Elizabeth Weintraub, Sacramento Short Sale Agent, 916.233.6759, Lyon RE

Your first instinct is not always reliable. I've learned that over the years. While I often rely on my intuition, I don't always grab the first instinct that pops up. For example, when I put on my reading glasses this morning to peer at my monitor, my vision was blurred. My first thought was perhaps I am experiencing an aneurysm. But when nothing further happened, I realized that I had forgotten to remove my contacts before going to bed.

A friend called yesterday to talk about her horrible real estate transaction. She shared details about all the nasty things the buyer and the buyer's agent had done to her since entering escrow. It was pretty clear she despised these people, and I didn't blame her. "I was going to leave the buyers all the furnace filters," she hissed, "But now I am taking them." Well, I offered, make sure you don't leave behind any rolls of aluminum foil or bottles of Windex, either. Leave the scum nothing. That made me laugh, but she wasn't laughing. She was still furious.

I'm a firm believer of not burning any bridges if one can help it. We've all had to deal with difficult people in our lives. We can't change them. The only thing we can change is our attitudes.

I told my friend about the last home I sold. Those buyers were pretty obnoxious. They were over at the house changing the locks before they had even received confirmation of recording. The moving truck was parked in the street and movers were carting out my belongings, preparing for the long cross country trip to Sacramento, during which the rude buyers were barking demands, insisting that I vacuum the second floor and haul the trash cans down to the curb. They were very unreasonable.

They had been horrible during escrow as well. I did not like them nor respect them. We can't always choose our buyers. But I could choose how I reacted toward them and whether I conveyed my feelings to them. I decided they didn't deserve to know what I thought and kept my emotions in check. I was pleasant and accommodating to the end.

When I arrived in Sacramento and began unpacking, I realized that all the hardware for our bed and dining room table had been left behind on top of the refrigerator. Crap. I called the buyers to ask if they would FedEx the bag of screws and bolts to me. They immediately sent the package overnight, which wouldn't have happened if I had given them a piece of my mind prior to departure. I could have been sleeping and eating on the floor.

I advise my sellers to be nice to their buyers as well, regardless of how the buyers behave during escrow. For one thing, the sellers might want their mail forwarded. And I try to not transfer any frustrated feelings that I may be experiencing to my clients. It's part of an agent's job to be a buffer.

See, unpleasant things happen every day. It's part of life. But so do good things. For the most part, good things tend to outweigh the bad things. Whenever I'm feeling frustrated or grumpy, I turn my attention to something more pleasant such as LOLcats. One can't scroll through LOLcats without smiling.

This week, for example, I had to change the status of a Sacramento listing from active contingent to active short sale because the buyer was obtuse. However, I also received a double short sale approval from Countrywide and, let me tell you, that doesn't happen every day. In fact, I consider that double Countrywide approval a Thanksgiving miracle. On top of that, Bank of America approved another short sale. That's where I prefer to focus. On the good things.

I wish everyone a safe and wonderful Thanksgiving.

Ah, the day before Thanksgiving. When I was considerably younger, this used to be one of my favorite days of the year. Because it's not a school night. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving was the one day out of the year I could stay out late without any consequences. Dance the night away if I wanted and sleep in late the following morning.

OK, I usually had to get up early to stick the turkey in the oven, but I could go back to sleep. Now that I've reached what is referred to as that "certain age," I no longer stay up late, and I get up early because that's when I wake up. I've also discovered that, at my age, it's easier to go out to Thanksgiving dinner with close friends and take home leftovers than prepare it myself.

One of the best places to enjoy a Thanksgiving dinner in Sacramento is The Firehouse Restaurant in Old Sacramento. The ambiance itself is remarkable. This is a historic building, built in 1853, and it originally housed a firehouse. The setting is beautiful, ornate and relaxed, and each dining room is unique.

If I have anything bad to say about The Firehouse Restaurant for Thanksgiving, it's that it doesn't serve dark turkey meat -- no thighs or drumsticks -- but few places around Sacramento do. The menu for this Thanksgiving features a choice between baked brie or lobster pudding for the first course, a mixed green salad with dried cranberries, spiced walnuts, blue cheese & pear or potato bisque for the second course, and the third course is, of course, roast turkey breast, prime rib, monkfish or maple-smoked pork.

I'm getting hungry just writing about it. My husband and I have been going there for 3 years now. The first year we went to The Firehouse, I skipped the roast turkey and felt a little guilty. After all, where I grew up in Minnesota, Thanksgiving is supposed to be all about the turkey. So, the second year, I chose the turkey. Except for the apple-pecan stuffing, which I thoroughly enjoyed, the turkey was, well, white turkey meat. There's not much one can do a turkey breast to make it any better than it already is.

