One is cuter than the last…

According to Christi Stephens, the very nice Coldwell Banker agent with whom we toured houses yesterderday, most people see 6-8 houses in a day of looking. If you’ve never gone through this process, you may not understand how tiring it can be. You drive from house to house, get out, wander through, and, if you like the place, spend several minutes picking it apart. “I’d replace the carpeting,” you muse aloud (if the owner isn’t home, and sotto voce if she is). “That swag curtain simply has to go.” And usually, also, no matter how much you’ve researched and culled your list of prospectives, there are a couple that sound promising, and turn out to be utter trash.

Knowing all of the above, you will have a better understanding of the level of exhaustion and overwhelmedness that Fuzzy and I had last night upon returning to our hotel (which, yes, we got lost trying to find, again). After all, we had barely slept the night before, and then had been up at six, gotten lost getting to Coldwell Banker (our own fault – we listened to the directions from the concierge instead of following our instincts), and I was temperamental from female stuff. And then, we saw something like a thousand houses yesterday…or maybe it was thirteen. Either way, it was considerably more than six or eight. And each one was cuter than the last.

I cannot guarantee that the following is in order. But here are the highlights.

1. A 3-bedroom house that was very nice, but had no yard. And since it also was a true 3-bedroom, was too small.
2. 4549 Jenning Drive, Plano – This is a sweet house. You can tell when you walk in that the owners love the house. It’s a 2-story traditional house. The floors on the first floor are mostly tile or pergo, and the upstairs is carpeted. Master bedroom has his&her closets separated by a mini-entertainment center designed for maximum comfort while watching tv from bed. Pool was pretty, but needs serious cleaning. There’s a lot of wood paneling, and I was afraid the rooms would feel dark, but they did not. Upstairs, there are three bedrooms, and 2nd full bath, as well as a central living area. For most of the day, this was to remain our number-one house, whenever Christi asked us to rank them.
3. Around the corner, was a vacant single-story on Nevada. The rooms were huge, and this was our number two for a while. The master bedroom was in the front though, and I didn’t like that, and some of the rooms were too big, while the secondary bedrooms were practically cubicles.
4. Next was an ultra modern house in a sea of neo-traditional houses. This is the one on teakwood that we pointed some of you toward. I knew within two seconds of walking in that the owners were Asian – black marble fire place, sleek track lighting, upstairs one of the bedrooms as big enough to be a second master, and both bathrooms were as big as small bedrooms. It was extremely monochromatic, with brush-painted tone-on-tone walls, and it was nice, if oddly misplaced, but the plumbing seemed to be done on the cheap, and we got an ‘off’ vibe from it.
5. Cardinal Drive was a house that I’d wanted to see. People I’d shown it to on the net had agreed with my description of it as retro-hunting lodge, but in person, it was more cottage than cabin. Very cute. Nice flow. The rooms all formed double figure eights, but the back yard was too much pool and not enough yard (yes, there was a dog run, but still), so while we kept it at a strong #2 for the next while, we ultimately downgraded it.
6. Next up, two huge tall houses, one on Grinelle and one on Nottingham. The first had plastic gerbera daises set into the ground. It was nice, but too much open space that served no purpose, while the rooms were not that big. Friendly dog, though. Nottingham was vacant, sponge-painted in Tuscan gold, a warm glowy color I love. It was a livable house, and we ranked it behind Cardinal.
7. We next moved on to a development called Stoneridge Ranch, a planned community with HOA dues of $600/year, that get you into the golf club, beach club (white sand and a man-made lagoon), and parks, including a lake with paddleboats. The country club is a separate membership. The first house in this neighborhood was a single-story 3 bedroom, with a see-through fireplace that flipped to a game room as big as the living room! It was lovely, but not our style (I could see my parents living in it, or the Golden Girls).
8. But the next house WAS our style, and was another of our picks – 209 Ledgenest Drive. Also in Stonebridge Ranch, this house is one of two that we’re waffling over. The entire first floor is white ceramic tile. The formal dining room is painted slate blue. The kitchen is cobalt. The master bedroom is sea-greenish-blue, and all are on the first floor. The yard is nice, with enough room for the dogs, barely. The pool cleaner was flipped over in the water, and kept attacking us – but it felt good because by that time, the day had gotten quite toasty. We could be very happy in it.
9. Wren Cove was not our pick, but was another in Stonebridge Ranch. A FSBO, this is my favorite from yesterday. It’s only got three bedrooms, but there’s a game room, formal living room, and formal dining room, and the yard is perfect. PERFECT. The pool and deck are off the kitchen, and then the yard circles around the deck, which has terraced planters at the back. There’s enough room for a play structure and still a ton of green space. Even though this house might be a bit smaller than we’d dreamed, it’s incredibly livable. I love it. (It’s my number one, and Fuzzy’s number two. Ledgenest is his one, and my two.)
10. Another one I can’t remember the name of. It’s not in Stonebridge Ranch, but ElDorado. It was lovely, if a teeny bit beyond the price we’d agreed on. And I liked it, but not as much as the previous two.

