May Days of 2007

Spring is anniversary time around our house -- Ron and I were married April 29. But May marks another, newer anniversary, for it was in May 2007 that Ron left Michigan to work in San Francisco.

May was also the month when our realtor showed our house for eight days in a row, sometimes multiple showings in one day, and received no offers. We had priced the house at the amount we owed, prepared to take a bath on realtor fees and STILL couldn't move the thing.

So it was in May that Ron and I faced the prospect of paying both mortgage and rent for an undefined period, and that's when our move back to San Francisco ceased to be a fun adventure and became a perilous gamble. When Ron boarded that plane last May, we were gambling that I would generate enough income to pay the mortgage, that huge budget-busting house repairs would not crop up, that we would sell the house before the July property tax bill arrived.

Looking back, I'm breathless that we had the nerve. Two things gave us hope: My brother had agreed to rent the house from us and my work prospects at the San Francisco newspaper were good. Both panned out beautifully: Andy went crazy over the house and ended up buying it; and I'm still working at the Business Times.

So we're facing May 2008 from a slightly better position, with nothing more worrisome on the horizon than Benny entering kindergarten next year (which is actually a big concern, given the crazy S.F. process, and worth a blog post of its own). These days, instead of emptying out a storage space and keeping a house Swiffer-perfect, I'm planning a family trip to San Diego and working on a fiction project. I wish I could have seen a glimpse of the future last May, when I was arguing with basement contractors and setting up a garage sale.

Living Larger

Here are some pictures of our new apartment.

Thank God for Kansas

Meanwhile, the great San Francisco Childcare Hunt continued today. Ron stayed home from work in the morning so he could accompany us to the home-based daycare in the Sunset district. “I’ve hardly been to work at all this week,” he complained.

The place was supposed to be “just blocks” from the N-Judah rail line. Well, they were long blocks, and all uphill. We were panting as we finally crested the hill at Noriega Street and met a lovely woman named Reema.

Her house was very nice, large and clean with a good play yard out back. Reema made all the food for the kids, breakfast, lunch and snacks. She had lots of assistants to help. The kids looked happy, and Benny was captivated when half a dozen children sat around a teacher to hear “The Princess Book.”

“Did you like that school?” I asked Benny as we wheeled him back to the rail line.

“I like it!” Benny yelled. “I like the Princess School!”

Well, that was something.

***

I finally got the nerve to call Ralf, our moving truck driver who held all our worldly possessions. Ralf sounded very depressed.

“I’m in Kansas,” he said. “The rig broke down. Then the truck sent out to fix the problem broke down too. I’ve been here for days.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” I said sympathetically as I danced around the apartment. “That’s terrible.”

“I should have been there by now,” he went on dolefully. “Now it could be Tuesday, Wednesday of next week.”

“We’ll get by,” I reassured him.

***

Our rental agent called. She’d gone to the head of the company and our lease break was now a bona fide transfer. Our security deposit for Cole Valley would be applied toward the new place’s deposit. We wouldn’t have to find another tenant. We could sign the lease on the new place today and take possession tonight or Friday.

“You are amazing,” I said. “Thank you so much.”

I met Ron at the rental agency office. (Benny was starting to think we lived there too.) Ron wore a suit and a harried expression. “I need to write some stories,” he muttered.

We signed all the papers and forked over another check. Ron raced off to write about some guy who dealt in mouse stem cells. I called Ralf on my cell as I wheeled Benny toward our soon-to-be-former apartment.

“They fixed the rig,” Ralf said. “I got stops in Modesto and Navato, but you’ll be first. I should be there Monday.”

“No worries,” I said, smiling. “By the way, I’ve got a new address for you.”

Hills and Valleys

I woke up Wednesday morning, lying stuffed inside Benny's racecar sleeping bag, and instantly started fretting. Today was the estimated arrival date for our furniture from Michigan. What if our driver Ralf called today, saying he was on Highway 101 outside the city?

Perhaps I should rent a storage space, I thought. That would be a good laugh, if I had to rent a storage space just days after triumphantly closing the one in Michigan. Storage space in the city would cost a fortune. Should I rent one in the East Bay?

Ron departed gloomily for work, and I tried to entice Callisto out of the bathroom. The cat's been perfecting her Evil Cursed Stare of Death for three days now, glaring out of the doorway of her covered litter box. She hadn't touched her food. I finally lured her out with a can of wet cat food with "Fancy Beef Flavor." Let's hope it wasn't from China.