The way to compensate for eschewing the turkey portion of a Thanksgiving meal is to order pumpkin torte for dessert. Skip the pear and pecan crisp. In fact, have 2 servings of pumpkin torte. With pumpkin cream-cheese mousse, spiced anglaise and caramel. When all is said and done, though, the purpose of Thanksgiving is not to stuff one's face with mashed potatoes and turkey. It's to give thanks and celebrate with friends and family.

So, wherever you end up this Thanksgiving, I hope you enjoy your company and have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

When I list a short sale in Sacramento, I often qualify the sellers partly on instinct. That's why my short sales get approved. Of course, I examine the usual qualifiers such as whether the seller has a hardship and whether the list price is reasonable. But some of my short sales that I thought were a long shot get approved as well, and that's where intuition comes into play.

This year, I've had only 3 short sales that did not close. In 2 of the cases, Bank of America took so long to approve those short sales that the sellers finally found a job and no longer qualified. Actually, one of those 2 had been approved 3 times, and each time the buyer vanished upon approval. By the 4th time, the seller was working. The 3rd short sale also was approved, with the stipulation that the seller occupy the home, but the seller refused to move back.

So, it's not really a matter of my short sales not getting approved as the bulk of them do. That's because I set standards for listing my Sacramento short sales.

Contrary to what some Sacramento short sale agents may believe, I don't refuse to list a short sale based primarily on the seller's qualifications because I am not qualified to accurately predict the types of circumstances a lender may or may not decide is a hardship. I have learned over the years that lenders will approve short sales even if the seller has assets and cash in the bank.

Moreover, some sellers don't want to share every last bit of their personal financial information with an agent, nor should they. I advise my sellers to speak about such private matters with their lawyers and tax accountants -- individuals licensed and qualified to give that type of guidance and advice.

Here are a few types of short sales that I avoid:

• Scams
• Flippers
• Mortgage Fraud
• Unlikeable sellers
• Transactions that are not arm's length
• Rent-backs
• Overpriced listings
• Hard-money seconds that may call for seller contributions from unwilling sellers
• Homes that are not upside-down
• Sellers who prefer to do a loan modification

I know some agents refuse to list short sales if they are Bank of America loans, which originated at Countrywide. However, I am seeing an improvement at the moment with the way Bank of America handles short sales. Especially when Bank of America holds the second on a Wachovia short sale. Not to mention, some Bank of America short sales are now in the ReoTrans system. So, maybe Bank of America is turning around. One such sale recently closed within 2 months. When they do it 30 days, though, I'll have to eat my shoes. Blech.

My husband laughs at Sacramento drivers who, upon leaving the vehicle, turn around and point the key remote at the car to lock it. That's because some people think it works like a TV remote, which emits infrared signals to the TV, but it doesn't. It sends its signal by radio, through the air. So, you don't need to face the vehicle to lock it. Although, I admit that I do look at the car, just to make sure the lights flash, which tells me it is definitely locked.

Hey, where would we be in modern society without our gadgets?

Take my DisplayKEY, for example. It opens SUPRA lockboxes, which lets me retrieve house keys to show homes. It's an essential part of my real estate business in Sacramento. While I was in The City this weekend, I received an email from MetroList that said it is retiring our DisplayKEYs. It is switching to an ActiveKey system that doesn't update daily in a cradle. Not only that, but MetroList informed me that it has already scheduled an appointment for me to exchange my DisplayKEY for an ActiveKey.

The only problem is the date it has scheduled me for is a day when I will be in Vietnam. Now, you know that MetroList has been working behind-the-scenes on this for months. But it just dropped the bomb in my lap on Friday. A little advance notice would have been nice. Because when I return from Vietnam, my DisplayKEY will no longer work. If my DisplayKEY doesn't work, I can't work. Thanks for the heads-up, MetroList.

Of course, if I had been using eKEY, I would not be in this position. The eKEY system lets an agent access a lockbox through an agent's cellphone. That sounds like an excellent solution. I went to the GE Security website to check devices that support eKEY software, but my BlackBerry 8700 was not listed. Now I remember why I am not using the eKEY system.

I popped over to my service provider's website and, low and behold, the BlackBerry BOLD 9700 is now available. I've been waiting for its release for months! And the BOLD works with eKEY. Plus, it has a video camera, a faster network connection and utilizes trackpad navigation. My 8700 is headed for a funeral. As my service provider reminded me, I've had this phone for 38 months. That's an eternity in a cellphone's life.

That research has solved 2 problems, but a 3rd problem still exists. My email downloads to my BlackBerry. I'll most likely bring my cellphone to Vietnam as I have World Access, which will let me check email from my phone. That will save time as I won't have to visit Internet cafes. Who wants to sit in an Internet cafe when you're on vacation? Instead, I can turn on my phone once a day to stay connected through email. That all sounds feasible except for spam. I deal with overnight spam by deleting it in huge blocks from my computer in the morning. But that won't be possible in Vietnam.

