Holy Mole-y

A few months ago I made reference to a night when we found some adorably tiny baby rabbits in our back yard. We briefly considered the fact that they could be moles -- after all, we never knew rabbits could have such short ears, even as babies, not to mention the fact that they were burrowed in their soft, mewing cuteness into a hole in the ground, one that might have been connected to a system of tunnels under the suspiciously soft and lumpy soil of our yard. But that flash of reality we allowed ourselves to consider was quickly extinguished when we remembered that our back yard is just a formality, not something we actually use like normal people, and also we needed to go open a bottle of wine: "I'm sure they're just rabbits. Their ears are small because they're babies. There are no tunnels, that's crazy! We just need to take better of our grass. I'm sure these holes out here are entirely related to the fact that we haven't fertilized. So it's settled. Now, Pinot or Cabernet?"

When we put the house on the market, the realtor told us we would probably have better luck selling the place if we took the time to remove from our back yard the two or three dozen faded, broken plastic walkers and lawnmowers and sandbox toys that haven't been touched in three years so it wouldn't look quite so much like a garbage dump. People apparently don't like to purchase homes with garbage dumps in the back yard. (People are so picky and demanding, GAH!) When I walked out there to start gathering it all up, I thought it felt pretty weird walking across the grass. Hmm, yes, I'm pretty sure my shoes didn't used to sink six inches into the ground out here. I could be wrong, but I don't think so.

Yeah, we have moles. I'm surprised they haven't popped up through the wood floors in the house by now, to be honest. The guy who came to "get rid" of them (I like to imagine he "gets rid" of them by luring them out with lots of yummy mole food, maybe some nice field greens or shallots thrown in for extra enticement) placed bright orange flags everywhere he "treated" the yard. Being the deceptive and sneaky homeowners that we are, we removed all the flags before two potential buyers walked through yesterday. Oh, WHAT?! We're paying for all three of the gourmet field green "treatments". The moles will have moved to a new mole condo in Florida by the time the house sells. I just thought it might be a little unsettling for someone to look out the back door and find a sea of orange flags flapping in the breeze, harbingers of doom that say eerily, moles and rabbits are not the same thing.

Eustress

Cliche thought of the moment: Everything changes so fast.


Seriously, though. You're going along, content to drop a complaint about boredom or fatigue every few days, whining here and there about the hum drum nature of your life, comfortable in your spoiled, western guilt over complaining about a life 90% of the world will never have the luxury of pretending to scoff at. And then all of a sudden, you look up and realize that all of those fake complaints are becoming null and void, sinking into oblivion under the weight of - what's this? - a lot of really good, exciting things happening all at once. It all happens so quickly and feels so unreal that you're completely in the thick of major life changes before you realize that your heart seems to be a lot more woodpecker-like than usual. You wonder, "Self, what is wrong? Everything is going right ALL AT THE SAME TIME!" You fight off paranoia and the temptation to seek out the inevitable tragedy sure to befall you as soon as the universe lulls you into a false sense of security regarding the recent and sudden set of unbelievably good and exciting things happening to you: "What will it be that finally ruins everything, self? A fire? A heart attack? A kidnapping? Cancer?" You talk to yourself like Annette Benning in American Beauty, but instead of "I will sell this house today" (which would be entirely appropriate), your mantra is, "I will not mentally sabotage myself with paranoia." But you can't help it. You've grown so accustomed to defending yourself against threatening changes, bad changes, changes requiring rapid response and slashing of resources, be they financial, emotional, logistical, that good changes don't compute. Your body and mind respond with the same fight-or-flight mechanism they've spent years perfecting.

Kid stories of the moment: Too numerous to recount, but I'll try.

Yesterday after Quinn's nap, he was incensed that John had dared to close the laptop and put away the mouse while tidying up in preparation for someone to look at our house. He remedied the situation by re-opening the laptop, finding the mouse, hooking it up to the laptop correctly, and resuming whatever game he had been playing on pbskids.org before being so rudely interrupted for a nap. I live with this not-quite-four-year-old kid, and yet I still find it patently unnatural that I'm telling a story about him 1.) playing an online game 2.) hooking everything back up correctly in his huffy, "the-world-burdens-me" frustration after his nap.


During dinner last night, Bryce informed me that the way he knew the grapes on his plate were clean was that he himself had washed them a day or two before: "They looked thilthy," he stated with his clear and simultaneously incorrect pronunciation of the word filthy, "so I decided to wash them." I beamed in pride at his attempt at maturity, and five minutes later when we told him to eat one single black-eyed pea, he gingerly, with his front teeth, bit off half of one, sloshed the nearby glass of water to his lips while his eyes filled with tears of disgust and near-nausea, choked dramatically, and then yelled, sputtering, with his arms flailing about his head in a final black-eyed pea-related decree, "I told you I do NOT like black-eyed peas. I will NEVER. Eat them! Again! They are disgusting and I might THROW UP."

