Sacramento Real Estate Blog

I’m tired of typing that Realtor® trademark symbol.

Here’s the plugin, if you want to get it.

Our local multiple listing service, Metrolist, recently made several changes to their search pages and database structure.

We all know how people like change.

Some of these changes are probably to the good, but looking at the database structure, it’s uglier than it ever was.  Whether a property is a short sale, for example, used to appear in two places, either one of which might be correct.  Since the change, whether or not a property is a short sale appears in one field if the property is active, and another if the property is sold.

Well, that’s fine, I get it — sometimes you’re talking about a flavor of the status “Active” and sometimes all you need to do is record history.

Some of the changes actually make things a little bit easier, though having five new varieties of “Active” isn’t one of them.

I do wish corporations wouldn’t write like corporations.  It doesn’t help to enter the system and get a message:

“MetroList is working harder to give you the tools to work smarter!”  What is this, an Anthony Robbins seminar?  No doubt someone will tout the six sigma benefits of the new design.

Meantime the changes broke some existing code of mine.

It’s time to go move some code around…

Over the weekend The Sacramento Real Estate Blog had a bit of a facelift.

Our old blog theme was ok, but it was looking a little long in the tooth and out of style.  Like everyone else, bloggers are slaves to fashion, and I was really starting to get tired of the three column layout — it was like wearing a wide tie when fat ties are back in vogue.

By the way, what kind of tie should I be wearing these days, if I wore one?

If you’re looking for Armani suit Realtors®, I’m afraid we don’t have any.

Things Should Be a Bit Easier To Find, I Hope

One of the things I like about the new layout is that it removes the huge number of links we had to everything under the sun.  Those links are still available from the web site.

Overall I think it’s a lot cleaner.  I hope you like it.

Does this dress make me look fat?

AdSense Ads, What’s Up With That?

One of the other things you may have noticed is that we’ve started putting up a few ads from AdSense.  In a few days we’ll probably also start serving some Project Wonderful ads as well. 

We expect the revenue from these ads to be extremely low compared to the revenue from our main business of helping our clients buy and sell homes in greater Sacramento.   Nevertheless, it’s a way to help offset the expense of maintaining our MLS feeds and other costs.  So with that let me welcome our current and future sponsors, whom I hope you’ll support.  If it gets to be too much of a distraction, I’ll take it down.

The green-eyed facelift lady stays up, however.

Some distractions are better than others.

Frogs and lizards love bugs bugs. I hate them.

The real bugs that crawl around on the ground and get eaten by frogs and lizards are OK, except when they bite. But I hate the software kind of bugs.

A visitor pointed out a nasty bug in the foreclosure search that I didn’t know about (and just caused a few days ago in my fight against a screen scraper). In the course of investigating that bug, I found a nest of other ones which made me wonder why more people weren’t screaming at me about how badly the site was working.

As far as I can tell the search pages and the browsing pages are all working a lot better now.

I should run a bug hunt for the web site now and then, with prizes. I’ll bet that would help things quite a bit.

Given that I’m seriously considering a redesign of the site’s theme, however, I should probably run that after the redesign, not before.

I am experimenting with a new comment policy.  In the past, comments were moderated.

I have reset the comment settings to be un-moderated (in the Wordpress sense), and I’ve removed some other restrictions as well.

These settings are subject to change in the future.   However, if everyone will please observe the following guidelines, I’m hoping I can leave them open and we’ll move forward toward more fruitful discussion.

Please Note The Following Guidelines:

• Real email addresses are required. Anonymous comments are not permitted.  We apologize for any inconvenience.
• No spam.  If you see an article here about foreclosures and you want to tell people about your nifty foreclosure site, don’t.  If you have something to say on the topic of what the article and your comment is interesting enough, they’ll click through on your name.  There’s some leeway if your site does not compete with ours and is truly an informational resource, but see the note on the opaqueness of the algorithm, below.
• Disagree gently.  Though we try hard to be patient and have forbearance because it is one of the ten paramitas, the moderator(s) are sensitive people, with an unfortunate bad habit of working out their insecurities using the delete key.  Like the Google algorithm, the relationship of your civility to our patience is a black box.  We’re working on improving the latter.  Please work on the former as much as you can.
• Real names are preferred.  A real name takes the form:  “John Smith”, not “Alabama Luxury Condos”.  The “nofollow” tag gives no benefit to the latter anyway, so why not pull up a chair and tell us who you are?

