I Got Nothin'.

Oh, of course I got somethin'.  I always churn out a blog post while I'm sitting here at Afrah, munching on pita bread and drinking lemonade while I type--usually very fast--on my laptop or my Nook. (Tonight: Laptop. And the fingers were happy.)  I just sometimes don't know what I'm going to come up with until I'm already here.  I went looking for an update on the Alicia Beltran case, but I couldn't find anything.  Not sure there's even a hearing set.  Now that the government's reopened, there's no point in airing my plan for all the furloughed employees to march into Washington armed with, I dunno, brooms and mops and stuff and shutter every single restaurant and pizza-delivery location within 10 miles of the Capitol Building.  (That'd be interesting, watching John Boehner chow down on a PBJ he'd made in his kitchen that morning.  Or that his houseboy made for him, more like.)  And I guess I could brag that @rubenagency favorited my tweets about how much it must suck to be a literary agent and have to actually READ all those hundreds of earnest letters that arrive from aspiring authors every day, but since I kind of had him in particular in mind, it's not that far of a stretch.  

Then, on the way here, the DJ on 98.7 gives me an idea: Misquoting Shakespeare.

People, you can take the English major out of Arizona State before she Makes the Big Mistake and goes to grad school, but you can't get the Bard out of her head.  No way.  Nohow.  Never.  It's too late by then.  And the next time I hear somebody say "First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" or "Money is the root of all evil," I'll probably blow a blood vessel.  I mean, I get it, okay?  When you make that statement about killing all the lawyers, it sounds really cool, and hip, and, I dunno, reactionary, somehow.  But when you throw in the context and realize that the guy who said it, Dick the Butcher, was saying it to impress the rebel Jack Cade, and that Jack wanted to break down law and order and create chaos where there was once a civilized society so he could crown himself King, well--not as hip, is it?  In fact, killing all the lawyers starts to sound like a bad thing.

And "Money is the root of all evil"--puh-lease.  Numero uno, the quote is "The love of money is the root of all evil,"  which makes a lot more sense in the context of the story that follows.  Numero two-o, that's not even Shakespeare.  It's Chaucer, you illiterate moron.  Chaucer died about 160 years before Shakespeare was even born, and left us with the Canterbury Tales and a lot of other weird stuff that's written in Old English and is harder than hell to understand.  Fun when translated, though.  Also, Chaucer was to literature what Michelangelo was to painting and sculpture.  Chaucer's original plan for the Canterbury Tales assumed he'd live at least ten thousand years and be writing right up through the last day of the last one.  Unfortunately, he died at the age of 46, like a lot of people did in his time.  

Speaking of the love of money, I would love some money.  In fact, if somebody wanted to give me an Ativan, a cup of very strong hot chocolate and, oh, money, that would be awesome.  (I'd settle for the hot chocolate.)  Last year, we were clobbered with a new roof (our share: $3,500.00), new pipes under the house ($3,700.00), a new transmission thingy (I never know the names of these thingies; just how much they cost.  This one was $2,500.00), a washing machine, a stove/range, and I forget what all else but none of it was cheap.  And yeah, we had a savings account, but had. Past tense.  Is gone.  And unfortunately, it's not like life's little disasters stop pouncing on you just because you are broke.  

Take the pipes under the house.  Please.  Seriously; we had a leak in our new pipes, and when the guy came to fix it, he told us that we had a Serious Problem with our sewer line that went out to the city system.  As in, dig it up, yank it out and put in a new one.  Cost:  Around $7k, not counting however much it costs to stay at a hotel for a few days because we don't have water.  Well, that was a fascinating conversation.  Then a few weeks ago we had another leak, another guy came out, and told us we had an equally Serious Problem with the water pipes that came in from the city system.  They, too, need to be dug up and replaced, and the price just went up to $12k (maybe only 11 if we have both that and the sewer line done at the same time).  Apparently the new pipes under the house are having trouble holding on to the old pipes that come and go.  The fault lies in the old pipes, which, let's face it, are pushing 60.  

For the record, we only paid $94k for the whole house.

So I guess I'm, I dunno, getting a Saturday job or something.  Maybe I'll turn tricks on Harry Hines Boulevard.  Maybe I'll use my exacting knowledge of chemistry to make the best crystal meth in the DFW metro area, and it'll quickly become popular and sell well and--

Hey.  That'd make a good TV show.

When Real Estate Deals Go Bad

Oh yeah.  We were selling the house, weren't we?

Well, we were, and then we weren't.  And now we're not.  And in case I never got around to telling that story, here it is.