Flushed by this small triumph, I put Benny in his new stroller and wheeled him over to the commercial district to run errands. Benny is adjusting beautifully to city life. When waiting at the bus stop, I always place the folded stroller between Benny and the street, and he stands nicely behind the stroller. Benny used to fight taking my hand in parking lots back in Ann Arbor; now I just waggle my fingers and say "hand," and his little paw immediately slips into mine.

An interesting email awaited me back at the apartment -- the rental agent who found this place for Ron had heard about our squawking. She wants to show me some other apartments and says we can work something out -- some sort of transfer as long as we pick a place with the same rent or more. Elated, I call her and arrange a meeting that afternoon. She'll pick me and Benny up in her car and show us three places.

The first two places revealed a familiar pattern for this rental agency: the neighborhood is great, but the agency always owns the sorriest building on the block. But the third place ... Ron and I were blown away. It was big. It was gleaming. It was perfect. It was also expensive. How could we afford it?

"We'll take it. We'll find a way," pronounced Ron, who has felt just awful about the whole apartment crisis. The agent said she would call us with details.

***
Well, the agent did call, and the details weren't pretty. I held the cell phone to my ear, my mouth open, as I stood outside a Burgermeister restaurant while Benny and Ron ate lunch inside. We would have to forfeit the security deposit we'd put done on the Cole Valley place. We would need an additional security deposit for the new place, plus first month's rent. AND we'd still have to find a new tenant for the Cole Valley place. But, the agent said happily, they've agreed to waive $500 fee!

"Are you kidding?" I asked incredulously. "This isn't a transfer, this is a lease break. You expect us to shell out thousands of dollars more? Tie ourselves to a new, more expensive apartment as well as the old place?"

The agent sputtered.

"Look, I appreciate your efforts," I said unsincerely. "But if this is a lease break, then we'll break the lease. We'll find a new tenant, and then we'll find an apartment ourselves, without your agency."

No, no, the agent said. Let me call you back.

I agreed and went inside the restaurant to tell Ron. It was a quiet lunch; Benny sensed our mood and concentrated on building towers out of jelly packets. At the end of the lunch, I looked at our bill: $30. One thing was for sure, we definitely couldn’t afford San Francisco.

##

Missions Impossible

SAN FRANCISCO -- I'm typing this while sitting on my bed -- which, in this case, is a child-sized racecar sleeping bag unrolled on the hardwood living room floor of our new apartment. Ron and Benny share the air mattress, and the cat hasn't left her unused litter box for two days.

We're all a little traumatized. We know we're happy to be here, but we're too freaked out to appreciate this wonderful city. The apartment is not working out, and we're not sure what to do about that. A weird smell developed in the closet while Ron was in Michigan and now it's taking over the apartment. I know I didn't imagine it, because Ron smelled it too.

So on Monday the three of us hoofed it over to the rental agency, a scary entity that owns a quarter of the residential rental space in San Francisco. We were there obstensibly for me to officially sign the apartment lease, but I just couldn't do it. So I left a bored, restless Benny with Ron and sat down with an agent to explain our plight. Crazed by jet-lag and worry, I didn't make a great impression. In fact, I burst into tears.

This resulted in a visit Tuesday by the agency's district supervisor and the building manager, who claimed to smell nothing. We'd have to break our lease if we wanted out, I was told. That meant either coughing up two months' rent or finding another tenant ourselves. It would be ironic, I told Ron, if after spending five months showing a house for sale, I'd find myself showing an apartment for rent. I personally never wanted to see a Clorox cleaning wipe again.

Feeling a little desperate, I turned to another difficult task: finding daycare for a small child in San Francisco in two weeks. Ron had spoken to a lady at a marvelous-sounding school the week before leaving for Michigan. It was small (16 children total) and cute, with a good teacher-student ratio and none of that weird academic bent that I'd noticed on some S.F. preschool web sites. Dinosaur School (not it's real name) was what I wanted. Clutching their little blue handbook, I left a message at 7 a.m. Tuesday morning. At noon, the school called back. There had been an opening, but it was filled while Ron was in Michigan. Ron had scheduled a parent tour for Aug. 1, which I agreed to keep. "Maybe something will open up," the school director said. Yeah.

Now a little panicked, I spent hours on Tuesday searching online for preschools, shamelessly using someone's nearby wireless connection for my laptop. Most schools I called had a waiting list: "We have openings for fall 2008," a few school officials said helpfully. Finally a preschool director took pity on me and coughed up two names for home-based daycares in the Sunset district.

By the end of Tuesday, things looked a little grim. The rental agency's lease department called me back and described how easy it would be for us to find a new tenant ourselves. An editor from the San Francisco Business Times emailed me, asking me if I could begin work Aug. 6. Sure, I emailed back, crossing my fingers.

