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Thursday, November 15, 2007

tying up a few loose ends

loose end the first:
The texbook was in the classroom. The instructor didn't bat an eyelash or even smirk (that I could see, anyway) when I asked about it. As Mr./Ms. Anonymous Commenter noted a couple of days ago, surely the guy knows me by now.

loose end the second:
Claire's ear is healing up. I am not at all certain that the thing was a keloid, simply because it has shrunk so much and keloids are supposed to be more or less permanent. I think it is/was a boil. But what do I know? Anyway, it's responding favorably to antibiotics and very careful earring hygiene, so I'm not worried.

loose end the third:
In case anyone's wondering, we're still buying The House. We just get to pay penalties for the extension of the escrow. The selling agency has courteously agreed to pay the penalties for which it is at fault (failure to get all the necessary signatures as fast as they should have); we pay the rest. Only buying a house (or, I suppose, having unimaginable-to-me wealth, or maybe serious remodeling, or having a dreadful disease... oh, shut up, Rachel) can put you in a mindset where you find out that you are going to have to pay $600-ish extra for something, and you just shrug and move on. So. Sometime between Thanksgiving and the end of the month, we should close, and then we start making repairs and doing a little bit of remodeling, and then we hope to move in before Christmas. It all feels very unreal to me at present, frankly. Watch this space for a possibly-asterisk-laden freakout once the layer of surreality wears off.

Friday, October 26, 2007

growl.

Now that I've finally allowed myself to get my hopes really and truly up, and to start to make thoughts into ideas and ideas into plans, we get this news: The seller's bank is insistent that escrow must close by 30 days from the date on which they accepted the offer. The problem is that the executor of the estate didn't accept the offer until almost two weeks later, which makes for far too short a time for the funding to be in place by the bank's firmly-held date, even in the best of cases. Which means that now we face a good chance of having the contract become null and void, or whatever happens when escrow goes bad (heck, I can't even articulately define the stupid term, as I mentioned yesterday, so how on earth am I supposed to be able to carry on an intelligent discussion about it?), and starting all. over. again. at. the. beginning. The beginning that was, what, four or five months ago when we made our first offer.

Part of me wants to say I could just scream or I need to blow something up, or, well, actually scream or blow something up or preferably both simultaneously. Another part of me is sitting smugly with her arms folded on her chest saying I told you so. And yet a third part just feels too worn out to register any emotion about this at all. That part is winning, for the moment. Blah.

In closing, I'll remind myself of the God-breathed version of "don't get your hopes up", which has honestly been very much in our minds throughout this whole process, although it was maybe shoved toward the backs of our minds for the last couple of weeks. Or something like that. Sometimes a little bit of negativity pays off. Sometimes it's even Biblical. (See! I told you so!, she says again.)

James 4:13-15
13 Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit."
14 Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are {just} a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.
15 Instead, {you ought} to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that."
(NAU)

Thursday, October 25, 2007

I am too tired to think of a title.

I haven't lost anything substantial in two weeks! That's good news, right? Except that now I totally jinxed myself and who knows what I'll lose tomorrow. Probably my mind.

Also, I stayed up late in spite of a nasty miserable head cold in order to register for next semester's classes, thinking that Friday was the 27th. (Because online registration is fun, OK? No, there's no danger that the classes will fill up. Yes, I have until January to register. Just realize that I'm a nerd and move on.) Except when I looked down at the handy-dandy little date display at the bottom of my monitor I realized (as you doubtless already have) that I had made a mistake and tortured my poor sickly self for nothing. Oops.

In spite of the fact that I'm apparently a total airhead who can't remember what day it is, I am doing OK in school. Music Appreciation is an absolute blast, and I manage to keep myself from being TOO annoying without having to shut up completely. And the English class is going better than I thought. So far I am surprised at how good my grades have been; the entire grade is based on writing papers and essays, which I hate. I'm especially surprised at how lenient the instructor was when he graded my in-class essay, which had to be done in ink, as in, without a word processor, in the process of which I learned two things: 1) My handwriting is abysmal and 2) I rely a bit too heavily on revision and I need to learn to organize my thoughts more thoroughly before I start writing, or else I end up starting over after writing for about forty-five of the allotted 150 minutes, and then turning in a paper that looks like it was written by a Rhesus monkey anyway.

