Checkin' In

It was kindly pointed out to me the other day by one of my faithful readers that I have been negligent in my blog duties of late and have therefore failed to provide needed procrastination for those that might partake of my ramblings while at work. I didn't mean to be neglectful. It's just that I kind of had this idea that I wasn't going to blog again until I could jump up and down and scream, "we've sold our house," which I cannot yet do. And I guess I kind of thought that if I didn't blog about selling my house, maybe it would sell. You know, I was trying not to jinx things. Alas, 'tis not the season to try to sell a house.
In the meantime however, we have officially acquired another house, because hey, if you can't get rid of one, you might as well have two. I have been feeling a little sorry and worried for us as of late because of the house situation. But then, on Friday morning I heard the Story Core segment on NPR. The segment featured two men who worked as sanitation workers and were telling about their efforts to organize in the '60's and about hearing Martin Luther King, Jr. give his final sermon. One of the men talked about awful working conditions were, how he'd have maggots in his shoes when he got off work. He also talked about how he'd wake-up in the morning and think, "I ain't going to work today, I ain't going." But then he'd see his kids and he knew he had to go to feed his family--he had no options. And in that moment, I decided that compared to that man's life, I have no problems. I've a got a good job. Moses has a good job. Our biggest worry right now is being stuck with two houses. Two houses that, if we are somewhat careful, we can make the mortgage payments for every month. Somewhat careful meaning paying attention to spending, not eating out much, and not traveling. Not really much in the way of a sacrifice there. And, we made the conscious decision to put ourselves in this particular hole anyway. We knew when we made the offer on the Flagstaff house that we might have two mortgages for a while and we decided it was worth the risk. So really, it's time for me to shut down the negative worry machine and quit complaining and live with this decision until this house sells or we have renters. Because either way we'll be fine and there are no maggots anywhere in either scenario, and for that I am grateful.
On a related note, we moved just about everything we own up to Flagstaff this weekend. Our new house looks much better (to me anyway) full of our junk rather than full of somebody else's. We had lots of Flagstaff friends come to help, received invitations for dinner and hiking in the upcoming weeks, and already have visits planned from my brother and parents. I've been having this feeling the last few weeks that after we moved to Flagstaff, I'd be stuck my little home office by myself and cut off from the world (and freezing cold). But after this weekend, I'm feeling a lot more positive about re-connecting with old friends and seeing a lot more of my family (although I still think I'm going to freeze). Next week, we move the last bits of our stuff and we'll be in Flagstaff for good.



We are going home, and I am glad.

The Money Shot

After we bought this house, we converted a large family room at the rear of the house into the master bedroom and turned a small bedroom between the (new) master bedroom and a bathroom into a dressing room/walk-in closet. We thought this was a brilliant idea. However, neither the real estate agent or the the professional photographer who did the virtual tour has included a photo of this dressing room /closet on the web ad. So here it is:


Would you consider that a selling point if you were shopping for houses? Or do I just have an inflated sense of my and Moses's cleverness? Regardless, now that there are some photos of this very clever use of space somewhere on the web, I feel better.

New Plan

So, it appears the group project was....well....not as much of a success as I was hoping it would be. We put our house on the market two weeks ago and have not received an offer. *sigh*
However, we went on a hunting expedition in Flagstaff this past weekend and found a house. Yay! But it's going to be pretty hard to pay for until the Tucson house sells. Boo! Here's the story, because of course you need to know the details: A former co-worker of my mom has been plotting a move to Prescott for quite awhile now. When she heard we were looking to move back to Flag, she called my mom and said we should come look at her house. So we did. And it's a great house in exactly the neighborhood we hoped to live in. We made and offer yesterday, they countered today, and we're taking the counter-offer. The house has three bedrooms, two and half baths (or as Garion remarked, "a potty for each of us!"), a nice living room, a family room, and an enclosed sun porch in the backyard. I will be able to walk Garion to his new preschool (which we also found this weekend) and Moses will be able to cycle to work. The only drawbacks are that the backyard is small and the house is covered in wallpaper. (I swore when we started looking at houses that I would NOT buy a house with wallpaper, so of course that's exactly what we're buying, and by covered I mean I don't think there's a room in the whole house that doesn't have wallpaper). All in all, the purchase of this house has a nice, karmic feel to it.
Which leads me to speculate that perhaps I didn't to the visualization/universe bending thing, right and maybe the universe misunderstood what I was after? Maybe the universe thought "Kerry and Moses need to find a new house in their price range in two weeks" when what I really meant was "I need to sell my current home for a decent price in two weeks"? Maybe I just had too much of my energy focused on the new digs? Or maybe I asked and the universe just said no. I don't know. So, I'm proposing that we re-set the group visualization project deadline and re-double our efforts.
New Plan: visualize us getting an offer (meaning we SELL and someone else BUYS) on our house by February 14th. More specifically, I think that we should visualize some nice happy family traipsing through my house, falling madly in love with it, and proposing to it just in time for Valentine's Day.