Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Offer And Acceptance

We stayed home this past weekend. Other than a brief house-hunting expedition on Saturday and attendance at service on Sunday, we remained in all weekend.

My mother has been busy devising ways to use the pumpkin pulp that had resulted from the previous weekend’s pumpkin project. On Friday night, she made pumpkin bread (with raisins and walnuts), one of my mother’s specialties. On Saturday afternoon, she made pumpkin cookies. Late Sunday afternoon, she made pumpkin soup. If we parcel things out properly, we shall have pumpkin pulp on hand through Thanksgiving—and, if we run out, we shall go buy more pumpkins.

On Saturday morning, everyone in the family went to examine a house Joshua and I were considering for a purchase. Josh and I had been looking at houses since Labor Day, and we had settled upon a house that we think is right for us. We wanted all family members to see the house in order to collect their opinions.

The exterior of the house is completed, but the interior has not been finished. Interior walls are in place, but the interior is otherwise a shell.

No one had any objections to the house other than my nephew and niece, who both thought the barren interiors very odd.

We discussed the matter for the remainder of the weekend—and we consulted about such matters as price and offer terms. At the conclusion of the weekend, our decision was to offer twenty-one per cent less than the asking price and await a response from the builder.

On Monday morning, Josh and I submitted a written offer and tendered earnest money.

Our offer was accepted within three hours.
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7 comments:

  1. tony68October 19, 2011 9:59 AM

    Congratulations on your new purchase!

    It seems that at least ONE house has a promising future.

    Sadly, a promising future cannot be foreseen for the financial or artistic house of the Philadelphia Orchestra, whose continued deterioration coincides in real time with the ongoing crumbling- into-ruin of all the bank houses in Europe.

    Who would have been able to dream up forty years ago a horror- fiction so prescient of today's reality.

    I stand horrified in this season of Halloween, 2011.

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  2. Drew80October 19, 2011 4:32 PM

    Among the Philadelphia Orchestra’s “solutions” to its financial crisis: reduce, modestly, the size of the orchestra; and perform more “pops” concerts.

    Philadelphia desperately needs a new board, and new administration.

    Allison Vulgamore is a conspicuous turkey, and Philadelphia should never have hired her. She saddled Atlanta with Robert Spano and Donald Runnicles, and failed to get the planned new Atlanta concert hall off the ground. Anyone who was paying attention to Vulgamore’s tenure in Atlanta would have known that she was a dismal failure there.

    I predict that the short, chubby Canadian conductor will not succeed in Philadelphia and will not last long as the orchestra’s music director. If Vulgamore knew anything about music and orchestras, she would never have allowed such a bone-jarring appointment to occur. If the short, chubby Canadian is allowed to linger in Philadelphia, the orchestra will lose its greatness.

    Along the same lines, I predict that the New York Philharmonic will address the Alan Gilbert situation within the next year. Because attendance has collapsed and because literally no one thinks Gilbert is doing good work at the Philharmonic, the NYPO truly has no choice but to address the issue. To save face, the NYPO will announce the appointments of a couple of very high-profile guest conductors, who will handle substantial portions of the season, or the NYPO will announce that Gilbert has decided to concentrate on his guest-conducting work and decrease his time with the orchestra.

    Have you noticed that The New York Times stubbornly refuses to report the NYPO’s attendance woes?

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  3. tony68October 19, 2011 5:47 PM

    I have not heard YNS (how's that for SHORT?) in concert; but neither have a lot of people, I'll wager. Apparently, he once made a couple of records in Rotterdam. He has never conducted a major orchestra before - impressively, at least, as far as I know.

    And what kind of idiot would appoint "Vulgarmoron" to the Board?

    Why didn't they just engage William Eddins if they really wanted a chubby music director? (The extra weight over-and-above the concensus definition of "chubby" which swaddles Mr Eddins today could perhaps make up for the "short" character of YNS).

    (Some people in Philadelphia have suggested that the Canadian was appointed for the sole reason that he would be the first openly gay music director of one of the "big five.")

    According to Artsjournal, the planned reduction of the musician's roster in Philadelphia is not "modest." With a 15 per cent reduction in salary in place, a whipper-snapper-of-a-nobody music director would have all the help he needed in order to rehearse the mass exodus in the eighties by musicians under Ozawa.