The whole point, you know, of selling the house was that it needs an expensive sewer pipe repair.  Not only is it expensive, it's also annoying; we'll have to move out for at least a couple of days, we don't know what to do about the cats during that time, the logistics are mind-boggling even if you aren't mentally interesting and the whole thing upsets my wife, and what does it say in the marriage manual on page one?  Never, ever upset your wife.  In italic print, no less.  So somehow, it seemed like a great idea to just sell the house and let someone else deal with it.  As if packing up, buying another house (with problems of its own, considering our budget) and settling into a weird new neighborhood was going to be less stressful than just fixing the damn sewer pipe, already.  And trust me, they were weird neighborhoods.  There was this one where we looked at a duplex that--actually, I liked that duplex.  A lot.  I just wanted it to be built somewhere else, that's all.

The first sign that This Was Never Going To Work was when our wonderful real estate agent, who helped us find this place after a day of running around in the rain, suddenly didn't work for the agency anymore (we never did find out what happened) and the agency assigned us another agent.  The new agent was--well, it didn't really matter, because I never gave her much of a chance.  I tried to.  I even muttered it through my teeth; "Give her a chance, Jen.  Give her a chance."  The truth is that I have very little patience for certain kinds of professionals, and one of them is real estate agents.  Before we found the Wonderful Real Estate Agent, I fired three others.  (Or was it two?)  In that particular transaction, we had 48 hours to fly into Dallas, buy a house and fly back out again.  We. Did. Not. Have. Time. To. Fuck. Around.  So the second one of them started messing with us (and they do that; they give you weird hand signals during a viewing that you're supposed to understand sight unseen, they show you places that have everything you don't want and say things like "Just wait until you see the kitchen", they show you places you can't even remotely begin to afford and say, "Now, with an FHA loan, you only have to put down 3 1/2 percent!"), I fired them.  But I was fair about it. When the next one came on board, I'd say, "Don't do this, this or this."  Then either they did, or they found a new and exciting way to mess with me, and I fired them.  God has a special place in Her heart for these people.  They had to put up with me, after all.

So here we are with this new agent, and already things aren't going well. She wants us to "dress up" our house so it'll sell faster, which basically means stripping it of everything that suggests two human beings live there.  She wants the pictures gone, the paintings gone, the craft stuff gone, the bells and chimes gone.  She wants the frick'n meditation cushions gone and makes some crack about it doesn't look good to homebuyers if you're worshipping a pagan god.  (Damn. Well, reschedule the human sacrifice til next week.)  She wants the doors replaced, the kitchen painted, the back yard redone.  Oh, and she has no sense of humor.  She didn't actually curl her lip at us and say, "How charming," but she could have and I wouldn't have been at all surprised.

The other thing was that she had a specific kind of person in mind to buy the house, a "target market," as it were.  Which was great, if the specific kind of person was ever going to come within fifteen miles of our neighborhood.  Our neighborhood was built in the late 50s/early 60s, and apart from the fashions and the presence of people who have skin colors other than white, it's kind of like it never left.  Kids ride bikes around and toss the football after school instead of going to some expensive day care. What's more, they walk to school.  Both ways.  In the snow.  Our street is about half white, half Hispanic with a smattering of Other, largely working class, largely multilingual.  Our across-the-street neighbors just got here from somewhere south of the Rio Grande, and on most weekends they have friends over, barbecue something, drink beer and tell jokes until the wee hours of the morning.

It's not suburbia, is what I'm trying to say here.  It's really not the scene for the soccer mom and the downtown lawyer dad.  Yet when we tried to suggest they print the flyer in Spanish, she looked at us like we'd just grown nine heads.  And when it arrived, a beautiful four-color laminated flyer that was all in English, we'd also lost a bedroom.  Somehow we went from a 3-bedroom 1-bath to a 2-bedroom 1-bath with an "extra living space."  But that wasn't supposed to have any effect on the price.  People like extra living spaces. Um, I checked Zillow and Realtor.com until my scroller got sore and there wasn't a single 2-bedroom 1-bath anywhere around listed for as much as we were.  3-bedrooms, sure, but no 2-bedrooms, extra living space or no extra living space.

Then the agent e-mailed me and suggested we drop the price, because there hadn't been very many showings.  Hey, was that the crack of doom I just heard?  I was delighted--not about dropping the price, but because I didn't think there had been any showings.  I immediately called her up to see what people had said during the showings.  Was there something particular they liked or didn't like, something we could fix, play up, learn from?  No reply for a while.  Finally she said there actually hadn't been any showings.  At all.  None.

I can put up with a lot, but when I lose respect for you, I do it all at once and very hard.  In this case it wasn't the lack of showings, it was the fact that she lied to me.  It was a ridiculous lie, too; all I had to do was call the lockbox company to find out how many showings there had been.  It was a good thing we weren't having too much luck finding something to buy, either, because I was about to fire another real estate agent.

