New address coming soon!

No, not web address. After next week, we will be living in a new house--a bought one--and scrambling to pay the piper. Well, hopefully not too scrambling :-) In any case, we will have new contact info coming soon to anyone who cares (as long as we know who you are).

It's very exciting. Now. See, there was about a week there of mortgage anxiety hell. Our timing is, as per usual, slightly off, slightly late, as what would have been an application that sailed through got snagged on a detail and put us on extremely unsteady ground. Things were bad. No, things were sh***y. A sh**tiness heretofore unknown and experienced by a woman who thought she'd been quite exposed to shi**ty. Frankly, for five days we weren't sure if we were going to move into this house, or perhaps the first fleabag cheap apartment complex that would take us. It sucked. I basically lived in the pit of my stomach, barely able to take a full breath.

You know, mortgage and real estate people greet you with a smile and tell you they just want to make you happy. And happiness comes with four walls and a shingle roof, maybe a chimney. but the actual underwriting process is always, always painful, unless your loaded. I had a friend go through this a few months ago and remember meeting her in the park so our kids could play. She was in agony. There's always some scrambling it seems, some tricks you have to show you can do before the dark-suited figures peering down at you from behind their big desks open their checkbook.

Ah, but I guess that's the key. It's their checkbook, not mine, not Trey's. At some point we need to remedy that. You know, just have enough in our account that if we want to buy another house (a bigger, shinier house!) we can just take the money from the bank and bypass these sinister figures. yeah. I know--it's not the American way. Oh well.

I'll post pics of the house soon. I guess it's safe enough at this point.

april is the cruellest month

It's really been a stressful time, and the month's not even half over. Still, by the time we hit May, things should be so much better, so different, and we'll be so much poorer.

But first things first, it's time for the annual Texas bluebonnet photo:

There, that's over with. I should say, it's been a banner year for the wildflowers here due to all the rain we've gotten this spring. They say the lakes are filling up again. Yesterday I took a walk in the woods behind my house, as was treated to the wet weather creek full and flowing--there were waterfalls and streamly gurglings that sounded like little songs. Zoey and I are used to scrambling over these rocks, and we can follow the little paved trail all the way to Duval street, but yesterday the way was too full of water. Lucky for me, I brought my camera and took pictures.

Here's what the creek bed usually looks like:


Here's how it looked yesterday:


It was a lovely, tuneful, scenic walk. Sad that I'm going to be moving away from this place at the end of the month, but the house purchase seems to be going through. Well, even if it wasn't, we'd still have to vacate the house at the end of the month because my landlords were not the least bit flexible in terms of move-out notification. There were about five days there where we were not sure if the house was going to go through or not, though we were sure enough to put in our move out notice. It was either take a chance and do that or fork out another 1100 or forfeit our deposit. what would you do?

In either case, so far so good, though they're still going to have to put a new roof on the house, like soon, and the sellers are galavanting about in europe somewhere so they're papers have to be emailed and then fed ex'd back, all this by the 25th. Which then gives us 5 days to move out and clean up this old house--which, by the way, they are already showing to people and advertising a May 1 move in date.

I'm actually praying. To something vague and powerful.

There's about 3 other stressful things going on right now, that I really don't want to blog about. They are not earth-shattering--just not worth mentioning.

I did get to spend some time Easter weekend with my good friends the Sweeney's who are in from Chicago, and also Susan, who just moved back to Houston and who promises to come and visit me in my new house as soon as possible!