    I haven't read the NYT in quite a while; but I'm not surprised this organ covers up for Gilber's failings as well as they cover up Obama's.

    I'm thinking of the final two words in David Lean's "The Bridge on the River Kwai," and also the most quoted words of Joseph Conrad:

    "Madness . . . Madness!"

    "The horror . . . the horror"

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  4. Drew80October 19, 2011 7:17 PM

    William Eddins is too busy feeding his face as well as throwing out widespread accusations of racism to take on additional work.

    Have you seen the absurd costume the short, chubby Canadian wears during concerts? From photographs, it appears to be some ridiculous faux-leather creation, one part Neo-Nazi and one part Village People. Not even Ernst Rohm would have had the courage—or the audacity—to wear such a thing in public.

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  5. tony68October 19, 2011 8:37 PM

    I hadn't seen CC (Chubby Canadian) before, so I went to youtube and looked at some of his concert videos. I was wrong to say that CC hadn't conducted a major orchestra, for there are videos from the London Phil.

    Yes, now I see his leather concert habit. How cute.

    Based on what I've seen so far, I can think of only one reason why the Board of the Philadelphia would pursue a CC. Like themselves, the Board members know that the young and "hip" new audiences they are trying to cultivate for the Orchestra are as musically bankrupt as the "hip" new audiences who flock to Disney Hall to worship the hack Gustavo.

    The attraction factor for these new audiences has nothing, therefore, to do with music whatsoever, but rather with CC's perceived talents in invoking a sustained, marketable fantasy among lusty ticket buyers, who are primed to be concerned only about CC's energy and prowess in bed, not on the podium.

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  6. tony68October 19, 2011 8:51 PM

    In that light, no wonder they didn't hire Eddins, notwithstanding the fact, that, any overlayed image of Eddins lying in bed might possibly suggest - by way of body girth, of course - the vertically challenged CC.

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  7. Drew80October 19, 2011 9:47 PM

    My father was told that the Philadelphia Board Of Directors looked very, very seriously at Vladimir Jurowski, and decided that Jurowski was not yet ready for an orchestra of Philadelphia’s quality. The Board told Jurowski that it would look at him again in another five to ten years, and that in the interim the Board wanted Jurowski to appear in Philadelphia each season, if possible.

    The Philadelphia Board also maintains close contact with Simon Rattle. Rattle continues to conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra each season—and Philadelphia is the only American orchestra Rattle has conducted for well over a decade. Rattle loves the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the members of the Philadelphia Orchestra love Rattle. Rattle has told sources that Philadelphia is his next move if his situation in Berlin ever blows up.

    So how does all this account for the appointment of the short, chubby Canadian?

    Philadelphia Board members handled the Jurowski and Rattle matters themselves, with assistance from the former orchestra administrator (now retired)—while Vulgamore came into the picture only after Jurowski and Rattle were off the table, at least near-term.

    Vulgamore convinced the Board that there were two choices, and two choices only: the short, chubby Canadian; or the short, chubby Frenchman who now conducts in Scotland.

    The short, chubby Frenchman who now conducts in Scotland has very bad hair as well as a face only a mother could love—and he was quickly eliminated. (He also received very bad marks from members of the orchestra, who asked that he not be reengaged.)

    That left the short, chubby Canadian.

    Of course, if Vladimir Jurowski was not yet ready for an orchestra of Philadelphia’s quality, what does that say about the appointment of the short, chubby Canadian? Jurowski—and I am not a fan of Jurowski—is probably ten times better than the short, chubby Canadian.

    My father has been told that there are members of the Philadelphia Board prepared to make the short, chubby Canadian’s Philadelphia tenure a short one. As soon as a real conductor expresses interest in the Philadelphia job, the short, chubby Canadian—greeted without enthusiasm; always viewed as a compromise appointment—will quickly be shown the door.

    However, what real conductor would possibly take the Philadelphia job at present?

    Philadelphia’s best hope for the future, in my estimation: a major falling-out in Berlin.

    By the way: Dudamel (known locally as “The Dud”) stopped selling out in Los Angeles midway through his first season.

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