Jane Powell, the author, not the actress!

Every time GMAC tells me they have all the paperwork they need, I don't believe them, but I can never get them to cop to it. Instead, two or three days later I get a letter asking for something else. The latest they wanted was IRS Form 4506T- this allows them to order  copies of my tax returns. I did, of course, send them a tax return in the original packet, but clearly I must have cooked the numbers on that one, conspiring with my tax preparer to do so. (Well, she is my sister.) Anyway, I called them today to make sure they received the 4506T, and to ask if they needed anything else. "The application is complete," said the GMAC rep (still not the mysterious and elusive Nicole Nesby). "That's what you told me on January 4th, yet two days later I got a letter asking for the 4506T, as well as for the three separate months of Profit and Loss statements, which I had already sent," I replied. More checking. She comes back to the phone, says, "You're scheduled to start a temporary modification on February 2nd." "What?!!" I said, "No one has said anything to me about a temporary modification."  So it turns out that once again they sent a letter instead of calling, and it was mailed last Friday, thus it is not here, due to the MLK holiday.

Don't get excited- this is all part of the game. The idea behind HAMP (Home Affordable Mortgage Program) is that if you faithfully paid the temporary payment for three months, you would then get a permanent modification. Except it's not really permanent, it only lasts five years, and I'm not at all sure that anyone really knows what happens at the end of that time. That was the theory- here is the reality. You pay the reduced payment for three months, or six months, or a year, or however long the servicer wants to dick you around, and then, at the end of that time, they announce that you don't qualify for the permanent mod, and by the way, here's a bill for all of your previous arrears, plus the difference between the modified payment and the original payment, and that totals, oh, twenty thousand dollars or so, and it's all now due and payable in a lump sum. Oh, you can't pay it? Well, then we'll just have to start foreclosure proceedings, which is what we wanted to do all along, because seriously, the thousand dollars we get from Treasury for doing a modification doesn't even cover the coffee we have to give our employees to put up with all you deadbeat homeowners whining. The fees from foreclosure are at least twenty times that, maybe more. Everybody gets screwed in a foreclosure except us- the homeowner, the neighborhood, the city, the county (well, we were already screwing them out of billions with the Mortgage Electronic Registration System- we just have to go on pretending it's a big proprietary database that is very complex, in order to cover up the reality that it's just a giant Excel spreadsheet that no one is checking for accuracy).

Needless to say, the benefit is still on. Response has been awesome so far. I am trying to get a page up listing the auction items, but it may be a few days, since tomorrow I'm having a tooth extracted, and I'm thinking I won't be good for much after that. There are some who think I'm not good for much anyway, but those people are not my friends. My friends, in fact, are totally awesome.

.

Well, as expected, GMAC requested more documents for the loan modification. First, they wanted a Profit and Loss statement with ONLY business income and expenses, and only for the last three months. Here's the deal- like many people with sole proprietorships, I have my whole life in Quickbooks. This is wrong, as my sister, who has done accounting for many years,  likes to point out.  So besides the income from books, lectures, and writing, my P&L also has rental income from my house, my employment income, the generous donations to the house made by relatives, friends, and readers, etc. To have it all in one place works for me, but apparently not for GMAC.

I spent an entire afternoon re-classifying all the stuff not directly related to the business, and duly faxed in a new P&L, along with more bank statements reflecting the rental income (with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against me...). Yesterday I called to make sure they had received the fax. They had. But they still couldn't deal with the new P&L- they wanted it broken down into three individual months. My suggestion that they might have mentioned that little detail when first making the request did not go over well.

I have ostensibly been assigned a "relationship manager"- I was even given an actual telephone extension for this person. Yet I have never spoken to her, and whoever answers the phone assures me they are on her team, but I am starting to think she is imaginary, kinda like the guy you get when you call tech support who tells you his name is Chris when you know damn well it's Sanjiv. So far it seems exactly like the same customer service roulette I dealt with the last time. They are all very nice, which merely makes me suspicious.