Only I couldn't.  We'd signed a contract.  The only way to get out of it was to take the house off the market.  So that's what we did, and we're still in our little house.

Which is good.  I love my little house.  And my shrink, when I mentioned all of these goings-on, got a bit annoyed and said, "You know, if you'd told your psychiatrist you were considering this move--and you should tell your psychiatrist, when you're planning a major life change--he would have told you not to do it, because it would be a lot of stress you wouldn't need right now."

Oops.  Duly noted.

No, the sewer pipe isn't fixed yet.  If you have seven grand you don't need, you could send it our way.  And maybe come pick up our cats for a little while.  But anyway, that's what happened with the selling of the house.  And now (Paul Harvey voice) you know the rest of the story.

Another One We Won't Post to Facebook.

The view from the front porch.

Oh, who am I kidding.  I probably will post it on Facebook.  I just won't email it to anyone in my family.  They don't come looking for my blog posts, you know.  They only read them if I email them.  Too much to do on the Internet already and blah blah blah.  (Actually, I don't know if they read them when I email them, but I figure they've got a slightly better shot.)

Anyway, I got a communique from one of my aunts that she and my uncle have sold their place on Lake Metigoshe (it means "many waters" in Chippewa) in North Dakota.  I was both sad and not surprised; it's been on the market for a couple of years.  The whole time I was hoping it could stay in the family, or that somebody would lend me $1.3 million and I'd be able to buy it.  Make it $1.4 and throw in the sailboat.

Most of the happy parts of my childhood took place in this house, and in a way, I'm glad it's gone before I have a chance to go back and see it one more time.  How do you do something when you know it's going to be the last time?  I've taken cats to the vet for the last time, and believe me, it is not fun.  I'm not in favor of trying to mark significant endings.  Buddha said people and things will come and go out of your life like the tide.  Love them while they're here and then let them go.  I think that was Buddha, anyway. (I'll bet Buddha never took a cat to the vet for the last time.)

They have to be out by the end of the month.  Which is kind of insane, seeing as they've lived there for about fifty years. Having done it once, when my grandmother died, I can honestly say I'd have no idea even where to start.  (Hint to those of you who expect to be survived by loved ones: Do the loved ones a favor and START CLEANING BEFORE YOU DIE, fer godsakes.  You think your loved ones want to try to figure out who should get the 1940s era Dick Tracy comic books and the Icelandic Bible?  And the piano--no, don't get me started about the piano.)

Speaking of childhood relics and pieces of real estate, it occurred to me a couple of blog posts ago that I never really explained about the whole Lutheran Church thing.  I grew up in the Lutheran Church, and if you're going to be a Christian, you could do a lot worse than this particular flavor.  Lutherans tend to be liberal-minded, soft-hearted, all about helping the poor and downtrodden, and just in general, very, very nice.  They rarely get mad; they just get very, very disappointed in you.  And yeah, there are a couple of factions that split off from the main body over literal interpretations of certain Bible verses and other strange things, but for the most part, the Swedes and the Germans have all come together and made one big happy church, at least in America and Canada.

And I grew up in it, which was hell.  I don't know why it was hell; as I've said, everybody's very nice.  But I had a Problem from the get-go, and as soon as I got old enough to articulate it, I was articulating it at anyone who would listen.  The Problem was that I didn't want to be there.  Not that I had any other grand plans for a Sunday morning -- Joan attends the High Church of the New York Times Sunday Crossword Puzzle, but that wasn't an option for me then, much less in ink--I Just. Didn't. Want. To Be. There.  And because I had to be there, I made sure to make a huge ruckus so that everyone knew beyond a doubt that I didn't want to be there.

This went on from my initial baptism, during which I made a run for it, until I was about twelve, which, coincidentally, covers most of the time we lived in Utah.  You'd think there'd be nothing like being an oppressed minority to make you love your religion, and you're right, mostly.  But I only loved my religion when I wasn't mired in it.  When we were there, all I thought about was escape.

Again, it's hard to articulate, but it's something like this: I had figured out very young that for all the supposed importance of church, the one thing I wasn't supposed to do was actually buy any of it.  You know, actually start believing that Christ rose from the dead and saved us all with his blood and that God loves us and wants us to be happy.  We weren't there because we actually believed that stuff.  We were there because my mother didn't want us turning into little Mormons.  We needed something to do on a Sunday morning that didn't involve a day-long church service and immersion baptism at the age of eight.  And to talk to people who said "Oh ya?" with the same flat Midwestern accent as we did.  And that, to me, was a complete and utter waste of time.  Why bother coming to church if you didn't believe it?

