Who knew?

So, it turns out that buying a house involves a lot more than writing a check and moving. Yeah, can you believe it? It takes, like, work and thinking and time and stuff. And you know, sometimes there's only so much work and thinking I can take in one single week. By the time we get to the closing table, we'll be so confused, exhausted, and frazzled that we'd probably sign off on a $5,000 breathing fee without noticing, or caring. In fact, we'd probably find some way to justify it: "A breathing fee? Well, we DO like air, after all."

In addition to trading in unknown piles of money for pretty kitchen counter tops and a mud room the size of Texas, we've lost any spare time we may have thought we had at one time before two weeks ago. I have the best intentions of sitting down to write every evening, but after restoring the house to "show" condition, writhing in agony over financing decisions that just won't make themselves already, and researching time travel to determine how best to wake up after all the money has been spent and all the thinking has been done and all the heavy lifting is over, I'm barely capable of keeping my eyes open, let alone typing, let alone thinking a coherent and complete sentence.

Speaking of finishing a thought, those two paragraphs you just read have been sitting in draft form for THREE DAYS. I've added a paragraph here and there when I have ten unused minutes at work, but when I go back and re-read, I start dry-heaving in disgust and end up deleting whatever crap it was that I just added, saving the whole thing as draft, AGAIN, and going back to pretending there is no blog, there is no "sit down and write" goal, there is only work and keeping a house show-ready. As it turns out, those two things have quite effectively taken up my time, and by "taken up my time" I mean taken over my entire life. Kids? What kids? Are those the little beings whose encrusted dinner mess I'm frantically cleaning off the dining room table and floor every night? They must also be the ones whose sharp, tiny legos I step on right before I launch into my red-faced, foot-holding, profanity-screaming sessions. Yeah, I think I remember the good ol' days when I used to spend my time telling them to stop throwing things down the stairs as opposed to scrubbing baseboards and ceiling fans.

Maybe it's just the recent house buying excitement warping my perception of time, but I get the feeling I'm entering into a phase of life that will require one of two things: sleeplessness or no more writing. So far when given the choice of sleep vs. something else, something else has always been the loser. So, given the fact that it's taken me three days just to come up with a post that says, "buying a house takes time" and "I'm brain dead and uncreative," I'm thinking my goal of posting here at least once a week is becoming more and more unrealistic. Maybe I'm wrong, and I hope I am, because when I'm not writing here, I'm not writing at all, and I think for me that's a bad thing. I'd like to think work would start to calm down, or we'd find a comfortable groove for the next six weeks (before we move out of the show-ready house and into the house nobody else will set eyes on until we've got boxes unpacked, hopefully by next Christmas), but I'd also like to think I could go through life consuming potato flautas, nachos, and margaritas every night with no negative repercussions, so I'm not exactly getting my hopes up.