It is a good thing that the hardware store was closed by the time we headed off to buy additional paint on Sunday, because even though I thought I could live with the color of the swatches on the wall, by the next morning, I knew I really didn’t like it at all. So this morning I painted over the green swatches with two coats of primer, and this afternoon I went to the hardware store to pick up something new. I was aiming for something in a neutral shade of warm beige. It certainly looked warm beige in the store. But the big squares of color on the living room wall are currently looking a lot more buttery yellow than beige, and I suspect that tomorrow morning there will be more priming in my future. Sigh. There is a very good reason why the dining room was the only room in this house that ever got painted.

On the plus side, the house we really like in Sacramento will need minimal painting, if at all, because the current color scheme is lovely, and I am all about minimizing any amount of taping and painting and also the inevitable swearing. Monday after work we went over to walk through the house a second time, in order to get a closer look and make sure this was really the one. I walked through the house and took a ton of pictures, and we opened cupboards and peeked in drawers, and stood in rooms and pondered possibilities. There were features we’d forgotten about from the first visit – like the little enclosed porch right off the kitchen that already has a pet door into the house, making it (with a little cleaning and adding of tile) the perfect place to put the litter boxes. The backyard has more than enough room to put in a two car garage and still have plenty of open area. The yard not only has a little fledgling pomegranate tree, it also has a lemon tree, a peach tree, and even a red grapefruit tree (and unlike the white peach tree in our current backyard, there was nary a peach-eating scrub jay in sight, and unlike the little baby grapefruit tree we currently have, that one is old enough to produce actual fruit).

We know, already, some of the work that will have to be done; as well as the work we will want to do (the style of tile and cabinets in the kitchen is rather unfortunate), but for a house built in 1920, it’s in amazingly good condition. We even got a chance to chat with one of the next door neighbors. And by the time we left, we knew that this house was the one.

So now we are going through the process of looking at the various options for financing and longer-than-usual escrows and contingency plans and bridge loans to figure out how to make this work, so that we are not suddenly saddled with two mortgages, and crossing our fingers that no one else out there is thinking the same thing about what we have now pretty much decided is ‘our’ house. And in the meantime, final plans are shaping up for the current house. This morning I was late to work because I had to stay and meet with the guys who will be fixing / replacing /repainting our exterior trim and installing railings on both the front and back porch, and I had to leave work early because I had to get home to meet with the guy who will be making our strangely warped marble shower wall go away forever, and Friday morning the people from the pest inspection place will be coming out and taking care of the damn termite problem once and for all. Or maybe not once and for all; but as long as the termites stay away long enough for us to sell this house, I will be happy.

And I keep on wandering around the house with empty boxes, finding new things to pack, emptying and reorganizing drawers and cupboards, wiping down surfaces, making lists, and telling myself that putting a lockbox on a house with indoor-only cats really won’t be as bad as I am imagining. And hoping that some time before they come this weekend to film the virtual tour, I will have finally nailed down the right color for that one wall in the living room that isn’t too green or too yellow, or too whatever other possible wrong color I can think of and will, instead, be just right.

Books, I have decided, have a unique property unlike anything else, in that the more you pack away in boxes, the more still remain on the shelves, until you wonder if you actually just imagined packing them all up and if the stack of sealed boxes in the garage are just full of very heavy air. Also, in case it wasn’t obvious, we have an awful lot of books. I packed up several more boxes yesterday, and sealed up three more this morning, and still it feels as if I have made barely even a dent in the numbers.

This morning I got up earlier than I needed to, simply because I just couldn’t sleep, and decided to make good use of the extra time by cleaning out the linen closet and the bathroom drawers. The nice thing about having big, deep drawers in the bathroom is that you have lots of room for lots of stuff. The not so nice thing about having big, deep drawers in the bathroom is that there is lots of room for lots of stuff, or more specifically, lots of stuff you forgot you had. I filled up two bags full of garbage – old makeup, half-empty bottles of medication that expired years ago, mostly used sample bottles of toiletries we collected back when we were traveling all over the state for Benthic Creatures, and so on. The cats were all happy because I also unearthed an unopened bag of catnip, which I set down on the bed at first, in order to deal with it after I finished the bathroom, but then gave up and emptied all over the bedroom floor because somehow it mysteriously developed holes that looked suspiciously like bite marks of the feline persuasion and I figured catnipping the floor was easier than dealing with a cat injesting a plastic bag in order to get to the happy drugs within. Then I tackled a few of the kitchen shelves, since people will be opening cupboards to see how much space we have, and that means clearing and organizing and cleaning and also figuring out which kitchen appliances and paraphenlia I can live without for the next few months so that the presence of completely empty shelves tells potential buyers that this kitchen has more cupboard space than they could possibly use.

