wedding), he didn’t have a lot of time to celebrate (quite possibly by design). I’m hoping to catch up with him soon and hear more, and rub it in that he is now THIRTY YEARS OLD. Egads. It’s cool though that, at my static age of 29, I’m finally younger than him.

Then there is Jack, who is also traveling a fair amount this weekend, but doing it all on foot (and wheel). He’ll be running the Portland marathon this Sunday, which is impressive (as are his splits), but he also intends to make it to —and possibly win— the CycloCross unicycle race afterward. The CycloCross is a 1-lap, all-out sprint, that “involves a lot of quick dismounting, re-mounting, running up steep grades, jumping over barriers and MUD (and sometimes beer).” From one of Jack’s emails to me: ” If I run the marathon as fast as I did last year, it will give me approximately 35 minutes before the CycloCross unicycle race starts, which is a 15 minute drive away.” Okaaay, Jack. I will be rooting for you while I’m vacuuming… and seriously contemplating which one of us was adopted.

Update: Jack just finished the marathon in the top 100 people at a 6:53 mile pace. He did make it to the CycloCross, but opted to spectate. Good call.

In case you haven’t had one yet this season, go and get yourself a Honeycrisp apple. At the advice of the parents, I got in line to buy one at the farmers’ market last Saturday and was pretty shocked when the girl next to me bought about a dozen apples and the price was $30. My lone apple was $2.25. Due to our three-mortgage situation, I figured that was the first and last Honeycrisp apple I’d be buying.

I got around to eating it Monday night for dinner, with crunchy peanut butter on it, and it was good to the point that I have been thinking about it for two days now. A trip to the Wednesday farmers’ market at noon today, specifically to get my Honeycrisp fix, produced no score — the woman at the booth laughed and told me they sold out hours beforehand. I physically crumbled and the woman stopped laughing and looked at me knowingly. Apparently I am not the first person to develop this expensive habit.

See you at the Saturday market, early.

I have a new calendaring system. This probably doesn’t seem like a big deal to most people but for someone with a lot of stuff to do and a crummy memory, it’s pretty crucial. I found this out the hard way when I upgraded both my home and work computers to an operating system which doesn’t support the Palm software I was using and then my Visor Edge (circa 2000 and yes it still worked perfectly) died. Did I mention I was moving? Chaos.

So I decided to start over from scratch. My goal was to have a calendar application with multi-colored categories that I could run on my home computer, work computer, laptop, and new iPhone. I also wanted it to sync with WiscCal, UW’s calendar software, be able to access it remotely, and subscribe to Matt’s calendar (and share mine with him). You’ve probably stopped reading by now unless you have the same needs. That’s good.

I looked at Google calendars, iCal and Mozilla Lightning/Sunbird. The best solution for my needs, not surprisingly, turned out to be iCal, which comes with the Apple OS, mainly because it was most compatible with the iPhone, although there are work-arounds for other systems.

For WiscCal (which I now limit to strictly work-related events) I created a share url (you must add “&compat=br” when using iCal) and then subscribed to that through iCal. It shows up as another calendar which I can turn on or off.

For Matt and I to share calendars, we use iCalX, which provides free publishing, either public or private, as well as an html viewer to see your calendar online, with a reasonable amount of privacy. (We don’t keep much sensitive information in our calendars, so this isn’t a big deal to us.) I keep all the calendar categories I want to share with Matt in one group and export that to iCalX, and he does the same. Then we both subscribe with each other’s password and voila.

When you subscribe to another calendar, you choose how often you want it updated (or you can refresh manually at any time), so hopefully things will just run from now on. There are also specific calendars (i.e. U.S. Holidays) you can subscribe to in iCal, which can save you time. WiscCal has a similar feature, allowing you to automatically import a selection of thousands of campus events according to department, events series, or even keywords. Pretty handy.

Lastly, I can also plug my iPhone into either my work or home computer and sync selected calendars or the whole thing. I don’t use iCalX’s html web-viewing option, because this provides all the portability I need.

Hope someone found this of use - it’s all pretty simple, but the initial choices are a little overwhelming. As always, comments, questions and feedback welcome.

Long time no write. I have a big list of blog updates, most of which are long and have accompanying photos, so the chances of me posting them anytime soon are slim. Today though, I bring you this fun little application which shows you the history of names. Just type your name and it takes you to a site which gives you its popularity by decade. Even more fun, you can then delete letters to see what variations or other names were popular. All on the fly. Who knew “Stacey” has always been more common then “Stacy”?

*And while the festivities of the last five evenings should leave little doubt, just to be clear, mom, I was not using the site for its intended purpose.

Thanks to everyone who helped spread the word for the last open house… there was a lot of interest and traffic, so we hope to keep the momentum going. The next one will be Sunday, 9/14, from 2:00 to 4:00.