By the end of the tour, we were hot, sweaty, and exhausted. We said goodbye to Christi, and then made our way back toward the hotel, pausing, not for the coffee everyone expected of me, but for gelato. Fuzzy had raspberry and some variety of chocolate; I had violet and peach. Yes. Violet. It was good.

This morning, we’re off, as soon as Fuzzy gets showered, to Ft Worth and Arlington, for more houses. Aieeee!

5:06 AM

It’s not even dawn here, but I can’t sleep. The mattress is fine, but the pillows are too small surface-area-wise, and while they’re thick enough, they’re about as firm as a layer of poly-fill batting wrapped around a brick. I woke up hot, made Fuzzy lower the A/C, and still couldn’t sleep, and the Actifed I took at 1:00 AM, before we finally went to bed, neither helped my sniffles nor made me drowsy, so here I sit dehydrated, achy, cramp-y (because we can’t have a trip without Aunt Flo coming along), and too wired to sleep. However, the hotel book says there’s a café in the lobby that serves Starbucks stuff, and it opens in half an hour. Things are looking up.

We left yesterday with plenty of time to get to the airport without having to rush. I wore thongs (as in flip-flops) as shoes, and packed my Tevas, because thongs are easiest to deal with at security. I was wired then, too, and babbly, which, I’m sure drove Jeremy and Fuzzy nuts, because both were in reading mode. Even though the act of sitting in a plane to get somewhere is a barbaric way to travel (efficient, but still barbaric), plane flights still make me giddy with delight. Travel is FUN. Experiencing new places is FUN. But anyway, back to the thongs. Despite having been up since 6:30 AM PDT when we got to the airport around one, I was still in giddy seven-year-old mode, so having to pad through security barefoot struck me as amusing. Cuz, you know, rubber flip-flops are a threat but Fuzzy’s Colorado hiking sneakers (which he did not have to remove) are not. Perhaps the reality is that the guy staffing the sensor has a fetish for women’s naked feet.

But anyway, we didn’t have to rush, and enjoyed mocking the guy who arrived at 1:00 for a 1:30 flight and was lectured on heightened security (which, you know, has only been the case for THREE YEARS now, so I can see why it might be shocking), and arriving at the airport with enough time. Way to lecture, American Airlines. We got water and chocolate, and I picked up a Nora Roberts paperback, breaking my self-imposed book-buying moratorium out of necessity – I’d finished my last Darkover novel in the bathroom an hour earlier. And we sat at our gate, until, just before our boarding call should have been announced, they said there was an equipment failure, and they GAVE OUR PLANE to the earlier Dallas Flight, and made us wait for a new one, bumping our 3:21 wheels-up to 4:30. Now, we could have joined the rush of people demanding to be moved to the flight that was leaving as soon as they could manage it, but we didn’t have a connection, so saw no reason to. Our only plans for the night were “pick up car, eat dinner, sleep” and an hour wasn’t going to affect that in the least.

Of course, at 3:50, they bumped us back to 4:50 take-off, but by then it was too late to care. And it worked in our favor, because so many people had opted to be re-routed in order to make connections, that our flight, which was originally full, wound up being only about 2/3 full, which meant we had a whole row to ourselves. More room is NEVER a bad thing.

We finally got on the plane around 4:45, and then they changed the flight path twice to avoid flying directly through storms. The result of this was that as we cruised through the deepening twilight over New Mexico, and later Amarillo, TX, on approach to DFW, we skirted around three or four different lightning storms, and I put my book away, turned off the work light, and enjoyed the light show.

If you’re not squeamish about flying, being on a plane during a lighting storm is really amazing. It’s nothing like the fingers of light, or gentle flashes of light, that you see from the ground. Last night, we flew OVER a fluffy cloud formation that had lightning inside. Imagine a cloudy snow-globe lit from the inside with pinkish yellow light surges that formed highlights and lowlights in the clouds, and that’s what it looked like. As if the most delicately tinted cotton candy was being lit from within. I thought of Jeremy, and a recent conversation we had about summer storms in the Midwest, as I stared out the window. At one point, I considered dragging out the camera, but even in night-shot mode, the angle necessary would have required the window of the plane to be open. Oh, well.

