Your standard computer desk, complete with file drawer, cabinet for hiding your computer tower, sliding keyboard shelf, now with coordinating cubby cat.

Or in other words, guess what we finally set up this weekend. That particular shelf, by the way, has been left deliberately empty on both desks because the cats really, really seem to like to hang out in them. And naturally we are all about keeping the cats happy around here.

The desks have been sitting, in pieces, in the dining room and living room, since we picked them up on Tuesday (and it wasn’t nearly as bad as I was expecting it to be – after all, we managed to get all four pieces of heavy furniture out of the truck and up the stairs through the front door not only just the two of us, but also without either of us dropping something on a foot, bashing something into a wall, or otherwise causing some form of bodily or house-related harm.

We actually set up the desks on Friday, in a carefully orchestrated spate of furniture rearrangement. First we had to carefully slide the very large, and very heavy china cabinet into the middle of the room so we could slide the first desk into place, and move half the stuff from the breakfast nook table (which had been serving as our computer desk since we moved in); then we brought in a cute little table a friend gave me to sit right under the window, providing a perfect space for the cats to sprawl and watch Squirrel TV, and also allowing us to transfer the rest of the computer paraphernalia from the table, which meant we could finally disassemble the table and move it to the back porch, where it will stay until we figure out what next to do with it. Then we finally slid the china cabinet out of the office, and set up the second desk. It worked out well enough that the server didn’t have to be down for more than a few minutes, and we didn’t have to clear out the whole room first. Of course, the china cabinet has been sitting in the dining room ever since, and I suspect it will continue to sit in there for a bit longer, but at least it is (mostly) out of the way.

Saturday we rearranged the upstairs guest room so that the daybed is against one wall and no longer blocking the path through the room, and continued working on the office. Today we continued on the reorganization path by tackling the furniture downstairs. The futon is now gone, broken down into parts which have been piled neatly on the patio under the front porch until such time as someone comes to cart them away (Craigslist ad has already been posted). All the remaining boxes of laminate flooring have been moved outside to the back patio, along with all the remaining garage shelve, so they’ll be protected from the rain. The smallest of our bookshelves has been moved downstairs and all the children’s books were tracked down and unpacked (or at least moved next to the shelf to be unpacked later). All games and toys have been stacked in the little alcove where they’ll eventually live, once we go buy the brackets and shelves we need to set up that space. And by mid afternoon we’d managed to clear out half a dozen plastic crates and a sizable stack of boxes, while the pile of stuff in the front hall to either donate or sell has nearly doubled in size.

The frustrating thing, of course, is that we are nowhere near done. Most of what remains still in boxes are books, which cannot be unpacked until they have a shelf to be place upon. And in order to put up the shelves, we need to paint the round room downstairs, because the big ugly shelving unit for all these books has no back, and once it is up, there is no way we are going to want to take it back down again later. But in order to paint, we have to first rip down all the wallpaper in that room, and that is likely far easier said than done.

So..progress, of a sort. More boxes unpacked, even if it doesn’t look like the stack has decreased in size. More furniture and rooms set up. And for the cats, new places to sit and watch the world go by.

Today has been the kind of day where we’ve been busy, but it’s a good kind of busy – where we’ve spent hours doing necessary chores, but still had time to just fall limply on into a chair and relax. We had to get up a bit earlier than we might normally (and by ‘we’ I mean ‘Richard’, because forget my brain ever letting me sleep in any later than 7 on a weekend morning these days), and headed off to check out a pair of desks someone is selling on Craigslist for a decent price. The still-living-out-of-boxes situation in our home office had started to get to the point where I was getting twitchy and irritable every time I couldn’t find something, so I’ve been haunting Craigslist for the past few weeks, hoping something would pop up that would make this particular new-house nightmare go away. It’s certainly not a requirement that we have desks that match, but it just so happens that this guy has two of them, which makes things easier in the long run. Plus, they come apart, so I am hoping that this means that getting up those front steps to our front door isn’t going to be nearly as painful as I am pretty much convinced it will be.

After checking out the desks and scheduling a time with the guy to pick them up later this week, we came home and spent an hour or so cleaning the house (which consisted mainly of Richard vacuuming up a rather disturbing amount of cat hair tumbleweeds, and me zipping around scrubbing toilets and sinks and random spots on the floor), and then, on a whim, I poked at Craigslist once more, continuing my up-til-now futile search for guest bed type furniture for our house. Except this time I stumbled on a pair of daybed-trundle combinations, posted just that morning for a price that made my jaw just about fall right off, so off we zipped to Davis to check them out. Luckily we can pick those up on the same night we’re going to get the desks. We did this, fully realizing that that evening is going to be a little piece of furniture-moving hell, since Murphy’s Law dictates that the weight of the furniture is always directly proportional to the number of steps one has to climb to get it to where it needs to go, but we figured as long as we’re renting the truck for the desks, we might as well use it for the other stuff too.