And Finally… THANK YOU …

for your participation here and for helping us create an interesting discussion!  We appreciate you reading us!

I am pleased to announce that we are now offering you two ways to subscribe to the Sacramento Real Estate Blog (see the form at the left).

The subscription form says “Weekly” but please note that for subscriptions processed before October 15th, you may receive messages more often. We’re in a testing and roll-out mode, so we have it set to send messages more often.

For those of you who don’t want to mess around with RSS readers, or don’t know what one is, or don’t care what one is, you can now subscribe via email to get the latest Sacramento real estate news, including market updates, tutorials, the latest real estate bargains, and many new features that we’ll be rolling out in the weeks ahead.

After that, I think weekly is a good schedule. Leave me a comment and let me know if you prefer weekly, daily, monthly, what have you.

After all, we think most buyers and sellers will benefit from a more email-friendly approach, since RSS stands for “Realtors Sure Subscribe”.

“If you don’t subscribe, the terrorists win.”
– New York Mayor, Rudolph Giuliani

“Aren’t you going to laugh at my nose too?”
– Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer

Those of you who do real estate searches from the either our main search page or many of our other search pages have access to listings that are updated six times per week.

I’m not sure why it’s six and not seven.  Presumably it’s to give FTP a Sabbath.  The point is, it’s practically daily, so it’s about as up to date as you can get without calling a Realtor up and asking him.

In addition to the search pages, there are also a lot of pages where you can browse listings, such as our foreclosure pages, the condos pages, and the new homes pages.  These pages are driven by a separate database that we maintain, that we update once per week or so.  We’ve recently improved the import mechanism on these pages to fix a few issues, so we expect these pages to more closely match our MLS (Metrolist) as time goes along.

We just did an import as well, so we’re pretty current as of now.  Enjoy!

I just finished upgrading to Wordpress 2.3.  It went off pretty smoothly, though I did run into one problem that turned out to be pretty well documented.  I installed the patch that Ryan responded with there and it worked like a champ.

Of course the big reason for upgrading to 2.3 is to get native tag support.  So naturally I had to install a tag cloud.  Now I feel like I need to go back and tag the last thirty or so posts so the poor cloud doesn’t look so pathetic.

In a moment we’ll see if Windows Live Writer supports tagging correctly.

Just When Purva Thought It Was Safe To Talk About Categories

Now it turns out we have categories, which should have a small set of things, and tags, which should be a much bigger set of everything we’re about.

But here’s the rub — what goes where?

I have to find that nice article I saw recently about that very thing and give it some thought.

Well, this post is sort of a mixed bag.  On the one hand, it’s a heads up about Maureen Francis’ article about FHA, Foreclosures and Foregiveness.

Under the hood, it’s more of a test post.  I’m writing this post from out a new browser, Flock, which I learned about through the Web 2.0 list of Web 2.0 Links.  (I think that title was written by someone who works in the Department of Redundancy Dept.)  Anyway, this new browser, Flock, is interesting in that it contains integrated blogging tools and an RSS reader with, and can detect whether a page you’ve landed on has a feed, among other handy Web 2.0ish tricks.

The blogging tool is fairly primitive once you’re used to Livewriter, but it’s interesting that it all hangs together.

Blogged with Flock

This is a test post.  I just finished installing Peter Westwood’s handy SK2 Moderate Plug-In.  Let’s see if it works.

Now to come in not logged in under IE and comment on myself.  I hope I agree with me.

[Later:  Looks like it works great.  Thanks Peter!]

I should probably ask Purva Brown to come over and join me here at the Sacramento Real Estate Blog. 

I need air support.  I am pinned down by enemy entropy.

(You can see:  I’ve been watching too much of the Military Channel, and taking my daughter out to see Transformers last night didn’t help at all).

The thing that has me pinned down and semi-literate is the new real estate listings site.  The reason it has rendered me semi-literate is that there’s a large body of work in front of me, and even though an intrepid early adopter (can I get an intrepid early adopter?) could start blogging right now, I’m trying to get the site to the point where I’m not embarrassed to even be calling for intrepid early adopters.

The usual dynamic on software projects goes something like this:

CEO:  “Ship it.”

Programmer: “It’s not ready.”

CEO:  “I need something to show people.”

Programmer: “It’s not ready to show anyone.  If I get a demo ready the whole project will take longer.”

