There are literally thousands of books on how to buy a house. Entire sections of the bookstore are dedicated to it. Hundreds of people lecture on it, and thousands of continuing education sites offer courses on it. Yet, I never found the quick and dirty list of exactly how you go about the process of buying a house, despite the fact that 90% of house purchases go exactly the same way. (This statistic completely made up.) Here’s how it breaks down:

• Go to a bunch of open houses. Not sure where you want to buy? Go to a bunch of different open houses in different areas, say five to ten. This will give you a sense of housing prices, as well as what the areas are like.
• Get pre-approved. Look in the phone book for a mortgage broker, or go to your local bank and say you want to get pre-approved for a house. They’ll tell you all about mortgages and financing, so ask a lot of questions. They’ll mail you a letter of approval when done to take with you to open houses.
• Get a buyer’s agent. Now that you have a sense of what areas you might like and what house prices are like, look for realtors who specialize in the area you’re looking. Call them up and make an appointment.
• Look at properties with your buyer’s agent. They should have a selection of listings in your price range for consideration. Have them set up some walk throughs. Look at as many houses as you think are necessary. More than three, you dope.
• Make an offer. Did you bring your checkbook? Work with your buyer’s agent to compose an offer to the seller.
• Negotiate the price. There will probably be a back-and-forth on the price. You’ll do all this negotiating through the buyer’s agent. If all works out, you’ll eventually get an accepted offer.
• Get an inspection. You’ll have to hire an inspector to go through the house and tell you what’s wrong.
• Get your mortgage broker to lock in a rate. Now that you’re actually buying, call up your mortgage broker and let them know. They’ll have to work on locking in a rate for you for the closing.
• Get the closing attorney to look over the Purchase and Sale. You haven’t officially said you’re going to buy until you finalize the Purchase and Sale, but for that, your interests are aligned with the bank’s — you both want the house for a reasonable price, with no issues. Your closing attorney will usually look over the paperwork for cheaper than if you get your own attorney. (Talk to your mortgage broker to get the closing attorney’s contact information.) Did everything go alright at the inspection? This is also a good opportunity to chip down the price.
• Sign the Purchase and Sale. The first of the really big checks: a downpayment with the revised P&S. A regular check is fine here. It will get deposited, so make sure you have the funds. Congratulations, you now have a closing date!
• Make sure the mortgage broker gets the commitment letter to the buyer’s agent. The people involved will do a lot of this work for you automatically, but it’s always good to follow up.
• Ask for a copy of the appraisal. The mortage broker will get an appraiser to look at the property. Ask for a copy of this report, which will come in handy for the homeowner’s insurance.
• Get homeowner’s insurance. Ask your mortgage broker for any particular language needed for the homeowner’s insurance. You can’t have a home without insurance — shop around for a quote. Once you’ve selected a provider, talk to them to go ahead with the insurance, and make sure they get a binder over to the mortgage broker.
• Review mortgage paperwork. Ask your mortgage broker frequently for what’s needed. They’ll send you documents outlining what’s needed for the mortgage and what terms, but often, you don’t need to worry about it, and will just sign everything you need at closing. Review it to make sure everything is correct, though.
• Schedule a walk through. Generally, the day or two before the closing, you’ll need to do a walk through, to make sure that the property is still in good condition. Do this a week before closing.
• Pick a date and location for closing. Talk to your closing attorney regarding the location for closing. This is negotiated between the buyer and seller.
• Get a copy of the HUD-1 form the day before. You probably won’t get this until the day before closing — a statement listing all closing costs. Go over any questions or issues with your closing attorney, to make sure everything checks out.
• Get a cashier’s check. A regular check won’t do — take the amount from the HUD-1 form, and go to the bank to get a cashier’s check in your name. You do this in your name to retain control of the money until closing is finished. Make sure it’s for the exact amount listed on the HUD-1.
• Close the deal. Have all conditions been met? Do you have homeowner’s insurance? All outstanding issues answered? Go to closing with the cashier’s check, and just in case, a copy of all paperwork, including homeowner’s insurance. Be prepared to sign and initial a lot of documents, while sitting across the table from the sellers who will be doing much the same.
• Get follow-up visit from homeowner’s insurance inspector. You’ve closed the deal, and now they get to come out and make sure that they are insuring you for the right amount.
• Talk to your mortgage broker about payment terms. Make sure you’ve sorted out exactly how you want to pay your mortgage, and get details on things like if you can do bi-weekly payments, pay extra, etc.