There is actual house news! The house is in escrow (am I the only person on the planet who says that all confidently but in actuality has only a very foggy and incomplete idea of what it means? Probably.). We are making plans for the renovations and repairs we will be doing, and I THINK maybe we can squeeze Pergo floors into the budget, which makes me a happy happy person. There will be painting to do in every single room including both bathrooms (augh), and there will also be a complete replacement of the ceiling in the living room and kitchen, but at least I will have those lovely floors to look forward to. Maybe. I hope. I think escrow closes in mid-November (hi, I'm so on top of things that I have no clear idea of exactly when I take possession of a house), but we won't be moving in right away thanks to all of this exciting stuff that we have get to do first.

I am thinking of a nice creamy, sunshiny yellow and white with lightish, warm-toned hardwoody floors. What does everyone else think? Please comment.

Some people have asked for pictures of the house. Here are a few. Sort of.

It's just a single-story fixer-upper rectangle of a house, nothing to write a magazine article about or anything, but it's ours. Or will be soon. We hope.

There's a little woodsy area below and beside the house. This is the kids' favorite tree. Someone at some point built a treehouse in it, but it's no longer usable; they have plans to build their own. Unfortunately, a lot of this old live oak is dead, so it'll have to be cut away.

I stitched together a panorama of the view from the front yard, and added silly notes; it's here.

Friday, October 05, 2007

WOOOOOT!!

OFFER ACCEPTED!!

finally! [happy dance]

wait a minute.

[stifled scream]

Must remind myself that what seems like a fat mortgage payment right now will seem really slim compared to rents in thirty years. Right?

yay!

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

a little help?

On Saturday, we will have our last interaction with the Other House when we go there to attempt to dig up Natalie's rosebush, in order to move it here (where I think we'll probably leave it permanently, not sure though). I may have the blackest thumb in California, but even I know that this is a TERRIBLE time to transplant anything -- what can we do, though? Ask the next tenants to let us come and do it in the winter? Does anyone who knows about gardening have any tips to help with this? For example, can we cut it off really short right now for ease of transport, or will that kill it forever? Should I feed it with anything before I put it in its new hole?

P.S. I'm doing much better, getting pretty well settled in, with only some minor nostalgic twinges now and then. :)

Thursday, September 20, 2007

OK, so now I know.

Yesterday I did the vast bulk of the cleaning at the old house, and then I cried all the way home.

I cried driving through town. I cried while I was putting things in one of our two mini-storage units. I cried on the phone with my dad (which was very embarrassing), and I cried while I listened to a serendipitous series of shuffled songs* on my iPod in the car on the half-hour drive from one house to the other. I had stopped crying by the time I got home, but I know I looked terrible and everyone was very nice to me at dinnertime. (It is taking practice, but I am learning to call this house "home" instead of "Mom and Dad's" and the other house "the other house" instead of "home").

It didn't help that I had been going on five hours of sleep for approximately a week, which does me no good at ALL, or that I had just worked hard, virtually nonstop, from 7:30 AM till 6:30 PM, or that I had had a semi-argument with T when he came to pick up LT from the old house for Boy Scouts, or that my hands were excruciatingly sore, tired, chapped, red, and banged-up from having scrubbed and scoured all day long. But in the main, I cried because I was grieving for a time and place that will never be mine again. Today I felt a little silly about it, but when I went back to pick up some cardboard to make garage sale signs, pulling in and parking in my old spot was a seriously nostalgic moment. Even now I choke up if I think about the sunlight coming through the sliding glass door in the afternoons, or the curtains with pictures of construction equipment that I made to hang in my toddler son's bedroom, or the smell of the first fire in the woodstove in the autumn.** See, there I go again. Some things I took for granted, even disliked in a way -- for example, that the default place to walk was in town, or that the safest place for the kids to run around and play was the nearby school playground -- seem sweet and like something to be missed.

In other words, I have it bad. But it'll pass. And at least now I can stop wondering if it's ever going to hit me, right?

*"What's Up", 4 Non Blondes, which, aside from being just an all around great song for when you're sad, because it's kind of ABOUT being sad/hurt/confused but not letting it ruin you, contains the line "I cry sometimes when I'm lying in bed/just to get it all out, what's in my head"; "Release Me", Wilson Phillips, which was a song that made me cry with regularity when it was current because I was So Dramatic and also I had Boyfriend Issues; "The Story", Brandi Carlile, another girl-power bittersweet kind of song, no explanation needed if you are familiar with it, and if you aren't, go listen to it, especially if you have two X chromosomes; "Sound of Silence", Simon and Garfunkel, which was not as pat to the circumstances as "Bridge Over Troubled Water" would have been, but it worked fine. I forget what came after those, but they got me over halfway home, at least.

