Wednesday, January 24, 2007

packing it up, but not in. Yet.

This has been a slightly odd day. It keeps snowing when I don't expect it to -- five minutes before we walked out the door this morning, big fat flakes started drifting down. I believe they stopped 15 minutes later. False alarm.

Ten minutes from Lizzy's day care, I realize that I forgot her shoes. AGAIN. Crap. And I didn't put a spare pair in her cubby at school, like I vowed to do the last time this happened. So she's running around in socks today. Thanks to her incompetent mother.

Shortly thereafter, I stood at the cash register at Starbucks, and a little movement along the top of the biscotti on the counter caught my eye. Turns out, it was a roach. I flicked it on the floor and stomped on it, which mightily startled one of the employees. I'm gonna bet it's not the first one they've seen in there. Yuk.

I know I've been packing too long, because I had trouble getting the lid to fit on the Tupperware container that held my lunch this morning, and my first impulse wasn't to find the lid that fit -- it was to use packing tape to fasten the darned thing on. Which worked pretty well, by the way. Kinda hard to penetrate once lunchtime rolled around, but no food escaped before then for sure.

This has been a challenging week. Poor Matt is staying up really late every night -- for instance, 2 a.m. last night -- working on some job-saving (we hope) proposal for work. He says he's been getting A LOT more respect there this past week, now that word has gotten out that some jobs probably will be disappearing soon. And he'll be in on that decision-making process. Nothing like a healthy fear for one's salary to get one to actually DO SOME WORK occasionally. (deep breath)

Yeah, this post is about as random as my thought processes feel right now. Too many little details floating around in my head. "Have I canceled the cable?" "Have I set up new cable?" "Which utilities need to stay on, and which need to be turned off?" "Who needs to know about our new address?"
But my daughter's shoes? Yeah. Not as important, apparently.

The one legitimate thing that I'm stressing about right now is the prospect of selling our soon-to-be-old house. I'm getting some pressure from Matt and our mortgage lady to 'consider' renting. Renting is a bad word, as far as I'm concerned. Not that I am against renting! I LOVE being the renter. I would rather be renting right now, especially considering the market, than dealing with a house that is going to lose us a lot of money. Just how much, is the only question mark. IF we can sell it at all... It's a fine house, but I don't know how many folks are clamoring to live in Manassas. Perhaps I'm being too faithless. That's probable.
I just don't want to own, or partially own, THREE properties. To be responsible for three sets of utilities. Etc. I want to make a clean break. I don't want to hope the market gets better. I don't want to have to worry about the market at all. And I've seen how renters have torn things up at other places in our neighborhood, and elsewhere. Our house is pretty nice right now. I don't want to have to inherit it back after renters have defaulted on a few months of payment, and punched holes in the wall. My peace of mind is worth some money, I figure. But just how much ... and where to find it. That part gets tricky.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous6:15 PM EST

    Snow. So odd to see that in print. I know there are places in the world that have snow. I've just never lived in those parts of the world for very long. Here in California, the irises in our planter box are just starting to bloom. They'll be gone long before Easter. Of course we're only two hours from Lake Tahoe, where it snows quite a bit, but it seems so far removed from my life.

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  2. I wouldn't want to be a landlord either. It just sounds... complicated. And, in other news, we actually had snow here on Monday. Not in Phoenix proper, but up on the higher hillsides. Isn't that something?

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