Have some slices of life.
There is a mechanism in your brain that shuts off all voluntary muscle activity when you sleep. It’s to prevent you from hurting yourself when you dream. Your body and brain apparently haven’t worked out that signals sent from the brain during sleep shouldn’t be interpreted, so nature created this stop gap.
This manifests most commonly when you wake from a nightmare and can’t move. It’s not because you’re paralyzed with fear, but that your brain forgot to turn the body back on. It’s also not entirely full proof and occasionally you can tell when your dream state performs a physical action and your body responds, usually jarring you awake.
As you get older, this mechanism, like all others, breaks down. Some of the most common injuries of elderly women are due to their husbands reliving a wartime scenario in their dreams and acting them out on their sleeping spouses. It’s pretty frightening and wonderfully intriguing at the same time. Not the old wife beating part, but the part about the brain having this valve to activity in the first place.
Why all the info? Well, my switch was left in the on position the other night when I was having a dream about adopting a new dog. All I remember is the dog running up to me and me giving it a good lovin’ on it’s head; i.e. furious petting and scratching. The next thing I know, Mrs. A is shouting, “Get the fuck off me! What am I a dog?!”
Uh, well, you were for a split second.
There is a new trend now for grease monkeys to hawk their trade on busy thoroughfares, waving, giving thumbs up, and carrying balloons. (Incidentally, do you actually carry balloons? Aren’t you really restraining them?)
Anyway, there they are, always happy at 7am to stand under your dirty car, pumping it full of fluids and lubricant. I’ve written about this already, so I won’t delve to far.
The fact of the matter is, I drive by one on my everyday route to take Lil Miss Austin to school. I almost wrecked the car when I saw a cardboard cutout of Chewbacca holding up the sign and wearing the company’s hat.
Apparently, times are tough for the wookie.
Cars are metallic colors for a reason. The reason is, people don’t wear metallic colored clothing. If you have a yellow car, you must never wear a yellow shirt. If you do, you’ll end up looking like you’re selling something or part of a cult.
On to the house front.
Yesterday I was home with two evilly sick children and trying my best to network into the office and do some work. I didn’t get a lot done, what with the constant pooping and puking and fevers and aches and potty accidents.
What I did get done is some cluster-fucking with our realtor. And now it burns when I pee.
For real. We’ve been kind of in a holding pattern over New House International Airport while we wait for other parties to figure out loan paperwork and find new houses. The whole time our agent has been MIA. He made a big deal about contacting us twice a week with updates, that hasn’t happened.
So the last we knew before yesterday was that the buyers of our new house had just past their option period during which they could back out. The sellers of the other house had yet to find a place so that closing was still unknown.
Yesterday afternoon, I called the realtor. I needed info on closing dates for our loan company so they could process the paperwork and be ready. Our agent said that the buyers had already closed and were waiting to move and the sellers found a place and could close any time. In a 10 minute conversation we went from being the waiters to being the bottleneck.
So, our closing date for both is the 27th of June, but we can’t move until the 21st of July, which means three weeks we have to pay a lease to the buyers, a sum that equals 3 times what our current mortgage is. They have reasoning behind it, and the sellers have already signed a contract saying they won’t pay for any time they live on the property after closing, so we’re out a couple grand.
Why is this? Well, the first problem was the timing. We thought selling our house in one day was a wonderful thing. If the sellers had a house ready to go, we could have closed and move next week. But because they didn’t, we had to wait. Not our fault.
Second, the realtor didn’t tell us shit. Every conversation was initiated by us. If I hadn’t called them yesterday, we’d still be waiting to hear when all this was going to go down. I mean, the buyers of our house already closed weeks before and were waiting for us to move! Isn’t that something, as a realtor, you would tell your clients?
This relationship with this agency has gone really sour. I don’t trust them anymore to speak for me, I don’t like them anymore for not having my best interest at heart. When I told them that we couldn’t afford and extra 4x our monthly payment for the lease, their response was, “The buyers won’t budge.” Well, then, what the fuck do you want me to do? This is your fault we didn’t know about it, and if we’d have known, we would have found a vacant property and moved in right then. But because we hadn’t heard from them, now we’re out money.
It’s not fair and unfortunately we have few options.
Not to totally burn all my bridges, and Mrs. A has been just as stressed out about this and other things as I have, but we also haven’t agreed on much of this lately. I think we’re being screwed and am stubborn about not paying anything extra due to no fault of our own, and she is wanting to bluff them into thinking we’ll walk away from this whole deal while at the same time saying that she’s going crazy in our house and needs to move.
Add to that the following factors: Mrs. A’s laptop died, with a wedding full of pictures. I’ve got 42 days until Chicago and I need 12 more pages drawn, then lettered, then a cover (colored) and back page material. Both kids have been out for 3 days with stomach viruses. Both our jobs have major personnel and project-oriented problems.
And there was no hockey this year.
Surprisingly we’re not complete basket cases, but neither of us have had 8 hours sleep in months and you can tell. I don’t want to jinx this home buying endeavor with negative thoughts, so this is the last you’ll hear of them. I still like the house, and I still would like to move there. I think selling our house in one day spoiled us. The house we’re in now we didn’t have to go through and agent and we didn’t have to sell the place we lived in, so it was a breeze. This is probably just par for the course.
Still, Chewbacca wants you to get your oil changed, life can’t be that bad.
22.6.05
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