I was going to write something worth reading today because I’m back in the office, where we have that mysterious and highly desirable thing called a functional internet connection.   But my head hurts so bad today that I’m not sure I’m going to make it to the end of the day without my eyes falling out of their sockets.

Sorry.

We’re in the new house.   Finally.   Closing was a hugely painful ordeal.   Will explain sometime later.

Apologies for not responding to comments or   emails.   We have no internet or phones until sometime in September (a result of the hugely painful closing).   Right now I’m mooching off the neighbors but the signal is so low that the connection goes out every 45 seconds.   So for the most part I’m not even bothering with it.

Which means I’m not reading blogs either.   Again, sorry.

Leaving on a weekend business trip tomorrow.   The house is a wreck.   Company coming into town tomorrow too.   Bad time for a business trip.

Hopefully I can get this posted before the internet connection wigs out.

Weird.  We don’t own a house right now.

We closed on the house we’re selling today.  Everything went smoothly and we got to meet the people who are buying it.  They’re a nice young couple and this is their first house.

We were supposed to close on our new house today but that didn’t work.  A couple of days ago, we found out that the house didn’t appraise for near what we had agreed to pay for it, which was odd because the sale price was based on a previous appraisal that had been done on the house.  But while the last appraiser counted the sunroom as part of the square footage of the house, this appraiser did not.  In fact, he completely discounted the sunroom alltogether because he couldn’t find a comp for it in the neighborhood.

Because, you know, if nobody else has one, then it must have been free to install.

Anyway, it worked out in our favor because we got them to drop the price of the house, but it ended up delaying our closing until next week.  Which means that we are sitting around twiddling our thumbs this weekend and dreading having to move during the workweek.

And in other news, we made an important scientific discovery this week.  Evidently, the universal compulsion to pop bubble wrap is independent of learned behavior, and must instead be an intuitive thing.

I was sitting in my office when I started hearing these vaguely familiar popping sounds…

Caught!

I love it when things work out exactly the way I hoped they would. Even though it was a major pain, the last minute problem with the appraisal turned out to be in our favor because the relocation company (in record-breaking decision-making time) just decided to drop the price on the house. So now we’re getting the same great house for less money and hopefully we’ll still be able to close on time. We won’t know until the last minute, but we’re keeping our fingers crossed.

And in other news, I was sitting at my computer when I started hearing these strangely suspicious popping noises coming from the living room…

It has now been confirmed that the innate obsession with popping bubble wrap has nothing to do with learned behavior and can only be instinctual.

Caught!

• I hurt myself from yawning too big.   I think I overstretched the tendon that connects my jaws or something.   I know.   I’m now in competition with Sammy Sosa for lamest injuries.   I wonder if Workers Comp covers that kind of thing.   It was the boredom brought on by my job that forced me to yawn, after all.
• I dreamed that I had an affair.   With J.   No idea who I was actually married to in the dream.   But Jens’ conscience got the best of him at the last second and he backed out on me.   So I woke up guilty, bummed, grumpy, and horny.   I hate dreams.
• After 4 years, my dog has just discovered that he has a penis.   He has been licking it for 48 hours straight.   It’s driving us crazy, especially since he sleeps in our room and he’s decided that licking himself is more fun than sleeping.
• Don’t buy hair dye that costs less than $10.   Especially if you use white towels and don’t want to see it bleeding onto your towel 4 days after you’ve colored your hair.   Just saying.
• Also, don’t believe the stuff on the box of cheap hair dye that says it comes with highlights and lowlights and multi-faceted color that doesn’t damage your hair.   Bollocks.
• Tomorrow we close on the house we’re selling.
• Tomorrow we’re supposed to close on the house we’re buying.
• Yesterday we found out that the house didn’t appraise for near what we had agreed to pay for it, so now our financing is messed up.
• The appraiser totally discounted the sunroom, which would have made up the difference in the appraisal price.   He refused to count it as part of the square footage of the house (as a previous appraiser had done) because it didn’t have duct work or something.   But since nobody else in the neighborhood has a sunroom, he couldn’t find “comps” so he just didn’t give it any value at all.
• Because, you know, if nobody else has one then it must have been free to install.
• Apparently if you can’t find one just like it then it’s easier just to pretend it doesn’t exist at all than to do some more research and assign a value based on an educated guess.
• Lazy ass.
• So we’ve asked the relocation company to lower the price on the house because it doesn’t make much sense to pay more than a house is actually worth.
• But it’s a relocation company and it will probably take them a week to get back to us because when you have 150 middlemen, things don’t move too quickly.
• And we don’t know what they’re going to say.
• So we don’t know if or when we’ll be closing.
• Annoying, since we’re supposed to move out of our house in 2 days.
• Regardless, we have to disassemble and pack up our computer tonight or tomorrow, so I’ll probably be offline for a few days.
• Bummer dude.