It's doubly sad about the apartment, because the neighborhood is just great -- everything Ron said and more. It's quiet and pretty, with a nice commercial area just a few blocks away, with a laundromat and grocery, and hardware store and crepes place. Bus lines and rail lines are just blocks away. There's a great playground a few blocks in the other direction. The great location almost makes up for the apartment.

Almost.

Confessions of a Reformed Control Freak

During the seven weeks that I cared for Benny alone in Michigan, an odd thing happened. I became a control freak. So the day before we left for San Francisco, I was looking for new things to worry about, and decided to fret about the drive to the airport.

We’d hired a car, but what about Benny? His booster seat was in a moving van heading west. Should we bring his old car seat? What would we do with it at the airport, since he won’t need a car seat on the plane? I finally called the car service and they said not to worry, Benny could just sit in back, belted up. But I couldn’t let it go at that. I also changed the pickup time my husband had arranged from 3:45 a.m. to 4:15 a.m. the next morning.

Well, that final bit of micromanaging was to have dire consequences. At 4:10 a.m. on Sunday morning, we were standing in the dimly-lit living room: bags packed, cat drugged, stroller folded, Benny in his coat. No car. 4:20 a.m. No car. 4:30 a.m. No car.

Ron called the car service and learned that no car was coming. The man I’d spoken to had changed our pickup time to 4:15 P.M. Aaagh! Quickly we dashed to the dining room cabinet, pulled out a phone book and started calling cab companies. Then we endured a 20-minute nail-biting wait (which included a false alarm from our newspaper carrier. Damn, I’d forgotten to cancel our Detroit Free Press.)

A cab finally pulled up and we raced over, tossed in our luggage and screeched away. The cab made the short trip to Metro Airport in record time. We arrived panting at the check-in counter (mercifully empty), with Benny in his stroller, clutching his stuffed sheep, wide-eyed with the drama of it all.

“Oh, you’re on the 6 a.m. flight?” the airline woman asked. “I was just about to close it up.”

“We have a cat!” I wheezed, waving the health certificate.

“Yes, I see,” the lady said soothingly. She obviously knew a nutcase when she saw one.

Security was, of course, a pill. Benny refused to go through the arch alone, so I had to push him through, then follow as he yelled. I forgot to take my laptop out of the bag, so they needed to give it a thorough anti-bomb scan. Meanwhile, another security guy made Ron pull Callisto the cat out of her carrier and carry her through the arch.

We made the plane with no time to spare, the last ones to board. By now I was almost weeping with stress and my usual fear of flying. Ron, the saint that he is, amused Benny during the plane’s taxi and liftoff while I listed to my iPod and tried to convince myself we weren’t going to die.

The rest of the flight went beautifully, probably because it was completely out of my control. Benny napped in his stroller during our layover in Houston and Continental Airlines does a nice breakfast service, which we got on both legs of the flight. We landed in Oakland, Calif., on time and miracle of miracles, so did our luggage.

Benny picked out Coit Tower, Alcatraz and the TransAmerica Pyramid during the taxi ride over the Bay Bridge. I pressed my own nose against the window glass and tried to see the Golden Gate Bridge. We were home.

Hassles

ANN ARBOR -- FINAL POST -- It’s 1:05 a.m. I’m lying awake on the floor of our home office, staring wide-eyed at the shadowed trees outside. Ron is beside me on the air mattress; Benny is snuggled in his sleeping bag on the floor to my left.

Our plane leaves in five hours. Everything feels unfinished, but I can’t think of a solitary thing left to do. Our luggage is piled in Benny’s empty room, our jackets draped on top. The stroller is folded up nearby. Our taxi is reserved, the cell phones charged. The whole house has been swept, wiped and Windexed in case a buyer with wads of cash turns up with a realtor later today.

Wait … I sit up. I forgot to clear out the liquor bottles. Then I settle back. Nah … we were renting the house to my brother Andy, after all. A full liquor cabinet would only be a plus.

I stretch, and my foot hits the empty cat carrier beside the mattress. Heaven knows where Callisto is right now, probably in the basement, hiding behind the washing machine. She knows something’s up. I’d never flown with a cat before. Do I have the right cat carrier, the right papers, the right pills? How would Callisto react to a sedative? I planned to crush up her pill into wet cat food – I’d even given her a bit before midnight to make sure she liked it. Would it work? What if she spit it out, threw it up …

I sit up again. Did I take the screen door key off my key chain? And what about the donuts in the fridge? Did Andy like donuts? Calm down, Chris, everyone likes donuts. Yeah, but this is Andy …

To take my mind off my rapidly developing psychosis, I think about San Francisco. But the picture is dim, undeveloped. My reality isn’t in California; it’s here, with sighing trees and tinny wind chimes and the faint whine of the neighbor’s lonely dog. Between me and San Francisco stands a daylong airplane trip with a cat, a toddler and a layover in Houston. Try as I might, my imagination can’t bridge that obstacle.

