We recently sold our old house and bought a new one, and moved.

The main reason we did this: to get closer to Amanda’s place of work. We managed to turn a commute that ran from 35 minutes to 1.5 hours (on really bad winter days) each way to one short enough that Amanda will usually bike, with about a five or six minute drive on non-biking days. Probably a ten minute drive on the worst winter days.

The main reason we did this now rather than a couple of years ago: our house was under water thanks to the GB Economic Crisis. In fact, we weren’t sure if we could sell the house at anything but a loss now. And, since we were trying to move into what is at present the best school district in the state (where Amanda happens to teach), the chances of finding a place to move to were somewhere between slim and none. And slim just left town after killing none.

But, we had excellent real estate agents working with us, and that made a huge difference. This blog post is, in fact, part of my thanks for and endorsement of Erik and Toby Nordin. They generally work as a team, and Erik was at the time the licensed agent (though Toby just became one as well), while Toby was the marketing guru. The Nordins work for Engle & Völkers, an international company that has recently moved into the Twin Cities area, and for which Amanda’s sister, Alyssa, works.

Erik and Toby gave us advice on what to do to get our house ready for sale. We followed their advice carefully, and rather than having to lose money on the sale, we walked away with a nice bit of cash. We sold the house in just over 24 hours after putting on the market, though it is a bit unfair to say that; the eventual buyers actually saw the house just a few hours into the process, but there was a bidding thing among the six or so offers we got.

Erik took us out to look at houses a few days after we sold ours. Twice. We found the house we wanted to buy with two bouts of searching. We know a few other people in our area that have moved recently, and most took weeks or months. One could argue that we are not picky, but see above: we were looking for an affordable place a bike ride from the top high school in the state, in a very fancy suburb.

(It turns out that Plymouth Minnesota has a sort of workers neighborhood right by the City Center. Erik knew about it, and showed us a couple of places here.)

Erik and Toby provided or organized all the necessary services and held our hands through every step. Their management of MLS data was excellent. They had great advice on anything you can imagine an agent can provide advice on. You need to know that I’m a person who normally does not like, trust, or have a whole hell of a lot of respect for most real estate agents. I was, after all, raised by one, and I’ve seen the sausage being made. Erik and Toby (and S-I-L Alyssa, and I suspect Engel & Völkers generally) are real professionals. If all agents and brokers were held to their standards a lot of people in the business would have to be looking for work elsewhere.

I’ve told our story to a handful of people who either just did the same thing, or who were in the process, and nobody has had an experience that went as smoothly, as successfully, and as quickly as ours. I attribute this to three things. A bit of random luck (maybe 10% of the outcome accounted for by this), a lot of hard work on our part, getting our place ready to sell (though it was fundamentally in great shape), and a huge amount of excellent work by Toby and Erik

So, thank you Toby and Erik.

I should also mention that Engel & Völklers, in the tradition of many European countries, is both a great place to work (so I hear) and does a lot to “give back” to the community. For example, they are a major supporter of the Special Olympics.

A moment or two ago a person who could only be described as annoying, whom I do not personally know, corrected me on Facebook. I had responded to Carl Zimmer‘s lament that he was unable to look back at Facebook entries, RSS feeds, and so on that had accumulated during his one week vacation. My comment was simply to say that absolutely nothing had happened over the previous week, so he should not worry. Obviously, I was kidding. But Mr. Annoying had to jump in with some news items that had in fact happened, with the implication that these news stories were very important to him and I was really bad for suggesting that it had been a slow week.

He started his Facebook troll-comment¹ with the phrase “Not so…”

It turns out that² I can’t hear or read a comment that starts with “Not so…” without getting real annoyed because it is a verbal expression that has extra meaning to me.

This extra meaning comes from a guy I knew when I was very young. Ten years old plus or minus one, I would say. He was a man of about twenty two who did his hair and beard up to look exactly like the standard Western depiction of Jesus Christ. One time, while staring at my aunt, who was a Franciscan nun, he simply said to her “Do I remind you of someone?” She thought for a moment and answered “Yes, actually, you remind me of a DJ I know in Hawaii,” and kind of grinned.

Anyway, he was trying to court my sister, and he was a councilor at the boys camp next to the state camp ground my family would live on for the months of May and June most summers. No matter what I ever said, he’d respond “Not so…” and then tell me how I was wrong.