We were in Davis just in time for lunch, and it’s been a few months since we’ve had sushi, so we headed off to the all-you-can-eat sushi bar downtown, put our names on the list, and 45 minutes later, were satisfying the craving for raw fish. And then it was back home, to set up the truck rental for Tuesday night, and then sit down with a cookbook and a sheet of paper and make up a rather lengthy grocery list. A quick run to the grocery store, and when we came back, we took a tiny email-checking break, but then dove right into a four hour spree of cooking the likes of which we have never before attempted. This is because I checked out “Frozen Assets Lite & Easy” from the library, since we keep saying it would be handy to do a pile of cooking to stock the freezer so we’re less prone to coming home midweek and being too tired or too unmotived to cook. And lo and behold, unlike most of these sort of ‘cook once; eat for weeks’ cookbooks I’ve looked at, this one actually had a bunch of recipes that looked tasty, didn’t rely on a whole lot of already processed foods, and were low in Points.

Our kitchen is very tiny, and we did occasionally run into each other over the course of the cooking marathon, but eventually we worked it all out. There isn’t much in the way of counter space, but there is just enough for the two of us, if we’re careful. We chopped, we measured, we simmered and stirred, and when we were done, we had a rather impressive stack of tightly sealed freezer bags and one aluminum foil-covered baking pan in the freezer to show for all our efforts. We managed to tackle seven full recipes (each recipe says it makes 6 servings) in the space of those few hours, miraculously with only one additional trip to the store (because apparently when making out grocery lists, I cannot add). The few we managed to taste before stuffing them away into the freezer were pretty yummy, so I’m crossing my fingers that they come out of the freezer just as good.

The next few days promise to be a bit busy, since tomorrow there is brunch with friends and knitting group, and Monday there is work and an extra-long rehearsal for the women’s ensemble, and we’re picking up the truck on Tuesday to get all this furniture, and somewhere in the middle of all of that we are going to have to clear a path through the boxes and the random computer stuff in the office in order to have a place to put the desks once we get home. But a few minutes spent this afternoon with a measuring tape has at least given us a pretty good idea of where everything will go once it’s in here, and at this point, anything that will reduce the number of boxes that still are waiting to be unpacked is more than worth a little heavy lifting and frantic rearranging.

The floor is (mostly) done. Hooray. Last Saturday, armed with my dad’s air compressor and nail gun, and the remains of the jar of painter’s putty, Richard and I slammed out the rest of the flooring, and most of the rest of the trim. I ran out of putty midway through the afternoon, so there are still some obvious gaps that need filling (about half the master bedroom closet, and all the trim around the bathroom sinks), and there are still three transition strips that need placement. Plus the doorways look a trifle unfinished still (even those where the transition strip is in place) so those will eventually need some work. But there are no patches of bare concrete or underlayment to be seen anymore, and no big gaps at the edges that still require tiny pieces and copious amounts of swearing to fill, and what do you know, it actually looks really, really good. This is not to say that should we ever decide to replace this flooring that we will not immediately fork over the extra few thousand bucks to let the professionals handle it, but for two people who had no clue what they were doing, I think we can be proud of what we accomplished.

It feels good to know that the floor isn’t hanging over our heads anymore. Granted I suspect in a few weeks the lack of transition strips in certain areas is going to make me twitchy, but for now, I am content to just walk over those spots and pretend I do not see them. Plus, it appears that we were using entirely the wrong tool for trying to drill holes in the concrete, so if we can just get our hands on a masonry drill (I am hoping we might be able to rent or borrow one from somewhere), we’ll be good. And this afternoon we also bought another, larger, container of putty, because I know that even after I finish off the trim downstairs, there is much, much more puttying in my future. There’s one room upstairs in which we will be doing some kind of wall trim – either a chair rail (or chair-rail height wainscoting) or picture rail – so there’ll be lots more opportunity for me to scootch around a room carefully stuffing putty into gaps. Doesn’t it make you positively giddy with anticipation? Yeah, me neither.