Instead, I think of Ann Arbor: our pretty house; the winding pathway in our backyard; Benny’s school friends; my family, my friends; daffodils in the spring; leaves in the fall. I remember the four-foot snowdrifts I navigated when we brought Benny home from the hospital. I remember the first screening of the “Europa Society” and my neice’s performance in the “Wizard of Oz.” (She was both a munchkin and a monkey – such dramatic range).

We were leaving so much -- whole thing sounded nuts. Who gives up jobs, cars and Mackinaw Island fudge to live in a tiny apartment? Who wants to wait at bus stops, wheel granny carts to the grocery, feed quarters into washing machines? Who wants the hassle?

I turn over and finally, reluctantly close my eyes. Oh hell, I think. Life is full of hassles, no matter where you are. All you can do is choose the hassles you want.

Boxing Day

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Just finished up a tiring but very happy weekend. Three longtime friends came to visit me -- two were roommates from college and the third a fellow reporter from my first full-time newspaper job (I was an education reporter in Battle Creek, Mich.) Seeing any one of these women would be enough to make my week. Visiting with all three in two days makes me realize how lucky I am.

In between visits, I'm frantically packing. Seventeen lovingly taped and labled boxes are stacked up in my home office, each sporting a sassy colored tape that says BEDROOM or LIVING ROOM. That may sound impressive (probably not), except that every box containes resorted and repacked stuff from our storage space. Tomorrow I actually begin packing things that have not been packed before. I suppose that's progress.

The storage space is, thankfully, no more. I'll admit to a happy lump in my throat as I surveyed the empty space. For six months I've shuttled boxes and debris between house, storage space, the Salvation Army and the city dump. At one point the space was completely full. Benny considered the storage facility a second home, squealing happily whenever the big sliding doors sprang open and cadging rides on the little moving cart.

Speaking of Benny, the poor kid's been a trifle neglected in my packing frenzy. I actually gave him a full bath tonight, with bubbles and everything, and scrubbed the areas around his little cuts and scrapes, which had developed dark outlines because I hadn't changed his Disney Princess band-aids in days. It shows a shocking lack of maternal feeling, I know, that I found the time to pumice-stone my toes this weekend, but not tend my child's wounds.

In other news, Xena, Warrior Princess, has invaded my house, yelling "Yi yi yi yi yi YI!" While updating my "NetFlix" queue last month, I thought it would be fun to rent a Xena DVD so I could laugh at funny hats and correct mythological errors.

Well, I must have been tired, because I didn't order just one Xena DVD; I signed on for the entire first season. Every time I opened my mailbox, more Xena was inside. "What's this?" I cried. "What happened to my '24' DVDs? I want Keifer!"

Apparently Jack Bauer just can't take on Xena in open battle. I quickly realized what happened, but I was too busy to update my NetFlix queue. I watched a half-dozen Xena episodes (mostly by fast-forwarding through the fight scenes), but Xena always came back. *

Tonight, however, I emerge victorious. I signed onto NetFlix and banished Xena, promoted Keifer and added the full second season of "Sex in the City," where the battles are equally physical but the hats are always fabulous.

________________________________________________

* Don't ask me why I didn't have 10 minutes to log on to NetFlix, but could spend whole evenings watching a screeching acrobat with a bad hair day. Such queries are not helpful.

Christine Gets a Flat Tire and Doesn't Freak Out

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- At this point in my life, when any small crisis immediately becomes a HUGE BIG DRAMA, it was refreshing to have a problem dealt with so smoothly and sensibly and with such dispatch.

I was driving back from Benny's daycare, listening to Pachabel's Canon and repeating my personal serenity prayer ("I have no fucking control over that, so I won't give a shit"), when I noticed the driver next to me was having a seizure.

OK, so he wasn't having a seizure, he was just trying to get my attention. And since I was wearing my 7:30 a.m. uniform of faded T-shirt, rumpled khakis and coke-bottle glasses, the only explanation was that something was wrong with my car. "Your tire is flat!" the man shouted as I rolled down the window. "Back there!"

Oh, crud. My car had just returned from Indianapolis (a 275-mile drive, one way) and I knew my tires were low. Now one had collapsed altogether.

