I LOVE MY REALTOR. NO REALLY. I DO.

So how was your weekend??

Wonderful! I'm so glad to hear it! You deserve such a weekend! Really! You do!!!

Ugh. Forgive me for being so cheerful. I spent two hours in the company of El Scumbag Realtor yesterday. After ten minutes, the cheerful attitude rubs off on you and before you know it, everything's daisies and sunshine.

We cornered the woman (finally) at the model home in our new neighborhood yesterday.

...Just as she was talking to a potential new client.

She was all "I know you're worried about selling your house, but it's going to sell...I PROMISE YOU."

That's her big line..."I promise you". Everything's "I promise you" or "We just have to keep praying."

But this time...the promises weren't going to work. I'm undergoing a ton of stress right now with this house thing. It's really, really hard to get into the whole scenario when you're not really sure if you're going to end up in the house or not because your scumbag realtor can't get up off her knees and quit praying long enough to actually show your house.

"That's fine," I said. "But I'd like to know what Plan B you have."

"Plan B is I dance naked in front of your house every Sunday," she laughed nervously, trying to look like she's a decent realtor who put the Bible down every now and then in order to actually WORK for the benefit of the potential new customer who was privvy to our conversation.

"No, Scumbag Realtor," I said with my patented sly grin that makes me look more retarded than sly. "We want to SELL the house."

She laughed and said "Oh! You got me!" When she was really thinking "See if I bother to help you out, Fatso."

Chuckles were shared all around and she asked us to wait while she took Potential New Customer outside to fill his head with the same lies she filled ours with two months ago.

We waited inside the home until she came back in.

And then for TWO SOLID HOURS, which I'll give her credit...one of those hours was on her own time, since she kept us there until 6 p.m. and she should have been closed the doors at 5 ... she reassured us that there was a plan to all of this and there were "tricks" she could do if the house didn't sell soon.

Like three magic words ... "No money down". If you offer a home with "no money down", it makes the ignorant grade school dropouts come out of the woodwork to buy your home.

She has a timeline for all of this. When the sheetrock is up, she does one trick. When the carpet's laid down, she does another. When the sod and shrubs have all been planted, she does one more trick.

When all else fails, she will reduce the house to a price where we make NO money off of it. We walk out even Steven. But the house will be the cheapest house in the neighborhood and people will FLOCK to it.

She PROMISED us that.

Soooo...as she said "Put your faith in the Lord first and me second."

Okay.

I guess I have no choice.

We went looking at Open Houses yesterday for homes that there is no way in Hell we could ever afford.

One house was built with the brick from the old Fox Theatre in Atlanta where "Gone With The Wind" was first shown and had a plaque imbedded in the brick in the den to prove it. We're talking homes with waterfalls in the backyards, huge media rooms, 5,000 sq. ft homes.

Tell ya what...if you ever get too cheerful for your own damned good and need something to really send you crashing into a pit of depression ... go to the ritziest section of your town and check out the Open Houses on Sunday afternoon. Talk about your eye openers.

I bought the Wilco CD. "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot".

I really like it. I lahk it a laht.

Susie wasn't so impressed. At one point, as the music breaks down into a sound that mimics an elephant getting a root canal, she screamed "Make it stop!!!"

I said "Honey, it will stop in 3 seconds."

"That's not quick enough," she said, turning the volume completely down.

I think it'll grow on her.

I've got this friend that owns a local wood furniture business that advertises heavily on television.

I think I've written about him before here. But the catch phrase in his commercial is "Friends don't let friends buy particle board."

It's funny because in his first commercial for the business, he added a comma into the phrase so that it's read "Friends, don't let friends buy particle board" like a command. He's addressing the person watching TV ("Friends") and then gives them an order ("Don't let friends buy particle board").

Rather than reading it like "Friends don't let friends drive drunk." Which is how the advertising guy wrote it for him to say. But my buddy is no thespian. I'm sure after about the 20th take of trying to get him to read the line properly, they probably threw their hands in the air and waved them like they just didn't care and said "Screw it. We'll do it your way."

And after the initial snickering died down from people watching at home, the phrase somehow managed to click. Maybe it's because it's shown on local television about 30 times a day.

Anyway ... I was waiting for Susie outside a store in the van Saturday afternoon, and I see my buddy and his wife exiting a store right in front of the van.

I casually laid on the horn which made everyone in the immediate area snap their heads around to see what was the matter.

And I yelled out my window in my best hick redneck impression "Look, honey....it's that Particle Board Guy!!!"

I think it was at that point that my Particle Board Guy joke had finally wore out its welcome.

He shot me a bird right there in front of God and everyone.

Naturally, this caused me to laugh my ass off at him. People who are semi-local celebrities due to their cheesy commercials should know better than to demonstrate disrespectful behavior by flipping the middle finger at zealous redneck fans.

He walked over to the van and asked me (with a sigh), when I was ever going to let up on the Particle Board Guy line.

I told him when he starts saying the line right in his commercials, I'll stop embarrassing him in public.

He just shot a new commercial a few weeks ago that's supposed to run for the next several months. And his line is still read in the same dorky fashion.

I'm a happy boy.

I have to take the dog to the Vet this morning and the wife wants a lunch made, so this must be where we say our goodbyes for the morning.

Goodbye.

Sheesh.

Quit making such a big deal about it, dude.