Oct
27
After four months of frantic, fruitless cleaning and all of maybe 5 showings, we’re taking the house off the market. Not permanently, but we have a chance to refinance and the house can’t be for sale while we do that. Refinancing would free up a chunk of change each month and now seems like the time for such things, since JB’s business is valiantly struggling to stay afloat and they’ve cut back on such luxuries as, you know, “paychecks.” My freelance salary is the same as my office job-minus-daycare salary was—and maybe even a little more on a good month—but it’s surely not enough on its own to keep us from spiraling further down the rabbit hole of credit card debt.
So anyway, blah blah blah refinancing. House going off the MLS, for at least some period of time.
I plan to find a new agent when we’re ready to put it back on the market, but I don’t have high hopes for getting our asking price any time soon. Maybe never. The market’s worse than we thought, our house is difficult to find comparables for, the middle class is disappearing, we probably buried St. Joseph in the wrong part of the yard, etc.
As much as we want to move, now would be a bad time to do so with JB’s business in such a difficult, anything-could-happen state. There’s no pressure to get aggressive with pricing yet—we’ll just stay put, and hope that the right person comes along and falls in love.
It’s been a disappointment. For all the soul-searching we did this summer to come to the decision to put the sign in the yard, all the work getting it ready to show, it feels like a defeat to quietly pull it back off the market. Even though this isn’t a long term thing, it feels like another enormous obstacle between us and the country home we dreamed of in Oregon.
Sometimes it seems like when you do the work to clearly identify a goal, the path should just seamlessly unfold before you. You did the hard part already, after all. But of course that’s not how it works. Now you have to navigate your way from here to there, and anything can happen in between. Maybe the destination isn’t where you thought it would be. Maybe there’s something else on the way that takes you in a different direction for a while. Maybe you have to scramble over a series of seemingly nonstop challenges, like JB and all the stress and money hardships that’s come with his dream job.
Still, the only time you can truly know a dream is no longer within reach is when you give up.
(PS: Speaking of dreams, my aunt is looking at self-publishing. If you’d take a couple minutes to answer her survey about e-books, it would really help her out.)
Oct
25
I woke up this morning with the familiar mild feeling of weekday dread—three articles today, my god, it’s like shoveling sand, sand made of Justin Bieber’s smug mop-haired face and Kim Kardashian’s improbably-shaped ass—and a deeper, panicky sense of doom regarding a project that’s due in, let’s check the calendar, two days, oh fuck oh fuck. On top of that like a nice little layer of shit-frosting, an infusion of regret over my food choices over the weekend. Weeks of eating clean and having goddamned herbal tea instead of cookies at night, and I throw it all away for two days of a pumpkin-muffin-themed Roman gorge-orgy?
I should have worked more during naptimes and at night, I think. I shouldn’t have used a date night as an excuse to go completely off the rails with my diet. I should have vacuumed, I should have done laundry, I should have gone to the gym.
It’s too easy to focus on everything I didn’t do. The sort of weekend that if I were still watercooler-bullshitting with a coworker, I’d dismiss with the flap of a hand. “Oh, you know,” I’d say with a laugh, “ate too much. Lazed around. Not much.”
On Saturday morning I packed a picnic lunch—in an actual picnic basket—and we drove to JB’s office, where we spun in office chairs and sent the boys on crazy giggling missions to leap over cardboard boxes.
I had my first night out with my husband in weeks, maybe months. We ate sushi at our favorite place and watched The Social Network, which we both loved.
We drove out to Alki in the rain and gloom and had lunch overlooking the water, venturing out onto the dock afterwards and pointing out buildings and boats and seagulls.
We cooked a giant breakfast for Sunday night dinner, complete with bacon and jam-covered toast, and we started our meal with our version of grace: everyone with two thumbs upraised, a group shout of “Good food, good meat, good grief, let’s eat! Teaaaaaaaam Sharps!” and a clap at the end.
Riley sat on the counter in order to supervise the assembly of pumpkin-chocolate muffins, both of us stealing bites of chocolate chips.
We bundled up on Sunday night and walked around a nearby park, ducking our heads against the rain, teaching the boys how to stuff their hands in their pockets to keep them warm. “Keep ’em against your balls,” advised JB.
JB got a fire going in the wood stove and we all curled up together on the couch with the lights off, watching the dancing flames and telling ghost stories.
Before bed, we played “Roly Poly” in the living room, the kids hurling themselves in running summersaults onto sofa cushions laid out on the floor.
I napped on Saturday—so delicious!—and on Sunday I finished an amazing, can’t-put-it-down book.
I don’t know why it isn’t easier to think of all that stuff, instead.
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