Sonicrusk Blog

I’ve been going to this new barber that isn’t raising his rates through the roof or having some type of issue in his personal life. The new barbershop, however, is pretty bare bones. A couple of TVs and a bunch of real estate booklets. Last time I went I saw a FHM or two by the door, but it was as I was leaving.

I flip through these real estate books while waiting. I have nothing else better to do. I noticed that it seemed that housing prices in this area might have gone done some. That’s what Gaylen Young keeps saying, isn’t it? Or maybe it is that sales have slowed down and not that prices have went down. Whatever the case, it seemed that the median price of most homes was around $280,000, according to these booklets.

Today, I was bored at the computer so I went to the Bloomberg mortgage calculator to see how these figures add up. I put in the loan amount of $280,000, found out that my bank charges 6.6% for a 30-year loan, and even added the notional down payment of $10,000. I ran the calculator.

It turns out that my monthly payments under such a situation would be $1,825.00. Holy fuck!

I guess this is one way to make people get married as that seems to be the only way to afford a mortgage like that as a first-time homebuyer. Wasn’t the old adage that housing should be a third of your income? I talked to an old real estate agent, and she said that has changed. It is now half your income. Are you kidding? Actually, $1825/month will eat up more than half my income for a good many years, and that’s with a meat and potatoes stable job.  If you make $25/hour, and work a full-time 160 hours/mo, that’s $4000/mo before taxes.

I had a 25-year-old girlfriend a few years ago that bought a house for $109,000 just north of North High School. It wasn’t lavish: three bedrooms, small back yard, garage. Nice little place. Ain’t that ancient history.

After my visit to Oklahoma, I checked out house prices over there. What costs $85,000 over there is exactly what I am talking about with this post. What is that, a 300% difference?

I guess it is just bad timing on my part. Five years ago in Bakersfield would’ve definitely been different. Is it really the greedheads coming from the Los Angeles area, or are we supporting the retirement of baby boomers selling their houses at monstrous rates? A lot of my contemporaries feel the same way. However, when I tell this to an existing homeowner, I just get a blank look in response. I guess I might have to move to some fundamentalist state in order to afford a house in the next ten years.

Guess what… I got a fever. And the only prescription, is more spokesmodels.

7 Bates has a long post on spiders over at his blog. Personally, I understand the benefit that spiders do for ecology, but they still freak me the hell out.

Bake Town and Black Dog have both talked about this on their own blogs. I just got the hang of the “referral” feature in Site Meter. It shows what type of searches people have done in reaching your blog. Mine aren’t too far out:

Edyta Kochanowska (someone simply searched for that name and reached my blog)

McLaughlin Group Pfizer

Defibrillator salesman saves lady

Have you ever made an atrocious drive, one where you had a super-long stretch in both highway and duration behind the wheel? It is something everyone has to go through sometime in their life to test their mettle.

For me, two come to mind. Way back when, I had to drive from Monterey, California to San Angelo, Texas, which is located in the western part of that state. This was during my army days, and they gave me a week to do it. I was traveling with an army buddy who had to go to the same place. I stopped off here in Bakersfield to visit the family for a couple of days, and then made it over to Las Vegas. Somewhere in between, my buddy tells me that his leave ends a day earlier than mine. So, I have one less day to get to Texas and two days total to get to that state.

We left Vegas at 1PM after staying the night and traveled straight through. At the time, my buddy didn’t know how to drive a stick shift vehicle so that left me to do all of the driving. We traveled down through Arizona, stopped at a Ruby Tuesday’s for food in Phoenix, and continued on. I stopped in El Paso at about 0400 the next morning. I thought, “Hey, I’m in Texas, might as well keep going.” It was my first time driving to the Lonestar State. Little did I know that San Angelo was another eight hours away. Eight hours of desolate Interstate 10 playing tricks on my mind. We made it safe but that was a monster drive, about twenty-four hours.

A couple of years ago, I drove with a close family friend to Oklahoma to visit her family. The trip was spur of the moment, only a day or two between first mention and getting on the road. Before leaving, we already planned to make a mission out of it: get to Oklahoma ASAP without screwing around. We left Bakersfield at 2200 with me taking the first driving shift.

I drove until just past Flagstaff, and then switched off. By this time fatigue was starting to set in for my driving companion and me. We continued to switch off, taking I-25 north at Albuquerque to avoid the treacherous winter conditions near Amarillo on I-40. It snowed along I-25. We planned on taking this back road in NE New Mexico that leads straight into the Oklahoma panhandle. We figured we could speed out assess off and make some good time. However, as we got on that road, the heater broke, and the roads were icy. The temperature outside was 14 degrees. It looked like purgatory out there, gloomy and gray. It took us 2.5 hours to make it 70 miles. We stopped off in Clayton, New Mexico to stay the night and get the heater repaired the next morning. We could’ve frozen to death out on Rte. 412 (or is it 442?) with worse luck.

After spending six days in Oklahoma, we had better luck with weather. However, that just meant that we gutted our way back to Bakersfield. We left OKC at 5:30PM, and got back to Bakersfield at 1PM the next day. No stopping except for gas and a 2AM breakfast at an Indian gaming casino right outside of Albuquerque. That was a rough drive. After the sun goes down and then comes up again, you get loopy. I was downing so much coffee I thought I’d get kidney failure. When you get across the non-descript California border, you think that it is only a couple of more hours, then you realize that it is actually four more. Along highway so bland it rivals that stretch of Texan I-10.