The underwear was still in the dryer when Kaelin and I got through with our shower this morning. With a towel around my head, I peeked out of the upstairs bedroom door to see if there were any observant passersby through the large window that looks in on our balcony. No one was out there, so I did my Lightning Judo Sprint and rushed across the balcony to the stairs. J gives me a hard time for being paranoid about somebody looking into our house and seeing me naked.

The blinds on the rest of the front windows were closed, so once I made it down the stairs I was pretty much safe. I had left Kaelin in the shower and she was calling something to me, so I stopped at the bottom of the stairs and called back to her.

It was then that I noticed some movement directly in front of me. A man with a tape measure standing at the back door (which is one giant window) was throwing his hand over his eyes and whirling away from the door.

Shrieking some expletive or another, I pulled out another one of my Ninja moves and dove across the living room into the bathroom. The dog started barking. I was trapped in the bathroom with no way to get to my clothing. J came down the stairs after the barking dog and I whimpered something to him about who the hell was looking into our back door and PLEASE BRING ME SOME UNDERWEAR.

He did, but not before stopping by the bathroom to laugh at my misfortune, not unlike the time I stood around laughing at him when Kaelin sprayed him with globs of projectile poo three times during the course of a single diaper change. We have that kind of supportive relationship.

Evidently, the Title Company had sent some guys over to do a land survey. J knew they were here because he answered the door while I was in the shower. He swears he yelled upstairs to me that they were here.

I don’t know what was worse: the fact that I full-on exposed myself to a perfect stranger, or his reaction of running away at the sight of my nudity. Perhaps it’s time to do some grooming…

My daughter has a new pet. She has selected a “baby bean” from her dinner plate and has been carrying it around the house for the last 20 minutes.

She holds it as though she’s handling a baby bird, hand cupped and held close to her heart. She has introduced Baby Bean to her doll Timmy, and apparently Timmy is rather impressed.   She talks to it, coos over it, hugs it, tells it how sweet it is and how much she loves it.

That is one spoiled bean.

My daughter has a new pet.  She has selected a “baby bean” from her dinner plate and has been carrying it around the house for the last 20 minutes.

She holds it as though she’s handling a baby bird, hand cupped and held close to her heart.Â

I always have a hard time coming up with wish lists around birthdays and holidays.  I usually end up asking for gift certificates, knowing that whenever I DO find something specific I want, it will be too late to ask for it as a gift.

For instance, this is August.  My birthday and anniversary have passed.  Christmas is a long way away.  And my iron chooses NOW to quit functioning.

My iron has multiple settings, depending on how hot you want it to be – settings like “Silk,” “Cotton,” and “Polyester.”  I tend to iron everything on the setting for “Melt Steel” because I find it to be the most effective.  Unfortunately, the heat my iron is currently generating would struggle to melt butter, much less steel.

Fortunately, for my last birthday, I had the foresight to ask exclusively for Ebay gift certificates.  And I have just enough left over for a new iron.

I created this site to keep family and friends in the loop because I’m such a terrible communicator and I pretty much hate the phone.

And yet somehow, when a bunch of stuff happens and life gets busy, this blog kind of gets the shaft.  Sad, isn’t it.

So yeah, we sold the house.  And we found a new one.  And we LOVE it.  It’s actually quite a bit more house than we need right now, but we’re buying it for the long run because it would be SO NICE to live in the same house for more than 2 years, which hasn’t happened since I graduated high school.  So we picked one that we’re pretty sure we will never outgrow.

It’s in a great location, equidistant from my parents’ house and the church.  It’s got a great open floor plan and the people who live there have no pets and no kids and barely live there because they both work, so it’s in great shape.  And they even have relatively decent taste, except for an over-indulged affection for large mirrors and the color peach.

Jens’ favorite part is the media room.  Raise your hand if you’re totally surprised by that.

Yeah, me neither.

I am in love with the gameroom, because see, it has doors.  And these doors?  You can close them.  As in, throw all the toys in the room, close the doors and walk away.  Which means people will stop asking us when we got hit by a tornado.Â

I keep sitting down and starting to write an entry, but get a little overwhelmed so I give up. Life has been a whirlwind recently, so rather than try to document it all, I’ve been avoiding the computer. I think I’ll just start with some bullets and hopefully get everything down. And come back later to add more bullets for the things I’ve forgotten.