We’ve been putting off doing some of the necessary repairs and alterations to the house til after the Dixon house is sold, but this week we finally couldn’t wait any longer. At some point Friday night, someone broke into our backyard and stole both our bikes. We’d had them chained to the back porch, but they simply clipped the cables (we found the severed locks in the alley). Ugh. So this morning a general contractor came over and took a bunch of measurements, and hopefully within the next week or two, the back fence will be completely replaced with something more sturdy and less see-through, and the storage building barn doors that lead to the back alley (through which the thief came) will have been walled up, so the only alley access will be through far sturdier locked gates.

When I joined Vox Musica last year, there were only eight of us in the group. There’s some perks to being in such a small ensemble, but it also made things really challenging if someone was sick and missed a rehearsal. There’s a big difference in how you use your voice if you’re the only one singing a part versus singing with other people, even if it’s just one other person. I’ve been used to doing that, on and off, over the years in the church choir, but that was singing as a tenor, and thus I mostly spent my time modulating my voice to either blend with the other men, or just sing by myself and try to sound as much like a guy as possible so it wouldn’t be so horribly obvious that the only tenor in the crowd was actually not really a tenor at all.

This year, the group is four people larger, so now there’s three to a part, and what a lovely difference it makes. For one thing, our voices are stronger and more cohesive; for another, it takes a bit of pressure off of each of us as individuals, since there’s one more person per section to carry the weight of the notes. It certainly doesn’t hurt that the music we’re singing for our upcoming concert in September is more traditional than what we’ve sung before. The music might be just as complex and occasionally difficult, but there is more of a logic to the old styles of music, or rather, it feels more logical to me.

Since we’re a larger group, the director decided it was high time to update our photographs (the ones on the website still show the smaller group size). So Sunday night was spent wandering around downtown Sacramento for a three hour photo shoot.

I did a teensy bit of panicking when he mentioned that the photographer would be taking not only group shots, but head shots and individual shots of each of us as well. I have never been found of having my picture taken – a common enough sentiment for anyone who is overweight, naturally, but also because I just don’t photograph well for close-up stuff. And the one thing that might possibly make this slightly less horrid for me is the one thing I simply do not know how to do. I am nearly 40 years old and have never learned how to apply makeup – the only stuff I ever use on a regular basis is eyeliner and mascara, and that is only out of necessity for the trich. On a very rare occasion I might wear lipstick, but it always tastes weird (probably since I’m just not used to it) so I tend to avoid it. As for blush and eyeshadow, my only tentative attempts to use either have resulted in me looking like I either got a rather uneven and blotchy sunburn on my cheeks (blush), or was recently punched in the eye (eye shadow). I tried, once or twice in college, going to those makeup counters in the stores to get my face ‘done’ and have them show me how to do it, but that was never very successful, mainly because they always ended up putting on far too much, and they usually seemed more concerned with how to get me to buy whatever their latest line of product was, then helping me figure out how to put the darn stuff on in the first place.

Luckily one of the other altos (who also happens to be a coworker was willing to help me, so she and I met up before the assigned time and she did my makeup for me. I still feel a bit like I look like I got punched in the eye (I suppose that, with my deep-set eyes, I am simply doomed with that look no matter what I do), and lipstick still tastes weird, but at least I was properly painted and prettied up for the close-up pictures. And after the photo shoot I think we all got a little taste of what it might be like to be a model (my verdict – it’s not remotely fun). There was a lot of standing and sitting in hot sun, squinting up at the photographer who managed to stand so he was directly in the light, trying to keep our eyes from watering because it was so bright. And there was a lot of extremely awkward posing, standing in positions that felt as if they could not possibly look natural, until you watched the other women being posed and realized that, even if they were also feeling the same way, it looked perfectly natural to everyone looking on.

The new pictures, from what we’ve seen of them so far, look terrific. Despite the squinting and the sun and the awkward posing, the group shots, at least, look good. I suspect that, unless the group size changes again, that will be the end our brief taste of what it might be like to be a model. And so I am back to my usual makeup regime (or distinct lack thereof), still wishing that one of these days I could figure out how to do all that silly girl stuff by myself, even if I do occasionally look like I’ve gotten a nasty sunburn or been punched in the eye.

This weekend we made a few more inroads on the never-ending saga that is the downstairs floor. My dad came over Wednesday night with his air gun and showed Richard how to use it, shortly after I dashed out to the hardware store to see how many 12-foot lengths of quarter round I could stuff into my car (they only hung out the front window about a foot, so it worked out well). Richard and my dad nailed one strip onto the wall Wednesday night, just so he could see how it’s done, and then Richard decided to take Friday off and see how much more he could put down by himself. So by the time I got home Friday evening, the guest room and both downstairs closets had been finished, and what a difference it made.