In other news, some friends have gotten together to put on a benefit for me and the house (the two are kind of inseparable)- they're calling it "Friends Don't Let Friends Lose Their Houses." It will take place the first or second Sunday in February, here at the house. There will be food, entertainment, a silent auction (possibly to be accompanied by an online auction if someone can get that together). Still in the planning stages- I will post updates as things progress.

And some lovely end of the year linoleum from the 1937 Armstrong catalog (sorry they're sideways- didn't have time to rotate them properly)

I spent yesterday cleaning the gutters. Luckily my roof isn't that steep so it doesn't involve ladders- instead, I sit on the edge of the roof and scoop debris out of the gutter with a special tablespoon, left to me by the previous owners. The reason for the tablespoon is that the gutters are rather narrow. They are the original redwood gutters, and except for being badly patched in a few places with other pieces of wooden gutter whose profiles don't match, they are in remarkably good condition. Usually I hang Christmas lights from the roof at the same time I'm doing the gutters, but I'm not feeling terribly festive this year, not to mention I can't afford the electric bill for the lights.

It's kind of a tedious job but what I realized while I was up there is how much I enjoy working on the house, taking care of it. After I finished the gutters I pruned some redwood branches that had grown too close to the roof, then went inside and sanded the floor in the green bedroom some more. If I hadn't had to stop for dinner, I probably would have kept going till midnight.

In other news, GMAC has received my loan mod package, and they have actually assigned me a "relationship manager", as promised. They said to call once a week- apparently they're not allowed to call me- something to do with my bankruptcy. I expect the requests for more documentation will now begin.

At least I finally got my car back.

Also, I was contacted by someone with a BBC radio show- they want to interview me about linoleum!

Today I sent my second loan modification package off to GMAC. It took me more than a month, with help from my friend Alison, to assemble it. It has the loan number on every freaking page. We put it in a notebook with tabs for every single document and an archival photo of the house on the front. It was accompanied by a suitably humble hardship letter, which Alison had to rewrite for me as she felt mine was too snarky. Really? Moi? Gist of her letter: "Please, please, please give me a loan modification and I promise I will pay it faithfully forever and ever!" Gist of my letter: "You destroyed my income, my retirement, the value of my house, and my sanity- the least you can do is give me a fucking loan modification!" My mother was fond of saying, "You can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar," to which I usually responded, "Why would I want to catch flies?" One might add, if you really want to catch flies, dead meat works much better than honey, but I digress. We went with Alison's version. We also included, for all the good it may do, a copy of the chapter about my house from Nancy Hiller's book, A Home of Her Own, as well as a copy of my C.V. (that's Curriculum Vitae- a fancy form of resume on which you get to list everything you've ever done. Used mostly in academia, it makes you look far more awesome than you actually are.) We'll see what happens. According to the GMAC website, they will assign you a "relationship manager" for your loan mod- maybe this means it won't be another round of "whoever answers the phone at customer service" roulette.

There was a lot of discussion about whether to include the CV and the book chapter- would it make the house look too good? Would it engender sympathy or disgust? Would it make the application stand out or would it cause it to be rejected simply for not fitting into their stupid parameters? Eventually I decided the whole thing is a crapshoot anyway.

In other news, thanks to contributions from viewers like you, plus a small royalty check (buy more books!), I have managed to scrounge up enough money to pay the property taxes, which are due this week. The "donate" button is to your right- even small amounts are welcome!

And, of course, linoleum.

Okay, I swore I was gonna avoid whining. Even though I'm really good at it. I was gonna save the "my life sucks- here's why- I am the 99%" for the Tumblr page devoted to that. But that was before.

Earlier today, I was driving on the freeway, on my way to pick up my friend Josh's appliance dolly. It's good to have a friend who owns an appliance dolly. Hell, if I could afford one, I'd probably get my own. Anyway, I needed it because the basement fridge died, and I was going to pick up a used fridge I'd found on Craigslist.

