The phone company fixed the line before I got home from work yesterday, so I'm relieved to report that I'm connecting to the internet again at the incredible speed of 46.6 again! Yeah, but compared to 1200, this is lightning fast.
Which is a good thing because I realized my non-visual mind needs to know what Creed's condo looks like and what kind of view he has of Lake Michigan. Unlike most Gineal, Creed can tolerate being surrounded by humans like this. I'm not sure why, but I have a feeling he's not as sensitive telepathically/empathically as most of his people. (Or maybe he's better at blocking?) And because he travels all the time and is rarely home, a condo made more sense for him than a house. But I wanted to know what it looked like. An image search turned up a few things, but most weren't particularly helpful. On the second page of results (out of 2), though, I found hits from a real estate site and I visited it. I did a search and ended up with an incredible number of results. The only catch? If I wanted to view them, I had to register.
So I signed Creed up. Hey, I wasn't giving them my name! 245 search results showed up. I didn't realize there were that many condos available between $550,000 and $2,500,000, but apparently there were. Along with gaining access to the results, Creed was assigned a personal real estate agent and promised that when new listings that fit his criteria became available, he'd receive an email. Okay, I thought, that would kind of be cool and how often can million dollar condos in one particular area of Chicago go up for sale anyway?
Then the deluge began. Creed's name might have been on the sign up form, but I used one of my email addresses. Two email arrived immediately. I opened one, found the opt out link, and used it. I went back to searching through the results, trying to find the right fit for a dark, troubled character. And more and more and more email arrived.
Maybe this was a different type of correspondence, one not covered under the opt-out link I already clicked. I opened another email prepared to opt out again and there was no link provided! They weren't going to let me opt out of these.
These notes are now going directly to my spam folder. I had a ridiculous amount come in last night and I woke up this morning to see that even more notes are in that folder. Sigh. I guess a sale in Creed's price range is just too tantalizing to honor any kind of opt-out agreement--or something. ;-O
This site did have a bunch of listings, but a lot of them didn't have pictures or just had that virtual tour thing where there's some kind of video of the condo. Still pictures would have worked better for me because I want to click and save them for future reference. I didn't find any one place that will work for my hero, but I'll patch a few of them together to come up with what will work. I also have pictures from a hotel that looks out over Lake Michigan and that fits what Creed is looking at better than the yacht club views I found last night.
I don't know why he couldn't just have a nice home where I could find dozens of usable pictures online, but I have a feeling Creed is going to be trouble all through this book. More than my characters usually are (and that's saying something)!