I was rarely wrong, so this was especially annoying. I was just a kid, and he was Jesus Christ, so he probably figured I was wrong all the time by default, but little did he know that I was one of those obnoxious precocious smart kids who in fact had already read his first encyclopedia and was about half way through his second, which he was carefully and sincerely doing just so that some day he could say “Oh. Encyclopedias. Yeah, I read a couple of those…”

So, if you say “Not so … bla bla bla” to me I’ll rarely hear the bla bla bla, I’ll think of this obnoxious guy (well, I think my sister liked him, but she was a teenager at the time so that does not mean much) and I won’t be listening to the rest of your sentence. Rather, I’ll be pleasantly recalling in my mind the fate that eventually came to Jesus Christ. Which was, if you must know, this: The boys at the boys camp, many of whom had been sent there by their parole or probation officers, were also annoyed by Jesus Christ. So one day he walked in after lights out to make sure the kids were all in their bunks, and some kids dropped on him from the rafters of the crudely built dormitory, tied him up, and shaved off every bid of hair on his head. I think they even plucked his nose hairs out for good measure.

So, that what i’ll be thinking about. You, de-haired.

I have a more pleasant example: “That makes me laugh.”

Last night, I was having coffee with Lizzie, and we were talking about her life and her plans for the next few years, which could involve moving. So we were talking about how representative New York City was of the rest of the east coast, and this got me on to a topic I often bring up which is how to know a phrase or mannerism is particular to an individual, vs. regionally or subregionally used. When I first moved to Minnesota, I already knew about certain Midwestern mannerisms, because I had lived in the Midwest for a while a couple of years earlier. So when people started randomly talking to me in the video rental store, I knew this was a Midwestern thing. I quickly learned that Minnesotans, uniquely and to the exclusion of Wisconsinites, reversed the meaning of “yet” and “still” compared to people on the east coast.

But there were other things I was not so sure of, and several of these came from my BFF Stephanie, who is the first person who took the time and energy to really show me around The Cities. She would say, for instance, “that makes me laugh” quite frequently (but at appropriate times). I didn’t know at first if “that makes me laugh” was her or Minnesota or the Midwest. After a while I concluded that it was Stephanie. But then I met my wife and her sister, and they said it too, and then I noticed that occasionally Amanda’s brother says it, and I heard a couple of their old high school friends say it. So I now realize that this is a Western Suburb (Golden valley, Plymouth, Hopkins) thing of a particular generation. It probably spread among these folks in high school.

I don’t hear many people say “that makes me laugh” but I use the phrase myself in my writing. When I do, that means that I’m thinking of Stephanie. So now when you read my stuff, you’ll know that.

I mentioned all this to Lizzie, pointing out that she does not have any western Twin Cities mannerisms because she is from the eastern Twin Cities. As I said that, she was twirling the end of the single braid of brilliantly red hair that came down from her feathered head dress, which nicely complemented her shamanistic necklace and her home made little black dress. Then I thought … wow. Lizzie has no mannerisms. So that is the second unique characteristic that makes me think so highly of her. “Actually, I think all your mannerisms are from Berkeley, California. Have you ever lived there?” I asked her. “Not yet,” was her reply.³

There are a whole bunch of blogospheric expressions that have emerged fairly recently that invoke particular meaning for me. The phrase “to call one out” in one form or another is particularly annoying to me no matter who uses it because it invokes the idea of the self righteous judgmental twit who thinks it is his or her job to patrol the blosophere for people who say or do certain things (whether they really do or not), then drag those individuals into the public square for some kind of blogflogging. The negativity arises, of course, from the fact that the first twenty or so times I heard the expression, it was me that was getting “called out!”

“As it were” reminds me of an old friend who used that expression, with irony, all the time. The construction “it is doing” for the English habitual “it does” reminds me of two or three European friends and their semi-broken English. Walter Cronkite’s “And that’s the way it was” is almost identical to the Efe Pygmy expression that ends most short story segments. That makes me laugh.

Am I the only person who experiences mannerism flashbacks?

¹It is of note that I am very rarely annoyed by anything anyone says on facebook. But I am often annoyed by comments on my blog. I suppose on facebook … well, those are my friends.
²This expression always makes me think of Terry Deacon.
³That was totally paraphrased.