We ran out of Fuzzy's favorite toothpaste a couple days ago, and since there's been no time to go shopping, we've been raiding the tubes we bought while on various vacations. This week, we're using a tube of Canadian Colgate, instead of our usual American AquaFresh.

I'd noticed when we were in Baja for Christmas, the year before that, that CocaCola was sweeter, and chocolate was grainier, but I'd also noticed that the toothpaste was, well, gloppier. It didn't come out of the tube in a pasty cylinder, much like the toothpaste equivalent of canned cranberry sauce (you know, the kind where, if you don't take measures, you can see the ring-marks from the can?), but instead sort of splatted onto the bristles of my toothbrush. It was also sweeter than I generally expected toothpaste to be.

I was mildly suprised when the Canadian toothpaste, which Fuzzy had grabbed while in Toronto for a Geek Conference, was much more like the Mexican stuff than the American stuff: Gloppy, sweet, and sort of glowy green, despite not being a gel.

Do we, as Americans, have such bad teeth that we require a more abrasive toothpaste, or is this just a result of the difference in which chemicals are allowed where? Or is the real problem that I'm comparing American AquaFresh to Mexican Crest and Canadian Colgate?

Just an idle thought while trying to survive the work day.

So, I just got off the phone with my realtor Anne Hansen, and she said she'd received a full price offer on our townhouse today. Yes!

The buyer has asked that we pay for Section I termite items, which is a normal seller-paid cost anyway, and any HOA transfer fees, which our HOA doesn't charge.

We're countering, with a capped liability of $3,000 for those termite repairs. The person wanting to buy didn't ask about the floors, so we're not offering to resurface them, but we got a quote to have it done.

Mysteriously, that number $3,000 is haunting us in another way. We're $3k short of the cash to increase the deposit (which sits in escrow until closing), and only because lenders are taking so long to fund stuff, that I won't get commissions for another two weeks. ARGH.

Well, we'll figure it out somehow.

In any case, we're glad that we got an offer so soon when the average time on the market in this city is currently around 38 days.

We worked like dogs, and my day off that was supposed to be a rest day for my birthday ended up being a workday. It's good that we never bothered to confirm plans for dinner last night, because at midnight, I was still painting the entry. We tried hard to match the original color, but it's still about half a shade darker than the original, which means we have to paint the whole front section, after all, but at least we don't have to rush.

By the time Pablo came yesterday afternoon to clean our carpets, Fuzzy and I were both in tears, and I was so stressed and tired that I was ready to call Anne and say, “Forget it, this isn't worth it.” But Fuzzy knew that I was just reacting to workstuff and homestuff, and didn't really mean that. Did I mention that I'm also having the PMS week from hell on top of everything else? Do I need to?

At noon today, I went to take a nap with the dogs while Fuzzy finished some outside stuff. At 12:56 he woke me from the deepest sleep I've had in weeks, telling me Anne was on her way, and there was already a couple with a toddler waiting to see the place, and was it okay to let them in? “Take the dogs,” I told him, “and I'll invite them inside.” So I smoothed the bed, and slipped on shoes, and they wandered around my house. “Oooh,” said Wife, “There's room for your weight set here, and look at the bathroom? It's so cute.” (For those who don't know, the powder room on the first floor of our townhouse is painted to look like a field beyond a picket fence.)

They won't, I don't think, make an offer, because they seemed to really want one more bedroom, but they wanted to send a friend. At 4 PM Anne called us to let us know that about 30 people (though people means 'buying units' and could mean couples) wandered through. That's actually really good for the first weekend on the market. She thinks we may get offers this week. I'm trying not to hope, and yet I want this to go quickly, just because I want to move NOW. (Patience is not one of my virtues, these days).

So, even though I had drive-through Bento for my birthday dinner, and am now at work trying to catch up, at least I know all the work we did was not completely wasted. (Also, Anne herself was impressed, and the formerly-purple wall which I painted something kinda salmon-y looks AMAZING, and echoes one of the colors in the living room rug.

It's 5:26 on Sunday evening, and my weekend has been spent doing things that no one should have to do on their weekend, but, finally, it's DONE.

Since I'm not going to work tomorrow, the guys decided a birthday lunch was in order for me today. Our company president bought lunch for the whole company for the occasion. Just Bento Boxes, but what an interesting mix of veggies in the tempura: It included asparagus and ube (a veryvery purple yam). Yum.

/And/ they gave me presents. They know my addictions too well, I think, for I received a B&N gift card and a Starbucks card.

Finally, the condo is actually on MLS. There's no picture yet, but it at least has a listing (some info is wrong, but hey.) this link takes you to the listing.

