2002-06-05 - 9:35 a.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "Shades of Gray", The Monkees

So, Florida was just lovely, as usual. Friday I sat around on my ass and didn't do a damn thing except read and chat with the 'rents-in-law. Well, I also ate about half of the coffeecake that MIL had made for me, so hopefully I have finally gained back the three pounds I lost during the vacation/move time.

Saturday we went to Boca Lake on the boat. I managed to stay awake until we got there, and then I passed out in the forward cabin. Me on a boat is like a baby being rocked. It felt like I slept for about ten minutes or so, and a loud thunk of a wave hitting the boat woke me up.

Then I jumped into the water, which was a gorgeous clear green now that they've dredged the inlet. It was a little chilly for me. Splashed around for a while, and then it was time to go home to "get cute", as MIL put it, to go out to dinner. It was at this point that someone told me I napped for OVER AN HOUR. Unbelievable. I sleep like a rock on that boat.

Dinner was wonderful. After we ate, MIL and I sat on the dock while she had a cigarette. There were little crabs all over the dock, crawling around. They are so adorable.

I told MIL about the crabs I used to have in college. I kept them in a fish tank with my black moor goldfish, with the bulging eyes. One day I came home from class and saw something small and brown skittering across the floor. I shrieked because I thought it was a roach. Then I looked more closely, and it was one of my crabs. How it got out of the tank, off my desk, and onto the floor, I have no idea.

Another day, I came home and discovered a crab, perched in a fake plant, with a dead black moor under one claw while it reached in and pulled the meat out with the other claw and ate it. Good lord. I don't know if the goldfish died first or if the crab caught it.

Sunday, MIL and I went to a couple of open houses, just for the hell of it. They live in a zip code that has become incredibly ritzy in the last ten years, so they get invites to these things all the time. The first house was $1.6 million, and the other was $1.1 million.

I wouldn't've bought either one of them. The first was well done, a high-quality renovation, but the layout was just odd. It felt weird. I don't know anything about the specifics of feng shui, but it probably violated a lot of the rules. The kitchen was tiny and stuffed away in a corner.

The second house had this huge, grand foyer, and looked incredible from the outside, and the inside was shit. Cheap, shoddy work. Whoever owned the house had obviously put all their money into the house and had none leftover for decorating because most of the rooms just looked terrible.

It's interesting. If I had that kind of money, I would buy a smaller house and renovate it into something that was absolutely perfect. The in-law's house is like that. It's only about 2000 square feet, but everything in it is perfect, and it's now worth about three times what they put into it (the house itself plus the renovation). That's the way to go.

Well, I found out what the building is in this entry. It's an ancient apartment building called "The Drake", which was just given a multi-million-dollar renovation. It's got all kinds of niftily designed apartments. If you're interested in this sort of thing, you can go here. Click "next photo" repeatedly, and you can see bunches of photos of the inside of the building plus some of the intricate details on the outside. There must be almost two dozen photos, and sometimes they repeat, but keep clicking until you see the first photo again.

I would loooooooove to rent an apartment there, but $1575 for 872 square feet is not really do-able. Boohoo.

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