Throughout this whole flooring process I have reminded myself that people do this sort of thing, by themselves, all the time, and it will turn out okay at some point. But for weeks now Richard and I have been silently looking at the floor, or more specifically at the uneven ends lining the walls, and second guessing our idea to do not just pay the extra several thousand dollars to have someone who actually had a clue do it for us. All of a sudden, the application of some baseboard edging, and it doesn’t look so bad.

So yesterday we spent working our way through the sizable stack of quarter round. Richard measured and cut and nailed and managed to trim out the bedroom area and the hexagonal reading room, while I spent the entire time scootching around on my butt, applying painter’s putty to fill in the cracks, so the transition between flat baseboard and curved quarter round looks perfect and seamless.

It looks awesome. We are, of course, not done, because this project will go on forever (or at least feel like it), but what has been accomplished looks amazing. As Richard put it, it now looks good enough that we might not be embarrassed to have people over. And it demonstrate completely why putty and baseboard are the very best things ever for the intrepid flooring do-it-yourselfer.

The floor downstairs, in case you were wondering, is still not done. We’d intended to tackle it again this weekend, in fact (yes, I know, you’ve heard *that* before), but we got stalled by the fact that one of the transition trips came completely out when we tried to adjust the existing boards, and the next strip we tried to install ended up in the wrong place, and after that we decided to give up on the floor for a few more days and work on more pressing matters instead.

These more pressing matters included, among other things, installing a towel rack in the downstairs bathroom, swapping out the shower head downstairs for one we like much better, painting a bookshelf for the upstairs bathroom (which did not fit in the space it was meant to go, so the bookshelf is back in ‘pending’ status until I figure out what to do with it), and most importantly, installing a pet door into the door to the laundry room. This, naturally, necessitated the purchase of a new tool – a keyhole saw. I suspect that owning this house is going to result in the purchase of a whole lot more new tools before we are done. One of these years we might even have someplace to put all of these tools we keep accumulating. In the meantime, the cats have all figured out how to get through the pet door (through the simple act of catching as many as we could, and stuffing them through the door manually, then walking away and letting them muddle their way back out when they felt like it), and Richard and I are breathing huge sighs of relief. The laundry room may now smell like a cattery, but the rest of the house is litterbox-odor free.

We also did a bunch of unpacking this weekend. The first chunk of it was driven by finally getting around to hanging the paperback bookshelf. Once that was up, that meant we could unpack all the paperback books, which emptied out at least half a dozen boxes from the rather untidy mountain that’s been lurking in the guest room upstairs since we moved in. We also dragged the remaining two large bookshelves into the office, one on each side of the breakfast nook table (which is currently serving as our joint computer desk), and once those were in place, we could then rummage through the (slightly smaller) mountain of boxes and unpack a whole lot of office-related stuff. Granted, despite our best efforts, we still have not managed to unearth either the battery charger for our rechargable batteries, or the toaster, but we did manage to cut the mountain of boxes still waiting to be unpacked down to a much more managable number. Plus, dragging those shelves into the office has had the rather unexpected side effect of making the office actually look larger. I do not claim to understand how this works, but despite the fact that there are now more boxes scattered all over the floor of the office than there were when we began this little spate of organization on Friday evening, it looks and feels more spacious in there. Go figure.

The two dozen or so boxes that remain to unpack have now been stacked neatly in their respective categories (games, books, random crap we don’t know what to do with yet) along the walls of the guest room, leaving a huge expanse of floor visible in that room for the first time since we moved in. Amusingly, it took less than an hour for Rosemary to claim that room as her own, and she now spends quite a bit of time dragging half a dozen of her stuffed critters around the room in various configurations, or sprawled out on the carpet, ready to pounce on any other cat who might be silly enough to consider taking a nap there as well.