So I'm motoring along, and I'm about to take the ramp that leads from 580 to 80, when I discover (too late) that some guy in a Toyota Camry has come to a dead stop on the off-ramp. Needless to say, though I slammed on the brakes- I ran into him. Pretty hard, actually- I was surprised the airbag didn't deploy.  I'm fine- the guy in the Toyota is fine- and frankly, the Toyota doesn't look like it was damaged that much. But the Toyota's bumper has pretty much destroyed most of the front of my car.

I won't bore you with the gory details of having the CHP push me down the off ramp (my car would no longer start) or the two hour wait for the tow truck. But almost all I could think of while I waited was, "Shit, I can't afford this." I have car insurance- and it has a $500 deductible. I've been driving around with a cracked windshield for more than a year- I can't afford to replace it. My tires are all bald- I finally bought a used one to replace the one that got so bad you could see the steel in the steel-belted radial.

So there's a blog out there called WTF Is It Now (http://maruthecrankpot.blogspot.com/)- and that's pretty much how I feel most of the time. This is what it's like to be one minor disaster away from everything spinning completely out of control.

So I will put the $500 deductible on a credit card (and thank God I have a credit card again after bankruptcy). And thank God my sister sent me money to renew my AAA membership, which I had allowed to lapse, or God only knows what it would have cost to have the car towed.

More whining later. Linoleum now-Armstrong linoleum rugs 1919.

The bunga-mansion looks glamorous from the outside. Even parts of the inside do. Other parts, not so much. The photo shows my dining room, currently the finishing space for kitchen cabinet doors (that I haven't worked on since July, but that's a whole other story). Why am I doing this in the dining room? Because I have no garage and no basement. Why no garage? Because it was torn down in 1952, when some previous owner of the property sold off a piece of it, and someone built this really ugly apartment building on the sold-off piece. The site of my garage is now part of the apartment building's driveway.

The apartment building is about twelve feet from the north side of the house, and their front doors, living room and bedroom windows all face the side of my house. The building resembles a very long double-wide mobile home, if mobile homes were covered in beige stucco. It's a four plex. When I first moved here there were a lot of bad tenants, including a meth dealer, and one apartment I swore the landlord only rented to couples with domestic violence issues. The tenants have improved slightly in the ensuing years, thank God. It is my fervent hope that one day there will be a miracle and I will be able to buy it and tear it down, and then be able to rebuild my garage.

The garage, by the way, was built in 1906. I know this because Matteson had a "garage-warming" party, which was written up in elaborate detail in the Oakland Tribune. Until I got this latest set of archival photos, the only picture I had of the garage was the photo from the Tribune article, which was a photocopy of a microfilm of the newspaper, courtesy of the Oakland Library. Matteson was an early adopter, as we would now say- not many people had an automobile in 1906. The garage-warming party took place only a few days before the 1906 earthquake. Apparently neither the house nor the garage was much damaged, or else the damage was repaired, since they certainly looked okay in the 1910 photos.

Today I am painting a client's family room for fifteen bucks an hour. I so enjoy working seven days a week.

And, of course, the linoleum of the day.

I was thinking I'd just put up a linoleum pattern, because I don't have much to say, my brain having turned to oatmeal after spending a day waiting on clueless idiots in the fabric store where I work. But I do have something to say. If you want to make your own Halloween costume, then freaking LEARN TO SEW! Don't you people watch Project Runway?!! Sewing is cool- even for guys! You can do many wonderful things with a hot glue gun- making a ball gown is not among them.

Of course, if you actually KNEW how to sew, then you would also know that three days before Halloween is NOT enough time to make an elaborate costume! Or were you fooled by watching too much Project Runway? Those people are professionals- of course they can make something in a day.

The linoleum (okay, technically it's felt-base, not linoleum. Don't know the difference? Then buy my Linoleum book!) is a 1948 Congoleum rug.