Excerpt:
The Hobbit House, in northwest Montana, about a three-hour drive from Spokane, Wash.,
is a guesthouse. Number of units: one. But it is a large unit. The Web site, which the reporter studies before arriving, shows a 1,000-square-foot structure built into a hill, on a 20-acre site dotted with structures that range from small to perfect for squashing with your foot: a four-foot stump-shaped troll house, a few round-door hobbit houses with chimney pipes and several shoe-box-size fairy houses.
But what is a visit to the Hobbit House without a tour of the shire? Into the RTV we go, accompanied by Mr. Michaels’s dog, Libby, a collie-shepherd mix. Here is a tiny sod-roof house belonging to Frodo, a Baggins relation; there, in the trunk of a tree, is a mother-son fairy abode (complete with two doors). Not everything is hobbitically accurate: there is a two-foot-tall hairy-back frog, because Mr. Michaels figured that if hobbits were hairy, their frogs should be, too.
“And look,” he says, steering the cart toward the sod-covered roof of the life-size guesthouse. “You can drive over the house, because it’s built into the ground. Right now, we’re 30 feet over your bedroom.”
Link to a story written by a New York Times reporter with a photo slide show
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/11/garden/the-hobbit-house-in-montana.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
“One of the changes adopted by the AQB requires that individuals who become Supervisory Appraisers or Trainee Appraisers after January 1, 2015, complete a course that, at a minimum, complies with the specifications for course content established by the AQB. The course must be completed by the Trainee Appraiser prior to obtaining a Trainee Appraiser credential, and completed by the Supervisory Appraiser prior to supervising a Trainee
The Texas AMC fee survey was taken in August, 2012. In the results, 10% of the appraisers said they received under $250 for 1004s and the AMCs said they paid no fees under $250.
How the AMC (maybe) saw the cat
