We listed our home for sale 6 months ago the conventional way, with a real estate agent. Six months later, after several price reductions and about 30 showings, we have gotten zero offers. We moved out 4 months ago, so the house is empty and I’m getting financially tired of owning two houses. If what you’re doing doesn’t work, trying doing something different.

I bought the domain 5419omaha.com and put up a web page describing our house, with pretty pictures. Having your own web page for your house is cool, because you can post things that listing agents don’t normally post, like the house location and elevation accurate to within 10 meters. And you never know when a potential buyer might want to look at a satellite view of the house, so I put that in, too. The web site is:

http://www.5419omaha.com/

I am figuring out a good way to list the house in the MLS (Multiple Listing Service), but with the web site we have a central contact point no matter what else we do. The domain will be posted on our front-lawn sign. If someone can’t figure out how to browse to an Internet domain, then (begin snide comment) they probably can’t afford the house anyway (end snide comment). Okay, okay, we’ll include a contact phone number.

I tried to keep the write-up “normal”, but some humor crept in despite my best efforts. I will have no use for this web site and domain after the house sells, so I figured, what the heck? Let’s include the web site and domain with the house purchase! It’s a gimmick, but hey – when conventional methods don’t work, ya gotta try unconventional ones.

Since Christine is an ebay expert, I asked her to put a listing on craigslist.com. Then the very next day at work I saw a demo of some new Google map technology using AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML). The engineer used housingmaps.com as an example of placing overlays on top of Google maps. He moved the display over our town, and sure enough, there was a little balloon over our house for sale!

That was cool. Way cool!

If you watched the Cardinals lose to the Astros Tuesday night on TV, you saw my nephew Zach. He was about 4 rows behind home plate, and offset such that the he was smack dab in the middle of the centerfield shot of the batter. My sister-in-law let us know he was on, and after watching him munch on the “free” food that comes with those seats for a while, my son got the bright idea of calling him on his cell phone. So we waiting for the commercial break to end and then called him. There is something oddly exhilerating about watching somebody answer their cell phone on TV when you are on the other end. But we kicked the exhileration up a notch when my son told him to wave and he did. That my friends is the pinnacle of interactive TV, right there. Watching your nephew/cousin wave to you live on TV.

I haven’t ever watched a spectator in a crowd before (on TV, that is), and there were some things I’d never noticed before. Like how Zach would look to his left after every pitch – I’m assuming to see the replay on the big screen. But it was downright spooky to watch the people in the stands on a pop up – all their heads snapping upward and then tracking the ball in unison. After that, I’m kind of glad I never did watch the crowd in the TV picture before, although the scientist in me will now be tempted to start comparing crowd action during different sporting events.

The Fruit of the Murphy Loins moved up in school this year; one started high school and the other started middle school. I don’t know if the change is more wrenching for them or me. OK, me. My father, shortly after my daughter first started school, mentioned that the drumbeat of time was at the loudest and steadiest when your kids were in school. And the drums are beating quite loudly and quickly these days. I was at my maudlin best when telling my daughter, after her first day of orientation, that she had taken a big step on the road to independence and leaving the nest (and me) behind.

I don’t worry about the Fruit as much as my wife, but I do worry. I just try to take the occasional day off from worrying. I was nervous about my son, as he didn’t have many friends on his “team”. While he wouldn’t comment beyond the standard “fine”, he was full of spunk after his first day, so I’m worrying a lot less. I figure if things had gone poorly, he would have been hangdog. It seems the excitement of the new school with its expanded opportunities is beating the friends thing; I just hope he makes new ones before the novelty wears off.

My daughter went to “Spirit Night”, and made it clear that she preferred that her parents not attend. So we didn’t. The school held an orientation meeting for us parents earlier in the week, and the principle invited us to come up to school anytime. Why, it was fine with the administration and faculty if we came to freshman orientation the next day if we so desired, but he doubted our child would ever forgive us. I have come to terms with the fact that I’m a huge source of embarrassment to my daughter, if only because it’s the best form of discipline I have, as in threatening to hug her if she doesn’t behave in public or call up her friends and tell them how much I love her if she doesn’t behave in private. She hasn’t risked it yet, probably because she knows I would.

My wife isn’t happy. Thankfully, it isn’t with me, but some market research firm. We both are happy to do market research, in part because it pays so well when you do qualify. So she agreed to watch a half hour tape and answer questions the next day. We watched the tape which turned out to be a lousy TV sitcom I’ve never heard of. At first we thought the show was a pilot that we were giving feedback on, as they did ask a few questions about it in the material my wife was supposed to fill out afterwards, but when they started putting ads in during the commercial breaks, and she had to fill out pages of product info, ostensibly for the “prize drawing” she was eligible, I thought the ads were the real object of the research. And the next day the half hour interview with somebody with a strong Indian accent who claimed he was calling from Alberta, Canada focused almost entirely with a single Ore Ida ad which I didn’t even remember (although my wife did). So she’s unhappy she’s out an hour of time over a stupid spud ad with nothing to show for it but a chance at a prize. I think we’ll both be sticking to the research where there’s an envelope full of cash at the end of the session, which helps one deal with such questions “if Ore Ida was a person, how would you describe him or her to your friends?”