What was worse, I didn't.  Believe it, I mean.  I tried to.  I was fine with the whole God part, big paternal spirit in the sky that keeps an eye on us and wishes we were nicer to each other.  But the Jesus thing?  Raising a little girl from her deathbed, saying "Lazarus, come out!", turning water to wine, coming back from the dead?  Uh, no. Sorry. Guy was cool--long haired radical, wanted people to do what was right instead of what was popular, looked out for the widows and the orphans and so on--but all that miracle stuff?  That was strictly an out-of-control press agent.

And it pissed me off.  I was furious that I couldn't believe the whole Jesus thing.  I was furious that my parents didn't believe the whole Jesus thing, because if they believed it, surely I'd have inherited some belief from them.  But I didn't buy it.  Couldn't buy it, really.  It just went against some fundamental something-or-other in my brain that I can't seem to let go of.  There's this whiny little voice in my head that pops up at the damnedest times and and says, "But Jen, that doesn't make any sense."  Handy when you have a high fever and you're hallucinating the sounds of falling paper clips, but really annoying when you're dreaming that you're having sex with a man/woman/ fantasy creature and it suddenly pops up and says, "Uh, Jen, you've been married to Joan for 18 years."  I mean, there's not much to say after that except, "I'm sorry, dude, I have to go home."  I lose more somnolent dates that way.

Fast forward to Tempe, Arizona circa 1983.  We've moved, so we need to find a new church.  We visit three of them, and one is much bigger and more ostentatious than the others, and populated by people who appear to be much richer than us. (I don't know yet that my parents are millionaires.)  Guess which one they liked best.  So for about a year I put up with this church--or maybe it's two years--and in that time a bunch of stuff happens, none of it good. (Remind me to tell you the story about the new organ sometime--I'd tell it now, but this blog post is already getting overlong.) One day I turn sixteen and I suddenly say, "You know what, I'm done.  I'm not going to church anymore.  You want to ground me til I'm eighteen, fine."  (I've already figured out that between music lessons, band practice and after-school study sessions, I'm rarely home anyway.)  They didn't.  Ground me until I was eighteen, I mean.  But I did fight like cats and dogs with my mother about this issue every single Sunday from that day until the day I moved out.  I kid you not.  Every week it was World War Three in our kitchen.

Having not learned my lesson, I joined another Lutheran church in San Diego when I was 26.  But that was different.  They fed the homeless every night, and they had an acupuncture clinic and a doctor that came around if anybody needed one, and a lawyer would volunteer his time to help people apply for benefits if they were due them, and a social worker would come down and get the kids into school (there was a special school for children of homeless parents), and if somebody wanted help with a drug or alcohol problem they'd make sure he or she got it, and oh yeah, they had this church over here, too, if you wanted to come by on Sunday.

Less than two hundred members, I might add.  Less than two hundred, and they made all that happen.  I miss them to this day.  But something started to happen to me the last two years in San Diego. Some of it was synod politics and some of it was just hubris, but I began to realize that I couldn't stand under the banner of Christianity and still be who I was.  The problem was how to extricate myself.  I'd become one of those church ladies with big breasts and a clipboard.  Just try getting off a committee sometime, never mind leaving an actual church.

Then we moved to Texas.  OH THANK GOD.

And now?  Well, nobody in my family goes to church anymore.  My brother in law does, I think, occasionally.  My sister doesn't.  My parents don't.  I go to the temple sometimes.  Hang with the Zen Center folks and the meditation group.  But that's kind of it.  I'm a Buddhist and I'm fine with being a Buddhist, but I can't say I'm all that religious, really.  I address my prayers "to whom it may concern."

And I posted this on Facebook.  But it's not getting emailed.

Give Us A Sign, Oh Lord

Thanks to meds and lots of other things, I don't often have full-blown anxiety fits anymore.  Even when I do, they're mostly small affairs, remedied by a look at a bank statement (oh good, I didn't really do that) or a case file (oh good, I really did that).  Because, odd as it may seem, I know what I'm doing most of the time.  Especially at work, screw-ups are rare.  They happen, but they're rare, and they are usually fixable.  And in my personal life, such that it exists, I more or less Handle Things.  I'm the chief quartermistress in charge of wardrobing and laundry, the head chef, preparer of (most) meals, the balancer of budgets and the cleaner of things that need cleaning (or, to be fair, the director of persons to things that need cleaning.  We're in this marriage thing together.)  But then, it's not every day that I come home from a day-long OA meeting to a sign that looks like the one on the left here.

Yep, that's it.  The Sign, Oh Lord.  Our house is really on the market.  Somebody is really going to buy it and we are really going to have to go and live somewhere else.  Here's the MLS listing.  Below is a pic of our front door with the lock box, so that realtors can come and go (by appointment, only) to show our little Dallas palace to potential buyers.  I pulled into the driveway (so as not to block the sign from view; I don't think I can park on the street anymore) and just sat there for a few minutes trying not to cry.

