never existed. I’m not stunned or disheartened, because I was only aware of her supposed existence in the most general of ways. I followed links to her page from time to time, but was never drawn in by the writing, and thus never stuck around. Nicole said it all much better than I could, anyway. Go read her entry about the whole deal. If you belong to my notify list (and if you don’t, I’d like to know why the hell not!) you already know that we signed the papers with the realtor on Sunday, got our bright, shiny "For Sale" sign in the yard, and spent much of Sunday and most of Monday cleaning frantically. The realtor told Fred yesterday afternoon that someone had already called and wanted to see the house. We were excited until we discovered that the supposed "Potential Buyers" were people who already lived in our neighborhood. Last time we put the house on the market, two years ago, these same (we suspect) neighbors went through the house, telling the realtor that they were interested in our house because they wanted a basement. The people who went through the house last night told him that they wanted a basement and a pool. They had to be the same people. It pisses me off, because we spent two hours rushing around, touching up the paint (Fred), vacuuming, scrubbing the kitchen, yelling at Fred to vacuum the couch and chairs downstairs (me), and only because some assholes who live in our neighborhood wanted to see what the house looked like. If they had simply knocked on the front door and asked for a tour, I would have let them look to their heart’s content. They told the realtor, after looking through the house last night, that they weren’t interested because they "Wanted bigger rooms." I don’t know where they think they’re going to find bigger rooms, because we have one of the biggest floorplans in this subdivision. Our bedroom is 15×16, the family room is 16×17, the rec room (what we use for the gym) 13×23. Those are some nice fucking room sizes, people. Assholes. So while they were going through our house, we were checking out another house, one that Fred found on ValleyMLS. We drove by it on Saturday, liked what we saw, and asked the realtor (whom I shall call Jeff, which is not his real name, because if I tell y’all his real name, you will figure out who he is, find out where our house is located, and come kill me in my sleep) to take us through it. It was a cute little house, with a nice big porch (a plus in my eyes), on around an acre of land (remember, we’re looking for more than the less than 1/4 acre we already have), and in the country, but not so far in the country we couldn’t drive to the grocery store in 10 minutes. Unfortunately, there were some structural problems – a window was rotting away on the outside, and the basement was obviously prone to flooding, which the current owners tried to disguise by painting the floor. Speaking of the basement, we were all standing in the basement discussing the flooding problems, when I heard a long, low sound coming from Jeff’s direction. To be blunt, it was the sound of a long, long fart. My eyes wide as saucers, mouth hanging open in amazement, I stared at Jeff, who just stood there, smiling, his hands in his pockets, rocking on his heels. No one said anything, and then Jeff pointed out a scary door near the stairs that led to the ground under the rest of the house. We all peeked in, Fred mentioned that "There could be a BODY buried in there!", and we went to check out the rest of the house. From the second floor, there was a gorgeous view of horses running in a nearby field. It was everything you’d want in country living – nice lot, pretty view, not too close to the neighbors – so it’s too bad that the house kinda sucked. But as I said on the way out, "One down, 150 to go!" Our search is just beginning, and we don’t want to get too excited yet, anyway, because we can’t really do anything until our house is sold, though Jeff thinks it’ll be sold by August. We dropped Jeff off at his office, and it was then that I found out – to my relief – that the long, low farting sound I’d heard was the scary door opening by itself.]]>
05/22/2001