CEO:  “Ship it.”

Programmer: “It’s not ready.”

The problem with a one man software project is that I’m both sides of that argument. 

I wonder which one of me will win?

Meantime, in order to get the work done at all, the programmer needs to be sitting at the keyboard thinking about nothing else but the project, period, and every twenty minutes the CEO comes along and says:  “Did you blog something today?  You know we need to keep up on our existing stuff while we’re doing new development, right?”

I really hate that guy.

I recently announced plans to create a web site where Realtors® could post their listings for free.  Although the development is strictly preliminary, I have posted a development blog so those of you who want to be first on your block can get a feel for what’s going on.

I recently posed the question about whether the real estate industry needs another social networking web site, and got only one yes vote, from a colleague in Albuquerque.

I can understand the concern.  On some level I agree with those who said we really don’t need such a site. 

First of all, how many blogs can you have?  I try to make a consistent and meaningful contribution to this one, but I have three or four others that I’m either a main author or co-author on, and really one is plenty.

Secondly, I’m sure that from the point of view of someone with forty or eighty posts invested in ActiveRain, thinking that some other site will start to get well positioned for real estate topics is not a great prospect.

Now having said all that, I’m still itching to do some development on the State of California or National level, and so what I envision putting together is a site where each user will get a blog when they sign up that they can use, but which will be centered around a national database of real estate listings (similar to Point2NLS or ZMls).

Assuming this itch continues, the roll-out order will look something like:

Phase I (Alpha Release — Early Adopters)

• Set up the blogging software, and the author’s blog.
• Site design outline — show where the pieces will go.
• Make blogs available to early adopters.  (Email if interested).  

Phase II (Implement Listing Display and Search - Full Release)

• Implement the listing entry and display.
• Implement listing search.
• Improve the user profile page.

Phase III (Enhancements)

• Bug fixes and incremental improvements.
• Integrate sponsored IHomefinder-integrated search on back end.  ($)
• Integrate vFlyer support.
• Make it profitable in other ways, while retaining user base by hanging onto basic:

• Free blogs
• Free user profiles
• Free listings

Writing a National MLS.  How hard can it be? 

I’ve been digging a lot into real estate social networks recently, and also looking into open source software to run such a network.

There are already several such networks making their way in the world.  ActiveRain is probably the most popular, but other sites that have beaten the one I haven’t done yet through the gate include RealEstateWebmasters (which didn’t really start out as a social network, but has started to grow in that direction) and WannaNetwork.

Wannanetwork (which I just joined this morning by way of testing) is especially interesting to me given that it’s:

• Running on one of the open source platforms I’m looking into (Drupal).
• Run by a Realtor®, and one who seems to be getting some benefit out of doing so.

Today I started trying to get my head around the software, but I don’t have too much to show for it yet.

I’ll let you know if I start to sense something more than just a bad case of projectitis and something starts looking deliverable.

Meantime I’m very curious to hear from those of you who are active on ActiveRain, etc. as to what you’d like to see in a real estate social network, what features are your favorites on existing networks, what your experiences have been, etc.

In the last couple of days, I’ve been answering the phones again and emails again, working to pick up a buyer / seller or two myself.  I guess I felt I needed to get out there and enjoy some of that invigorating Sacramento July weather.

Everyone outside of maybe Phoenix should find that ironic.

In between calls, I had the pleasure of watching Bruce Willis blow stuff up (John gives this movie two thumbs up).

Also, in the fine mad-scientist tradition, I arrive back from the lab with my face only slightly burnt and exploded to report on my Web 2.0 experiments.

1. I’ve actually published the Web 2.0 John Lockwood Profile that I had earlier threatened to write.  There’s probably a Web 2.0 application to be written that’s just the ultimate aggregator of all your other Web 2.0 junk.  I’m sure Ben Franklin felt much like this when he wired up his kite to the printing press for Poor Richard’s Almanac.
2. I’ve begun a Squidoo Lens consisting of a list of Sacramento Area Bloggers. 
3. Using Yahoo pipes, I’ve created an aggregate web feed from our five most active Elite Properties blogs, and published it here.

Those of you who were waiting for Part III of the Article Series on My Love Hate Relationshiop with Web 2.0 (See Part II or Part I), please note we’ve moved the series to a more Web 2.0-ish sort of Place, ActiveRain, and so Part III is here, where I was gratified to see it as a featured article.  I guess ambvialence is something people can really get behind (well, maybe not).

