Nice horse corral.

Beautiful, sunny, usable land it said. Lovely, lodge style home near Soquel Creek. My realtor emailed and said we should go look. I emailed her back, I think this is the place that sold last year that had all the red tags. She said no way. I secretly smiled inside, knowing, aha, she will find out now that I am the real estate wizard and understand how the game works. I am the Stringer Bell of real estate clients, truly now in the game.

I drove up there and yes indeed. It was the house under Old San Jose Road that when we looked at it, was covered in red tags. Apparently they are all cleared now and the price has been raised 100,000. The sunny usable land is the lawn, the rest of it is redwood soaked creek frontage. The horse corral is an ex-pen, perfect for 2 small dogs. A basketball player had remodeled part of it and it's perfect for the over 7foot tall buyer. It did have cute elements, was sort of like grandma's holiday camp inside from the 1950's (the parts that hadn't been remodeled by the basketball player in the 70's) but some of the other flaws were too major. Like the fact it sat under a road bridge on a busy fast part of San Jose Road. Like the steep driveway that no truck or horse trailer could ever make it down. Like the janky little retaining wall holding up a giant cliff over the illegal unit. Like the fact it was covered in trees and there was no place to put horses.

When we looked at it a year ago, the seller's eldery dad took us on a tour and talked to us in depth about the polluted well and the fight that started between his daughter and the tenants and all the red tagged features and tried to upsell things like the weird sauna and the super high basketball player counters. And someone had kept a tiny, magic pony in the pen at one point. It probably fit in the backseat of their car.

My realtor feigned surprise. This is not the first time I am seeing houses back on the market since I have now been looking for a ranch for officially more than 2 years. About 2 1/2 years. I did have to drive by the Evil One, the One We didn't Get the other day. Just to stab myself in the eye for giggles. They were having a party on the deck and all their dogs ran down the driveway to bark at my car. The fields were unmowed or fenced, no horses to be seen. It seemed a little smaller than it had, so I did think, that would have been tight to make it into something and so expensive. But then I drove back down the hill and had that ocean view and I knew it that I still wanted to live right there.

If I studied the Secret Laws of Attraction better, I would still be saying I live on that road and then the lady would sell me Seven Springs Ranch for $650,000 which is even better and I would live happily ever after as the Queen of Dog Agility with Really Good Hair! But just writing that makes my eyes shrink down to stink eye little slits and my mind go all black inside and mean.