We finally landed at 10 PM local time, and while I can’t complain about the brief trek to baggage claim, I have to do some obligatory whining about the wait for baggage to start coming out of the chute. I guess the gorilla was asleep. (Seriously, I know that the real reason for the delay is that our late arrival meant that we’d missed every connecting flight OUT of DFW. As DFW was our final destination, this didn’t affect us, but, anyone going on to anywhere except Tulsa, last night, had to have their baggage re-routed to a flight the next morning, and then the Tulsa baggage had to be loaded onto that plane, first. But at 10PM, when you haven’t had anything to eat all day but a machiatto, two glasses of juice, half a liter of water and a chocolate bar, whining is allowed.)

While waiting for our single bag to appear on the carousel (it was one of the first two, at least) we discovered that our hotel is actually in the Dallas airport. As in ATTACHED to the very terminal in which we were standing. We could have walked to it, but I’d arranged for a car rental, so we spent another 40 minutes walking to the shuttle, riding it to the rental car center, doing paperwork, picking a car (we’re driving around in a gold Impala this weekend. It’s so QUIET), and then, because in my food-deprived state I mis-interpreted the directions that Qiana the Alamo agent had kindly provided, getting lost and un-lost getting to the hotel, and seeing quite a lot of the backstage of DFW in the process. Finally, we got to our room on the 25th floor (for those interpretations of 25th floor that are equivalent to “five floors above ground level, but numbered creatively”) of the Hyatt Regency, ordered room service and extra towels (because I use one towel just for my HAIR), and tumbled into bed.

And now, here I sit, hot, even though the room is NOT hot (I know this because the surface of this desk is cool to the touch, it’s just hormone-induced internal combustion), distressed because Jeremy said Zorro was barking nonstop, which means he’s really upset (he’s NEVER, EVER done that before. Usually when we leave him with someone he wanders around looking hopeful and pathetic, but silent.) and I heard him on the phone, and it made me feel horrible for leaving him, and bad for Jeremy and Leon having to deal with it, and anxious because I want to start looking at houses NOW, and at the moment nine AM seems like EONS away.

The alarm goes off in an hour, and breakfast will be delivered 30 minutes after that. I’m trying to decide if I should crawl back into bed and rest a bit, or if it’s late enough to shower without annoying the neighbors (yeah, I worry about that, in hotels) so that at least I’ll feel cleaner. I can handle being tired, crabby, and hungry, but I hate not feeling clean.

I woke at 2:49 this morning (Tuesday – I haven’t slept yet, so it’s still fiscally Tuesday) from a dream that left me convinced I’d see a face at the window, or find a bat hanging from the shower bar.

The part of the dream I’m willing to share involved vampires, a brick clock-tower, a body of water, sitting in a darkened room watching a documentary of the history of horror films while a sleeping wolf was sprawled across a table nearby, and chimes – clock-chimes. There was also an intoxicating scent, some kind of perfume that came in waxy sticks of deep, oily blue-green. I had been half-watching Jaws on Bravo just before sleep, and idly thinking that I’d love to have a spinning blue light in the bedroom, one that made the room feel as if it was beneath the sea. I woke with the feeling that I’d dreamed of all these things before, and that I had to solve a mystery. Perhaps I’ll attempt to spin a tale out of these elements, but for now, I’m simply intrigued.

There were erotic elements of the dream as well. My inner censor isn’t letting me type about them here, even though my inner writer screams that I must. Cruel of me to tease, I guess. At the risk of TMI, though, if you’ve ever read the Stephen King book Tommyknockers and you remember the bits where the lead female character was first succumbing to the radiation, there was an element of that as I woke as well. I was shaken from sleep by the very real feeling that I was lying in menstrual blood, but of course I was not. It was all very odd. My dreams are not usually recurring, not usually on such themes. Though, it’s possible the tower and the water were influenced by my recent re-reading of Marian Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover novels (which, it must be said, have NOTHING to do with vampires).

Things continue on the house front. The appraiser and property inspector are coming tomorrow, at eleven and three respectively, and then, again, Thursday we’re leaving for Texas to go shopping. It’s such a differnt feeling to have so MANY homes to choose from – I’m looking forward to seeing some of our favorites “in person”, and to seeing the actual neighborhoods.