The recorder group played today, so I headed off to church early to rehearse. There were only four of us, but luckily it worked out so there was one person on each part and I think it is safe to say that we have never sounded better than we did this morning. Then we met my parents for lunch and got around to discussing the location of the house we’re hoping to buy, which ended up in the dragging out of maps and the spilling of very cold iced beverages all over the table in the excitement.

A friend came over to do a quick walk through of the house for us, pointing out a few things we should work on, and we went to the hardware store and stared at walls of paint chip cards and eventually came back home with a little sample pot of color which turned out to be exactly the perfect color for what we had in mind. I know that I would have never picked this color out if it were up to me, because when it comes to choosing colors – especially paint color – I am beyond hopeless – but I slapped a few large patches of paint onto one wall of the living room and what do you know, it works. The only room in this house that was ever painted beyond the move-in white was the dining room, which I sponge painted in three shades of blue, and even then I had to have a friend help me figure out which shades. I have already warned several of my more artistically inclined friends that I intend to bring them into our new house (when we get a new house), hand them a huge stack of paint chip cards, and set them loose to tape appropriate color chips to the walls. I do not mind doing the actual painting work; I just want someone else to tell me what color I should use. I had intended to go back and get a full quart of paint to finish off the walls, once we all decided that the color worked, but by the time we got back out to the hardware store, it was closed. So the living room wall will have to remain strangely splotchy until Tuesday night, at which point, armed with painters tape and a brush, and sheer determination, I will transform our currently bland fireplace wall into a vision of beauty (or at the very least, a wall that is slightly more interesting than it currently is, which will not be hard at all).

We finally got an estimate for the work that will be required to fix up (and paint) the exterior trim, and tackle the issue with the warping marble wall in the master bathroom shower, and treat the ground underneath our house for the termites that, it turns out, were there all along (sigh), and it is a number that is a little bit daunting to be confronted with, but I am telling myself that at least now we know the worst (and it isn’t as bad as it could be, especially considering the termites) and that the silver lining here is that when someone does decide to buy this house and sends in their inspectors, we will not get any more nasty surprises.

One of the things we were told to do in order to get the house ready for going on the market was to go through and pack up everything we could live without – not just knick knacks, but furniture, too. The whole point is that you want the rooms to have the minimal amount of furniture and things, so that the rooms look spacious and not cramped.

We’re not much into knick knacks (knick knacks plus cats usually equals startling crashing noises in the middle of the night, followed shortly thereafter by a massive skittering of panicked feline perpetrators, and ending up in pieces of broken stuff on the floor), but we do have a lot of books and games and knitting paraphenilia. So the past week I’ve been slowly packing up what I can, scrounging and begging boxes from family and friends and coworkers, and we’ve been slowly moving things into the garage – smaller bookshelves, boxes of books and games and CD’s. I walked through the house and made a lengthy list of things to get done, divided up by room, and since we signed the paperwork I’ve been making pretty good progress on that list, crossing off one or two things almost every day.

Today was one of my Friday’s off, so I’d already planned on tackling a few of the larger items on the list, while trying to (mostly) stay out of Richard’s way, since he still had to work. But then we met with our realtor last night and he mentioned that someone was really interested and wanted to see our house before they made an offer on another house early next week, and Richard and I pondered the possibility of selling the house before we ever get the thing officially on the market and said sure, send them on over, and I didn’t think much more about it until this morning when the woman called at about 9:30 am, and we made plans for her to come over at 2:30 and then I thought about how much on that list still really needed to be done and I gulped down some coffee and then I went into overdrive in a desperate attempt to see how much I could actually accomplish in four short hours without driving either myself or Richard completely insane.

