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.

…there will be cat.

He’s going to be sixteen this year. Doesn’t look it, does he.

The sinuses did not respond to the antibiotics. So now I’m on a new course of meds – nasal spray and decogestants. My mouth is constantly dry, the decongestants occasionally make me jittery and even though I am taking them in the morning, they make it hard for me to fall asleep. And still, the facial nerve spasms continue. Does my face know how to have fun, or what?

After we found out about the termites, we tossed around various options. The one option we really do not want to take is to have to pay someone an insane amount of money to come in and do a treatment that we could do ourselves, especially since the termites haven’t actually made it to the structure yet, so are still basically containable.  Since Richard’s asthma precludes him going into our crawlspace (dust + possible mold + severe asthma = bad mix), it was up to me. And I really did think I could do it too. We went out and bought the treated stakes that were recommended to us by our contractor friend, and we borrowed my parents’ rake to use to clear out the debris, and we came home and emptied out the hall closet where the trapdoor to the crawlspace is located, and I changed into my grungiest clothes and pulled back my hair, and we scrounged up a flashlight, and off I went into the crawlspace. Except….not. I climbed down there, and then looked under the house, to where the dark enclosed space stretched out for a very long way, and I just couldn’t make myself do it.  I felt like a stupid, lousy home owner, incapable of doing even the most basic of home owning tasks, and I thought longingly of the days when we were renters and someone else would have had to do this, and I wondered briefly if the insulating properties of having a raised foundation had really been worth *this*.

That was Saturday. We talked to a few people on Sunday. I chatted with a friend with a ten year old son to see if he might be willing to rummage around in our crawlspace (and we would definitely pay him well to do so) and all the while I felt like the biggest loser because I am such a wimp that I cannot get over my issues and just get into that damn crawlspace and take care of it myself.  And then I stopped and thought about *why*, exactly, it was that I was so scared.  It wasn’t the fact that it’s an enclosed space. Sure, that’s not exactly comfortable, but I can deal with that. It was the fact that it is dark under there. And I do not do well in the dark. I realize that I am nearly forty years old and being scared of the dark is something that you are supposed to grow out of before you reach double digits in age, but there it is. The thought of being underneath that house, the flashlight suddenly going out, and not being able to see where I was, let alone how to escape, terrifies me completely.

I got to thinking about how I could deal with this, because no matter how illogical the phobia, it’s still real and no amount of self-lecturing will ever make it go completely away, unless you have a really good plan. And I suddenly thought of the perfect solution. Christmas lights. We have lots of them up in the attic, and they are wound conveniently onto little wheels. I could still bring the flashlight with me, but they would be not only my back-up  in case the flashlight batteries died, they would also be the path that led me back out.

So, last night we tried it again. Richard got a wheel of lights down from the attic, and I got back into my grungy clothes, and this time, it wasn’t scary at all. Good thing I had those lights, too, because the flashlight was not being very cooperative. I got down into the crawlspace and I rolled out my string of tiny little lights and inched my way further in, and that’s when I discovered that this was all pointless anyway. Because there is only about two feet of clearance under there. Literally the only way to move around is to slither forward, snake-like, using my elbows and my toes to drag myself along. And while I can manage that for a short period of time, there was no way I was going to be able to slither myself around the entire crawlspace to do what needs to be done. I got myself down there and I was damn proud of that, but I hadn’t counted on the simple fact that I just wasn’t going to be able to *move*.

Sigh. Last night I had dreams of being back in that crawlspace, except that it was large enough I could walk around. I was scraping mud tubes off the sides of the mechanical vents, but they were the size of manicotti shells, and the termites that emerged were the length of my hand. But the weird thing was that through it all, I wasn’t scared. Not one bit. If only the real thing could be this easy.

A month or two ago, I tried to post a recipe to the recipe list Richard and I (well, mostly I) maintain, only to get a series of errors. All the existing blog entries were still visible on the site, but I could not edit them, nor post anything new. The recipe list was created using a much older version of Moveable Type, and we just never got around to upgrading it. Richard couldn’t figure out how to fix the errors, and I really didn’t want to mess with starting from scratch with a brand new installation of MT. So he suggested I give WordPress a try.

Richard’s been using WordPress for a year or so now, but I’ve been hesitant to switch before now because I knew it used php, and I do not ‘speak’ php. However, we found a nice, basic theme to use for the recipe site, and he installed it and I manually ported in all the recipes (because not only could I not edit or post, I could also no longer export the older entries into a nice, compact file for later use. Wince), and then I started actually looking around WordPress, and looking at the actual templates themselves and much to my surprise I discovered that the amount of code I really can’t ‘read’ is far smaller than I had expected. Plus, this system is *nice*.