Meantime, spreadsheet mavens, worry not, we haven’t forgotten about you, and we now have the latest roundup of the May Numbers, albeit a little bit late.

Coming Next…

I’ve avoided using del.icio.us for a long time.  Actually I think more than anything I’ve avoided typing del.icio.us for a long time.  That’s got to be as ugly a word as you can think of to type.

There’s a trend in the Web 2.0 world toward ugly words.  It’s almost as though nothing happens at all if the word isn’t butt-ugly:  Blog.  del.icio.us. Mashup.

I mean:  who are we writing for?  Germans?  Why can’t our Web 2.0 words be prettier, like French words?  Je ne sais pourquoi pas!

Anyway, be not afraid.  For purposes of this article I’ve stuck del.icio.us into the clipboard.  Easy.

As much as I hate typing del.icio.us, I love using it, now that I’ve given it a spin.  I’m using it extensively to plan out and execute the work for my new map project blog, and after doing this, I’m not sure how I ever blogged without it!  The feature I like best for this purpose is the ability to subscribe to one or more tags.  In the case of the Sacramento Map Project, for example, I subscribe to “Sacramento”, “Maps”, Mashup”, “GPS” and the like, and every so often go into the subscription page to see what folks are linking to.

The next step is to view those pages, see if there’s anything cool to write about, and either go write about it now, or tag it for later.  A tag can be anything, of course, so for things I want to write about I use “Map_Todo” as a reminder to myself to write about it on my map blog.  I’ve already written one blog entry that I would never have even learned the background for if I hadn’t been digging further into categories.  There’s something about going after “tags” as opposed to keywords that seems to be more conducive to the creative process.  Conceptually they’re pretty similar, of course, so perhaps it’s just the fact that you’re statistically more likely to bump into something that other people have found interesting.

Next thing you know, you’ve got fifteen things to blog about and a bunch of bookmarks to remind you how to get back to those fifteen things.

What’s not to love?

By the way, if you want to check out my bookmarks, here’s where to go:  http://del.icio.us/JohnLockwood.

Here it is not even Haloween, and I’m started to get very interested in the latest monstrous Mashup possibilities offered by the Yahoo Map API.  Actually I was interested a few days ago when I first saw what the API could do. 

As you know by now, between a glimmer in the developer’s eye and a full blown application lies an opportunity to draw an outline of 95684.

How 95684 Got Its Groove On

So without further ado, here’s my first hobbling along example featuring the now famous 95864 profile with the Yahoo maps API.  It’s more a proof of concept than anything, but what’s cool is that you can just drop your addresses into your code and up pops your marker more or less where the house is.  I know, it’s only rock and roll but I like it.

Where the whole effort starts to get interesting is that I should have some really neat neighborhood maps within a couple of weeks or less.

Whatever Happened to My Transylvania Twist?

It’s now the mash…

Thanks to PERL, the US Census Bureau, and a total unwillingness to walk away from my desk, my awesome map everything in Sacramento County project is now shipping (version .007). 

OK, so there’s a lot more to do to make this cool and useful, but the Sacramento County Zip Code Map Index is already up and running, not to mention the 57 (Hey — just like Heinz!) zip code maps thus indexed.*

Here for example is our old friend 95864 – our original figure study model.  95864 now has lots of friends to play with.

*(Woops — make that 56.  Something is rotten in Denmark, I mean, McClellan AFB, so I’ve taken that off line).

Over the last few weeks I started showing some new Google maps for Roseville and other areas in Placer County.  I had some fun putting that together, but working with the map data turned out to be rather tedious, especially since my goal is to provide similar maps for all of Sacramento County soon.

The data you need for drawing zip code boundaries is publicly available, but in a rather unusual text file format.  Unusual text file format, you say?   Any  programmers reading this are no doubt ready to shout:  Use PERL!  Those of you who aren’t programmers may be amused to learn that PERL is an acronym for a programming language, which stands for either Practical Extraction and Reporting Language or Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister.  What’s worse, the people who support the latter definition are more likely to be PERL advocates!  Given those two definitions, you can see that if you have some rubbish that needs to be listed, PERL has the right stuff.

If there were seven circles in Geek heaven, PERL would sit somewhere darned close to the middle of number seven.

Anyway, after a couple of pleasant hours last night and a whopping 49 lines of PERL code, I had the unusual format transformed into a database ready script.  With another day or two of heads-down work, I should be in a position to map out Sacramento County rather nicely.

