
Well, this is not something you want to find outside your front door. Apparently, the owner of the house we're renting neglected to pay the water bill.
Everyone who comes here wonders who the owner is, and we have precious few answers. Around seven years ago, he built this house and another one as investments; the other one sold quickly, but this one didn't. So he rented it for a while, until the big fire destroyed the landscaping around the house and everything soft (i.e., fabric) inside had to be replaced. Which is why we were subsequently able to rent it for a relative deal.
The man himself, however, remains a mystery. He once worked for Goldman Sachs, but no one knows where he lives—not us, not the brokers who have represented the house for sale (and who are helping us look for a house), and not the broker who represents the house for rent. (In fact, she has never even spoken to him on the phone.) He has a Japanese name, but while some of his emails can read awkwardly, the brokers who have spoken to him say that he's most definitely fluent. I like to picture him in a sky-high penthouse, stroking a hairless cat.
Anyway, he apologized for the water sitch; the credit card on file had expired. And Adam got to go down to the Montecito Water District—once his nemesis, but that's a story for another day—to pay the bill in person, as directed, before we got shut off.
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Adam has been pestering me to do an Instagram ad for Siteline, and it would indeed be nice if someone would read the site. To say the process has been an exercise in frustration is a massive understatement.
First, I was told that I either had to link my Siteline Instagram page to an existing Facebook page or to create a new Facebook page—but there was no link to do the former. Doing the latter created a duplicate page, which I tried to merge with the real page, but Facebook said I was forbidden to do such a thing.
Then, after I chose the parameters for ad, it was rejected because Facebook (which owns Instagram) requires extra scrutiny for ads relating to "social issues, elections, or politics." The ad was about "the grooviest house in greater Santa Barbara," but of course there was no way for me to explain their mistake to them. Instead, I was directed to "confirm my ID," so they could be comfortable that I wasn't a foreign agent. This entailed turning on the dreaded two-factor authentication; uploading a copy—front and back—of my driver's license; and submitting a non-P.O.-box mailing address so the company can snail-mail me a postcard with a code that I'll have to enter.
This rant isn't just to whine about Facebook, a company I despise. It's to show that while Facebook may, in many ways, be as evil as the media likes to portray it, it's also fantastically inept.
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This photo stopped me cold when I was looking at listings. You rarely see diving boards anymore, presumably because they make insurance companies nervous. What's the fun of being a kid if you can't do an upside-down cannonball every now and then? Related: "Why do we scream 'Geronimo' when leaping from things?"