Jock Vs. Nerd

The process of signing the contract for the condo was really long and drawn out.  I can’t recall a time in my life in which I had to sign my name or write my initials that many times.
One thing that was kind of irritating was that after dealing with us on Wednesday, Daniela, the cute sales person, decided to pawn us off on someone else, so instead of being treated to some eye candy I got to have an eyesore.
Okay, so the guy, Chris, wasn’t horrible looking, but he was a guy, which was a letdown.
I don’t think that she ditched us, exactly; I think it was more a matter of professional courtesy to her co-worker in that Chris was the person we had originally spoken to.
It just struck me as another example of how I just don’t get to have those “chance encounters” that can lead to romance, though it’s extremely unlikely that Daniela would have developed any interest in a guy who drives a Kia and is in a state of near panic at the prospect of writing a check for $1,500 when you consider how much money she probably makes.  After all, she just recently bought a condo in Reston, where most one-bedroom condos cost about as much as a two-bedroom condo in Leesburg.
In particular, my utter lack of charm – much worse than usual thanks to my high levels of anxiety – would have effectively prevented her from developing any amount of interest, though I don’t think that there’s enough charm in the world to make a short, weird-looking, pudgy nerd stand out to an attractive, successful woman when he’s in the same room as a big, good-looking, former Washington Redskin who is now a successful realtor and who drives a big, fancy SUV about which said attractive, successful woman made numerous comments about “loving” the other day.
I’m not saying that my realtor would have been putting the moves on her (he has a girlfriend), just that he wouldn’t have to; his simple presence would overshadow me whether he meant it to or not.
(As a related aside, on Wednesday, when were waiting outside for my realtor to pull up his SUV to drive us to the building where the condo I was looking at was located, Daniela asked me where I work and what I do.  When I started explaining the nature of my job it was very much like that scene in “Office Space” when Peter is explaining what he does for a living to Jennifer Aniston’s character and we see her attention just drift away as she loses all interest in what he’s saying.)
But like I said, a little eye candy might have been nice.
Monday I have to start on the financing end of things.  It’s not as though I’m some huge credit risk, and my credit score is decent, but I just have a feeling that there are enough problems with my credit history that actually getting financing will be out of the question.
But I guess we’ll see.
It snowed a bit last night, so naturally all the schools were closed today.  
What’s interesting is that while it was unsafe for the kids to go to school, and for many of their parents to go to work, it was safe enough for them to all head out to go shopping.
It must be great to be a school-age kid around here.  For one thing, even under the best of circumstances they only seem to go to school two to three times a week anyway, but the mere mention of potential snowfall pretty much guarantees that there will be no school.  School is frequently cancelled in advance, well before the first flake even falls.
Still, as I’ve often said, there are some problems that result from the snowfall out here, problems that can make traveling even more of a hassle than it is in places that get real amounts of snowfall.
The biggest, of course, is the panicky nature of your average Northern Virginia driver.
Beyond that, though, is the condition of many of the roads.  The attitude of the road crew around here seems to flow from a line of thinking that goes something like, “It’s snowing now, but eventually it will stop.  No matter what happens, pretty much everything will be closed, so nobody really needs to be on the road, and eventually the snow will just melt on its own, so…”
The end result of the attitude is that no effort is made to clear the roads until after it’s stopped snowing, and the majority of the snow removal is actually left to nature and traffic, with some of the side streets that don’t get much sunlight or traffic left with terrible, icy ruts for days on end.
I just don’t understand why they do such a shitty job of snow removal.  For one thing, there’s so little in the way of snow to actually remove in the course of a winter.  And it’s hardly as though there’s no money to pay for snow removal.  I mean, I pay taxes out the wazoo:  what the hell are they spending the money on?  What am I paying for with my “personal property tax” on my car, or the additional fee I pay to buy a sticker that shows that I paid my personal property tax?  What about the food tax?  What does my annual inspection fee pay for?
There must be some money somewhere in the state and county coffers to pay for a decent snow removal system.
Oh well.
Tomorrow night my realtor is holding a Christmas party for clients.  It looks like I’m going to go with Kathleen, who is herself a former client.  In fact, it was on Brian and Kathleen’s recommendation that I (and several other people at work) went with his services in the first place.
Anyway, Brian is on duty at the fire station tomorrow night, so I get to be his stand-in for the evening.  Though it’s not any sort of set-up, Kathleen is also bringing the only single woman she actually knows as a guest.
In Kathleen’s words it will be a “threesome that really isn’t.”
Since neither Kathleen nor I are actually designed for the whole “mingling” thing, we figure we’ll have a third person to sit with us and join in while we make fun of all of the other people there.
At the very least it’ll be a chance to get a free meal, and there’s an outside chance that one of us could win a new TV or an iPod or something.
In any case, not much else is going on.  I’m now officially in the “time off zone,” though that will end on Sunday night, at which point I’ll be into my regular weekend.