I receive daily huge volumes of spam. The worst offenders are two short sale promoters. How I end up on their targeted spam list is beyond me. One would think they could use their marketing dollars in a more effective manner. They bombard my email with short sale spam. As a Sacramento short sale agent, I don't need their short sale courses since I am tortured enough daily through my very own activities. So, this brings me to the solution of signing up for a spam-blocking service. The downside is important emails may be delayed. But the upside is I will never again have to manually delete their crap.

Some people use spam blockers that require the recipient to click on a link and enter a password to prove that one is not a robot. Those sites annoy me. If they annoy me, they probably annoy others. I guess that leaves Postini or Barracuda to consider. If you have any suggestions regarding spam blockers, I would welcome the input. I hate to do it, but this Sacramento agent has got to lock the gate.

One of the things I really enjoy about Golden Gate Park is that you see stuff in San Francisco that you'll rarely come across in, say, Land Park in Sacramento. For example, during our six-block stroll from the N Line to the de Young Museum at Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, I spotted guys like those Party Down dudes (love that show), dressed in bow ties and black suits, carefully removing and stacking bottles of champagne from the back of a black sedan.

Across the street, a wedding Limo decorated like Hello Kitty. Then, a nearly naked guy jogging. A Cyndi Lauper look-a-like smacking gum, photographers carrying tri-pods, kids toting skateboards, an old woman wrapped up like a mummy and asleep in her wheelchair, a tuba player, a hooker, a lost kid playing drums on the sidewalk with a tree branch, Daddy Warbucks screaming on his cell, and a greyhound pulling a kid in a wagon. You've gotta love the diversity.

My husband and I woke sleepy-eyed yesterday due to the trains roaring by all night, stashed our luggage at The Waterfront Hotel at Jack London Square and walked around back to the Oakland Ferry. It's a 30-minute ride to San Francisco from this spot. No sitting in traffic on the Bay Bridge or taking the B.A.R.T. under the water. Best views of the Bay.

A somber group of people sat together at port side. This guy with a hat and scarf wrapped around his neck held a velvet-covered box, and we overheard them discussing the 23rd Psalm. I suspect it's not legal to dump a person's ashes in the Bay, but that wouldn't stop me if I were in their shoes.

It was a short 3-minute walk from the ferry landing in San Francisco to our favorite dim sum restaurant in the Rincon Center, Yank Sing, which was already hopping by 10:30 AM. We started out with an order of Peking Duck, followed by dishes of scallion prawns, Hau Gau, sugar-snap peas, sticky rice in banana leaves, chicken-stuffed mushrooms, and pretty much crammed dumplings into our faces to the point where I didn't leave enough room to finish off with a sesame ball.

The weather was much more cooperative yesterday than it had been on Friday. Sunny, with a light breeze and no rain. The question was did we want to take a street car or the muni to Golden Gate Park. Or were cable cars the best direct route? We opted for the muni, but the N Line stopped at Church and Duboce, where we transferred to a bus. The bus driver told us she's never seen King Tut, even though she's a San Francisco native.

She didn't drive a bus very well. At the first stop, she almost left a baby at the curb because the parents couldn't open the back door of the bus to get out. At the next, she passed up a stop and 2 passengers screamed that they needed to get off. It was a fun ride up Haight Street. Also, somehow fitting that Ben and Jerry's scored the corner location at Haight and Ashbury.

When we arrived at the de Young Museum, it was readily apparent that VIP tickets were the way to go. Otherwise, we would have stood in this crowd of visitors for hours, but a VIP ticket let us bypass the long lines. There are 10 chambers that comprise the King Tutankhamun exhibit. I learned that King Tut married his half-sister. Among the many 3,000-year-old burial treasures are religious pieces such as an ankh, which is the Egyptian symbol of life, and lots of jewelery, including tiny coffins that housed King Tut's internal organs. Probably the best thing was this painted wooden torso of King Tut, or maybe the pectoral with lunar and solar emblems and a glass scarab.

After the tour, we visited the gift shop because no tour is complete without a gift shop. There, you can buy mummy magnets, rubber mummies that squeak and mummy pencils, among other trinkets. I think it's important to support museums, so I bought a pearl jewelery box for my sister and an alabaster cat figurine made in Egypt.

We spent our last hour in San Francisco at the Ferry Building, gorging ourselves on gourmet chocolate, Point Reyes cheese from the Cowgirl Creamery and salami from Tasty Salted Pig Parts, before heading back to Oakland to hop the Capitol Corrider train to Sacramento. Below are a few photos I hope you enjoy:

Oakland Ferry to San Francisco, left and Yank Sing, right

de Young Museum King Tut Exhibit, left and Cowgirl Creamery, right

Photos: Elizabeth Weintraub

Click here for Day 1: The Swell Season in Oakland