Last weekend we went to the Sacramento city archives and two historians very nicely helped us get started on our quest to learn the history of our house. We now have an official ‘build’ year – 1913 – and the name of the house’s first owner. We saw maps of the original neighborhood, back before there was a highway that cut through this part of the city instead of train tracks and trolley routes through the brand new streets. We also got some wonderful pointers for where to go next – who to contact to do a reverse title search, and where we might find more information on all the changes that have been done to this house over time. And we found out something new (to us) about our house – something which convinces us even more to hang on to these wonderful old windows as long as we can. My boss and I went to a meeting Monday, down in Yosemite, and since it made sense to carpool, we met at my house before combining cars and heading down in just one. While I was giving him the abbreviated tour, he asked if the windows were double-hung, and then noted that if this was the case, that meant the tops should open as well as the bottoms. News to us – I don’t think either of us has ever lived in a house with double-hung windows before and it had not even occurred to us that such a thing was possible. But sure enough, they open just like he said they would.It’s been a huge bonus to learn this, since most of the windows upstairs – the part of the house that tends to get the warmest during the day – don’t have screens, and the screens that do exist tend to be of dubious strength. There’d been only a few we were comfortable would be cat-proof, thus limiting the number of windows we were able to open. Just being able to open the top half of an extra half dozen windows upstairs has made a huge difference in the air flow in the upper half of the house (and has allowed us to avoid having to turn on the air conditioner completely).

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It is late morning on a Sunday, and I have been downstairs, working furiously on some knitted lace, in an attempt to catch up to the rest of the several thousand people who have been working on the same project. After several weeks of feeling restless and unable to focus on knitting anything more complicated than a simple stockinette sock, it is lovely to find myself right back into it, as if I’d never left.

Most of the cats have assumed their usual midday positions – zonked out on the couch and loveseat upstairs, or curled up in some favorite hiding spot downstairs. The lone exception is Checkers, who has has spent the past hour skittering around the bedroom floor with one of my hair ties. I picked it up off the floor this morning and put it away, assuming Azzie had been the one to knock it down, but it didn’t take more than a minute or two for Checkers to ‘capture’ it once more, and she’s having so much fun with it I don’t have the heart to take it away again.

Richard is off at a writer’s workshop this weekend, and it’s obvious from his excitement and his energy in the evening when he comes home that he’s been having a wonderful time. I think both of us have been in a holding pattern for our respective crafts for some time now – our minds just too distracted by everything to do with buying/selling/moving/renovating houses. We still have not sold the old house, but right now I think we are both at peace with it – at least for the moment. Every time I start to worry, I remind myself that we went into this whole experience prepared – that we set up our finances specifically to cover this sort of scenario, and while things might be a little tight for a few more months as we face paying double mortgages, we will be okay.

So it’s been kind of a long week. No, let’s put it this way. By the time Monday was over it had already been a long week; by the time Tuesday was finished it was even longer, and tonight? Well let’s just hope tomorrow just zips by as boring as a day can possibly be, because I really do not need any more of this week.

We’ll start small, with tonight, when I discovered the kitchen sink swarming with ants. I have no idea how long they have been swarming because the kitchen counter is made of the most hideous orange-brown speckled tile, against which I can see nothing. I hate this tile, I really do. It drives me nuts. I need a nice, clean, non-speckled surface so that I can see the dirt (or lack thereof); and more important, so I can see the damn ants when they come in. And they do come in, because this is the Sacramento valley, and thus it is ant country, and nothing short of having regular bug repelling maintenance ever kept the nasty little bugs from coming in at our last house, or at the house I rented before that.

Stepping back a day or two, we move to Tuesday, which is the day I went to the dentist and had the pleasure of having not only two cavities filled (thank you crappy dental genetics), I also had a tooth prepped for a crown. I did not get the crown like I was supposed to, because the machine that is required for this was not playing nicely with the dental folks, so because one dentist visit was not enough fun, I get to go back next week and do it all again. In the meantime I now have a temporary crown, and am not supposed to chew on the left side.

So now we come to the very start of it all – Monday. Since we’re going in reverse chronological order, the next doozy happened Monday evening, which is when the disposal unit spontaneously disconnected from under the sink right as I was trying to dispose of a large quantity of water and the remains of something from the fridge that had started to take on a life of its own, thus spilling nasty stinky gunk everywhere. That was all kinds of fun to clean up.

And finally, we come to the very beginning of the week – Monday morning, which is when our realtor called to tell me he had some news for which I would likely be 90% disappointed and 10% relieved. And that’s when I knew that the obnoxious, high maintenance idiots who’d put the (very low) offer on our house that we accepted only because it’s such a crappy market we didn’t feel like we had much choice, had decided to back out. But wait, it gets better. The reason these idiots gave was that until they read the disclosures they had no idea the house was so near agricultural fields, where there could be the potential of occasional traffic noise, or the use of pesticides. Apparently the cornfield that is RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET from the house was too cryptic a clue. When you have finished laughing hysterically – the reaction I chose for this pronouncement – I will also point out that they have lived in a nearby town for over six months, and have made numerous trips back and forth between the two locations in the meantime, and there is absolutely no way to get from one town to the next without passing ‘agricultural areas’ unless they have somehow developed a means of teleporting that they are just to nasty and mean to share with the rest of us.

