As a teenager, I watched my mother and her friends experience the end of their marriages, in a time when women (especially these women) were defined by their wifehood. I watched their anger, and their fear, and their determination to make it anyway, with their heads held high. The lesson I learned from these women was two-fold: Everything changes, just when you're the most secure, and You can't count on anyone besides yourself.
I get to learn this over and over, don't I?
- Location:the apartment office
- Music:The roofers
Most of what I own is still in boxes, but I'm "here", where ever that may be. Waves.
G'bye, Ed McMahon. I guess I can stop waiting for you to deliver that check now.
I've had some of the luck![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
onegrapeshy wished me. (May it hold!) My "I have a mover" decided he couldn't do the move after all, and 7 days before I actually have to move, I found a mover. With three guys, this time. Hopefully better than the guys who moved me last fall. They're certainly expensive enough.
I'm taking Loosefur and Cowboy to the vet the morning of the house move to keep them from underfoot. They're not good travelers (C.J. Cherryh has some great tips on how to teach cats to road trip, but too late to embark on that now.)
My best friend will be here to help supervise and keep me from meltdown. (I will not turn down drugs, though, which I avoid otherwise.)
And I'll have my assistant for the office move, the next day (we're hoping to be done by early afternoon).
Fingers crossed. (Yeah for pagan antecedents).
- Location:almost gone
- Mood:
hopeful
. . . finally died a sputtering, choked and embarassing death. Mr. Mortgage Broker finally, finally, admitted he couldn't get me a mortgage. (I wouldn't mind so much if it weren't for that fact that he, like Ms. Mortgage Broker before him, enthusiastically assured me that a mortgage wouldn't be any problem at all!) I wasted so much time and energy on this quest, which I wouldn't have even started except I'd been told I had the financing.
Could be much, much worse. Looks like I have an apartment; I have movers; and I'm at least half-packed. I'll be outta here.
No, you won't be hearing much from me until after the red, white and blue holiday.
- Music:Groo Grux King, David Matthews Band
- 13:12 Working? Write it out now: I will not be distracted by intarwebs. #
This is a problem because he's a little too heavy for me to be carting back and forth to the vet. I hope my vet's amused.
Underwriter? Can you hear me? I have never, ever been evicted for non-payment of rent in my whole life. In order of importance, (Thank you Dr. Maslow) SHELTER, first. This bodes well for paying a mortgage, don't you think? Plus, I HATE HATE HATE to move. And no matter how I look on paper now, I always pay my bills. And letting me have this house will decrease my expenses, i.e. increase my income. Please?
Oh, so undignified to beg. I don't care.
In the meantime I was going to start an apartment search this morning but I don't feel so good and I slept into the afternoon. Tomorrow. Yeah, tomorrow.
- Music:dogs barking.
Paul Aaron Klein
6-4-1959 to 6-30-1981.
28 years, like yesterday.
Oh, yeah, got it bad.
I still don't know if I have financing for the house (the date this knowledge reputedly becomes available is increasingly remote with each request, so I've just stopped asking).
I have to move in 29 days.
The anniversary of my murdered best friend/lover's birthday is Thursday, and this year, for the first time, I put a memorial in the paper. Just two words.
Someone (I am hoping it was the incompent landlord's even less competent 20-something son, in lieu of other even less attractive alternatives) was running up and down the back stairs at 3 in the morning Saturday night/Sunday morning. He/she/it vigorously tried my door. Incompetent landlord denied all knowledge thereof.
I was very proud of myself for the uber-professional tone of the "I'm outta here" letter to the Incompetent Landlord. Despite not calling him everything but a child of god, the petty acts of attempted revenge have already started (it only took an hour). I've got to finish this fast because the internet will be the next thing to go . . .
Yes, I know, I know. First world angst, (almost) all of it.
- Mood:Morose
In the other, moi. Generally morose fifty year old, outweighing cat by factors of "many".
And who wins?
Wow, that hurt.
- 15:55 It's so cool to get emails from the President of the U.S. Even if it's one of millions. #
- 18:59 Why produce when you can catalogue? Yes, instead of packing the books, I finished - Library Thing! 6 hours later . . . #
- 09:33 How cool is this?! Using captchas to decipher unreadable text: bit.ly/5Cs3D #
Because (and couldn't you guess this?) I'm not. I really wish I was a happy person who found the good in every experience, or could laugh some of this stuff off. Yet, having the back door of the house left open by TIL or his wife 23 days out of 24? GRR. At the beginning of the month I tried locking the back door on my way out of the house in the am, and at night before I went to bed. No joy. It would be open or unlocked again when I got home, and they must get up in the middle of the night to let the dogs out - unlocked again in the earliest of the am. Yesterday, in an not-isolated example, TIL took off on his new scooter for hours; Wife 'o'TIL went upstairs for about the same amount of time (she'd been doing laundry) and they left not only the back door but the screen door open. The flies are insult to injury . . . . The only good news is that the chickens, which they are "free ranging" in the back yard, apparently do not climb stairs. Otherwise I'd have them to deal with too. . .. (but wouldn't they eat the flies?)
