Petty Seaweed

Petty:  Narrow-minded; small-minded; insignificant, trifling, or inconsiderable.

I've mulled over the outcome of the real estate decisions that my father has made, heavily abetted by my sister.  I've mulled them over so much because they ran directly counter to my real estate suggestions and were consequently very, very wrong.  Any idiot knows that my suggestions are invariably the right ones.  

Please keep in mind that I'm not qualified to advise anyone on anything, especially when I'm sitting here in my trailer house many hundreds of miles away.  I'm lucky if I can keep tabs on my wallet and my wife let alone shit going down quickly in The Old City.

And here's the thing: it has been a hard slog through a cold rain trying to get my dad's house sold.  He decided to use a real estate agent - a colleague of my sister - to sell his house instead of taking my suggestion and burning the %$!! thing down.  Actually, I'm not that much of a criminal anymore.  I found a buyer - a friend in The Program that I trust implicitly - who offered less money but would have bought the property As Is.  I thought this was the no-fuss way to get the house sold, an opinion held by exactly no one else and consequently followed by no one else, either.  My dad doesn't really need the extra money so I thought easy trumped greedy.

In this case, I was right.  The house sold to a woman who couldn't get financing.  Back on the market it went and sold quickly again - to a speculator who found thousands of dollars worth of damage that he insisted be repaired.  Back on the market to be sold again to the original woman who had magically repaired her credit history but who now wisely offered less money on the house than she had initially, no doubt because the house was still on the market.  Each one of these delays cost money because of the upkeep on the house - utilities, taxes, insurance, etc.  Add that sum to the real estate agent's commission and we were getting a lot closer to my friend's original offer lo these many month's hence, minus all of the emotional wear and tear on my sister and father.

To my credit I kept my fucking mouth shut through the whole circus.  How, you ask?  I have no idea how.

The final step was to transfer the deed from my father to the buyer, a request denied by the county tax assessor because, 60 years ago, the deed was made out to my father AND my mother -but not jointly - which meant my mother needed to rise from the grave - which she cheerfully would have done to save us all the trouble - to sign over the deed to my dad OR we had to probate her part of the estate.  Following all of this?  Still reading any of it?  Why, might I ask?
  
The point is that it was all I could do to keep my self from screaming: "I TOLD you so!!"  I was particularly interested in what the real estate agent was doing to earn her commission.  She didn't appear to be vetting anyone or researching anything.

Not a word from my mouth that wasn't pleasant and complimentary.