This Old House

So I may have prematurely mentioned that we are buying a house.  Lesson learned.  Just because you put an offer on a house doesn't mean you will actually pony up and buy that house.  Unless you can magically pull this guy out of your pocket and fix all your household ailments in the duration of a one-hour time slot on PBS:

Bob Vila, no relation despite his disturbingly identical resemblance to my late father, who oddly, was also a master carpenter (Bob is Hispanic, not Jewish, btw, but longtime readers of this blog already know that)

So we put an offer on a house.  An inspection revealed that it was a horrific cesspool of decay in ways that were not apparent to the untrained eye, and which we were not prepared to correct, so we said, as politely as possible, "NO F'ING THANK YOU" and ran away.

Then we found this other house.  This house was incredible, in that it was a 2700 square foot time capsule.  I half expected Don Draper to walk in the door and berate us, as he is wont to do, for being in his house.  This house was clearly built by some very classy swingers, who decorated to the hilt in 1967 and then never updated a single detail.  Many a key party must have taken place at this pad.  Full bar in the basement, complete with secret passageway into super-secret store-room where they probably hid all their sex toys from the kids.  Red canvas wallpaper and multi-colored pin-striped carpet.  Gold foil and red velvet flocked wallpaper in the bathroom.  It has been vacant for over 2 years, and the second time we visited the house, the dryer was running and full of Levis.  So basically, the house is haunted by classy swingers.

I can't make up this kind of crap.

Well, we made an offer, but the greedy heirs to the deceased owners rejected our low-ball offer.  This, despite the fact that the house needs a new roof, new carpet, new windows, new kitchen appliances, and it probably needs John Stossel of Nightline to come in with a black light and test for bodily fluids EVERYWHERE because come on people SWINGERS.  So we are back to square one.

To assuage the pain of house-hunting, tonight I made a delicious meal that just happened to be vegan, which magically makes it have zero calories.  Because, you see, my brain evaluates calories based on the amount of explicit animal suffering that went into the preparation.  And don't even complicate things with arguments about human rights abuses in agricultural labor, or unintended animal harm from farm machines, or the environmental impact of food shipping, because my head will explode and I will run into the forest and forage for twigs and leaves for the rest of my life because I can't shoulder all that guilt and still enjoy my food, but people's gotta eat, you know?

I came across this vegan paella recipe on Oh Dear Drea's blog.  Yes, my twitching ovaries and I read baby blogs.  Let the judgment commence.  But the recipe was a great success.  Andy liked it, and he didn't even seem to notice that it was animal-free until I casually mentioned it as we were cleaning up (yes I just said WE and CLEANING in the same sentence, because that's what happens, and it's wonderful). 

Vegan Paella.  No animals were intentionally harmed in the creation of this meal, except I narrowly missed stepping on the cat's tail but I don't think that counts.