Now, I am not exactly famous these days for my calm, confident responses to life's little curve balls. Generally I react to minor setbacks (a closed day care, a sick cat, a dropped earring) with rhetoric and hand-wringing suitable for a Greek tragedy. When I arrived at the doctor's last Friday for a checkup, I was so wound up from packing clothes and dispensing cat medicine and cleaning the house for a possible showing, that my first blood pressure reading hit the roof. My second one was normal, thank goodness. The nurse said the first reading was probably a bad cuff, but I know better.

Back to this morning. I simply drove to a nearby Discount Tire. They took the tire off and floated it in water to find where the leak was. "I'm turning in this car in two weeks," I begged. "I can't spend much." Discount Tire did not fail me. Those guys scrounged up a used tire from somewhere and put it on the car, free of charge. In 30 minutes I was back on the road.

Alas, my new maturity couldn't last. Within an hour I was in a loud altercation with a stubborn roll of packing tape, my shouts echoing off the walls of our nearly empty storage space. Oh well, I thought as I ground the tape roll under my heel (hard to do in flip-flops), I'm not always like this.

Why Do Cars Have Wheels?

CINCINNATI, Ohio, and ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Well, I'm back from Cincinnati, trying to put my life back together. Traveling always screws everything up, although since I'm moving to California, it's hard to tell the difference.

I'd planned to leave for Cincy on Thursday and return on Sunday, but my 105-item to-do list delayed our departure until Friday. The usually 5-hour drive took 7 hours due to construction near the Michigan-Ohio border and a bad accident on I-75 in Cincinnati. Mara and her husband Kurt must have wondered what they were getting when I finally arrived, wild-eyed from two solid hours of Benny's "Philadelphia Chickens" CD. Not that I'm complaining, since the CD and songbook spared me two hours of "Why do cars have wheels? Why are trucks big? Why do cars need gas?" and so on.

Mara and I promptly launched a steady round of late nights and excessive beer-drinking, always a sign of a successful weekend. Mara talked me into staying an extra day, prompting a flurry of phone calls where I canceled a babysitter, asked my brother to check the cat and fretted over missing a birthday party for one of Benny's friends. Mara is very persuasive; she should work for the U.N. She dragged me out to a bar after my 7-hour drive, leaving the children with Kurt. The next day we went to the park, the zoo and another birthday party. On Sunday we went to brunch and a Greek Festival. By then I'd had it, but she cajoled me into a pool party. I hate pool parties and was relieved that we arrived too late to see anyone.

Benny and I zoomed home on Monday to the music of "Rhinoceros Tap," arriving at Benny's daycare at 2:30 p.m. There I was regaled with a vivid account of the missed birthday party, which had some sort of dump truck theme. I was told the birthday boy and his mother constantly asked for Benny and that a personalized hard hat was waiting for him, lonely and neglected. Guilt-ridden, I drove home and left a groveling message on the birthday family's answering machine.

But I'm finished traveling for now, thank goodness, until I head to Indianapolis on July 6. The cat is at the vet's having some sort of dental operation, Benny is at daycare, and the temperature in Ann Arbor is topping 90 degrees. Good to be home.

OK, Now These Folks Are Nuts

I'm reading "Minding Our Own Business" by Charlotte Paul, which was published 50 years ago and is surely out of print. My copy is a tattered green hand-me-down with yellowy pages. It's the story of a husband and wife who chucked their comfortable lives in Chicago and moved to Washington state to run their own newspaper.

To say their decision to move was impetuous is a drastic understatement. Charlotte and her husband Ed gave themselves two months to quit Ed's job, sell the farm, find a newspaper on the West Coast, buy it, move across the country and start making a profit. They took shocking risks. The whole journey was harrowing. The work hours were insane. The debt was enormous. The entire book gave me a heart attack. Ed himself had a heart attack in Chapter 8. Compared to them, Ron and I are hopelessly conventional. Perhaps journalists just shouldn't marry each other.

The book opens in August 1949 with Charlotte and her husband living an idyllic life on a small farm outside Chicago. Ed had been laid off from the Chicago Tribune and now had a comfortable job in PR; Charlotte was trying to publish a novel. She left their small boys with a sitter each morning and bicycled to a neighbor's house, where she had a little office. Sounded great.

But Ed was a little bored with his job, so they decided he should quit Oct. 1. Two months to pull it off. One month later, the farm still hadn't sold, but it was time to fly to Washington and Oregon and find a newspaper. They bought one in Snoqalmie, Wash., and flew back to Chicago. Two weeks left. They sold the farm (for much less than they'd hoped), packed the kids in the car, and drove out of Illinois in the dark.

Then things really got rough. I read the whole book in a day, goggle-eyed, reading passages out loud to Ron: "That first day in Snoqualmie I had noticed that the [newspaper] building seemed to need a new coat of paint. We soon discovered that what it really needed was a coat of wood."