And then, because of course this had to get worse, my idiot neighbor came out of his house.  (Warning:  If you buy this house, you will have an idiot neighbor.) He wanted to know how much and who was in charge.  I gave him the real estate agent's card and got inside as fast as I could.  I knew he was interested.  I just knew it.  From the second we started hauling boxes of books out of here and taking them to a storage unit, he's had his weird little eyeballs on us.  I think he wants to buy it to rent out, which is fine with us really, but I hate hate hate having to talk to him.  He kind of scares me.  

Why?  Because he's the male of the species.  Well, that and he's not safe around a chainsaw, but that's another story and shall be told another time.  At this day-long OA meeting, there was this workshop about sex and body images, and one of the speakers said something that I thought was very profound.  She said the whole time she was losing weight, and she's lost over a hundred pounds, there was this constant battle raging inside her head between wanting to be thinner, and thereby both healthier and more attractive to the opposite sex, and being scared of the opposite sex and not wanting to lose her layer of protection against looking too attractive.  She'd been molested when she was about four.  I have lost count of how many women I have heard at OA meetings say that they were molested or otherwise sexually abused when they were children.  Literally lost count.  I guess some women turn to drugs or alcohol to deal with this sort of thing, but it looks like an awful lot of us turn to excess food, and bulimia, and anorexia.  And when it was time for comments from the audience, I was waving my hand so I could say, "Me, too!  I got fat to keep men away, too!  I was molested, too!"  which is usually not something I'm terribly excited to tell people. 

Anyway.  I got inside, had my anxiety fit and went to the first thing that's guaranteed to calm me down a little: Food.  First I heated up some of the leftover enchilada casserole from the other night, and then I had a few graham crackers with Biscoff spread.  That's not really a binge--pretty close to a regular meal, in fact, and it was dinnertime--but figure this out:  Daylong OA meeting.  Brilliant insight about reasons for being fat.  And what do I do when something bothers me but come in here and eat.  Anyone who doubts the addictive power of food, particularly sugar, really needs to spend a few days with me when I'm trying to get off it. (Surprisingly, however, Biscoff spread doesn't have much sugar in it.  Only 5 grams a serving.  So I dodged a bullet, there.)  

In retrospect, it occurs to me that our idiot neighbor buying our house might indeed be the perfect solution.  He'd have himself for a neighbor, and no one else would have to put up with him.  And my anxiety fit's more or less over, so I can, I dunno, hide under a blanket with Caesar the Cat for the rest of the evening and just hope nobody wants to view the house past seven on a Saturday.

Or maybe watch a horror movie.  As if life isn't scary enough.

Death, Taxes and Real Estate

I dunno if this is true of all real estate agents everywhere at all times, but the ones I've dealt with, at least, seem to have a kind of selective hearing.  Whatever you say, they pick out the stuff that's relevant to what they've already decided to do.  So, when I say, for example, "First off, we're looking for a duplex, not a single family house, and it needs to have at least one and a half baths," they seem to hear, "xxxxx xxx we're looking for x xxxxxx xxx x single family house, and it needs to have xx xxxxx one xxx x xxxx bathx."  "We don't have any kids, so we don't need to be near all the best schools" turns into "xx xxxx xxxx xxx kids xx xx xxxx need to be near all the best schools."  And don't even ask me what "Please don't show us any more ranch houses in suburban Arlington" turns into.  It's kind of untypeable.  It may not even be audible to human ears. 

It gets worse when we're talking about money.  Mention that your absolute maximum is $175,000 and they'll somehow find a way to make that $250,000.  ("Don't worry, it will sell for $225.")  And the mortgage broker?  My friends, if you have the misfortune to have good credit, the mortgage broker will finance you well above and beyond anything you can even remotely begin to afford.  I mean, I wouldn't lend me that much money and I'm a nice person.  I can't imagine a total stranger lending it to me, even if they knew more about my finances.  Which they don't, apparently. 

When we bought the little 3-bedroom palace in Far East Dallas, we did it only after we fired three real estate agents.  We didn't have time to fool around.  We had less than two days to fly to Dallas, find a house and buy it, so when the real estate agents started jerking us around, I fired them.  To be fair, each time a new one came on board I told him or her what the last one(s) had done to piss me off ("Please don't do this, this or this.")  When they did it anyway, or found some other new and exciting way to make this whole process completely counterproductive, I fired them. 

