Help for the aurally impaired.

Ever been listening to the radio and heard a song you liked but didn't know how to find out who it was? Well hang on to your car seats, radio listeners: if you live in a major metro area, chances are now you can. Yes.net has signed up over 1,000 major radio stations across the country to catalog their songs, the times they play and list artist information, not without links to Amazon.com, should it strike your fancy enough to purchase the CD. The rest of you will just have to illegally download it somewhere*. But now you'll never be without vital music info. Go to Yes.net and try it out.

*this is not a formal endorsement for the piracy of music.

posted by paula 12:48 PM

Finding Home

Over the past few weeks we’ve been looking for a new abode; another place to set up shop, if you will. I haven’t the slightest of a clue as to what the housing market is like in other metro areas or even rural ones for that fact, but here, it’s another story.

What typically is an enjoyable experience, exciting and leisurely is now a competitive rat race. Sure the market’s turning around and it’s becoming a buyers’ market, but if you’re looking for any sort of diamond in the rough, good luck. Everyone else is as well. Case in point: last Friday morning we were set to see eight houses the following morning, most of which had been on the market for less than a week. By Friday evening, four of them had been sold.

I think the most frustrating part of the whole ordeal is that house shopping requires a bounty of forethought that apartment shopping never does. There’s a million things to consider beyond location: condition of the structure, value, resale value, potential, length of stay, etc. and most importantly, most everyone eventually asks themselves: “Is this where I can feel at home?” Finding home is at the forefront of our search, the other qualities following close seconds and thirds.

We’ve learned a lot in the process and again, this evening we’ll set out to see another one, in another suburb, probably chalked full of photos of its sunkissed (probably newly married) inhabitants at cabins and on beaches like all the rest. There may be a baby carriage, religious memorabilia adorning the walls or tell tale signs of hunting or fishing hobbies. Whatever the case, I’ve realized that although we’re now in the mindset that ‘he’ and ‘I’ are making our ‘us’ more official, there’s little evidence that on our walls that makes us ‘us’. Perhaps that’s because we have nothing owned that’s ‘ours’ to display it in.

posted by paula 11:48 AM