I'd found a house, I thought. A 50's ranch, needed a roof. I put an offer on it. Wait. Many documents. Wait. Offer accepted. Many more documents. Notify Mortgage company. Wait. Dig through many documents, fax and scan and email. Wait. Preapproval withdrawn. No financing for me. One sheet of paper, a letter: We're not giving you money, bitch. New mortgage broker, courtesy of realtor. Dig through many documents, fax and scan and email. Wait. Many documents. Signed and scanned. Wait. In meantime, housing inspection. Besides roof, house needs almost 5 thousand dollars of !surprise! repairs, most urgently. (Owners hadn't been keeping up on maintenance.) Signback to sellers, will split at 2.5 K. Wait. Sellers won't pony up any money. New, best offer: $1500 from sellers towards repairs. Wait. No. Sellers won't "give back" "any more" money. WTF? "give back", my ass! Nasty email back: 1500 or nothing. Waiting. Waiting for mortgage results (another week).
In the meantime I've given notice at my office building that I'm not renewing that lease, and I have no where to put an office here, so even if I could put up with the invitation to robbery, I HAVE TO MOVE no matter what.
i was in and out yesterday because I took Loosefur to the vet. He's one of those cats that throws up. (I thought, when I got him, that he was just reacting to the move; then I tried a whole bunch of things after his dental work to see if he'd stop. It had abated for a while, but then ramped back up to daily+.) I was talking to the sister I inherited him and Mr. Curiosity from, and she said, Oh, yes, he always throws up. (Insert stunned silence here. You couldn't have told me that BEFORE I took the cats?) The vet said he seems healthy, shot him up with pepcid, and recommends a three-day worming treatment for some obscure lives totally in the digestive system of cats parasite. 12 pound cat v. (mumble) pound woman for daily vet visits. Promises to be entertaining, for someone not me or Loosefur. Stay tuned.
Not all bad, though. I thoroughly blew off all other work yesterday consuming mass media. First up: I finished Kings and Assassins by Lane Roberts, Living with Ghosts by Keri Sperring, and Santa Olivia by Jacqueline Carey.
Kings is a sequel to Maledicte. The story continues, dark and angry. The foundling prince engages in politics. Angst isn't what I need right now, so I may reread both of these later to see if they resonate better when I'm not in such a mood. I don't think I can give it fair review right now.
Living with Ghosts was a pleasant surprise, and a more-than-respectable first novel. Paradoxically, it was also dark, but without losing sight of the underlying joy in life that motivates survival. A young (more-than) courtesan proves to be the turning point in a complicated magical working which weaves the citizens and gentry of three nations into a fight for survival.
And finally, Santa Olivia. I hadn't liked Ms. Carey's earlier non-Kushiel ventures, Banewreaker and Godslayer (they weren't exactly bad, just not good - enough), so I didn't have really high hopes for this one. Ms. Carey certainly exercises her writing chops here. This post-apocalyptic novel tells the story of a girl, orphaned young in a closed enclave controlled by the military. The daughter of a genetically modified soldier, her differences create problems for her survival, but eventually give her a way out. Bonus win: Lesbian love story treated sensitively! One reviewer referred to this as a take on comic books, but the story is more sophisticated and the characters far better drawn than that. An excellent book, worth reading.
Okay, I really need to be packing now. Wherever I'm going.
*no apologies for bad puns. "waiting in the weeds"
- Location:where I hope not to be, soon.
- Music:2009 Grammys
Allison Krause
William Schroeder
Jeffrey Miller
Is it hard to imagine a country so divided that it saw its own youth as the enemy?
So intolerant of discourse and protest that murder - by mere children themselves - became an accepted response?
Please take a moment today to think about those who have died or been murdered in the ongoing effort to ensure that contrary voices are heard. Kent State was not the first, or even the worst, of these.
- Music:Crosby, Stills and Nash
You'll be shocked, SHOCKED, I tell you, to hear that I came home yesterday at 8 p.m. to find the back door of the house - what? Yes! standing WIDE open. Not a person in evidence. Not even a barking dog to keep off the hoodlums.