It’s probably no surprise that shortly after I got the recipe site up and running on its brand new system, it wasn’t long before I asked Richard to give me my own instance of WordPress to poke and prod and turn into my very own. I had to get his help on a lot of the set up, and the documentation for the php tags WordPress uses is not always very useful for someone who doesn’t know php, but what I couldn’t figure out on my own, Richard did for me. I imported all the entries since 2003 from Moveable Type, and then by some miracle, I stumbled across an export file of all the entries that were composed in Greymatter (pretty much all of 2001 and 2002), and even though I still had to copy and paste all the entries from 2000 by hand, it didn’t take long before my entire history was uploaded into one system, for the very first time since I started this thing seven years ago.

Compared to the amount of time it took me to configure my journal layout the last few times I gave my site a redesign, this version was a piece of cake. I am kicking myself, ever so slightly, for waiting so long to switch over. At least, however, I finally made it. And look, I even found a theme that seems tailor made just for me.

Do you know what is even more fun than just the usual sinus pressure and occasional inability to breathe? Sinus pressure, the occasional inability to breathe, accompanied *with* your head feeling as if it is about to explode almost every time you stand up, to the point of feeling almost dizzy on occasion.

And do you know what is even more fun than standing up and feeling dizzy from your head feeling like it’s about to explode? Having the entire right side of your face go into spasms to the point where other people notice that your eye is twitching and hey, are you okay?

(Have I mentioned lately how very much I hate my sinuses? Or how very much more they seem to hate me?)

I finally broke down on Monday, after the second episode of face twitching, and went to the doctor. He listened to my list of symptoms, peered into my nose, noted with no surprise that I was extremely blocked up, and prescribed me a course of antibiotics for the sinus infection that was rapidly building up in my head. The face twitching, he theorized, was due to the fact that my sinuses are so inflammed that they are pressing on a nerve. The fact that the last episode resulted in my entire jaw feeling as if I had been clenching my teeth extremely tight for the better part of a month was just further proof of that.

Well. I have been dutifully taking my antibiotics all week. But so far, they do not seem to be helping. Nearly every time I stood up at work yesterday the right side of my face would start to spasm again, and the intense sinus pressure is pretty much now a constant, no matter what I’m doing. Sigh. But I know that if I go back to the doctor before I finish out this course of antibiotics, he will remind me that these things take time, and I need to be patient. So. I am being patient. And dreading every change in position that might result in triggering yet another bout of pressure-induced dizzyness, or oh-so-exciting facial spasms. And I am most certainly not pondering grabbing the nearest sharp object and driving it into my cheek, if only to relieve the pressure and put this thing finally to rest.

A few years back we signed up with a pest control company to come out every three months and treat the exterior of our house for buggy kind of critters. We did it mainly because, while I try very hard to adopt a live-and-let-live attitude with those of the many-legged set, the situation with the paper wasps was really worrying me. We have little peaked roof overhangs over the front door, and the second story library window, which apparently provide the perfect spot for paper wasps to build their nests, and as much as I tried to reason with them and convince them to build their nests in the backyard instead, they refused to listen and sometimes they would come inside and there is nothing quite like finding a mostly-dead wasp twitching on your floor to make you a bit jumpy. As an added bonus, we have not had a single ant infestation since we started the quarterly bug patrol, which makes me more happy than I can possibly describe, considering the millions of ant bodies I had to clean up during the first year or two we lived here.

Anyway. A week or so ago, they called to schedule a termite inspection. It seemed odd to have this come suddenly out of the blue, but they said it was part of our anti-bug package to get a free termite inspection every three years, so Richard scheduled it, and then stayed home on Friday in order to meet the termite guy when he came to check out the house. The guy wandered around outside and checked our foundation, and climbed up into the attic and checked there, and so far everything was looking just peachy and extremely termite free, until he headed into the last segment of the inspection, which was to look underneath the house. Our house has a raised foundation, so there is about two feet of crawl space underneath, accessible only through a small square opening in the floor of the front hall closet. And this is where he discovered that maybe we were not as happily termite free as we had hoped.

It turns out that the contractors who built our house had, in their infinite non-wisdom, left a bunch of scrap wood lying about in the crawlspace – an act which is sort of like an engraved invitation to those of the termite persuasion. And the termites, never willing to turn down an invitation to a party, had responded just about as you expect. He brought out a piece of wood to show Richard, and then started quoting prices for termite treatment, and it’s no surprise to say that there was a wee bit of silent screaming and panic when Richard forwarded all this info on to me.

Luckily, the termite inspector said that there was no structural damage, which basically means that while the termites have been happily feasting on the scrap wood lying about down there, they haven’t made it up to the actual house foundation. Which suggests that as careless as the contractors were for leaving the stuff down there in the first place, they at least managed to do their job when they built the actual foundation itself. And the even better news is that if we can just get back down there and rake out the wood, while leaving behind some treated stakes that will take out any termites that start pondering bigger and better things once their main source is taken away, we’ll probably be fine. And while I am not remotely a fan of dark, enclosed spaces full of dirt and bugs and who knows what else, I think I can manage to get over my utter distaste for the idea of crawling underneath my own house if it will save us the $1600 the inspector quoted us to have someone else come out and do the exact same thing.