We rearranged the library. We moved a bookshelf out into the garage and I trotted up and down the stairs, hauling boxes and crates outside. I tackled stacks of things that needed sorting and threw stuff out. I vacuumed and swept and rearranged and found creative places to put things out of sight, and after lunch I got down on my hands and knees and scrubbed several floors. I am actually in awe of how much I managed to get done in such a short period of time.

The sheer irony of this is that if we had not had someone coming over to look at the house, I would not have accomplished even half the things I did today. I would have found excuses to spend an hour here and there poking around on the computer, or knitting, or annoying the cats. I am a procrastinator by nature, and while I know that we will have everything on my list accomplished by the time the house hits the market, I also know that there’d be a fairly mad scramble during the last few days to get it all done. So in a way, letting these people come over for a sneak peek was more to give myself a deadline than anything else – and it worked pretty darn well.

There is still more to do, of course. But the things that remain are, for the most part smaller, less urgent. After the people left I made a new list, a much shorter list, and even though there is now only a week left to do everything on that list, I feel more confident that we’ll actually somehow get it all done.

So now it is official. The realtor came over and the three of us sat around the dining room table – Richard and the realtor and I – and he opened up the notebook he’d put together for us and we went over everything, one more time. How much we will be listing the house for. The range of prices we hope to get. What all needs to be done to get the house ready. When things will happen. Everything.

May 1st. That is the day the house goes on the market. I am at once excited and terrified by what this date means. I hope that our house sells quickly. I hope that the inspectors don’t find anything horribly wrong. I hope that the house that we found in Sacramento that we both fell in love with is still available when we’re ready to put in an offer. I hope that all of us – Richard and I and the cats – can get through this and that we are doing the right thing.

Three weeks. I’d better get packing.

There was a knitting group this afternoon, at the store in Davis, but I didn’t go. I am an introvert at heart, and it’s been kind of a crazy weekend and there is only so much ‘social’ I can do before I just need to hole up in my own house where I am not required to interact with anyone at all except for Richard and the cats. So instead of going out to knit with my friends, I sat at the breakfast nook table and wove in all the ends of the mitered square blocks I’ve been working on, and read a few books, and didn’t have to deal with anyone at all.

It’s been a busy weekend because last night was the spring concert for the women’s ensemble I sing in, and because last night was the concert, that meant that Friday night was the dress rehearsal, and all together that was about ten hours of singing, or otherwise stressing about singing, over the course of two days, which is far more exhausting than you might expect. If that were not enough, this morning was even more singing, seeing as how it was Palm Sunday and the choir pretty much sang all the way through the service. And of course all of this was prefaced and followed by talking and interacting, and after something exhausting, the last thing I want to do is make small talk. I am not good at small talk. I may smile and nod and come up with the occasional vaguely witty thing to say, but deep down inside I am still that shy and awkward girl I was all through childhood, and no matter how much I try I am not sure I will ever not be.

So this afternoon I did not go hang out with friends. Because sometimes I just need to not have to do anything more than be with just me.

It has been an interesting week. First, and foremost, of course, is the issue of moving. The realtor came by again on Wednesday and we talked about specifics – namely, what we can expect to get for this house, and what our price range would then be for buying the next one. We walked through the house and he pointed out a few things that we would definitely need to take care of before putting it on the market. The big thing is the shower stall in the master bedroom. The marble on one wall started bowing out ever so slightly shortly after we moved in, and despite their best efforts, the contractors were never able to fix it. I haven’t given it much thought ever since, but the warping has gotten a lot worse over the past few years. So we can either look into fixing it (or more likely simply replacing the shower insert entirely) ourselves, or have a future buyer decide to try to ding us for replacing a lot more than just a shower insert when we sell. Everything else is just little – basic maintenance stuff we really should have been keeping on top of anyway. So now all we have to do is decide when, and then commence with a whirlwind of painting, minor repairs, and of course packing. In anticipation I finally tackled a chore I’ve been meaning to do for years now, and purged my closet. I was fairly ruthless – if it doesn’t fit and I haven’t worn it in years, it was stuffed into paper bags and set aside for Goodwill. The end result – my half of the closet looks disturbingly bare, and Goodwill just gained nine overstuffed bags of clothes this morning, including a box of belts that went with clothing I have not owned since I cannot really remember when.