That’s the quick rundown. There’s a whole world of details in each step and places to save money, but for the most part, this is what most people do. It’s not that hard, and people do it all the time, so don’t be intimidated by the process!

One of Wyoming’s best kept secrets has got to be Grand Targhee. While many have heard of Jackson Hole (forty miles to the West) not as many talk about GT, and with good reason: that way they can keep Grand Targhee all to themselves.

The basic facts show that it’s a decent mountain: 2,400 vertical feet, 2,000 acres, and 500+ inches of snowfall a year. However, you might be put off by its seemingly simple trail map — don’t be fooled. Yes, you’ll be bored if you stick to groomers, but if you’re sticking to groomers, you’re missing most of the mountain. Not to mention most of the fun. There’s also a decent acre to skiier ratio (yes, those are in the right order) — quite often, you’ll be all by your lonesome as you cut down the slopes.

The trick is to have a local show you the mountain the first time through. They have free guided tours every day at 11:00am, but after experimenting a bit, you’ll be a pro. Go off trail. It’s the only way to really experience Targhee. Fortunately, the mountain is set up decently to allow you to end up on a cat trail (or escape to one, as the case might be). Here’s how to run the mountain like a local:

After a night snow fall, take the Shoshone beginner lift up, then take the path down to the Blackfoot lift. The Blackfoot lift has to be one of the oldest lifts still around — it’s a double chair with no foot rests and no restraints. It’s almost as if someone took the idea of a T-bar and extended it just slightly. If you take that chair, I hope you’re not afraid of heights! At the top of Blackfoot, take the cat trail off to the skier’s right side, and keep going until you pass a sign marked “no groomed runs beyond this point”. This will put you in the Powder Area, where we often got fresh tracks (in powder, of course) in the morning. Just make sure to cut over to the skier’s left at the bottom, lest you end up on a traverse.

All set on fresh tracks for the morning? Cut over to Dreamcatcher, and ride up. Go to the skier’s right along the cat track, and work your way over to the ridge running by The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, a trio of “trails”. The Good is a steep ridge that drops you into a bowl. The Bad is similar, except you have an eight foot ledge to start (don’t worry, the landing is soft!). The Ugly is a smaller ledge, but jumps straight away into trees. When done with that, play in the East Woods for some more powder tree skiing fun.

Take Dreamcatcher back up, and cut down to the skiier’s left, and you’ll often find powder in wide spaced trees. Just be careful if you end up on the Instructor’s Chute or Patrol Chute — those are steep! You’ll most likely end up on the Teton Vista Traverse trail, which meanders to the bottom. You could ride this all the way to the bottom, and then take a cat trail off to the skier’s left to get to the Sacajawea lift. You could. Or, you could notice all those “Sacajawea Open” signs along the traverse, and realize that if you cut through trees, you’ll end up there in style. Going through the woods you may find a little two foot wide trail at the bottom of a ravine, which I believe is the Waterfall trail. Don’t bother looking for it on the map — it’s not there. It’s a wild ride down this narrow trail, which will dump you back onto the cat track heading to Sacajawea.

Take the Sacajawea chair up, and get on Northern Lights. Bomb down the trail as fast as you can, because you have an uphill climb to drop into a bowl between Northern Lights and Half ‘n Half — another great source of powder.

What, you still want more powder action? Take Dreamcatcher up, and take the cat track down to the skier’s left, and you’ll find a ridge to walk up. It’s a fifteen minute hike (if you’re in shape, much longer if you’re like me and not). After admiring the view, traverse to your skier’s left to get to the ridge over a treeless bowl; jump in for some deep powder fun.