One of the most memorable chapters was about their first vacation. They'd planned it for weeks, it was a necessity, given Ed's heart. But everything fell apart:

"We had to wait until the paper was out, so it wasn't until 4:30 that afternoon that the four of us got into the car and started out. Hi [the older son] was stretched out on a pile of blankets in the back seat, nursing his concussion. Johnny [the younger son] was catching Ed's head cold. My face was so badly swollen I could scarcely open my mouth or swallow. Ed, our driver, was in relatively good health; all he could boast of was two heart attacks, a severe case of shingles, a head cold and a sacroiliac that had slipped out of place that morning when he lifted a bundle of newsprint."

When they stopped for gas, a state patrolman saw them and said it looked like they were going someplace.

"Actually," Charlotte wrote, "we looked like a wholesale shipment for the county hospital. 'Headed for California,' said Ed, gay as a pallbearer.'"

Amazingly, they did have a good vacation, although their house was robbed while they were gone.

That chapter reminded me of my own family's vacation to Washington D.C. in 1992, which Mom was determined to pull off despite everything. I drove us all out of Michigan after midnight in a rented minivan. My sister was ill, Andy had a very bad eye infection. It was just days after I'd completed my first year of teaching high school and my nerves were shot. We were all exhausted. It also turned out to be a good vacation and thankfully, our mobile home wasn't robbed.

Won't You Be Their Neighbor?

I apologize for being such a terrible blogger -- this is only the second post this month -- but seriously, it would all just be tedious whining about how I hate packing our stuff and showing our house.

My brother Andy has graciously agreed to rent our house if it doesn't sell. I advised him to keep the family connnection quiet, since both our next-door neighbors dislike me. One neighbor, the one with the camouflage banners (let's call him Big Foot), is trained as a Realtor. He's mad because we won't use him to sell our house and hasn't spoken to us since February.

Our other neighbor (let's call him Little Foot) and I have had testy relations in the past. Little Foot runs a dogsitting service, and started bringing around a tons of dogs right after moving in. About a dozen dogs ran around his backyard every day. I'd complain about the noise and the odor, he'd get defensive, and we had several little discussions on the topic.

Finally he found a place to run his million dogs, and our relationship is now cordial. He still gets on my nerves, though, because Little Foot is a nosy guy. The first time I met him he asked how much we paid for our house. When I wouldn't tell him, he said, "I can just find out online." I glared at him and said, "Then do so."

As soon as we put our house on the market, Little Foot asked every time we met" "Got any offers?" I finally said to him that I wished we'd get an insulting offer, just so we'd have something to say to people who asked about it. He looked surprised and said, "I was just curious." Grrrrr.

Christine Does the Math

Oh, my life is completely weird now. I'm typing this on the back deck, trying to be invisible, while a very nice couple from Delaware tours the house. Since Ron has accepted a reporting job with the San Francisco Business Times, life has taken on an odd quality: a combination of Alice in Wonderland and two months of final exams.

And it's getting weirder as Ron and I dismantle our life in Michigan. Working From Home + No Car + House Showings = Christine Huddled on the Back Porch. Or as an alternate formula: Benny + No Car + House Showings = Christine Fleeing to the Park. We sold the Jeep last week, so we're down to Ron's small Saturn, which he uses to get to work.

I'm not cranky about it (really) because I'm pathetically grateful that the Jeep sold so quickly. Gas prices are at $3.18 a gallon, which doesn't help the SUV market. I drove our 2004 Jeep Liberty over to the dealership last week, praying for a decent sale price since we still owed more than $10,000 on it.

The used car guy inspected it, then sat behind his desk and looked at me as if his best friend just died.

"I'll give you $7,000," he said.

I blinked. "That's considerably below blue book," I said. Which it was, blue book being around $9,700.

"There's something wrong with the steering," he said. "And the oil changes aren't up to date. That really hurts the value."

I was floored. "But I'm only three weeks overdue."

He shook his head. "Doesn't matter. It's indicative."

"You're kidding," I said. "You're cutting down the price because of three weeks?"

All I got was a flat stare. "I can cut you a check in 20 minutes," he said.

I stood. "Thank you, but no, I don't think so." I stomped out, irritated with myself. I should have had the oil changed, and probably cleared those bits of mulch out of the back, too. Actually, I couldn't have sold the Jeep that minute anyway, since it was in Ron's name, but I wasn't telling Used Car Guy that. Creep. Blondist. Probably is mean to his dog, too.

