05/16/2001

We have agreed to decide one way or the other about the house this weekend. I’m betting we’ll end up putting it on the market. The average time homes around here are spending on the market these days is 3 – 4 months. Last time we put the house up for sale, we took it off the market after 28 days, because we got impatient. As long as we realize it’ll take a little while to get things rolling, we should be okay.

Of course, we could always sell the house the day after we put it on the market. Realtors love to tell the stories of the houses they’ve sold – "This one house went on the market on a Friday and it was sold Monday morning! Sight unseen! And it was LITERALLY falling down! And the buyer insisted on paying double the asking price, plus an extra 10% commission for me! So… I guess we could probably sell your shithole…"

No, actually, the realtors tell us the house is in good shape and yadda yadda yadda. The depressing part is that we’ll be recouping hardly any of the money we put into the pool and fence, the hardwood stairs. In fact, we decided on an asking price of just $6,000 more than we were asking last time.

Should we decide to sell, that is.

I told Fred that we should just accept that we’re nomads and will want to move every couple of years for the rest of our lives.

Have I mentioned that we’re going to Gatlinburg next weekend? I don’t think I have. The original plan was that we were going to go to Florida – not only is it Memorial Day weekend, but it’s also Fred birthday (Saturday). When Himself got around to looking for either a hotel suite or house to rent, he realized that prices went way, way up for Memorial Day weekend. And since we’re dorky that way, we didn’t particularly want to share a hotel room with the spud, at least not for 3 nights.

If you’ve forgotten this little tidbit of information, being around water really puts Himself in the mood.

Anyway, once we realized that we could get an entire house (with a hottub!) for less than half what we’d pay for a decent hotel room in Destin, we decided to go there instead.

It’s actually more appropriate to go to Gatlinburg, because it was just after we got home from Gatlinburg last May that Fred’s wakeup call came and he started eating right and exercising.

And now he’s lost an entire person. 138 pounds! Pretty awesome, isn’t it?

This year we intend to do a couple of short hikes in the national forest. Just because we can, without killing ourselves.

And y’all KNOW I will have fifty million billion zillion pictures of houses and mountains, and maybe this time we’ll even get some of those little bitty waterfalls I loved so much.

Does life get any better, do you think?

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