* * *
*sigh* I have painting to do. Still. Fuzzy complained that the paint I chose for the entry and bathroom is 'pale, almost white', but I explained that all I wanted was the merest hint of peachy-pink to warm the rooms a little. /I/ get to paint the tint on the big wall, which we primed by moonlight.

Also, the gardeners have done the bulk of the stuff in our back yard – we've never seen it vine free, and now it is, and mulched, and manured, and sprinkler heads are in, and Cleo's rolled in it, but Zorro's afraid of it. Tomorrow: SOD.

The clock on my Computer says that it's 12:50 AM on 08/14, but I have no idea if that's correct, or not, because this computer is a bit funky about time. The cable box says it's only 12:46. Depending on which is correct I've either been home from work for a full hour, or just under one.

Yes. We're that busy.
No, I'm not technically required to stay that late, but I didn't stop working on files early enough, and then I was also engaged in some online interaction for part of that time.

Maggie, one of our frequently-used escrow officers, sent us a gift basket of the most wonderful non-chocolate cookies ever. Oatmeal raisin, cinnamon swirl, and lemon. It really helped us all to be less crabby, and slightly less stressed by the sheer amount of volume we're dealing with.

I process loans for 4 loan officers, plus my own originations. In the last six months we have originated $65,000,000 worth of loans, and closed about $45,000,000. July and August account for almost half of that number. It's been that busy. And yet, because rates keep dropping, instead of getting things under control, it's getting worse.

I have a minion, who does status calls for me, and does copying. (The amount of wasted paper in the mortgage industry is phenomenal. California legalized digital signatures on legal documents more than two years ago, and we're still requiring wet signatures on loan applications.) Without him, I would be less than half as productive, because I'd have to stop and copy each file. He used to be a bouncer at a nightclub. I maintain that this is an excellent background for a receptionist to have.

When I was working with my mother, in a company I partly owned, I resented being there. With this group of guys, all of whom are roughly my age, I mostly love my job. They don't care if I come in at noon, and leave at eight, or come in at six and leave at two, or declare that I'm leaving three hours early, as long as work gets done. When my office door is closed, they actually respect it, and will only knock if the situation is dire. And when I'm grumpy or stressed they bring me chocolate and designer coffee. Am I being bribed? Hell yes. But I'm worth it.

Rates are the lowest they've been in thirty years, and the new clients, at this point, seem to come in hoardes and droves. Tonight I deleted 84 messages from my voicemail, all from the last 10 days.

Tomorrow, I will stop for breakfast on the way to work, and I will change my voicemail to tell people I'm in submission hell and will return phone calls every two hours. Thursday, I'm leaving at two, and Friday I'm not working at all. It was supposed to be long weekend for my birthday; instead I'll be doing more work on the condo. It's being listed on Thursday, and there's an open house on Sunday.

Right now, I'm going to bed.

…That's what I said to my younger dog, Cleo, after a stagey gasp, when Fuzzy presented her to me for her bath last night. The nice thing about small dogs is that you can bathe them in the kitchen sink, using the sprayer hose, and as long as you remember to disinfect the sink, after, life's usually good.

We got really annoyed with my parents because their dog, Abigail, a six-pound fawn colored chihuahua, left our dogs with fleas. Not that this is difficult to deal with. A little borax sprinkled on the carpet before vacuuming, bleach in the laundry, and they're pretty much dead, but once they get ON the dogs, it's harder. Especially when we have to treat Zorro, because we think, but are not certain, that flea medication is one of his seizure triggers.

Last night, I noticed that Cleo had been chewing at the base of her tail so hard that there was a bare patch, and the skin was irritated. Poor puppy. We give them Advantage top-spot applications whenever bugs are really bad, and with painting and all we'd been loathe to bring more chemicals into their lives, but we had no choice. So that meant a break from packing, and last night our sink became a canine car-wash.

Anyway, they were still damp when we finally tumbled into bed last night, so I left their collars are. Ever worn wet jeans? My dogs react to wet collars the same way most of us react to wet denim. Ick!

It says a lot about my state of exhaustion that I didn't wake up every time Zorro moved last night, convinced he was having a seizure. You see, the jingling of his tags changes when that happens, and without the tags I can't tell without consciously checking if his moving about is normal, or not. Usually I sleep in fits and starts when he doesn't have them on.

So, today, we're off to lunch, because we slept late, and only just got up. Oy. At this rate, we'll be killing ourselves to have the condo ready for the realtor to hold it open on the weekend. (And the fact that we can't be there means that Sunday will be an enforced trip to the beach with the doggies.)

But now, at least, I have two doggies who don't smell like dogs, but vaguely of citrus. (Actually Zorro's mostly a chihuahua, and never smells like a dog, because chihuahuas just don't have that dog-odor). Except they're still naked.