Final thought of the day: Just a wafer thin mint.

John and I went to the Cheesecake Factory over the weekend to celebrate my birthday. Avocado eggrolls + cheesecake + wine = no more stress. In theory that sounds great, but it's really because your entire body's focus is on surviving the impending Monty Python explosion. Whatever works, though. Whatever works.

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.

The Latest from the Fringe

Watch out, because some day he's going to be in authority.
Just as I'd finished getting ready for work and had sat down to check e-mail this morning, I heard some muffled knocking at the bedroom door. I knew it was Bryce, since Quinn just barges confidently in regardless of the time of day or level of fatigue. I opened the door, and Bryce stood there, holding his wadded blanket under his chin and squinting as his eyes adjusted to the lights in my room. Before I could even speak, he said, "Can I tell you a story about me and Connor?" I ushered him into the room and he kept talking. "At lunch, he really infuriates me? And when the teachers clap to tell us how long we have left at lunch, we're all supposed to clap with them like this, CLAP-CLAP-clapclapclap, but Connor just says BOP-BOP-bopbopbop instead of clapping." John walked in from the gym and I told him about Connor "infuriating" Bryce, and Bryce began to re-tell the story while John and I tried to giggle and shake our heads in disbelief as subtly as possible.

As much as I've talked about his intensity and his constant struggle for power, it doesn't seem like I would ever call Bryce a rule-follower, but he definitely is. It drives him absolutely insane if he knows there are clear expectations for a group of people, and certain individuals choose not to meet them. We are supposed to clap with the teachers, NOT SAY BOP! The other night on the way to his piano lesson, a motorcycle passed us right before Bryce started a 20-minute monologue from the back seat consisting of variations on THOSE PEOPLE AREN'T WEARING HELMETS! THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO BE WEARING HELMETS. IF THEY WERE TO FALL OFF THE MOTORCYCLE THEY WOULD BE HURT AND WOULD HAVE TO GO TO THE HOSPITAL BECAUSE CONCRETE IS HARD! I DON'T THINK THEY SHOULD BE RIDING THAT MOTORCYCLE WITHOUT HELMETS ON BECAUSE THEY AREN'T SAFE!

We are masochists.
Last Saturday, as John and I walked through a newly built house for sale, the realtor representing the builder asked, in that prodding, unavoidable way, "how long have you been looking for a new house?"

"Seven years," I said seriously. She looked at me with a little fear and uncertainty, like she wasn't sure how to continue a conversation with a psycho. She did anyway. "Well, what is your motivation for looking for a new house?"

I kept walking and looking around. "We need more space. We need a better layout. JOHN! OHMYGODHAVEYOUSEENTHISLAUNDRYROOMINHERE? AND THE MASTER CLOSET IS THE SIZE OF A FOOTBALL FIELD!" She ran out of the house at that point, but only after throwing her business card at me. I'm sure she thought doing business with us over the phone would be fairly safe.

Meanwhile, between keeping Quinn from swinging on the chandelier in the dining room and keeping Bryce from climbing on the fire place, John was busy measuring the study and drooling over the size of the pantry in the kitchen. There is so much closet space that Hide and Seek in this house could last for hours. Given that fact, if we lived there, I might actually find some time to read again.

We put in an offer and haggled for a few days before we settled on a price. Aren't those games fun?!

--Ten dollars!
--Fifteen dollars!
--Okay, Eleven Fifty plus you have to add a phone jack and bring a dollar to closing.
--Fifteen and we'll add the phone jack and bring the dollar.
--Sigh. Twelve, no dollar at closing, but we still want the phone jack.
--Thirteen dollars and the phone jack.
--If we say okay does the madness end here?

So, we're going to buy our "dream" house. Of course, there is one tiny detail we have to address first. It's just a minor thing, really; it probably won't affect our lives at all. We have. To sell. Our house. The one full of tiny sharp objects strewn everywhere by three-foot-tall dictators. Also the one with the room occupied by a sullen, pack rat teenager.

Oh god.

What horror have we brought upon ourselves?

Don't worry. I'm sure it will be documented thoroughly for your "better them than me" pleasure. Glad we can help.

Somebody pray to the real estate gods for us. Maybe sacrifice a couch or something, too. We need everything we can get over here. Seriously.