I like bullets. They make me feel organized even when life seems a little out of control.

• We’re in the waiting game on the house selling thing. I think everything is pretty much taken care of and now we’re just waiting for the closing date. Hopefully we’ll close on time because we have the closing of our new house (which is dependent on the closing of our current house) set up for the same day, so they will both be delayed if anything goes wrong.
• Speaking of going wrong, the people we’re trying to buy the house from are being relocated, which means that a relocation company is handling the sale from here on out. Which means 3x as much paperwork and everything is taking 3x as long. Which means that we’re really pushing it to make the aforementioned closing date because they’re TAKING FOREVER.
• The good news is that we had the inspection done Saturday and even though there are several things we’re requesting they address (or pay to have us address) there was really nothing major wrong with the house.
• Half our computer supplies are packed away so I don’t have my card reader and therefore can’t download the pictures I took in New York (or any other pictures I’ve taken recently) so that’s kind of irritating me right now.
• The trip was fun and I loved hanging out with Stereoette and I got to eat some great food and do a ton of walking around the city and it was a much needed break from the stress of house. I tried not to rub it in that our mortgage payment for our new humongo house is going to be the same as what she’s paying for her efficiency apartment in NY. Ah, Texas real estate…
• Kaelin is really growing up. She’s now the traffic light enforcer. Wherever we go, she’s sure to point out “Uh-oh, it’s red! We have to stop now,” and “Green! The light is green! We can go now! Go green go!” through the entire car ride.
• Her repertoire of complete sentences and appropriate phrases seems (to me) to be remarkably advanced over the other kids her age. She’s still substituting “t’s” for all her “k’s” which is only a problem because her name starts with K. Well, that and it’s a little disconcerting when she starts talking about “kitties” in public.
• She’s very polite and uses “please” and “thank you” often. When we go to the public play areas in the mall and she gets mowed over by other children, she always says “Excuse me.”
• She’s still in love with her Grandmommy and Grandpa and would happily move in with them if we let her. I might let her when she hits the rebellious teenager stage.
• I think I’m going to have to give in and read Harry Potter. Even though I already know what happens in all the books. I’m not very good at commitment so long term projects rarely get finished, and reading is no exception. Maybe I’ll get the books on CD and listen to them in the car.
• I have a ridiculous amount of laundry that needs to be done. Ridiculous, I tell you.
• Moving Company is coming tomorrow morning to give estimates. Hopefully they’ll be able to see past the piles of laundry everywhere.
• Need to clean the house again top to bottom. We got out of the habit since we’ve stopped showing the house. But the appraiser is coming this week and we need to make a really good impression.
• Having so much laundry and cleaning to do makes me feel overwhelmed.
• I am totally annoyed that “maternity” is the “in” fashion right now. I was appalled when I went to Old Navy yesterday. I’m short-torsoed and store my fat around my middle – do you know how hard I have to work already to avoid looking 12 months pregnant? Every piece of clothing I saw was formless and rendered my body completely devoid of any feminine shape whatsoever. Grrr…
• I played 4 back-to-back softball games Friday night. Apparently we’re so behind in the season (due to rain) that they decided to have the entire playoff tournament in a single night.
• Consequently, every muscle in my body hurts. I could hardly get out of bed this morning. I’m getting too old for this.
• We came in second, in case you were wondering.
• The last game we played was a game we lost (hence the 2nd place), and we actually didn’t mind losing because we were so worn out that we didn’t want to play another game, which we would have to had we won.
• Actually, as beat as we were, we probably wouldn’t have minded playing another game too much if we felt like the teams were evenly matched. The other team had 4x as many players to rotate through and got to rest for an hour before the final game, so they were full of energy. And all of their guys were 6’4″ and built like athletes. We didn’t have the same advantage, so every minute was a fight just to stay in the game. That said, we did pretty well and might have won if they hadn’t hit that grand slam.
• I managed to close my knee in the car door today and it’s starting to bruise. It hurts.
• Thanks to the stress of buying/selling/moving/etc, I have 3 ulcers in my mouth. Yippee. Now I just need my face to break out so my whole head can be swollen and aching.
• My superstitious side is thinking I probably shouldn’t have said that.
• It’s after 11:30pm.
• My brain is starting to shut down.
• Good night.