Whichever way you cut down the mountain, be sure to stop by The Trap — a quite fitting name. Stop in and drink with the friendly locals in an open, well-lit atmosphere. They know how to mix drinks well here, and the higher elevation means it doesn’t take much. Plus, the food is excellent — we ate there often, and enjoyed it every time. Of course, if you want a really good meal, head down to the airport in Driggs. Yes, you read that right: the best eating in town is at the airport. The Warbirds’ Cafe offers a top notch dining experience, as well as an airplane museum with a changing inventory. Their Elk medallions were outstanding, as was their prime rib. Bon appetit!

We went for a week, with the idea that we’d spend a few days at Grand Targhee, and a few at Jackson Hole, yet we never made it to JH. Targhee was just too fun! While this gives us reason to come back, I imagine we would want to hit up GT for a few days again. I highly recommend anyone who’s into skiing check it out. Just keep it under your hat: it’ll be our little secret.

From where did the term soccer originate? I was puzzling this at a bar in the UK recently while watching a match on the telly, wondering why the rest of the world referred to this game as “football”, while we Americans referred to it as “soccer”. Logically, the rest of the world is right; in American football, the foot only connects with the ball for punts, kickoffs, and extra points — for most of the game, it’s carried or passed, both involving the hand, not the foot. Was the term “soccer” an American creation? How did we get to this name? As it turns out, it’s not an American term, but to understand it, you have to learn a little bit of soccer’s history.

Soccer traces its origins to Roman times in the first century AD. For the most part, it did not involve carrying the ball, hence the rather appropriate name. That split happened at Rugby School in England, where carrying the ball, as opposed to kicking it, came into vogue in the 1800’s, giving rise to the game of rugby. This same century saw the creation of the Football Association, the ruling body for English football. Rugby and soccer went their separate ways, with football under FA rules being called properly “Association Football”.

From here, you have to understand British abbreviations. They would often drop the end of a word, ending it with an -er, e.g. “rugger” for rugby. Hence, Association Football would get shortened to “asoccer football”, eventually being dropped to just “soccer”. In UK media, the term “soccer” is frequently used to refer to the sport, apparently. It’s just in common parlance that it’s not. (Americans would later bring rugby and soccer to Yale and modify the rules, giving birth to modern American football, hence its rather inauspicious name.)

So the term “soccer” isn’t wrong, per se. In fact, it’s of English origin, created around the same time as the game itself, though it is slang. The term has just fallen out of general use outside of the US. If you want to keep from getting beat up at rowdy UK bars, though, you’d do well to refer to soccer as football. Even calling it by its proper name, ‘association football’, might get you an odd word or two. When in Rome, do as Romans do, right?

Amsterdam. To the uninitiated, the name conjures up images of John Travolta riding in a car with Samuel Jackson, discussing the “little differences”. Images of people getting high in coffeeshops and prostitutes dancing in windows in the Red Light District are the primary highlights. Yet, it’s so much more.

Three words of advice to the visiting tourist: be very aware. If you only see traffic stateside, you might be surprised. The initial ride into town is a brief introduction to the rules of the road: just do what you can. Lanes are more of a suggestion here than a rule, and bicyclists are everywhere. If you’re not paying attention crossing the street, you could quite easily get clobbered. But somehow, it all works out. In the US this would be chaos.

The first thing you may notice when you hit the streets is the smell, unfortunately. Urine and feces are the cologne of the streets, which combined with the occasional whiff of marijuana, become a quite familiar scent during your stay. It’s not a constant smell, so much as an occasional reminder. You get used to it, or you stick to cleaner streets.

Three more words of advice: rent a bike. Rent early, rent often. We didn’t, and may have built more character that way, but screw character and save your feet. Bicyclists trump all. Right of way is a suggestion for them, even with traffic lights. Bike path, sidewalk, street — it’s almost as if they say, “What are you going to do? I’m on a bike.”