The Sacramento County mapping project will probably live on our new Elite Properties Company Web Site, which in turn was resurrected from the ashes of our not-doing-too-much other Sacramento site.

As an aside, big company web sites have been recently criticized for having pictures of agents with no real biographical information behind them.  However, as we’ve proven with our agent pages, you don’t need to be big for that.

Really given the way this is unfolding the real estate mapping category should become a blog of its own on the other site, but I’ve found that whenever I have more than two blogs going, only two end up getting my attention anyway.  

Maybe I can just recuse myself from Amador County.

I’ve always wanted to recuse myself from someplace.

I was just thinking about some of the real estate web site development projects I have planned or underway, and to tell you the truth, it’s exciting.

You know.  Progammer exciting.  Your endorphins may vary.

As far as real estate mapping sites are concerned, I have more to learn before settling on an API.  I’ve been playing around a lot with Google’s, and it works well enough, but it seems rather limited in functionality.   I like the look of this Yahoo App, and some of what I’ve read about the Yahoo APIs, but I’m also seeing some nice stuff shipping on Microsoft’s API, so the learning curve isn’t over yet.

As someone brilliant once observed, “The nice thing about standards is we have so many of them.”

So while I’m hunting for the API that I’ll want to use for my next foray  into real estate mapping, one of my projects will be finishing up the existing work on my overall Placer County Zip Code Map and the rest of the component area maps on my Roseville site.   A few hours ought to have the maps in good shape (for what they are).

Also in the work queue is the new company web site, which now has the brokerage-wide IDX in place but otherwise is too broken to be linking to just yet.  The IDX system for this site will take the place of several individual agent accounts I have now, which will be consolidated to use this one brokerage account.  At the same time, I have to sell off one site if possible, and remove about one to three more from Google’s index.  The idea here is to prune off the dead wood, so hopefully the rest of the tree will do even better.

Then there’s the work item:  more maps, more use of the listings script, more bug fixes and enhancements to the listing script.

Finish up the redesign of BridgetSells.com and ship it.

Pay some attention to poor neglected Amador County.  It’s starting to feel like Kim Jong-il:  I’m so ronery.  Or maybe just do a King Solomon on it and give half of it to one mom and half to another.

Write an agent performance feedback form.

Simonize the coax.

Rah.

Today I had more fun with my listing display script and the Google Map API, producing some maps and listings for Rocklin and a broader Western Placer County Zip Code Map.

Keep on Rocklin in the Free World.

Sorry.

There’s some map starting to happen for Granite Bay as well.

Following up on some recent posts about some different work I’ve been doing on my custom listing display script and playing with the Google Maps API, here’s a fun little bit of work product, my a custom Google Map of Roseville with links to the listings displayed by the listing script.

It’s nice to see the work paying off in something tangible. Whether it’s useful is another matter — in that respect, I’ll judge it a success if any buyers mention it.

I’ve made some progress with my database and listing script early this morning. 

I started supporting updates, which of course is necessary if the script is going to be useful for longer than about two weeks.  This also means that the software now supports listings going pending, sold, off the market, etc.  (I suspect there’s still a bug when they come back on the market, but that’s not a rocket science fix).

I fixed the format of the dates, which (Murphy is great, long live Murphy) had an impedance mismatch between what MLS cooked and MYSQL ate.  Also not rocket science.

I love saying “impedance mismatch”.  But you’re not truly a pedant until you say orthogonal.

Orthogonal.  There, it’s out of the way.

I went back about two months on the sold data, so it’s in there and ready to display.  I just need to add a display function or two.  It can’t link to the IDX system because the IDX system doesn’t care about solds.  So I’ve got a couple of hours (mythical man hours, not calendar hours) before I’ll be able to surface a working prototype or two.

I’m probably a couple of months away from building anything really cool with the pieces I’ve been assembling, but meantime I’m enjoying the opportunity to play with my mental blocks.

Last night it was a bit of a late night, chasing down a bug I had introduced into my property listing database.  I got that squared away around midnight or so, so once the bug hunting was done I was able to finish up the project I was working on when I first saw the problem, my page of Roseville Listings by Price and Area.

The bug is fixed, so tomrrow I can go after a few cosmetic bugs there and call it a day on that section of the Roseville listings, at least.

