I Am a Master Negotiator

Crisis averted on the real estate front. I cagily countered their $4,000 demand with a $200 credit. They accepted it, and we are now moving forward on all fronts. Woohoo! Feel free to set up your visits to come help me throw shit away. There's lots of good stuff to be had, I assure you.

But I will say, as excited as I am to be moving on, I am so going to miss this house. I hadn't realized how much work I put into making it juuuuust so. My little writing corner (the realtor gushed over that), my cooking space, my feng shui-ful bedroom are all very happy making for me.

Possibly Too Good to Be True

Contract on the house may be falling through, with the buyers asking for an additional $4000 in a credit, on top of almost $5K in closing costs.

I really wish I'd never bought real estate.

Who Do You Write Like?

If you're me:

I write like
P. G. Wodehouse

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Never read him, but! But! "Acknowledged as a master of English prose"!

Or, with a different story:

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

PTSD

I find it really traumatic that I'm doing these goddamned city inspections on my house, again. Paint my house? Didn't I just do this? Why???? Why do I get to deal with the headache both buying and selling?? Isn't it enough that I scraped up the hideous linoleum in the kitchen???

The Countdown Begins in Earnest

I've started my MFA program! Soon after I finish typing my inane musings here, I'm going to do some homework and shit. Can you believe that? Homework??

The residency was an interesting experience. I can't say it was "fun," exactly, but it was thought provoking. I'd like to connect more with the people in the program, but at this point, we're still in our own orbits (except the people who are getting everybody's facebook pages). The seminar sessions were very broad, topic-wise, and worthwhile from a craft perspective. It seems like the perfect follow up to my class experiences thus far.

And just before I left for my residency, I acquired a real estate agent, who suggested that we start showing the house while I was out of town. Ergo, I kicked it into gear and spent a day staging and cleaning my house like nobody's business. All the things I meant to do--carrying out furniture and so forth--went by the wayside. But the end results were pretty spectacular, even if I had to stuff some things in my basement, in a tidy fashion.

Three showings later (well, four, if you count a consolidated tour of two parties), I have a contract on the house. The price is a sad reminder of what I could have gotten, had I sold before the crash. But considering the carnage of the housing market around me--short sales, foreclosures, houses on the market for months unto months, price drops following price drops--it's a very respectable deal that gives me a bit of money for the transition to the next job in a newer, sunnier location. Don't tell the cat.

We close on August 15. Oh my god!