Until we found Sondra, and she was a candidate for sainthood.  She put up with me, for one thing.  She drove us all over town in the pouring rain, for another.  She found us the perfect house, got the deal done, arranged for us to close on the house in Phoenix, Arizona while we were driving between point A and point B, and even got the gas turned on for us when it turned out we'd forgotten that little detail.  Our only regret was that we couldn't give her the commission for selling our place in San Diego, because she certainly earned it.  So naturally she was the real estate agent we wanted when we were selling our place in Dallas.  But something's happened to her and she's No Longer With The Agency.  We're meeting our new agent on Sunday.  Meanwhile, our selling agent is scaring up things we can't afford, and--oh, it hasn't been a lot of fun, okay?  At this point I'm like, let's just sell blood, turn tricks on Harry Hines Boulevard, whatever, get the ridiculous sum of money and fix the stupid pipes, already.  Except then Tracy and Tammy wouldn't have anywhere to go.  Sigh.  I guess we'll just have to plod along.

Speaking of plodding along, it's time I came out of the closet.  No, not about THAT.  About the other thing.  The scandal that's been building since August.  Okay, I confess; it's all true.  After almost eighteen years of marriage, I'm seeing this guy.

Who's a therapist.

What, you expected me to suddenly morph into a suburban swinger?  You can take the fat white Lutheran chick out of North Dakota, but you can't--yeah. 

Anyway, he's a nice guy, but he's still a guy, so not a spark of romantic interest can possibly be kindled.  Although I do catch myself trying to mother him in a put-your-sweater-on, it's-cold-out sort of way.  No idea why.  It's the same way I treat my boys, I mean my lawyers. (They're all my boys.  Even if they're girls.)  Those who have children, mother.  Those who don't have children mother their cats and their therapists.  Sigmund Freud would have a field day with that one. But, sometimes a cat is just a cat.  

About six months ago, I was in a state.  Like Texas, only even more fucked up.  I still don't know what exactly caused it--something about writing and a mid-forties crisis and I'm not sure what all else--but my unique craniobiology guarantees I'll go through the occasional low period.  I don't know if that's what it was.  I do know that between my psychiatrist bugging me and Joan worrying about me, I finally got on the Internet and looked up psychologists until I found one that looked like a good match.  We met.  He was.  (Which is odd; usually Girls Are Supposed To See Girl Therapists, but I've never done a very good job of that--I relate better to dudes, I guess).  And I started feeling better pretty fast, without the aid of chemical interference (or, I should say, any more chemical interference than I've already got--man, this condition sucks sometimes.) 

So now it's six-ish months later and I feel better and I'm not sure what to do.  With this guy.  I mean, I'm positive I still need to be there every Wednesday at six.  There's no question about it, really. I sort of look forward all week to going there.  And when I get there, I actually relax for about an hour.  As Joan puts it, to quit now would be like saying, "Oh, yeah.  I'm fine, so I don't need meds anymore." (And then she'd throw me out of the house, which, considering that we haven't found a new one yet, would kind of suck.)  I just don't know where to go from here, what to say, without dredging up a lot of gunk from my sordid past that I don't really wanna even touch much less talk about.  (I subscribe to the three-sentence method of discussing past traumas: "Yes, that happened.  It was nasty.  Let's move on.") 

I dunno.  Is it possible to do therapy wrong?  Because if it is, I'd find a way.  I'm very good at finding lots of ways of doing something that will not work.  Maybe that explains my bad luck with real estate agents.  Or maybe some things in life are merely certain.  Death, taxes, real estate agents who don't listen to you. 

Well, it could be worse. 

It could be Arlington.

Bon Voyage

I hate it when the situation deteriorates before I even finish the blog post.

Because I had one, right, and it was a good one.  I was going to call it "And This Just Keeps Getting Better And Better," and it was going to be all about the further adventures of Ernie in the dark realm known as The Crawlspace.  Simply replacing all of the water pipes, you see, was not going to do the job.  Nor was the final bill from ServPro (which still hasn't shown up; they said it would be $250 just to come out to the house, but absolutely not a thing more than that except "We'll bill your insurance company," which they can do all day long, but our insurance company isn't gonna pay them).  No, we needed Ernie to locate the main sewer pipe and announce to us that We Had Another Problem.  We needed him to run a little camera down said sewer pipe so we could see what the problem was.  (I got the honor; Joan was at work.)  Uponst seeing said problem, I was going to have apoplexy, or something, and upon hearing how much the problem was going to be to fix, I was going to have apoplexy again.  Or maybe a stroke.  But forget all that. Just never mind, sweep it all back under the rug (or into the Crawlspace), and we'll just start from right this very moment.

We're selling the house.