Those are my two atrocious driving stories. Maybe my buddy Adam will post and tell us how he drove from Tuscon to Maryland alone in two days. Rough.

I am a big fan of Santa Barbara Pizza and Chicken here in Bakersfield. To me, they have the best pizza in town. Whether delivered or carryout, the bread is always fresh and soft. The crust is not overcooked. The pepperoni or sausage tastes fresh and also is not overcooked. The bottom of the pie is never burnt.

Their sauce has tanginess to it. It’s thick and not watery like Domino’s. They don’t overdo the baking like a lot of pizza joints. All around, the pizza just tastes fresh and spicy, not only right after baking but for several refrigerated days afterwards.

Unfortunately, both of Santa Barbara Pizza’s joints are in the hood: on the corner of Niles and Oswell and north of Roberts Lane on North Chester. I’ve only been to the location in Oildale to pick up an order. It is not very accommodating to those wishing to dine in. So, deliver and carryout is the way to go, but it is worth it.

Anybody that comes to my house for a visit and asks for a pizza delivery will get a chance to eat a Santa Barbara Pizza. Great stuff.

Live long and thrive.

I was watching The McLaughlin Group today. It was a different type of episode. Usually, he has four pundits of all types of political ideology sitting around on a set arguing about the week’s political news. This week’s episode dispensed with that. It was all about health care.

McLaughlin had some heavy hitters on the panel: the Secretary of Health and Human Services for the United States, some big-wig physician with “Permanente” (can only assume it’s Kaiser), a journalist from The Newshour, and the CEO of Pfizer.

Certain health care issues kept coming up. Of course, that 45 million Americans are uninsured, and that it is expensive. Lots of facts thrown around; I don’t know the veracity of each one: GM spends more on health care than steel, 125,000 Americans die each year from medical error. One of the panel members said that the US spends 14-16% of all money spent every year on health care. Can you believe that? The journalist and the Secretary both agreed that electronic medical records across the board for the entire company would save 100 BILLION dollars. Sweet Jesus!

Another concept that was oft-repeated during the episode was preventive medicine. The CEO mentioned several times how preventable diseases like hypertension, Diabetes,  obesity, and “certain types of cancer” contribute to running up health care costs.

That last part made me think, since they were obviously talking about tobacco-related illness. For a split second, I thought, “What if they just got rid of all the tobacco in the country?” That is obviously pretty stupid, as it doesn’t factor in the subsequent black market and tens of millions of pissed off people it would create. Then I remembered reading about the nicotine vaccine.

I know that quite a few regular readers of this blog have dealt with nicotine, myself included. It’s easy to be sanctimonious nowadays against the smoker or dipper. Find the biggest fuck-up – if you are a tobacco user and they aren’t, they thumb their nose at you. It’s commonplace and sanctioned. To those that have never had the habit, I always tell them to imagine a month without water. A month in which they would not die, but they could not imbibe any fluids by mouth. After that, you wouldn’t really crave water anymore but whenever someone was taking a hearty swig in the middle of summer, chances are you would lick your lips wanting some. Willpower would have to take over during those unexpected cravings. Also, chances are, you would probably spend the month craving water all day and feeling like crap. Your concentration would wane. There’s cold turkey for you.

From what I’ve read about this nicotine vaccine, it removes the pleasure of the drug derived. You don’t get the kick, and therefore, will find the act of smoking of dipping fruitless. Considering what The CEO, The Secretary, The Journalist, The Physician, and The Candlestick Maker were all talking about on McLaughlin, maybe this should be a priority instead of some of these “esteem” drugs.

Bakosphere is a blog that I believe is run in conjunction with The Bakersfield Californian. At least, that is how I first discovered it. Right after Frank Amestoy died, I went to the Californian to read more about what happened. I found the link to Bakosphere off of their front page and thereafter entered into the Bakersfield blogosphere. That is how I found the blogs of Bake Town, Dusty, and Black Dog (all in Big Time Links).

There are three blogmasters at Bakosphere: Mr. Owens, Mr. McHenry, and Mr. Molen. They have a pretty cool site. However, they haven’t updated the blog in almost two weeks. Three blogmasters and no entries. I wonder if any one knows what’s going on. I hope everything is all right.

UPDATE: Bakosphere returned after a 15-day absence with a five post flurry.

I told you in a previous post how I have seen all six episodes of Sopranos Season Six. Some people have claimed that they don’t like it. It has yet another dream sequence, which seems to be the way David Chase and Crew take a break a la sitcom retrospectives with flashbacks and scenes from past episodes.

I am not a big fan of The Sopranos Dream Sequence for the most part. They might be chock full of symbolism, but mostly I think it is just potato loaf. Annette Bening as an imaginary in-law and strange car rides with dead folks.

But I thought that this seasons dream sequence was interesting. It had Tony Soprano dreaming that he was a salesman out in California, all the while he lay in a coma in Jersey. It was cool hearing Gandolfini’s real voice without an accent, and the symbolism was more distinct. I think it might be my favorite part of the season so far. Call me crazy.