Several months back I published a link to a Sacramento Zip Code map that another webmaster had published.  It was amazing how many people clicked through to the blog post with that link, so clearly lots of folks are interested in finding out where one zip code begins and another ends.  I guess snail mail is still popular.

Ever since, every so often I’d think to myself that I wanted a better zip code map if I could lay my hands on one.  Better in this case meant something resizable, clickable, that sort of thing — the kind of thing someone publishing web pages containing real estate in certain zip codes or another would consider “better”.

Also, better meant I’d be able to use it without spending a lot of money and / or violating someone else’s copyright, which I had a feeling the guy I was linking to was doing.

Well, it turns out that everything I found was either worse, very expensive, or also subject to copyright.

As I was looking into how to get Googlemaps to do such a trick, I came across Matt Cutts’ Fun With Zip Codes article, which has little enough to do with Googlemaps (except by way of showing you what you might need to know once you’ve looked up the appropriate Googlemaps API, which is GPolygon).  But the article does show you to have fun with zip codes (as promised), if by fun you mean using an open source plotting tool and US census data to draw the picture above.

Well, yes, that’s fun, assuming one can make James Joyce roll over in his grave at the same time.

The other day I mentioned that I had begun work on some new software to enable me to display more listings in many different ways — by city, price, subdivision, or what have you.  When complete, this software will unify and supplant the three or four different scripts and exports I run to provide the Sacramento duplex, new homes, and condo listings on this site, and the Granite Bay subdivision listings on that site.

This project is progressing fairly well, somewhat better than expected in fact, so I should have something to show for it in a week or less.  I say it’s going better than expected partly because PHP makes coding to mysql easier than expected.  I always knew PHP was a cakewalk, but it’s even more of a joy to work in a full LAMP environment.

It’s also going better than expected because I have a tendency to announce and begin projects that don’t get finished.  This one’s looking like it won’t fall into that category.

I guess I’m not the only one whoever did this sort of thing, because there’s a tee shirt for that, too.

I should probably become a ThinkGeek affiliate if I’m going to keep this up.  Until I do, I should have this disclosure:

If you click on one of these ThinkGeek links, I make a 0% commission.

I’ve published some comparative real estate data for the following Sacramento Counties:  Sacramento, Amador, El Dorado, and Placer.

It’s pretty dry stuff, even for me, but you might enjoy it if you know without looking it up what the shirt at right is about.

If you do know what the shirt at right is about without looking it up, there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy this as well, and you’ll realize that this shirt is actually real estate related.

Word of honor:  I will work on being less obtuse.

I know the quantity of my posts has slacked off somewhat lately.

Once again: work cuts a hole in my whole day.

Actually, in real estate, one’s work is as likely to cut a hole well into one’s evening instead, sometimes leaving your days pretty laid back to catch up on paperwork. Last night was a personal record, I think, as I was still talking to a buyer and working on an offer at 10:45 PM.

Usually I get to knock off by 9:30 PM at the latest. Piece of cake.

This is my story and I’m sticking to it: my brain is mud not because it’s congenitally muddy, but because of the deleterious influence of work.

It’s so muddy that there are no Web 2.0 bells and whistles here. It was darned charitable of Kevin Boer to link to me and use me in an example, especially because I’m the second least likely guy I can think of to add Criteo’s Autoroll to my site. I’m still pretty much a dinosaur, albeit a rather modern one. From the late cretaceous, maybe. (I’m sure my daughter would be happy to learn I’m taking an interest.)

There’s hardly any Javascript here, if any. Much less any Ajax. When I visit a MyBlogLog enabled site, I appear there as an annonymous black head. (No, not an anonymous blackhead — that would be worse — watch those spaces).

Once in awhile I need to discuss the mud that my thinking has turned into, by way of cleansing it, turning the back porch hose back on the anonymous black head and washing it off, so to speak.

To coin a phrase.

Do I dare to go back for thirds? Sure: as it were.

In a few days it’ll be April, so I can set loose my muddy brain to a task that won’t overload its sedimentary sensibilities: teasing out the data from March.

Meantime if any bright sparkle of intelligence filters down into the muddy deeps, I’ll be sure to share it.

I’m not greedy.

I’ve publised our second photo tour, this time highlighting Vicki’s beautiful listing on San Jacinto in Citrus Heights.

Kaila’s recording of her rendition of Spanish Dance music appears courtesy of Kaila’s Piano Music Web Page.