If you have a burning desire to buy from me, my WePay store and Alphabitsy.com remain open.

No, I’ve had dogs since I was eight years old. I anticipated all of that, or something like it.

What I didn’t realize was quite how hard it would be to find an affordable one-bedroom apartment. Here is a visual aid.

This is the Padmapper.com map of the city of Albany, showing apartments in my price parameters. (Red signifies listings that I hadn’t clicked on yet.) I think this map included room shares, which I wasn’t really considering unless they’re in perfect locations. (i.e. the nice parts of Pine Hills)

This is what happens if you tick the “dogs” box.

Troy is actually worse. More of the listings disappear. Albany apparently has a few more student rentals where the absentee landlords don’t give a crap.

Of course, my current place didn’t explicitly say dogs were allowed, so I’m combing through the other places and e-mailing or calling to see what their deal is. Most of them just come out and say “no dogs,” though.

A lot of these I’ve eliminated because they’re scam listings, in bad/noisy neighborhoods, or lack parking. (not off-street parking: ANY parking. In the middle of the day.) One seemed ideal except for the ’70s-vintage frayed royal blue carpet and bare wires dangling from the ceiling where a light fixture should have been. Things I could work around, but that signify deeper neglect.

I have an alternate option, but was looking forward to living totally on my own for the first time. And I wanted to illustrate the problem for people who don’t understand the extent of it.

Klout knows me better than I had thought.

Hope you find a good home, little ham.

And then… I saw this story on Fark.

A FAMILY have rechristened their hamster “Jesus” — after he clawed his way out of a 2ft deep grave to come back from the dead.

The four-year-old pet — buried by dad Dave Eyley after being found “cold and lifeless” in his cage — was spotted scampering around the garden by a neighbour next day.

Shocked Dave, 49, got a call on his mobile from Sandy Humphreys to tell him: “Your hamster has escaped and I’ve just caught him.”

He replied: “It’s impossible — our hamster is dead.” When Dave got home she showed it to him — and it WAS their resurrected rodent.

Maybe it’s because I hate horse racing, or I find OTB incredibly depressing. But none of these are appealing choices, since racinos exist to prop up horse racing.

Yes, I know. Just don’t vote in that category. And I didn’t. That doesn’t mean it can’t make me sad.

p.s. Are you like me, and don’t get out enough to have an opinion on food categories? Don’t just pick something you happen to have heard of. Check out the humble suggestions of the FUSSYlittleBALLOT.

When I was eight or nine years old, my parents were setting up a home office for their side businesses, and we attended a furniture-and-fixtures auction at a closed Sears store.

They bought pretty mundane things, like nice office chairs, a wonderful old oak desk and chairs, and a much less awesome metal and fake wood desk that we used for the typewriter, and later for our first computer. I didn’t care about office furniture, though. I was a child, and what I saw at the auction broke the spell of perfectly arranged retail displays. There were empty racks and shelves, toy displays from the old McKids line, everything that had once displayed merchandise in this now-empty store. An empty store was sad and weird in itself.

I assume there were displays. I remember the McKids train, I vaguely remember some metal racks, and I remember the auctiongoers standing around in this cavernous, dirty space that used to be a Sears. Those memories are fuzzy, and I probably wouldn’t remember the auction at all except for one thing.

The mannequins.

Dozens of them. Male, female, children, missing arms and heads, pulled out of storage with damaged bodies. All races and even some strange colors. Nude, lined up in a single row as if they were facing a firing squad.

I haven’t been comfortable around mannequins since. I still half-believed at that point that my dolls and stuffed animals would come to life and play with each other when I was out of the room or sleeping, so what were dozens of human-sized dolls doing when everyone left Sears at night? What did they say about the people who ran the store once everyone went home? How would they handle being separated?

This is what happens when you give a nine-year-old too much time to think.