Yes, Problem and all.  The Problem is going to set our price back a ways, and it's not worth what we paid for it back in '04 when we first ambled into Texas, and the odds of us getting any kind of profit out of it are just about zero, but that's okay.  We're fine with it.  We never set out to be real-estate magnates; we were just looking for a place to live.  And now that our place to live is looking like a used car that's requiring half again of its value every year just to keep it running, it's time to find another place to live. (It's not really that bad.  But it is a headache that I don't want.  Nor does Joan.  So:) Condo, subdivided house, apartment, whatever.

So we called up the realtor that helped us buy this place a little less than eight years ago,  Her name is Sondra Patton and that is her real name.  If you are ever of a mind to buy or sell property in the DFW area, most particularly Lakewood, you could do a lot worse than giving Ms. Patton a call.  In addition to being really smart, knowledgeable and honest, she's also very nice.  And, she can put up with, uh, me.  I was not the easiest person to put up with during the Great House Hunt of 2004, no matter what anybody says.  She came over with reams of paperwork and we started signing stuff.  The listing goes "live" on January 1.  Despite the ho-hum state of the Dallas house market, she thinks it'll sell pretty fast.  So we have to find a place to live in a hurry.

After our vacation, that is.  We're on an imaginary cruise on the S.S. Flamingo, with ports of call in Dallas, Fort Worth, Corsicana, Waxahatchie and maybe Austin.  It's the last cruise for this ship before she's decommissioned, so it's become kind of historical.  Ahoy, mateys, it's time for "It's a Wonderful Life," being broadcast on the widescreen on the Lido Deck.  Merry Christmas, everybody.

Mud, Sweat and Piers (and Beams)

It's a good thing I've been putting off writing the Christmas letter, because honestly, we just hadn't had near enough disasters yet.  I mean, I know there was the transmission repair, and the roof repair, and the water heater thing, and the washing machine thing, and Joan's emergency oral surgery, and then the--the thing I can't remember; actually there may be more than one thing I can't remember.  I mean it all ran together this year.  So, anyway, I was about to write the Christmas letter and I was going to use the oral surgery as kind of the topper, the thing, the "hey, how do you like them apples," and then, out of nowhere, we started to hear this weird little hissing sound.

It started out kind of soft, so soft we might have been imagining it.  It sounded a lot like the hose was on in the back yard, but it wasn't; I checked several times.  Then it got a little louder, and it started to sound like a gas leak, only it couldn't be a gas leak because we'd smell it, wouldn't we?  I mean, natural gas smells like rotten eggs that have been sitting around in a sea of farts for three or four days.  Hard to ignore that kind of smell.

So if it wasn't natural gas, it had to be water, right?  But where was it?  No puddles of water anywhere in the house.  No soft spots on the walls, no water oozing up through the floorboards.  No idea.  But it was getting louder.  Call Ernie, the plumber.  Like, immediately.

Ernie showed up an hour early, like he always does, startling heck out of Joan who wasn't quite awake yet.  He went through the house, listening to everything, looking at everything, wanting to see everything that was hooked up to water.  He agreed with us that nothing was running.  He said he would have to go under the house.

Under the house.  Oh God, I hate those words.  I picture swarms of gigantic six-leggers waiting to pounce on innocent people like me.  Even rats and snakes and spiders aren't as scary as the prospect of giant bugs.  But I didn't have to go down there.  Ernie had to go down there.  Luckily, Ernie is not a very big guy, because the trap door that goes under the house is not very big.  As it is, the door was underneath sheets and towels and a big plastic bin that was full of more sheets and towels.  But, we got it all out of the way and opened the trap door. And then Ernie said, "You guys got a lake down there." 

Yep.  It's the Night of the Broken Pipe. 

Ernie couldn't do anything until we got rid of the water, so we shut the water off and called ServPro.  They showed up, ran gigantic blue anaconda snakes through the house and sucked out the water-and plenty of mud, too, and some stuff that made a creepy rattling sound that I decided I really didn't want to know about.  (Rat bones?  Giant six-leggers?)  Insurance might or might not pay for this, oh joy, oh rapture.

Oh, and when I say insurance might or might not pay for this, I mean the suctioning-out of the water.  Not the repair of the actual pipe.  Since it didn't break inside the house and damage anything, we're S.O.L. on insurance coverage.  Not that I'm complaining; I do have flood insurance, but I don't wanna actually use it.  And I'm kinda fond of my laminate flooring and stuff.  So, yeah, fine that we have a pier-and-beam foundation, and not a slab, and that the water stayed in the crawl space with the rat bones and the six-leggers.

Ernie was back the next day with a backhoe and several shovels.  I got to miss this part because I was at work, but I was here today when the actual digging-up of the old pipe happened.  Turned out, our old pipe was in such crummy shape that the only thing to do was to replace it all.  If they just patched the leak, the water would have gone down the pipe and found another weak spot and we'd be back in this same quandary a week from now.  How much does it cost to replace an entire small house worth of pipe, you ask. Uh, about three thousand seven hundred sixty dollars and fifty-eight cents.  I have the number tattooed on my brain. 

