A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Selling My House

My house has now been officially on the market for almost two weeks. No offers yet, though a few people seem pretty seriously interested. The process of getting it ready for showing was truly arduous, especially for someone with my history. There was one room in the house that had never been fully unpacked and set up for use. It was half-full of boxes, files, disassembled furniture, and spinning and knitting supplies. D'you think it's telling that that room is the only room in the house where I have some personal space all my own?? Oy, I loathe the last stages of unpacking. All those decisions -- Do I keep this? Where does it go? And the self-recriminations -- Aargh, I already bought a replacement for this because I couldn't find it! How could I leave this in a box for a whole year? Why do I hang onto so much junk? And so on. Totally paralyzing.

I had to decide, over and over again, not to pay attention to those awful voices in my head. With a lot of help and moral support from my cousin, who is working this summer as my babysitter/organizational assistant, I slogged through the hardest stuff, pitching the junk, filing the files, packing up the craft supplies I won't be able to use before we move. Then in a couple of days on my own, I got through the rest. The room -- a den with my desk in a little nook -- is beautiful, peaceful, CLEAN. And so is the rest of the house.

Getting ready for showing was sort of like a Manhattan project. A Herculean effort to get the house ready to be that special fiction that house-hunters want to see: spacious, clean, uncluttered, and depersonalized, to allow maximum imagination of what their stuff would look like here, and how gracious their life could be in such a beautiful, sparsely furnished home. When I get moved to the new house in a month or two, I think I want to put the same level of energy into getting the house set up for the life we want there. No more of this not finishing unpacking until it's time to pack for the next move stuff. I'm hoping this next house will be a long-time landing place for us. I want every room to be usable. Know what I mean? My cousin says she LOVES unpacking. I hope she has some time on her hands!

Meanwhile, back at the current house, we get calls for showings every few days, often on short notice. That means we pretty much have to keep the place immaculate all the time, which is an extremely foreign way for me to live. Relatively uncluttered, functional, comfortable -- yes, I strive for that and often achieve it. Immaculate and ultra-pared-down? Sorry, that girl doesn't live here.

But then this voice pipes up. She's been getting louder over the two weeks or so of living in a semi-staged house. "Wouldn't it be easier to just clean up the lunch dishes now, while they're fresh, instead of checking email or paying the bills first? Wouldn't it be nice to just relax tonight and not worry about doing cleanup chores after the kids are in bed? C'mon, darlin', just do it now. You won't be sorry." And this voice? It comes from inside my head. I can't blame my Mom, who's hundreds of miles away, or even DH, who's on a business trip again. Sure, I could have internalized my Mom's urgings, but it doesn't sound like her. This is me, folks. Or maybe I'm being haunted by FlyLady.

Do I always listen? Nope. I stopped writing in the middle of that last paragraph to do the last of dinner cleanup, at 9:30 p.m. That gentle urging proved irresistible, albeit belatedly. But you know, in the old days, I'd put off the dinner cleanup and the litter boxes until after 10:30, when I should really be getting to bed -- or hours later on a bad night. I guess the triple pressures of DH being gone, the house being for sale, and the housekeepers we tried to hire for the for-sale period not returning our calls, are doing some good. I can't claim I'm doing all this great cleaning-as-I-go alone: DH and my cousin have also put in a lot of work. But the good news, my friends, is that I am doing it at all.

Creative Block

I'm in one of those periods where I can't think of anything interesting to write about, and I'm not even in the mood for knitting or spinning much. I'm doing okay with my house and my kids. Maybe it's that I've been rereading the fifth Harry Potter book. Rereading novels doesn't do much for my creative side. But I'm done with the book now, so it's time to jump-start the writing thing again.

So here's a meme. It came to me from sockpr0n, who I noticed on Ravelry because of her GORGEOUS handspun socks. I wanna do that someday.

1. What was I doing 10 years ago? In 1998, I was single, but had begun searching in earnest for a mate. (I found him in 1999.) I spent the first half of 1998 working as a science writer and editor at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and the second half at grad school, in the Master's and Credential in Science and Math Education program at UC Berkeley. I ended up finishing the credential but never finishing my master's project.
2. What are 5 things on my to-do list for today? Get my house listed for sale (already closed on the new one, but tenants are there through July); do bedtime for both my kids (DH was out playing competitive badminton this evening); get a neighbor to move the camper parked in front of my house before any potential buyers come looking; do the grocery shopping with my 2.5-month-old son in the front baby carrier; look through kitchen magazines and books for inspiration for remodeling the kitchen in the new house.
3. Snacks I enjoy? Date/roasted almond/coconut bonbons my postpartum doula taught me how to make; chips and salsa (SOO glad DS isn't sensitive to corn in my diet, as DD was in her colicky days); hummus and pita/veggies/chips; baked sweet potato "fries," popcorn popped with oil and sugar to make a light, sweet coating...
   
4. Things I would do if I were a billionaire? Go big into microlending as a way to address poverty in developing countries and elsewhere; endow school music, art, and experiential science programs; let DH quit his programming job and do photography, electronic music, open-source software and woodworking in between helping me with the above; start a center where people could learn pre-industrial crafts and survival skills like sewing, knitting, spinning, weaving, gardening, food preservation, woodworking with hand tools, metalsmithing, etc.
   
5. Places I have lived? In order: Dallas, TX; Colorado Springs, CO; Walnut Creek, Oakland, Alameda, and Pleasant Hill, CA; Boulder, CO.
   
6. Jobs I have had? High school physics and math teacher, science writer/editor at a national laboratory, middle school life science and pre-algebra teacher, full-time mom.
   
7. People I want to know more about? Some of my fellow spinners -- do we really have the values and interests in common that I project? My sister -- she's built quite a life, and sometimes I think I don't know her all that well.