My life as of July 19, 2008

Bad anxiety attacks today. I had a lull for about a week. I was less anxious, no panic attacks. I was able to sleep 4-5 hours a night. Then something happened yesterday evening that really shook me. Holding up my hands right now... they are shaking. I feel like a very dark cloud of doom is about to wash over me. Sorry for being such a downer, it's just the way things are.

Different note. I've written about this house many times before. It was the house with the small, nasty-ass pool. I even did some short video clips about it that amazingly received close to 50,000 views on YouTube.

I was pedaling by and I noticed the house sold 3 weeks ago! An older Hispanic woman was moving in. A bunch of cars in the driveway all had Florida plates. I assume they were relatives, and they were busy repainting the exterior and doing new landscaping.

I've pointed out the explosion of foreclosures in this part of town before, but a real estate agent told me that it's slowly crawling back. Houses are ridiculously cheap here, and in fact we never saw the price mania. Just a slow appreciation of between 3-5% a year until 2001, when it stalled out. The reason? A flood of cheap cookie-cutter houses in Katy neighborhoods. Why buy a used house when you can drive another 10 miles up the road and get a new one for the same price? Those new neighborhoods are now Foreclosure Central. Worse, they are 10 miles from the nearest freeway and traffic on the local roads really sucks. I think these older, more established neighborhoods with larger houses that have convenient access to the freeways will come back sooner than places like Lakeville, where owners have no yards and prices for tiny 1200 square foot houses are still $100k.