If the house is almost my only subject of conversation lately, I think it’s justifiable. At any rate, I’m off to bed now.

It feels like I haven’t posted in forever. I’ve missed the Thursday Threesome two weeks in a row. I might go back and do them anyway, because they’re fun.

Rather than anything truly interesting, this post is an update:

– We’ve sold the house. We received an offer of $545,000, and countered with $565,000, and they countered back at $560,000, and that’s what we accepted. Not quiet what we wanted, but enough. Our close of escrow is August 31st, and we’ve got a rent-back to September 7th. If you’re local, the going away party is August 28th.

– We leave for Texas on Thursday afternoon, and will spend Friday and Saturday looking at the properties we’ve found on the net, and from our realtors, and making a decision. By the time we come home on Sunday, we’ll know where we’ll be living. There’s so much on the market there that it’s tough to decide. So far, we’ve narrowed it down to 5br/3ba or 4/3 with a study, two stories, and an in-ground pool. (Having had my own pool for the last two years, I find that it’s no longer an OPTION, but a REQUIREMENT, also, these all have hot tubs as well.)

– I’m seriously PMSing, which means I’m whiny, bitchy, tired, and antisocial. Also, I have an earache, and I haven’t been sleeping, so, be nice to Fuzzy, and please understand if I play hermit this weekend. It’s the first time in a month we’re NOT having an open house, and I’m mentally, physically, and emotionally TIRED, and want to just be insulated from everything for a while.

– As of Tuesday, I’m officially unemployed. Or self-employed, rather. I’ll be closing out the pipeline at the office, but new originations will be handled under my independent contractor status. I love working from home, and I’m looking forward to figuring out the kinks in this system BEFORE I’m several thousand miles away.

I say… And you think… ?

1. Testicles:: spectacles-watch-wallet
2. Ribald:: drinking songs
3. Auction:: silent
4. Inch:: worm
5. Tony:: award
6. Phony:: boloney (for phonetic purposes, I do realize the meat is bologna)
7. Stool:: step
8. Coyote:: Loco
9. Cinderella:: complex
10. Battery:: acid

Like this game? Play along at http://subliminal.lunanina.com

The problem with muses is this: once you acknowledge their existence, they scamper away for a while, as if to make you realize just how crucial they really are. Mine have done so. While normally I find that stringing words together requires no effort, for the last week my well has run dry. My brain isn’t functioning the way it should. I’m easily distracted, unfocussed, and spend far too much time sleeping.

* * * * *

I’ve been complaining that I have nothing to read. Anyone who’s seen my shelves would argue that point, so I shall elaborate: I have nothing new to read. I’ve sworn off buying books til after we move, though I’m sorely tempted to hit the used bookstore closest to me, and see if I can find some missing books in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover and am frustrated by the gaps in the story, where I don’t have the books.

* * * * *

I hesitate to put this in print, but, we think we may have found a buyer for the house. He’s meeting with E. on Tuesday. More on that, then.

* * * * *

We went to see The Village last night. I realize critics have panned it, but I don’t generally base my movie choices on what critics think. It was nothing like The Sixth Sense, and not even as good as Signs, but was entertaining enough. It’s a moody piece, and feels like a short story that was expanded to fill a movie-length timeslot, but visually it was interesting, and the soundtrack, featuring a lot of slightly dissonant solo violin, was hauntingly beautiful.

* * * * *

My month has begun. (August is my month because my birthday is in it. As there are no other holidays, no one’s ever quibbled over my claim. However, if your birthday is in August, I’m willing to share.) I turn 34 this year. I don’t feel old, or anything, but I do feel like perhaps – just perhaps – I should know by now what I want to be when I grow up. Something to work harder on, I suppose.

* * * * *

And on that note, I am picking up a book, brewing coffee, and going out to lounge on the patio for a while.

I’ve always been a night person. Ever since I can remember, my mind has been most alive in the dark hours. As a child, I reveled in weekend nights, when I’d go to bed with a book, and fall asleep reading, waking later to find it nearly morning, the light in my room still burning. I credit the designer of the condominium we lived in, that my mother never saw the light in the crack under my door.

As a teenager, I’d wait until my parents went to bed, then claim the dimly lit living room as my own. I was addicted to Saturday Night Live, then, and would curl up on the couch and laugh quietly as my parents slumbered blissfully in their own space. Every so often, my stepfather would rise from sleep, and break my solitude. Sometimes I’d glare at him, he’d lecture, and we’d all go back to our separate beds. As I grew to accept him more, as we got to know each other more, it was more likely that we’d have wonderful midnight conversations – he’d show me whatever new math trick he’d discovered, I’d talk about the books I was reading,. Once, he explained to me why he doesn’t believe in time travel.