So basically this is now the second ‘confirmed’ offer on our house that has fallen through – first the one in May that was contingent on them selling their house (which they didn’t manage to do), and now this one. From the very beginning of this second transaction I have hated the very thought of selling my house to these people, and I wanted so badly to just write a big fat ‘Screw you’ on their joke of an offer, but….we would like to sell this house and I am not supposed to care who it is who actually buys it, so we signed. In retrospect I should have gone with my first instinct (the ‘screw you’ idea) since it would have saved us and our realtor a lot of paperwork and hassle, and made this week maybe a little less long and unbearable. Or as long and unbearable any week that includes a nasty mess in the kitchen, a trip to the dentist, and a confrontation with one of my many insect nemisises (nemisii?), can be.

There is some kind of truly nasty traffic on I-80 this weekend, heading toward San Francisco. I know this because we have been stuck in it, now, twice, and both times, on the trip back home, the traffic has shown no signs of abating. I am not entirely sure what is going on in the Bay Area, but whatever it is, I want no part of it. Anything so crowded that it will back traffic up nearly to Sacramento for days in a row is not my idea of fun.

We got stuck in it the first time on Friday evening, when we had to head back to the old house to do some paperwork. A trip that normally would have taken me about half an hour (since it was right about the time I would have been heading home from work) took nearly twice that long, and that’s only because we were able to take advantage of some of the off-the-highway routes we’re familiar with. The second time was yesterday, driving up to the ranch, although this time we could escape it sooner, and take the back country roads for the longest part of the journey. I feel bad for all the rest of the people stuck in it, though.

Our old house continues to mock me. When we were down there for the paperwork on Friday night we also swung by the house to pick up the house plans (which we’re leaving behind for whoever buys the place), and while we were there I decided to check the fruit trees to see what might have ripened since we’ve been gone. And what do you know. The Granny Smith apple tree which, until this year has managed to produce nothing more than very tiny, oddly shaped inedible apples, is suddenly full of huge apples, many of which were  (mostly) worm free, and ripe. So I found a cloth bag in the trunk of my car, and between the two of us, Richard and I managed to pull over a dozen huge apples off that tree. I dreamed of harvesting apples for years, waiting for that darn tree to finally produce, and now that it has finally decided to get with the apple-growing (apparently dropping a fence on it earlier in the year was just the kick-start it needed), we won’t be around to take advantage of it anymore. First the peach tree; now this. I suppose I can only be grateful that the grapefruit and the tangelo tree never even produced so much as a blossom this year, so at least they won’t be mocking me too.

Anyway. The apples have come home with us and are sitting in the fridge while I ponder what to do with them. I am thinking that there may have to be a pie in our near future, or possibly two (there’s certainly enough apples for them), and I am currently leaning towards the idea of putting the pies together and then freezing them for later. Somehow I think it would be appropriate. We had home-grown white peach cobbler for the family gathering on the Fourth of July; we can have home-grown apple pie for the family gathering this winter. And in the meantime, I guess I had better start mapping out where we could possibly plant a few more fruit trees in our new backyard, so perhaps in about five or six years time, I can do this again.

Years ago, before we were married, Richard and I bought a share in a local ranch, where his parents used to go when he was younger. We went there a few times, but it tends to be hot there, and the few times we’ve had to take some time off and go somewhere, we’ve always had other places we wanted to go.It’s been over four years since we have actually used the place, but we’ve still been paying the (rather expensive) yearly dues, so it was way past time this thing was sold.

This week Richard got an offer from someone who answered his ad on Craigslist, and the guy really wanted to close the deal as soon as possible. So this afternoon we drove out to the ranch and met the guy and his family, and we all sat around and chatted while the ranch people prepared the paperwork and had a notary come out so people could sign things, and then, in far less time than it took us to drive out there, we were done.

Richard is feeling very nostalgic about the place, since he used to go there with his family. But his family also hasn’t gone in a number of years and they’ve also been talking about selling their own share, so the end was in sight no matter what. As for me, I am feeling mostly just relief. The sale could not have come at a better time, since this is the month we’re now facing a number of double bills (utilities and mortgage) that come along with being the (nervous) owner of two houses, so the cash for the ranch share is going to come in quite handy.