And then, of course, there is the continuing saga of my evil sinuses of doom. When I saw the ENT earlier in the month, he decided I needed to have a bunch of tests run, and sent me off to get them. First up was the hearing test, which I had last Monday. This is a far more complicated procedure than the hearing tests I remember from when I was back in grade school – when they would cram about a dozen of us into a dark little trailor, slap headphones on our ears, and tell us to raise our hands if we heard a beep. This involved two different sets of headphones, a strange little device that the doctor stuck so far down my ear I thought maybe she was trying to work her way out the other side, and a series of words whispered in ever decreasing volume that I was supposed to repeat back to her to, I assume, show that I can hear different variations in sound. By the end, the verdict was that I can hear just fine. It’s just that sometimes my sinuses like to pretend otherwise.

As for the rest of the tests, they finally sent in my referral this week, and Wednesday morning I went in for another CAT scan and an MRI. The CAT scan is nothing at all – it goes incredibly quick and aside from the fact that lying on your stomach with your hands tucked under your hips and your head tilted up as far as it can go is a wee bit uncomfortable, it went fine. The MRI, however, was quite an experience. Mainly because I had no idea how long it takes, or how loud those machines can be. Seriously. It is sort of how I envision life would be if I lived inside a video game. All manner of knocking and beeping and droning and random sounds. I must admit the only exposure I have ever had to an MRI prior to this was what I’ve seen on television medical sitcoms, which obviously should not be considered a reliable source of any sound medical expertise, but it seems odd that not a one of them ever addresses the issue of the noise. Heh.

I know there are a lot of people who freak out about an MRI, and maybe if I’d had to be completely inside one it would have been more unnerving, but it wasn’t bad at all. If I opened my eyes I could see the outer portion of the tube I was in, and only the top half of me was inside, so the part of my brain that might otherwise have wanted to go into full scale panic attack at being confined into a large and noisy metal coffin was able to content itself by plotting out how easily it would be to squirm my way out of there should something happen, and let the rest of me just focus on whether or not the latest series of thunking and beeping had any sort of potential for use as the beat for a heavy metal tune.

We’ve been tossing around the idea of moving out of this little town for a year or two but never got to the point where we were ready to be actually serious about it…until now. We both work in Sacramento; it would make far more sense for us to actually live there, especially since we both really like our jobs and have no plans for finding new ones for as long as we can possibly manage it. Plus, we were gradually realizing that any time we go anywhere, with few exceptions (Starbucks, the grocery store, that kind of thing) we go to another town. This little farm burb we live in has a lot of plusses for someone who really likes that kind of thing, but it’s been sinking in that we are just not farm town sort of people. Especially farm towns that show no hope of ever getting a bookstore or independent music venue or decent public transportation any time in the near (or even slightly distant) future.

It’s been a hard decision to come to, because when we built this house, we really did want it to be the house we stayed in forever. But as Richard and I have concluded over the past few years, we are not the same people we were when we moved here six years ago, and this just isn’t where we want to be for the rest of our lives.

Tuesday night we met with a realtor, just to get some ideas of what would be involved in selling the house, and in buying a new one. We asked him to be very blunt with us when we did the walkthrough and I think he was worried about insulting us when he mentioned that we would definitely need to tone down the ‘hey, cats live here!’ thing we’ve got going on, but on the contrary, this is exactly what we needed to know. He talked about what all would be involved, and also took ideas for our preferred location in Sacramento, and it was a very informative little chat. And then the next morning he set up some search parameters for us, so not only are we getting notices of houses for sale in Sacramento of the type (and location) we’re interested in, we’re also getting notices of the other houses in our current location that are of similar size and type to ours, so we can see what we’d be up against. It’s all been very sobering, and exciting at the same time.

I am finding it amusingly ironic that after six years, talking to a realtor is what finally is  motivating us to replace the ‘temporary’ paper shades in the breakfast nook with actual curtains, and to start seriously looking at a storage armoire for our television and all its assorted paraphenelia, and to finally make some decisions on what to do with the ugly futon in the living room, and whether or not to buy a daybed for the library.  There are some things we will need to repair – places where the texturing on the walls has cracked due to the house settling over time, and possibly installing a railing around the front and back porches (both of which are several feet off the ground, and something we’d toyed with on and off over the years on our own anyway).