Being nocturnal is murder when you have to function in a daylight world, but having a night job, for me, was worse. Why? Because my creative hours were usurped by work, and I had no time or desire to write, to play with words, to create anything. I became addicted to bad television and even read less, when I worked at night.

After all this, after nearly 34 years of being nocturnal, my muse has started to betray me. Instead of happily visiting around nine PM, she’s been showing up just after dawn. Perhaps she knows that, just as computer processors are faster when they’re cooled, my brain is more active in the soft, grey, chill of morning. Or, perhaps she’s just being fickle. I wouldn’t put it past a muse to goad, taunt, tease, and , yes, to destroy sleep patterns, in order to get her charge to do something, anything, creative.

For the past two weeks I’ve been waking before six, faced with two choices: go to my office and write, or go back to bed, and try to sleep. The thing is, though, that when I wake, I always have to answer nature’s call, and that wakes my body as well as my mind. And I’m the kind of person who, once awake, STAYS that way. I’ve been forcing myself back to sleep, and as a result I feel drugged, muddled, and, oddly, not very well rested. So I’m determined to let my muse win tomorrow. If I’m wakened in the hours before true dawn, I will pad down the hall to my desk, and see what, if anything, flows from my fingertips to the screen.

Benjamin Franklin said, “The muses love the morning.” Apparently, he was correct.

I say… And you think… ?

1. Sleep:: deprivation
2. Stats:: online
3. Portfolio:: financial
4. Lipton:: brisk
5. Telly:: Savalas
6. Immigrate:: Ellis Island
7. Viable:: biiology
8. Serene:: evening
9. Mountain:: rocky
10. Natalie:: Goldberg

Meme taken from http://subliminal.lunanina.com. Play along!

I’ve tried to capture him in motion more than once, but the camera is never handy, the moment is always over too soon. Still, I love to watch him jump, even if I can’t capture it on film or datastick.

He weighs almost nothing, and when he takes off it always amazes me that there’s such power and strength in such a tiny body. He makes vertical leaps seem effortless – Baryshnikov in canine form. And when he lands, there’s no loud thud, just a tiny click of his claws touching the surface of the floor.

We joke, of course, that our Zorro-dog thinks he’s a cat, rather than the mostly-chihuahua he really is. Why else, we wonder, would he be so fastidious about cleanliness, so picky about food, so terpsichorian in his movements. (Ironically, his balletic moves limited to jumping – walking, he tends to be underfoot a lot. I’ve never seen a small dog so often stepped upon.)

I see him aging, now, even though he’s not that old for a small breed, a mixed breed. He’s stiffer, and on cold nights he scratches at me to lift him into our high bed. He whimpers if I don’t move fast enough, too.

Still, when the sun has warmed his muscles, and we’ve just come home from a long day away, he greets us as he always has – a seemingly endless series of joyful jumps, until we pick him up, tickle his ears, and set him down again.

Maybe it’s because one of the first sounds I ever heard as a child was the foghorn in Atlantic Highlands; maybe it’s because I learned how to swim in the ocean off Sandy Hook; maybe it’s something more primal, fascination with a creature capable of eating humans, compelled curiosity about huge fish, and the concept of dying by being eaten, but I’ve been in love with sharks for as long as I remember.

Almost every year since The Discovery Channel started celebrating Shark Week, it’s coincided with my birthday, and I always found it strangely appropriate. After all, what better present could there be for a girl in love with big toothy fish? This year, they’re running it almost a MONTH early (Beginning tonight), but I find consolation in the knowledge that in August, Animal Planet is running a movie based on the book Twelve Days of Terror, about the early twentieth century shark attacks along the Jersey Shore and Matawan Creek. Even if they don’t get the facts right, I love a good shark movie, so I’m really excited about this.

The one thing I’ve wanted to do, ever since we came back to California in 1998, and the one thing I likely won’t be ever to do before we migrate to Texas, is take a day trip to the Farralons to photograph them myself. But, there are always vacations, and there’s a Mexican cruise that offers night diving with sharks if you get scuba certification first.

Meanwhile, I’m curled up in the bed, with two sleeping dogs, and my lovely ocean-blue carpet, and I’m watching Shark Week.