Monday, February 27, 2012

That Time I Lived In A Duplex

Dear Internet,

Sorry for my absence. I was going to wait and write once something definitive had happened but I missed you. Nothing definitive has happened. The only thing that has changed from when I wrote this, is that there is a new fish and he might be dying. Yes, I'm serious.

THE house is stuck in a twisting labyrinth of paperwork and federal regulations. The possible baby is still just possible. And Malcolm died to be replaced by Felix, who is trying to die as I write this. And not because I am a horrible pet owner...apparently he has terminal constipation. Again, not joking.

SO, fuck all that. I don't want to talk about it anymore. Instead, let me share one of the most embarrassing things that ever happened to me. Doesn't that sound like good times? Okay, here we go:

Once upon a time, R and I were dating. A few months into our relationship, R went to Italy for 5 weeks with his roommate, a trip planned before we had gotten together.

While R was in Italy, I moved into a small duplex. Before moving in, I was told all about the other occupant of the duplex, a woman my age who owned a dog. However, as I was busy pining for R's return, I never got around to walking the whole 8 feet over to her front door to meet her. Also, my motto at the time, cultivated from other past experiences, was to do my best to avoid neighbors. At any rate, I hadn't heard her yelling or playing loud music, and the dog wasn't barking non-stop, so I hadn't had a pressing reason to go over.

The weeks slowly crawled by and then the day finally arrived. I drove to the airport to pick up R and his roommate. We stopped by R's house, threw his roommate out of the car, and sped to my new place. Once there we proceeded to make up for lost time. Repeatedly. For the next several days, stopping only to eat and shower...and the shower might not have been the clean kind either.

Several days later, after a vigorous session of reuniting, we lay cuddled together in my bed. And then there was a sneeze. Not a particularly loud sneeze. In fact, a rather lady-like sneeze. The problem was that it had not come from me or R.

We turned to stare at one another in horror. Had we just heard my neighbor sneeze?!? Was it an aberration? It turned out that it was not. The next morning, we sat in my living room listening to EVERY word the neighbor said as she talked on the phone.

Later that same day, I was walking out to my car and the young woman who lived next door came up to introduce herself. It seems that she was also on vacation while R had been out of the country and she had returned the same day he had! Which is why I hadn't heard her before his return, and we had been to, umm, busy once he was back to realize that the walls dividing the duplex were paper thin.

I was so embarrassed by this first impression, and what she most certainly heard, that I never spoke to her again. The end.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

The Local Economy Is Looking Up

I haven't written about OUR house, because I didn't want to jinx the sale. But what the heck? I can't hold it in any longer!

We are buying a house. For real this time. But let me tell this in an actual story format with a timeline and chronological order. My, how fancy!

In my last entry, I mentioned that we had tried to purchase a home only to be rebuffed by the current owners who have yet to realize they are trying to sell a house during a recession and no one is going to pay the price they are asking. So we had moved on.

However, the house we thought we were going to like was a bust. And the next house was even worse. So R and I were in the car on the way to the third house and were discussing that we have plenty of time. We shouldn't rush into this. Lots of houses will hit the market around March. We can wait for the perfect house, and that might be for the best, blah blah blah.

Then we went into the third house and the skies opened up and angels sang. It. Was. Perfect.
Okay, that's a lie. There is no such thing (within our price range). But it was damn close. So close, that on our way to the next house all we could talk about was putting an offer in on it because it was SO awesome! The view! The location! The counter tops! The DAYLIGHT BASEMENT!

And because I we had been closely obsessing over watching the housing market for almost two years a while, we knew this house wouldn't stay on the market long. So that night we put in an offer on a house that had only been on the market a handful of days.

The offer wasn't much lower that they were asking because it had just gone up for sale. They countered. We were in the midst of countering back (to land right where we were aiming for the whole time) AND THEN their realtor told our realtor that a couple had just viewed the house for a THIRD time! We briefly PANICKED and then agreed to everything in the sellers' counter offer to avoid a bidding war (which, by the way, is almost the same price as that first house only there is MORE house for the same $$).

The moral of this story? Act on impulse. Ha. I'm kidding (not really).

R and I know how bad that couple must feel to have a house scooped out from under them (suckers!).

Which is what set us up for this next bit of karma. Our jeep, which we've been waiting patiently for while it is being repaired, cannot be fixed. It was totalled. We were given a fair amount of money and very few options, because the money we received was not enough to get a vehicle that was in pristine condition to replace our absolutely perfect, low mileage, owned outright jeep. Thus, we now have our dream vehicle (it's a Subaru Forester because our dreams are fairly realistic and limited by good gas mileage and safety tests) and a hefty car payment to go along with our new house payment. Hurrah!

And that is how our household single handedly fixed our town's economy.

P.S. Wow, there are a lot of conjunctions in that story! But I'm leaving them in there for you, because you mean that much to me.