Maybe Cowboy/Chaplin the cat can take care of it. He's on his way to a new moniker: "The cat curiosity's going to kill!" This 12 pound cat tried to jump on the 1/4 inch lintel of my back door, with predictable results. I was laughing so hard I almost couldn't rescue him.
This week included two rounds of "how about this house?". No joy so far. If I do manage to snag a house, my poor realtor will have earned about 8 cents per hour. I'm putting in another offer and then if that doesn't work I think I'm just going to find an apartment and a doctor to give me tranquilizers.
The problem is that in my very limited price range, I seem to have a choice between 'OMG I wouldn't let a rat live in this house! and I have to replace the furnace, waterproof the basement, replace the windows, (sometimes replace all of the plumbing, which has been stolen), replace the hot water heater, replace the roof, and then do all of the cosmetic work. Sometimes I get a bonus greasepit! I have to replace the kitchen too. '
Or I find a house that looks pretty good, priced at or near my top point, but then when I get in and look at it, I have to (you guessed it) replace the furnace, waterproof the basement, and/or replace the windows, and/or replace the roof and gutters, and then do all of the cosmetic work. So I put in an offer 20K below asking just so I can do the work (and because many of these houses really aren't, right now, worth asking price). And the offers predictably get refused (my realtor's taken to calling the listing agent with a verbal just to see if it's worth our time to write up the offer. Lots of "Heck, no! They turned down a much higher offer!")
In any event, I did pack two boxes of books today, checking each volume to make sure it was in my Librarything. Can I say, "time consuming"? Now I'm going to set off the smoke alarm, oops, I mean broil some meat for tonite (and for salad tomorrow), and eat dinner while watching Dollhouse. Later, the Amazing Race, and ice cream (hey, it was on sale!). Then early to bed for a long, long week ahead.
Oh, but in the best of worlds, I got an extended visit with Bren Cameron yesterday! A really well-done installment of Foreigner, with action, character development, and bonus! political maneuvering.
- Location:Not anywhere I want to be.
- Music:Grammy Nominees 2009
I might be putting an offer on a house today. Not that my realtor thinks I'll get it. Sigh. It's really a nice house, but fixed up is going to be worth about 20K more than I have. That means that my best offer of mortgage, downpayment and fix up money is below other expected bids. Plus I'd have to do a bucketload of work myself (a huge room, two layers of wallpaper; dead, dead carpets removed, cleaning.)
This is after a lovely Sunday on which my landlord left the back door of the house open all day, and then bitched when I pointed out the security problem inherent in an unattended door (and who was in the first line of fire/acquisition)(my unit's back door is a hollow core - anybody could just walk through the thing.). He retaliated by locking my door while I was doing laundry. How grownup can we get?
And lovely Sunday was preceeded by noisy, noisy first Saturday night of hot weather in an urban neighborhood. Parties puncuated by random gunshot, with a bass line laid down by the guys cruising slowly past in beefed up beaters.
At least the cats have been entertained by the open windows.
The house hunt continues. Where's Suzanne Whang when you need her?
Instead I have about 6 houses without everything (sometimes most things) on my want list, all of which are either listed at prices way out of my range or which need extensive repair (foundation, roofs, drywalling) and/or lack all appliances, or all three; complicated by intransigent and/or way too busy realtors.
If one more person says to me, "Oh, it's a great time to buy a house, there are all those foreclosure bargains!" I'm going to lock them in one of the scarier versions of those "bargains" - for example, the otherwise cute little house I saw earlier this week. The owners walked away probably late last summer or early fall. They turned off all of the utilities. Over the harsh Cleveland winter, two pipes burst, creating a smelly, unholy mess. And I mean horribly odorous. The dried soup of drywall and mold was so bad that I couldn't even stay to look at the bedrooms.
And - the power of marketing! - this house is described as "delightful, with new hardwood* floors in living and dining room, with a parklike backyard" and priced as though it were pristine . . (*the "hardwood" is actually an inexpensive laminate. Tell me you didn't know the difference. The "parklike" backyard was barely big enough for a picnic table, rutted with tree roots and lacking grass.) There is 'puffery', and then there's real estate descriptions. Lies, lies, and damned lies.
Not to mention all of the houses I saw missing copper pipe, or with paint peeling right off of the drywall. . . I know my limits. My goal is to get housing, not to go into the rehab business.
And the "intransigent and/or way too busy realtors" doesn't include my own realtor. She's quite the trooper, but I'm worried I broke her.
I'm off to a wedding later, then housework. Or packing. Or slobbery.
- 08:37 Breakfasted, spent too much time reading news and flists. Time for work. #
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