Ever since my grandfather gave me a construction set when I was a toddler, I've had a thing for hardware stores. I love the sense of possibilities, and visiting OSH or Home Depot is almost as good, in my personal rating system, as visiting a bookstore or stationery store.

Today, rather than risk getting lost in the overwhelming warehouseyness of HD, we opted to go to a store that specialized only in PAINT. We were there about half an hour, and left $140 later with primer, white semi-gloss for the frames of some doors, a gallon of flat paint in a kind of clay-y color (not as orange as terra cotta, but not really a brown). They call it 'trattoria' and it should be a perfect replacement for our purple wall, and tie in the sand colored carpet, and the hardwood floors, and all, and lend some warmth to the room.

We also bought a quart of a color called Ambria, which is basically a palepale blush pink/beige, to do the entry. After arguing with Fuzzy and NOT getting a 2nd quart of the same color in semi-gloss for the upstairs bathroom, we returned home, and I said, “See, the kitchen is, too, a different color than the entry, and see, it is a semi-gloss.” So we'll go back for a quart of Ambria in semi-gloss later. We have to do the texturing and masking first, anyway.

Even though all this paint is for the condo we're leaving, it's one of the parts of this process that I'm really excited about. So much so, that I told Fuzzy, “I get to paint the new house, too, right?”

But he cringed. “Too much work!”

*sigh*

So, my mother left for her home in Baja Sur, Mexico last week, and today, at my office, I received a birthday card, postmarked from SanDiego, which means she sent it just before they crossed the border. (Note: My birthday isn't actually until next Saturday, the 17th.) It made me all misty, and I'm therefore compelled to share:

Sweet Xenobia,
Happy 32nd Birthday, darling girl!

Happy Birthday!
I love you!
Mom

*grin*
Thanks mom.

I've just gotten word from my Realtor that our offer was accepted on the last house we considered. This house, which looks really plain from the outside, but is quite nice inside. It still doesn't have a formal dining room, but it does have a real dining area, and more than two bedrooms, and the master suite has a den/office/spare room thing as part of it. The back yard is mostly occupied by a 20' oval doughboy pool, that's been sunken into the ground, though there's just enough grass to enjoy without it being a lifetime project. There's also a covered patio that runs the length of the house, as well as a dog run.

The kitchen has TONS of storage, the garage has a storage loft, and oh, wonder of wonders, the inside walls are flat plaster NOT TEXTURIZED. I hate texturized walls.

It's on a street that doesn't really go through to anything, so even though the surrounding neighborhood is busy, this street is not. I'm told that there are only two non-owner occupied properties on the entire block, which is cool.

So, now to sell the condo, and by the end of September, we'll have moved. Woo!

So we met with our Realtor this morning, and her checklist of Things That Must Be Done we not as bad as we thought. She said, for example, not to worry about the parquet in the kitchen, and that the water damage on the counter around the kitchen sink would be called in the Termite Report. They'll give a quote for the work, and we won't have to pay them till Close of Escrow (COE). The same goes for her gardener who is going to lay new sod,

The rest of the wood floors need to be resurfaced, but a friend referred me to another friend who is supposedly 50% less expensive than anyone else in the area. I'll be leaving him a message today or tomorrow.

The rest of the list is little niggly things:
1) Move half the furniture out of the living room, and the bookshelves from the bedroom. Get rid of the boxes in the loft storage area above our bedroom closet.
2) Paint the upstairs bathroom in a pale-but-warm color. There's peach tile in there, so we'll be doing some barely-beyond-white-but-with-hints-of-peach paint. Also, must replace shower curtain. Again, something pale. (The idea is that bright, light colors make the space look bigger, and warm colors enhance the wood fixtures.)
3) Paint our single purple wall so that it's not purple any more.
4) Replace the sinks in both bathrooms, and possibly the toilets if judicious application of pumice stone and elbow grease doesn't yield satisfactory results.
5) Clean the hot tub.
6) Clean the deck.
7) Have the carpets chemically cleaned, and hire Merrie Maids to clean the entire house top-to-bottom.

So far, we've accomplished getting paint chips to determine just which color we'll need, we've sold the piano (yay) and are moving it next weekend, and one of the two sinks has been replaced. Next weekend, we'll be spackling and painting, and the goal is to be on the market in two weeks, with an open house the weekend of my birthday.

Meanwhile, tomorrow we're LOOKING at open houses, and deciding if we want to go forward with the Pershing Ave. property, or make a new offer on a house in Burbank that has 4 bedrooms and a pool for less money.

Eep. Time to shower so Fuzzy can caulk it.