Perhaps the most notable feature of Amsterdam is the canal system. Call me a romantic, but I love canals. They just make the streets feel more European somehow. Plus, they make a great navigational aid. When you get to Amsterdam, learn to start picking directions based on canals. You might be amazed at what they term a street.

Trivia on the name Amsterdam: they built a dam on the river Amstel, hence the original name Amsteldamme. The canal system made it ideal for trade, and most foreign shipments were routed through there, making it one of the most important cities for trade in the old world. This perhaps explains its ranging diversity and tolerance for all people: the European melting pot, so to speak. I only wish tolerance worked as well in all parts of the world. I dreaded returning to the hack and slash partisan politics and subtle bigotry of the States. (Don’t get me wrong: I love the United States of America. It’s still a land of great opportunity and culture. We just could still learn a thing or two about true tolerance of others.)

Most people are content with visiting two locales on the trip, before hitting the coffee houses: the Anne Frank House, and the Van Gogh Museum. It’s like doing pennance to being a cultured person, before getting seriously wasted. If that’s your thing, that’s fine, but realize this: there’s a lot more to Amsterdam than that. More than just coffeeshops and hookers, even. Some other places you may or may not visit:

• Amsterdam’s Historich Museum: a great city history, but a little long winded.
• Vondelpark: nice park in the city near the shopping district, with a young and hippyish crowd.
• Deck of NEMO: probably not worth the 2.50 euros to enter, but best view of the city.
• Stelelijk Museum CS: if modern art is your thing, this is the place to be. If you hate po-mo, run away!
• Oosterpark: another nice park, but more for older folk and families.
• Tropenmuseum: see how the Dutch plundered the world back in the day!

"Cafès" are bars. "Coffeeshops" are places that sell marijuana. So where do you get a cup of coffee? As it turns out, almost anywhere. Not just any coffee, mind you: good coffee. I wish the US would pick up the Dutch’s knack for good java in almost every location. We’d found bad coffee, but it tended to be the exception, not the rule. Even the crappy in-room coffee maker was a capuccino / espresso machine. I hadn’t found a place that wouldn’t serve me up a capuccino. Try doing that at a bar in Boston.

The dining is exquisite. The shopping is intense. Oh yeah, there’s something about people getting high and such and loose women in Red Light, but that misses the point.

So what’s the big deal? What’s so great about Amsterdam, if you’re not a stoner or looking for a 50 euro “suck and f*ck”?

“The little differences.” It goes back to that car with John Travolta and Samuel Jackson, discussing what’s so great about Amsterdam: “They got the same sh*t we got over here, it’s just different.”

It starts with the people. They’re nice. They’re nice almost to a fault. It’s like they’ve taken the whole notion of tolerance, ingrained it in a few generations, and really made it a way of live. They’re polite, they speak good English (in addition to their Dutch, of course), and are totally non-judgemental. Frankly, it’s a bit unnerving at first, like these folks are too good to be true. They’re not all idealistic liberals; they have liberals, they have conservatives, they have moderates. Just like over here. Unlike over here, they all get along just fine.

Did I mention the tipping? I hate tipping. In Amsterdam, it’s fairly painless. If you don’t want to tip, don’t. Most prices have a gratuity built into the price (though they don’t list it separately anywhere). How do you tip? Simple. When they tell you the price, say, 8.50 euros, just round up to the next euro, and say “make it nine” and hand them your money. Or, if you have large bills, round it up to the next five, e.g. hand them a fifty and say “make it ten”. That’s it. Or, don’t do it at all. It doesn’t matter. That’s really nice. Much nicer than the sliding scale weird unspoken rule we have over here.

Plus, the whole experience is like an introduction to European culture. A nice one, being that the people are very pleasant, and they all speak English (and don’t care that you don’t speak Dutch). You walk thin, canal-lined streets, dodge a whole mess of bike riders, and generally just relax.

There too many reasons to list on why I love Amsterdam, some of them intangible. Visiting there makes me want to travel more. I had a lot of fun this trip, and hope to some day visit again.

