We have been spending part of our weekends looking at houses around Little Rock, mostly open houses of course: however, in the last few weeks we've been skipping that, as it's been too hot and humid to stomach it, even for relatively short exposures dashing to/from houses on show.

However, we had been ruminating over various ideas, and one that Cat suggested, seemed worth checking out a bit more, which is the idea of settling a bit further out of town, trading some commuting time for cheaper price and more land/privacy. I had a look on craigslist.com, and spotted one that looked very appealing - 22 minute drive to my office, 4 bedroom, on 4.5 acres of land.

We drove out on Sunday, and wow - now I see why a friend of mine calls it liarslist.com ... lets just say, if that was 4 acres, then we're currently living in Buck House: and I can't believe they could have squeezed 4 bedrooms into a house that small (we didn't get out of the car). Rather than privacy, it offered neighbours crowding up with a perfect oversight over the yard.

We haven't given up on the idea, but I'll be taking the ads with a good grain of salt in future.

In fact, we are thinking more and more, that if my firm accedes in my taking my job with me, we will shift to somewhere else, anywhere where the firm has offices and a spare desk to house me. As I'm already working remote from the client site, it would seem to make no real difference where I work from, and there may well be quite a few more desirable options - somewhere out of the south, is I think what we need.

Not that it will necessarily be great elsewhere, but the mulish intransigence of the racist, sexist conservatives (of both political parties) is at times quite overpowering, and constantly wearing. I think what outrages both of us most - but of course, in the nature of it, Cat runs into most commonly - is what I can only call an Alpha-male dickheadedness: a man in a position of petty power, who will throw his weight about and attempt to bully his customers into submitting to his dictates in order to prove his superiority and Alpha-ness.

As you can imagine, that goes over like a Lead Zeppelin with Cat: I must admit, I've been very proud of her recently, as she has stopped biting back, getting equally angry, and having loud flaming rows. Instead, she has been able to hold her temper, and instead just withdraw and not engage with this bullshit. Of course, this sometimes means we don't buy something quite as we'd planned, but that's nothing compared to preserving her (or our) integrity and sense of selfworth.

It just amazes me, how often this sort of thing seems to emerge - and presumably this technique works for these dickheads, at least often enough that they continue to use it (assuming, of course, that they ever realise that there are alternatives, which is moot). But it's not just Cat, we've both encountered it, at AT&T, Best Buy, Bale Honda (a particularly loathesome sales manager), Borders, just to rattle off the first few that popped into my head.

I suspect we'll encounter some of this anywhere we go, in the States: I think it's some sort of aggressive male-reinforcing bullshit that just gets sucked up & repeated. It's impossible to imagine an English manager acting like this (but then it's impossible to imagine an American manager pulling the usual English passive-aggressive rubbish.

Still, both this, and the overt racism and sexism that both genders evince fairly constantly here, might well be less prevalent outside the South - and Arkansas is pretty much the most backward part of the States (well, yeah, Mississippi and Alabama might push it to a draw there). We can but hope :)