**which probably would have been built tomorrow. It has been blessedly cooler this week, and it's supposed to be a brisk, possibly wet weekend. YES. Garage sale and all.

Monday, September 17, 2007

moved out, moved on

Whatever else has been true about the house where my family has lived for the past dozen years, one thing has been certain: It has always looked lived-in. Sometimes, in fact, 'lived-in' would have been far too charitable a term for the chaos that filled every room. This past weekend, the house has achieved a state, for the first time since I've had anything to do with it, wherein it does not look lived-in in the slightest, for the simple reason that it no longer is lived-in. Our belongings have been moved out (although I keep several boxes on hand to catch the last few things that are left lying around: the hair scrunchie on the top shelf of the closet; the crayons that fell into the gap where the hardwood doesn't quite meet the sliding-glass door and we never got around to putting in new trim; the answering machine; the spoon rest; the clock). Even the outdoors is as pristine as any non-landscaped area overseen by a family of people with the world's blackest thumbs can be in September in California. (That is to say... not very pristine. But it's devoid of anything we put there, anyway.)

And yesterday I started the job of going through all the rooms, removing every trace of our lives from the shell of the house that holds so many of our memories. By the end of the week there will be no smudges on the cabinet doors, no ring in the bathtub, no shed-skin-cell dust on the built-in shelves. Our germs will be gone from the doorknobs, and the house won't smell like us anymore. I've already washed away the wildly inaccurate marks made by my children over the years as they "measured" themselves against a doorjamb: Here is LT on his tiptoes. Here is C sitting down. Here is LT squatting. Here is C standing on a chair.

That house, where I've lived my entire adult life, is the only home my children have ever known. In fact, it is the only earthly home one of my children will ever have known, if she could even be said to have known it at all, before leaving it for one filled with glory, where there has never even once been, I presume, a toppling pile of laundry waiting to be folded and put away. All three of them were conceived there; all three came home from the hospital to one of the rooms I'm cleaning this week. The future tenants/owners will probably never stop to think of all the quiet candlelit trysts that have been kept in front of their fireplace, or of all the times we've sat in their bathroom, filled with shower steam, cuddling a croupy child at 3 AM. Nor will they have any way of knowing that my newborn son once lay in his crib in the apartment over their garage and projectile-pooped across his little bedroom until (I swear this is true) he hit the opposite wall four feet away. They won't know about the morning we came home from the hospital without our daughter: how the house filled with people who loved us while we began the task of learning to live without her, how I went to my son's room and lifted him still sleeping from his crib, so that I could comfort myself with his warm, breathing neediness while our family sat in a circle of grief in the living room at dawn.

I keep waiting to feel sad about moving out and moving on -- or even to have more than an occasional sweet-painful twinge of nostalgia. I feel like I'm skirting the edge of a well of sadness. In the space of a week, "home" will become another "place I used to live". There have been a few of those in my life, but it's been so long since I've added one to the list that apparently I don't remember how to feel.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

verily, I am a prophet

Back when we first started really doing the work of moving out of this house, a couple of months ago, I started prophesying about a very specific thing in a "just you wait" kind of way, and today I found out that I was right. I suppose the fact that I am totally OK (although a titch... annoyed) with the fact that our landlord is not going to sell this house after all when we move out is a sign that I am seeing God work, or something equally spiritual and holy. Seriously, this move has been good for us in a lot of ways, all kidding about boxes aside, even though it has been an utter and complete pain in the derriere for everyone concerned. We may not have decluttered a whole lot (although we are having a moving sale in ten days; y'all come on Thursday evening the 20th for a freebie preview), but at least now everything we own is organized, mentally inventoried, and boxed. Right? I can honestly say that I am very glad that we've gone to all this trouble, even though we're moving home with my parents temporarily which I swore I would never do unless it was them needing us -- even though my back will never ever be the same -- even though it happened in the dead heat of the hottest summer in a decade or so, when just being outside is hellish misery, let alone toting around boxes and furniture all the livelong day.

But I do hereby proclaim that I told you so.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

yeah, baby, you know what I want.

(Legal wrangling continues.)