Anyway. Friday afternoon Richard and I went through the list of houses in Sacramento that he’d sent us and picked out six or seven, and then mapped out a route on Google Maps (love!) and then we drove by all of them to see where they are and what kind of neighborhood they’re in. And today the realtor came to get us and we headed back in to Sacramento and spent several hours actually walking through five of those houses, just to start getting a sense of what we will be looking at when we do decide to make this move.

So now we have some big decisions to make.  Turns out April and May are the best times to put a house on the market, and anything after August would be probably the worst. There are feasible options for how to put an offer on a new house while still selling the old one without suddenly ending up with two mortgages and a whole world of debt. It is not a question of whether or not we can do this, or even whether we can afford the kind of house that we are hoping to move to. It is now simply a matter of when.

So it hasn’t all been termites and sinus hell around here, despite all evidence to the contrary in my previous few entries. There has also been Fun With Taxes (and the subsequent Paying Of Large Bills that resulted).

Last month we picked up Turbo Tax during a trip to CostCo, so I finally installed that and gave it a whirl. Aside from spending close to half an hour swearing under my breath about how my life would be ever so much easier if the bank would just provide the damn investment tax statement in the same easy-to-read format as every other damn tax statement created by every other company out there, it wasn’t too painful. The software very nicely walked me through a million different questions (including the one about foreign tax from capitol gains, which is what got me started on the muttering and the swearing in the first place) and then just as nicely presented us with a big fat whomping number of dollars that we owe the Feds. The amount we owe the state is much smaller in terms of whomping, but still painful, in the grand scheme of things. And then Turbo Tax did something that not one single tax preparer from the popular tax place with the green signs ever did – it suggested some ways we can avoid this big fat nasty tax bill in the future. Not only did it suggest ways, it then went one step further and merrily filled out the forms and let me print them out, all without having to figure any of it out by myself. And really, can you give any higher praise to a tax software than that?

Things are otherwise sort of normal and boring around here. Just as my sinuses have finally decided to calm things down (prompted, I am pretty certain, by the impending tests and poking and prodding that is sure to ensue), Richard’s asthma has been ramping up and he’s spent the last week or so wheezing. We are a fun pair, we are, what with our inversely coordinating issues with breathing.

And in other news, now that it is spring, the white peach tree finally decided to bloom and I pondered going out and treating it for the curly leaf problem that has led to a distinct lack in fruit production over the past year or two, but then decided not to bother, because if it is not the curly leaf, it is the blue jays, and really, maybe it is time I accepted that this is all nature’s way of telling me that my dreams of getting enough peaches off this little tree to make even one measly pie per season are pointless. On the plus side, the apple tree is also blooming, which means that it somehow survived having a fence fall on top of it and part of the root system splitting ever so slightly in half. I am not holding out any hope of getting actual edible fruit off of that tree either, if past history is any example, but it is at least nice to know that at least it is still alive and can continue throwing tiny little oddly shaped apples all over the ground, just in case the blue jays finish off all the peaches and are still hungry.

The third termite inspector confirmed what the second found – no termites. So either the first termite inspector has eagle eyes and can see things no other termite inspector can see, or he was lying in an attempt to convince us to sign up for termite prevention services. Considering how hard he tried to push the services, I am suspecting the latter. It should be no surprise that we will be cancelling our contract with this particular company. I do not know if this guy was just one bad apple in the bunch, or if this is a symptom of a much larger problem but I cannot find a way to feel comfortable with continuing to pay them, even though this is the only problem we’ve ever had with them.

Things just keep getting more and more fun in the world of the sinuses from hell. I had my appointment with the ENT doctor on Friday – luckily I brought along some knitting because they were running extremely late – and after I listed out all my symptoms he noted that he thinks the facial nerve spasms I’ve been having may not be related to my sinuses at all. He brought in a little plastic model of a skull and showed me how the auditory and facial nerves lie along the same path (turns out I pick up sounds more on my left side than on my right – and he also noted some minor muscle weakness under my right eye) so he thinks those all might be related. He’s scheduled me for a meeting with an audiologist and referred me for an MRI and a CT scan. As for the sinuses, he said a few times that he wasn’t worried about them, until I finally noted that I *was*, because they are getting worse. So then he decided to do a nasal endoscopy to check things out, which was just about as much fun as it sounds. They sprayed stuff into my nose to numb it, which meant that the roof of my mouth was also numbed, and it is the weirdest sensation to have your sinuses go numb. It’s like suddenly the top part of your head weighs a lot more than it used to. Then he tried to do the endoscopy. Notice I said ‘tried’? Turns out that even though the numbing stuff was also supposed to shrink down the nasal passages, my sinuses are a little tight (no, *really*?) and he didn’t want to go very far for fear of scraping against the sides and giving me a nose bleed.