Ah, finally at the beach. The summer has been so busy, I’ve found no time to get out until now. Today we’re checking out Nantasket Beach in Hingham, Massachusetts. It’s easy to forget that the beach is so close. It reminds me a lot of Hampton Beach up in New Hampshire.

The beach was sandy as you’d expect, though we came in at high tide. The waterline receded about a hundred feet over the course of the day. The water itself was a little rocky — grab your sandals, or it’s a little uncomfortable!

Getting some quick fried scallops from the overpriced beachside restaurant wrapped up the day. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday.

Boing Boing reports on a new guideline for dealing with suspected bombers: shoot them in the head. From the article: “An international group of police chiefs recently expanded its guidelines for use of deadly force, instructing officers to shoot suspected suicide bombers in the head.”

Wow.

If that doesn’t send chills down your spine, then perhaps you didn’t read that correctly. Note the use of the word suspected. So, if they think you might be packing a little TNT under your coat, you could have a permanent lights-out while waiting for the train. No trial, no jury. No “Whoops, sorry, we made a mistake there buddy.” Instant judge, jury, and executioner.

This is a terrifying idea. What if you wore the wrong coat out of the house? What if you happened to carry a laptop or MP3 player in your bag, and the wires were protruding? What if you’re not very sociable, and tend to be nervous around other people? Though they have some ideas of what might make a suspected terrorist, it’s not like being a shifty character is a crime punishable by death.

I can understand why they might decide this: if you can shoot a bomber in the head before he has a chance to detonate it, then you’ll save a lot of lives. Provided they don’t have a dead man switch, that is. In the wake of the London bombings and the ongoing insurgency struggle, people want a way to instantly deal with the threat.

But this is a little draconian, even in the wake of such troubles. The idea of using deadly force on people you just suspect may be a troublemaker is a tough one. In fact, one might say this fills me with terror. As Nietzsche would say, “Those who fight monsters must make sure they don’t become them.”

Update: I sometimes hate it when I’m right.

If you’re in the Boston area and haven’t checked out Minado, you’re missing out. That is, unless you don’t like good all you can eat sushi. Located right off Route 9 in Natick, they boast a rather large buffet-style lineup to satisfy your insatiable hunger for maki, nigiri, sashimi, tempura, and more.

I checked them out this weekend (tip: go around 6pm on Saturday, and you won’t have to fight the lines!), and was pretty impressed. The food quality was pretty good, and the variety was fantastic. Pricing is a little heavy, running around $26 a head on the weekends, but if you’re looking for a lot of different kinds of sushi and want to eat until you can’t move, it’s a great spot.

The Canadian National Post reports that recent translations of the oldest version of the New Testament currently available show that the original mark of the beast, traditionally 666, might actually be 616. The world of rock music must be terrified.

People have researched 666 ad nauseum, wondering how the mark of the beast might make its appearance. 616, on the other hand, is relatively unresearched. Here are some facts about 616.

• It’s the telephone prefix code for Grand Rapids, Michigan. I always thought the Michigan Militia must be up to something.
• In this year in history, a shrine was founded on the site that would become Westminster Abbey. All that goth architecture looked evil, didn’t it?
• As with any other freakin’ number imaginable, 616 has been processed biblically, with such useful matches as “The Law”, “The Vengeance of the Lord”, and “The Territory of Wickedness”.
• A Googlism of 616 will turn up even more uninteresting gibberish!

Of course, like its predecessor, 616 can also be tipped on its head, and create 919, perfect for exploitation by modern horror movies. Hollywood, get on it! We don’t really care, but we know you’ll do it anyway.

• 919 is the area code for Raleigh, North Carolina. Meaningful if the end of the world happens in the US.
• There’s a 919 Marketing agency, and as we all know, marketing is evil.
• RFC 919 is about broadcasting Internet datagrams, so the Internet must be evil. (That is, unless most RFCs weren’t about the Internet anyway.)
• When you read publication 919 from the most evil organization ever, you learn how to adjust your tax witholding. Like you can withhold anything from them.
• 919 wasn’t that fascinating a time in history.
• Yes, more Googlism nonsense on 919.