Mind you, while all this has been going on, we haven't had any water at the house.  That's been all kinds of fun.  Filling the commode from five-gallon buckets purchased at Home Depot, brushing our teeth with bottled water bought in flats from Kroger.  We took showers at the gym.  Yes, I know normal people would go stay at a hotel.  But, we are not normal people, and see above re: three thousand seven hundred sixty dollars and fifty-eight cents.  Merry Christmas to you, too.

So, anyway, if you were thinking of sending us anything for the upcoming Christian holiday, money would be great.  As it is, I think we can pay Ernie but I'm not at all sure about ServPro.  I got a Christmas bonus at work last week.  It was a really nice one.  It's gone.  As for the rest--well, it's good to have friends.

In fact, it's so good to have friends that we're going to sell this house and move in with them, because it doesn't seem like we can't afford to maintain it anymore.  The house, that is.  Stay tuned.   

One Down, One to Go

Playing in the background: The soft gurgle of the kitty fountain
Meters swum today: Zilch. I overslept.

Okay, gang, I sent the first letter last night to Wild Child Publishing. They're a print-on-demand, mainly electronic press, and if I dare say so, they have some pretty nifty titles. Check them out here. So that's one letter outta here. Now I gotta find some agent to write to about Mindbender. I can't tell you how old that's getting. Well, I'd tell you how old it was getting if I were actually writing the letters but since I'm not, I can't tell you. Suffice to say, the story's been taking up valuable real estate in my head for a long time, and I've managed to dredge up some passing interest but nothing lasting.

Brief tangent: Last night at work one of my vendors, Kyle, came by to install some software. We were chatting as we're wont to do and he brought up that he was having trouble with his real estate agent. He's been trying to buy a house for some time now, and you'd think with as depressed as the real estate market is around here, he wouldn't have any trouble at all. Well, you'd be wrong. He spun his saga while my computer churned away in the background, busily digesting documents for our litigation-management software, and concluded with this: "What I really need is a real estate agent who doesn't yank me around."

Boy, did I ever have a phone number for him. When we moved to Dallas four years ago, we had less than 40 days to sell the place in Cali, buy a place in Dallas, pack, get the movers, move, turn everything on in the new place, and unpack. I climbed the Mount Everest of logistics on that one and I did not, repeat not, have time to fool around. We went through three real estate agents in about a week because the second they started jerking me around, I fired them. No argument, no discussion, just, "Thanks for everything, you're fired." Then I found Sondra, and she is a goddess, and my only regret was that she couldn't get the commission for the place we sold back in Cali because she certainly earned it.

So I gave her phone number to Kyle and it suddenly occurred to me that this is what I need. Someone who knows me who also knows someone in the publishing world who also knows someone who just happens to need a suspense/ thriller with a strong female protagonist and a politically charged story line for the 2009 rollout. That's it. That's all. I don't ask for much.

See, here's the problem with literary agents. Any human being on the planet probably knows less than a hundred people that he/she could call on the phone and talk to out of the blue at any given moment. For most of us it's less than that (I counted less than fifty). Now, it's the business of agents to know people in the publishing world, but I'll bet even the very top ones know fewer than, say, 45 people in the industry that they could call and say, "Hey, I've got this great new manuscript." Even among that 45, they still know that, "Okay, Bob doesn't read that genre, and Mildred does but there's no way she'd get this manuscript past that fundamentalist-whacko boss of hers, and Steve might be interested but I owe him too many favors, so I think I'll try JoAnn and Fred." So it's not just a matter of finding AN agent, it's a matter of finding the RIGHT agent, and the only thing that says whether this agent is right or not (at least at the beginning of the relationship) is, "Does this agent know some people who might be interested in what I wrote?" Or, for the agent, "Do I know anybody who might buy this thing?"

In short, luck plays no small part. I mean, I suppose if you can't write to save your life, you're out of the game anyway, but even if you're really good (and I think I am), you still have to land in the right place at the right time. Somebody rejecting your manuscript is probably not thinking, "This sucks." He or she is probably thinking, "I can't sell this." There's probably some middle ground where they think, "This is interesting but I don't like it enough to go to all the trouble of trying to sell it." I mean, they do this for a living, people. And it can't be easy.

So having said all that, I'm going to look for a literary agent who needs a Latin-themed thriller with political undertones and blah blah blah. Or a comedy about a time-traveling municipal accountant out to save the Tree of Life before all of reality comes unglued. If anybody knows anybody who knows anybody who needs something like that, send 'em my way, will you?

The rest of you, go read something.