I went home, chugged a Snapple and called another Jeep dealership. I described our Liberty to the used car manager, Ron N., who got excited when I said the mileage was 36,000. "If it looks good," Ron said, "I can give you $10,000."

"OK," I said casually, if a little breathlessly because I was dancing around the living room. "I'll stop by."

I raced right over and Ron N. confirmed the sale price. Then I raced home and tore the house apart looking for the Jeep's title. Couldn't find it, so Ron (husband Ron) had to drive to the Secretary of State in Canton (Mich., not China) and get a duplicate title. But the next night we sold the Jeep, and wrote a check for a few hundred dollars to cover the rest of the car loan.

So I'm not crabby about sharing the Saturn with Ron, although it's hard not having a car to stuff laundry and dirty dishes in when I'm showing the house. And it is really nice sitting out here under the trees, watching a soft breeze blowing our neighbor's huge camouflage drapes around. (1) After all, Benny's not around today and the formula is simple: Benny At Daycare + No More House Showings = Christine Popping Open a Beer on the Deck.

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1) Oh, the angst. The people living diagonally from us built a huge addition last year, with giant windows looking straight into our next-door neighbor's back yard. This gave our next-door neighbors the heebie-jeebies when they were relaxing in their gazebo or walking beside their little pond. So next-door neighbors hung giant camouflage draperies on one tree to block the view. They change the colors in accordance with the seasons. I'm thinking of buying them pith helmets with leafy branches as a going-away gift.

The Dark Gloomy Spring of Our Discontent

When last we posted on BabySpace, our intrepid heroine was preparing her house for sale. The water heater was replaced and the basement floor stripped down to gloomy dark concrete. All that remained was a litany of picky awful chores before the house was revealed to the world.

Well, we did it, but not without more loss of funds and some serious psychological trauma. Truly, it's been too painful to write about. A simple repainting of a corner of our home office turned into a major project requiring new paint on the walls, ceiling and doorway. Ron and I tried to do it, but the project dragged on for weeks until I finally brought in two seriously weird guys to throw a little paint around. Meanwhile another guy installed carpeting and tile in the basement and Barry returned to replace our dryer vent.

The night before our home's debut on Sunday, March 4, Ron and I worked like dogs all day and were relaxing around 11 p.m. when I decided to put some cute towels in the basement's half-bath. I went downstairs and promptly stepped into a huge puddle of water. Apparently the washing machine had had a nervous breakdown and leaked all over the laundry room and into the half-bath. Ron and I gloomily mopped up the puddle, vowing never to own a home again.

The next day we gussied up the house some more. Then, one hour before the open house, while Benny was napping, I realized the upstairs toilet had been bubbling for a while. Suddenly we were in crisis mode again, because we couldn't make it stop. Ron nearly tore the thing apart, then considered turning it off, when finally, 20 minutes to the open house, it quit bubbling and we could grab Benny and flee.

The open house went well, so I went on to the second tier of picky to-dos in March. Nothing was easy. I needed to get the shades in the dining room cleaned, for example. But these aren't ordinary shades, these are fancy-linen-paneled shades with cute tassels, purchased by Crazy Phil, our home's former owner. I talked to two drapery stores and a dry cleaner before someone could tell me what the damn things were called (Roman shades). Then I visited two cleaners before I found someone who could deal with them. Apparently these shades were custom-made and cost hundreds of dollars. They certainly cost a pretty penny to clean. And the cleaning guy was kind of nuts, cornering me when I came to get the shades and talking about how women in labor shouldn't use drugs and sick people should Just Welcome Jesus.

With the house finally in order, we addressed our sadly neglected yard. We spent hours in late March raking leaves and spreading mulch and pulling up a few early-bird weeds. Ron repaired the winding path in our backyard and brought in rocks and dirt to fill up Lake Leuty, a puddle that appears whenever we get a lot of rain.

The front yard looked really good, with dozens of purple and white flowers popping up everywhere. I was very proud. We enjoyed the spectacle for three days, then an April snowstorm fell on us and wiped out everything. All our flowers are dead. I had to dig Benny's winter coat and scarf out of storage and I still haven't found his hat. Temperatures have been in the 20s for more than a week. Today it's 40 degrees and I'm pathetically grateful.

So the house has been on the market for about a month now. Lots of showings, sometimes twice, but no offers yet. I yearn for warm, sunny days and monied home buyers who don't like flowers anyway.

Home Repair Hell

Well, thank god we’re almost through January, which at our house has become The Month of Home Repair. Those last two words always make me want to lie down in a darkened room -- now a viable option since our handyman has fixed the bedroom’s broken window.