More numerology will turn up, because you can pretty much find relations to anything these days and patterns in the chaos. All you people with 666 tattoos, prepare to get lazed!

What the hell is corn snow? I was checking out a ski report for Sugarloaf in Maine, and saw the following status update:

Sugarloaf USA 0 38-76″ 125/133 6/15 94% Corn Snow

Corn snow was definitely a new one on me. According to one definition, it’s “Coarse, granular wet snow. During the spring and summer diurnal cycle of melting and refreezing the corn snow skiing is at its best in mid to late morning, after a layer has begun to melt but before it is too wet and sloppy.” Basically, it’s snow that melted and refroze to form a strange rough granular consistency.

Ski Magazine has this to say about it:

“It’s the product of a convergence of sun, snow and exposure. And it seems fitting that it shows up each spring, when the weather warms and the clothes come off. Corn snow treats you like your first girlfriend: Everything you do is perfect. With every slight shift of weight you become a world-class racer—every inch the sultan of snow. What skill! What grace! What control! Go ahead, check out your shadow as you jet down the slope. You’ll like what you see.”

Wow, so corn snow is like my first girlfriend, huh. Does this mean my first girlfriend was frigid? Susceptible to changes in temperature?

It apparently sticks to your skis and is also called “salt snow”. Or, as I read on another blog, “My husband says when he was a kid in Vermont, in the days before artificial snowmaking, everybody looked forward to early spring and corn snow, because it was a whole lot better to ski on than ice.”

How exciting that my first girlfriend is better than skiing on ice! I’m still trying to figure out what that means about my first girlfriend or skiing on ice.

I guess the ski season is officially over. *sigh*

It would appear that Maine had a sanity adjustment, and has decided to accept EZPass / FastLane for tolls. Being a FastLane user, you would think that I’d find this to be great news. Yet, somehow it’s not. In this transitional period where the roads still have that “new FastLane toll smell”, there’s still a bit of confusion for FastLane users as to what’s going on. Let me explain.

Here in Massachusetts, when there is a FastLane toll available, it’s labeled as such. This is clearly marked and well understood, even to the most tired of drivers at 3am on a Saturday night. In fact, the attendant, if there even is an attendant, is not expected to look at you, say hello, or otherwise make his or her presence known. Not so on the Maine roads. They might have a sign somewhere along the way saying that EZPass is accepted, but that’s about it. Then, I’m not sure about this, but I think all lanes have it, with toll collectors working the booths and all.

So far, this sounds like a good thing, right? It is, except for one thing: the newbie FastLane user, having never been up this way while FastLane acceptance was working, probably gets toll money ready. He or she gets up to the booth and hands the money to the attendant, who takes it, like normal. (A FastLane user doesn’t usually even see an attendant in an automated lane, mind you.) However, if this person should perchance look forward at the same time, he or she might (and I emphasize might) notice a green light ahead of them with words on it. If they should happen to read the light, which they probably wouldn’t as they haven’t the other ninety thousand times they’d driven this way, they might see it say “EZ Pass Paid”. This might confuse them the first few times if they’re a FastLane user, especially after, say, a day of hard skiing. End result? Double payment. It’s like donating to the states in which you’re traveling.

Now, it’s not fair to put this on the toll collectors, who are probably not quite sure how to handle the whole thing either. They’ve spent most of their time to date taking money giving change as applicable. This whole drive-through-the-toll-like-you’re-doing-a-fifteen-mile-per-hour-drive-by thing isn’t normal in Maine. It’s normal for people to stop, give them money, then move on.

But that’s the rub. There’s a difference in action here that is a little disorienting for the person new to this setup, which means free revenue for the state in terms of double dipping. This can be a little aggravating when you realize how many tolls on which you’ve just double-paid.

With New Hampshire planning to switch in the near future, I see my double payments happening again soon, though this time I might be ready for it. Next time, I think I’ll just sit in my lane and stare blankly at the attendant. Or perhaps I’ll just look straight ahead, and pretend the attendant isn’t there. Let’s see who glances at that green light first!