This move has changed me in ways that I never envisioned. Not only is my body now accustomed to lugging heavy things around and being in near-constant motion, not only do I avoid buying or permitting my children to buy anything that I can't eat or throw away lest I should have to (scary chord) move it, but I have discovered in myself an insatiable lust for... boxes.

My maternal grandmother has a wall in her kitchen that is one big bulletin board, and in the way of ladies who lived through the Depression and collected ev-er-y-thing, it is always covered with interesting objects. Interesting, at least, the first time you look, because the turnover on this wall art is zero. Every now and then something is added, but nothing ever gets taken away; I remember seeing some dooey-buttons from a 1960's presidential election way down in one corner and thinking that it was neat that Grandma had found those and put them there, and it wasn't until years later that I realized that she had probably put them there when they were current.

I digress (no, really?). One of the items on Grandma's bulletin board that, in my hyperlexic restlessness, I read and re-read when my family lived with her for five years, was a column by Erma Bombeck about her mother's fixation with boxes, and how she would never let one go once she had it, and how Erma and the rest of the family "received gifts in boxes from stores that had gone out of business twenty years ago" or some such thing, and how Erma's mother had to know a young man brought home by one of her daughters was worthy of her box before she would give it to him. This was another mere bit of (very funny) quaintness to me, any time I thought about it, until this past month.

But now... now the smell of cardboard in the sunshine makes me get all happy inside. I get a little tingly feeling when I hear the sound of the tape screeching out to make this flat bit of cardboard into a lovely prism-shaped container that will carry my belongings. I have a favorite box (U-Haul "Small Box" size, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways...). I never had a favorite box before. Honestly, I never thought about boxes at all, until every single moment of every day of my life became consumed with the need to put more and more and more things in boxes, moving to and fro and taping and marking like a robot on speed, until my house becomes empty. Yesterday I ran out. It was a terrible moment. I had ONE very large box on the porch, and a whole slew of shoebox-and-smaller sizes, but nothing in which I could pack our clothing, which was the task of the day. I had a leeetle meltdown (I cannot pack! How can I PACK when I don't have BOXES? What am I supposed to DO HERE?) blew up at my husband on the phone (after all, if a man can't provide you with the boxes to which you have been accustomed...), complained to my mother, and before I knew it God was having a good laugh at me and I was very nearly buried in boxes. I went to grocery stores and collected some (at T's urging -- I so thought grocery stores must have stopped getting things in boxes sometime around the Summer of Love, but then what else would they get things in?); my mother brought a pile of them from work; T came home with about a hundred pounds of very large ones from the warehouse at work. Then this morning my dad rescued some for me at the hardware store, and just as I was sitting down to blog about boxes, Debi arrived with another heap of them. I am set.

With God as my witness, I will never go boxless again.

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

aauuughhhhh

no news about The House. There are legal maneuverings underway but I'm not holding my breath.

Meanwhile, T just came home from a Boy Scout meeting with the news that a hike has been scheduled into the weekend during which we were going to be moving the last of our belongings out of this house and transferring ourselves for good and all to my parents'. Well, not for good and all. For until we are convinced that the real estate market is not going to help us magically find a house we can both live in and afford in our county, and we find a place to rent and get out of my parents' hair. Anyway. Did you catch that? I thought I had THREE weeks before we moved, but nooo, I have two. LESS than two, because today is Tuesday. TEN DAYS would be a more accurate way of putting it.

Please excuse me while I panic.

You know what's hardest? Even harder than the complications caused by the fact that the few things on The Spreadsheet that were left in the ASAP group have now been pretty much merged with the early-September group as well as the Last Wave group? Is that I am going to have to figure out which books I want to do without for something on the order of an entire... week. Or close to two. Of course I wouldn't be reading every book on my precious (channeling Smeagol) bookshelves in the next ten days, but I like to have all of my options open at all times just in case. What if eleven PM next Wednesday is the perfect psychological moment in which I will be able to pick up War and Peace and finally, after many many failures, actually get into it and read beyond those interminable soirées at the beginning? The moment will pass and it will be another fifteen or twenty years before the stars realign to favor that event! What if I find myself checking into the hospital for some dire and completely unforeseen problem (meningitis? broken limb?) and all of my Anne books are at my parents', out of my reach, so I actually have to read a magazine while I wait for someone to bring me one? huh? huh?

OK, so the Annes stay until the very last minute and that is final.

Also, I should not be sitting here typing right now; I should be packing something. But not the books.

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