I suppose I shouldn’t complain (not that it’s ever stopped me before), since we’ve lived in this house for nearly four years without a home repair bill. Are we lucky or just slothful? I suspect the latter. I mean, I broke that bedroom window a year ago while trying to jam an ill-fitting shade into its bracket (socket? docket? moppet?). So yeah, we haven’t paid any home repair bills before this month, preferring to live with broken windows, sticky doors and cracked caulking.

But now we’ve decided to sell said house, since Ron’s daily commute to Oakland County has given him nervous twitches and a predilection for weird audio books. (“Who will you meet in Heaven?”) Plus Benny refuses to add the Daddy when he plays with his stuffed sheep family because “the Daddy’s at work.” It’s just a difficult situation.

So we’re selling the homestead during what the Detroit Free Press calls a “perfect storm” of economic misery. The National Association of Realtors, the Free Press continues, said last year that Metro Detroit had suffered the sharpest decline in home values in any large urban market in the nation.

So we’re really excited, as you might imagine. Determined to wring every last drop of blood from this stone, we’re doing home repairs, walking that fine line between adding value to the house and just throwing money down the drain (or the basement, to be precise).

The phrase “doing home repairs” is, of course, terribly misleading. You might imagine me or Ron replacing hinges or popping off old tiles. Actually the real process is less impressive. I make a list of the most necessary jobs: fix windows, recaulk bathtub, deal with basement (affectionately nicknamed “The Evil Dungeon of Cat Hairballs).

Then I whine about the list for weeks, frequently lying down on the bed and glaring at the broken window. Then I reluctantly call a handyman recommended by a local hardware store. His line is busy. I lie down again, exhausted by my efforts. But Barry the Handyman calls me back (curse that caller ID!) and I reluctantly admit I have some jobs for him and try not to groan when he says he’s free this week.

Barry shows up with his son and they’re unfailingly kind and patient with my sorry self. I feel humiliated, pointing out all the problems I’ve ignored for years, but I rally until we come to the bathroom electric outlet.

The outlet is itself is fine, but the cover isn’t screwed on. The house’s previous owner (who frankly had more do-it-yourself spirit then was good for a man) had updated the outlet per our home inspector’s recommendation, but didn’t have time to attach the cover.

“No trouble, I said blithely then. “We’ll get that screwed on this weekend.”

Ahem. Well, three and a half years later, and the cover still hangs there, fastened only by a round nightlight. Barry looks at me blankly, then instructs his son to screw the cover on – no extra charge. Barry Jr. does it in two minutes.

After that harrowing experience, I was ready to abandon all home repair efforts and tell prospective buyers the house had “lots of character.” But then our water heater busted, leaking all over the basement carpet. (Why do you always discover these things at 11:45 p.m.?)

So I only had eight hours to whine before calling Barry again. He bought us a new water heater, installed it, took the old one away and advised me to call our insurance agent. Maybe they can clean up the water damage. “Who’s your insurer?” he asked.

I had no clue. This is another reason why home repair is so stressful. I’m just ignorant. I don’t know how old my water heater is, I don’t know when we last replaced our furnace filter, I don’t know the square footage of our basement, I don’t know whether our electricity operates off fuses or circuit breakers (although I did guess right on the last).

I did find our homeowners’ policy, but our deductible was too large to save any money. Which left me and Barry and Barry Jr. staring at the basement carpet, unequivocally damp and smelling faintly of mold. It had to go.

So I sent them away, lay down in a darkened room (admiring my unbroken window), then consulted Ron, who frothed at the mouth at the idea of paying the Barrys to rip up the carpet. “I can do that!” he cried over the phone.

“Oh yeah?” I asked. “But we don’t know what’s underneath. You want to rip out rotted subfloor?” I painted dire pictures of putrid sinkholes and nests of trolls living under our basement carpet, then promised to write some articles to pay for the work.

“But you have to be there when they start ripping it up,” I said.

Ron agreed. We finished shoveling out the basement Tuesday night. Ron dropped the kid off at daycare yesterday morning while I put our cat in Benny’s bedroom and our dirty laundry in the home office. Then Ron and I lined up wide-eyed on the basement stairs for the ceremonial First Cut.

We got off easy. The carpet wasn’t even glued down. The only thing underneath was concrete and some old tile. Ron fled to the safety of work and I hid in Benny’s bedroom with my laptop and the cat while the Barry’s hauled out carpet and tile and mopped the concrete.

So now we’ve come to the end of this episode of home repair. We’ll have to cover that concrete somehow, but we’ve run out of momentum … and money. The basement will have to wait until March. For now, I think I’ll go lie down in a darkened room. Or maybe not. The vent cover on the floor looks like it might need replacing.