Light Rail at Ella Dining Room and Bar.

Just about every time I go to Ella Dining Room and Bar in downtown Sacramento, I try to capture the Light Rail going by. It wraps the restaurant, from K Street around on 12th, and it’s such a lovely view. Not that I would want to live anywhere near the Light Rail nor look at it every day, mind you, but for an evening out downtown, it lends that exciting, raw urban atmosphere, an element to the environment at Ella that stimulates and, if I pause for just one moment can make myself believe that I am not in Sacramento at all but instead am on vacation somewhere in Europe.

Which sometimes is a better frame of mind than thinking about the mortgage lender who left me a voice mail promising absolutely, positively, without fail, that loan docs would arrive in escrow yesterday. The same loan docs we’ve been waiting for from 7 days back. Good thing I didn’t alert the media! When they’ve cried wolf so many times, you get to a point where nothing they have to say holds much credence. At the end of the day, when loan docs don’t arrive, well, let’s say I don’t want to be that guy with my fly unzipped.

You don’t promise what you can’t deliver.

Steve Earle at the Crest Theatre, Sacramento

Or, thinking about the buyer’s agent who has the miserable job of submitting an offer almost 15% under list price for a home that’s been on the market for only 5 days. It makes me cringe for that guy. That buyer’s agent who is way too professional and polite to blurt: you are a knucklehead to the buyer. That buyer’s agent who hopes that sooner or later the buyer will learn his lesson and realize that the buyer’s agent’s advice is correct and, if the buyer has any shot whatsoever at buying a home in Sacramento’s seller’s market today, well, that buyer better start relying on the agent’s experience and, for crying out loud, analyze the comparable sales.

Throwing darts blindfolded at a wall doesn’t work very well.

Steve Earle, The Dukes, The Mastersons

Don’t get me started on the agents who believe banks are desperate to sell short sales they don’t own and wrongly assume that because a home has been on the market for a while, that it’s priced too high. Price is not the only reason a home doesn’t quickly sell. They don’t realize that some homes take longer to sell because they need work and not every buyer today wants to tackle repairs immediately after closing. Those homes take longer to sell, especially when they need to sell at market, which is calculated as market less cost of repair. With that kind of calculation, most buyers would prefer to buy a home that doesn’t need repair.

But a buyer eventually will buy this house, it just won’t be theirs.

Instead, I am grateful that we had parked our car with valet at Ella and could walk two blocks to the Crest Theatre to see Steve Earle and the Dukes, along with The Mastersons. It was a long show, by my standards, starting at 7:30 and emptying out 3 hours later, with no breaks,and way past my bedtime. I am grateful for front row seats so I don’t have to peer over or around somebody else’s bald head, as there were a lot of older people in the audience. I am grateful there were no kids kicking the back of my chair or spilling beer down my back. I am grateful talents like Steve Earle are still performing, and an experience like that is available to me.

His show was very unlike the Steve Earle show in 2009. Lots of Blues. He also talked about his child who has autism, and he said one in 85 children are diagnosed with autism today, and those odds affect 1 in 58 boys, specifically. If true, why is that?