The numbness wore off after about an hour, and my sinuses reacted to having something inserted into them just about like you might expect. By the time I left work, it was as if I was in the middle of a full blown sinus infection – I couldn’t breathe through my nose and even the decongestants I took didn’t do much to help out. I hate you too, sinuses. Luckily by this morning, they’d forgiven me, and I could breathe normally again, but still. I could have done without the stupid little sinus temper tantrum. Really.

The facial nerve spasms don’t come as often anymore, but they’re still around, hitting me at least a few times a day, usually just about the time when I think maybe they might have finally gone away for good. I am exerting massive amounts of will power to not go and poke around on WebMD to see if I can figure out what’s going on all by myself (seeing as how I have no medical training at all and thus am naturally going to figure out the problem far quicker than a guy who actually specializes in that area. Ha ha). And I am still holding on to the (admittedly now slimmer) hope that all of these tests will eventually come up with something that will take care of my damn sinuses once and for all.

To make up for our uncharacteristically dry winter, the weather gods decided to send all the rain and snow for the entire season all at once. The past few days have been all kinds of exciting for us here in Northern California. Snow in the north; rain in the Sacramento valley; all pouring from the sky with wild abandon. I am actually rather enjoying the return of the lake in the backyard, though. It’s kind of comforting to know that some things never change.

Speaking of other things are are exciting, we decided to get a second opinion on the iminent infesting of the undersides of our house with termites, because I still was very uncomfortable with how the first inspection came down and no matter which way I looked at it, it just kept feeling wrong. Turns out I was justified. The second inspector found no termites. None. Nada. Zilch. No termitey nibbles in the teensy bits of wood sliver under the house; no tubes being constructed by nasty critters determined to chow down on our raised foundation, no sign of them anywhere. Gee.

Of course, now we are pondering calling out one more inspector, just to see if we can get some kind of consensus (best two out of three), but I am feeling far less guilty about my failings as a home owner when it comes to crawling around in the dusty, musty space below the floor. And I am thinking that just to be on the safe side, we might take those termite stakes and plant them around the exterior of the house anyway, because one should never miss out on an opportunity to wipe out a colony of house-ravaging insects when one gets the chance.

And because I knew you all were dying to know, here is an update on my latest bout of happy sinus fun. Two weeks of decongestants and OTC nasal sprays has done very little to improve the situation, although I have now decided that I should stop fighting the pressure and the nerve spasms and become one with the feeling of impending head-explosion.  This little attempt at Zen is not going as well as one might expect, but I figure if this keeps up, eventually I’ll have no choice but to reach a level of pressure-induced enlightenment. Either that or one of these days when I stand up and the pressure smacks me upside the head, I will keel over and crack my skull open on a conveniently placed sharp edge, and none of this will matter anyway.

However, lest you think that this is the end of the fun, do not fear. The doctor sent me off for x-rays of my sinuses, and I must admit that there was part of me hoping that they’d find *something* – something easily fixable, of course, but *something* that would at least indicate just why my sinuses have been doing their best to make me miserable . Alas, the x-rays showed nothing, which means that since my sinuses have now successfully stumped my regular doctor, I have now been foisted off onto someone else. I’ve got an appointment with an EN&T specialist next week, which means, if past history is anything to go by, my sinuses will continue to torment until the morning of my scheduled appointment, at which time they will miraculously resume something approximating normal behavior, thereby making me look like a neurotic hypochondriac, should I still choose to keep my appointment.

In other news, today I sent away for level I of the Master Knitter program. My goal is to get through all three levels by the time I am 40, which gives me just a bit over two years to accomplish this. The fact that one of the driving factors for doing this is because the thought of then being able to introduce myself as a Master Knitter makes me giggle is probably not something I should be admitting to, is it. Hmm.