House hunters
That’s who we are.
House hunters
Looking from afar.

Without going into a long, wordy rant, I’ll just sum up: California real estate sucks. Income required for loan approval vs. home prices on even tiny ratty houses = frustration. I’m sure it sucks elsewhere too, but California is where I live, so that’s my personal mantra. Oh and short-sales suck, even from the buyers point of view.
The only bright side is that prices and interest rates are still falling, which means we can consider slightly better houses as time goes on. We looked at a lot of houses yesterday - and a couple days ago too - some were actually fair enough for us and our needs, in a somewhat better area than some others we’ve been looking in. ie, these neighborhoods don’t make my husband think about buying guns to put in a drawer in every room. But they cost more, and are they better enough to pull out of another bid, that is the question.

I don’t write too many bloggity-blogs anymore, but it’s a fair bet that when I do, real estate will be one of the more frequent topics for a while.

House hunters
With no 4-leaf clover
House hunters
When will it be over.

This bee was obsessed with the top of my car, confusing it with a giant flower, perhaps? It wandered around up there long enough for me to take several photos from about 6 inches away. Unfortunately all I had was a 18-55 lens, as I was expecting to take pictures of houses that day, not insects. My husband, who was with me at the time, commented “I bet you wish you’d brought along your macro-lens.” He’s witty like that.

I guess those lamps aren’t big enough for two.

This was one of those situations where a lot of small birds in a parking lot decide to go on a sudden flight, flying around in a circle in a large group. The photos they come from were just a series of “press the button on auto-fire” snapshots, which I almost deleted, but I noticed that at 100% a few of the individual birds actually had some detail to them. Considering how small they were in the full-size photo, I felt I had to make a slight retractment of my usual derogratory comments about the Canon 20D kit lens. The quality of that lens is still sub-par in many ways, but I guess this shows how even the worst lens can sometimes catch detail you wouldn’t think it might. You won’t get prints out of such extreme cropping, of course, but hey, for a blog, it works fine. :D

The second picture is an example of the full image ratio from which I cropped the above full-size snippets.