Friday night, we decided to get out of Dodge for part of the weekend, so we packed the truck with the minimum and headed for the hills. It’s archery season right now, so Junior brought his bow and we pulled into the camp some of his friends were using.

We blew up the air mattress and laid out the sleeping bags in the back of the truck, right out under the stars. They were so bright up there that we could easily see the shadows of the trees above us by starlight. When the half-moon came up later, it was almost blinding. Every time I woke up, I could see the fuzzy stars, even more than I can see in the Valley when I’m wearing my glasses.

Junior wanted to show me a nice place to deer hunt, so we walked up to it before daylight. It’s a little noisy up there under the debris from the trees, so sneaking up on a deer isn’t really an option. We sat and watched for a few hours before making our way back down to the truck and into camp.

We did a little more touring around, a little sitting and shooting the breeze with his friends, some bow and BB gun practice, and a little frog-chasing with a seven-year-old boy. You’d think that I would have found more than enough peace to make up for all of the stress the house-buying has been laying on us lately, but you’d be wrong.

It all started to crash right back down on me as we were leaving, and I had me a bit of a meltdown. You know the kind of conversation; when everything vomits out at once, what you’re afraid of and what you want out of life. I’ve been feeling a little nervous about buying a house with a man I’m not married to, even though we’ve discussed marriage quite a bit. My head never had a doubt that this is the right decision to make, and the right man to be doing it with, but every now and then my history rears its ugly head and I get a little panicky when I shouldn’t.

I was feeling pretty insecure about living together without getting married, and that sparked a whole conversation that I suppose we needed, but I really wish I could have waited for.

See, it turns out that if I’d just managed to contain myself for another month or so, he was going to surprise me with a question and a ring. I really did not want to push him into something that he wasn’t ready for, but it turned out that he decided that I needed to hear that question right then and there, no ring, no special timing, no romance.

I said yes, of course, but then I felt very silly. I was still all emotional from what we were discussing earlier, and didn’t exactly give him the reaction that he should have gotten. He should have had arms thrown around him, and me tearing up with happy tears. We should have been standing on top of his mountain, not rolling in the truck where all we can really touch is our hands. I should have let him do it his way; it would have been a really neat story.

Yes, there are a ton of practical reasons why we should get married, but I didn’t want to get married for any of those. We can deal with taxes and health insurance and society’s perceptions. I want to marry this man because he is the best thing that ever happened to me. I love him more than I ever conceived of loving someone, and I want to spend the rest of my life as his wife, as old-fashioned as that sounds. I am incredibly lucky that he loves me through my own faults. I want to be a better person so he can have the wife he deserves.

But still, we’re getting married, and I get to keep this incredible man as long as we both shall live, and it brings the happy tears to my eyes every time I stop and really grasp the concept. Thank you baby; I love you.

We’ve got an empty water tank at my site that we need to get back in order for a tenant that wants to use it. It’s huge: 700,000 gallons and 40 feet high. I emptied it out years ago in my previous job because one of the enormous pipes underground was leaking somewhere. We couldn’t find the minor leak and nobody was using it at the time, so I just dumped the water. It has sat empty for at least five years now, slowly rusting.

 

 

It’s not a drinking water storage tank, but since it’s connected to my water system, I’m somewhat in charge of the water in it. It’s a deluge tank for fire supression in the big hangars. A deluge system is no wimpy fire sprinkler system; when that alarm goes off, the whole world gets flooded all at once.

 

  

Four big diesel engines power pumps that move a lot of water in a hurry through a 24″ pipe to the top of the affected hangar. I would really not want to be standing underneath that kind of hydraulic power when it went off. I sincerely hope they have some sort of warning system to get the people out of the way, because 700,000 gallons dropping on you all at once would be somewhat dramatic. If the impact didn’t kill you, the drowning would.

 

  

So the customer wants the tank filled up. I had to go look at the mechanisms at the top, even though I very much didn’t want to. Have I mentioned that I’m quite afraid of heights? Glen took me up on the manlift and I carefully did not look down. Mostly I pointed my camera at things and let it do the seeing while I concentrated on not throwing up or crying.

 

  

I haven’t decided if I’m going to fill it before they fix the liner or not. It depends on their estimates; I’d think it would be cheaper to work on dry, even with confined-space procedures, than to have divers do it. I’m going to have to be right there in either case, because it’s mine and I don’t trust the tenant to take as much care of my equipment as I would. That part will be very interesting; I missed the last inspection and repair of our water storage tank.

 

 

It’s going to take me days to fill it through that little two-inch line. It will take five hours of our big pumps running, and they have to keep the regular water system supplied too. It’s going to be a huge demand on our little system, but at the end, we should have a working deluge system again.

Well, OK, more like walking down the dock of the Bay on the way to the boat.

Junior’s family invited us on a fishing trip in the San Francisco Bay they’d put together. We accepted and paid before this whole house this went through and besides, we really wanted to go. So we frantically got everything done during the week, booked a hotel so we didn’t have to get up at 2 AM again, and headed for the marina with his Dad.

 

  

It was supposed to be a shark fishing trip, but after a couple of hours with only one keeper, the crew switched us over to halibut rigs. I was having a good time with the sharks myself, even without catching a legal one. Even the two-foot variety is pretty challenging for a noodle-armed woman like me to reel in, and the one I did get was satisfyingly bitey, going for someone’s leg in revenge before he got tossed back in.

 

 

But the halibut fishing was fun too, and a lot more active. I plopped my line in while they were still rigging up other people and *bang*! Caught the first one. He was a half-inch too small, so back he went. Then I’d catch one every hour or so, but none of them were legal until the last. Junior limited out with three and Dad caught two, so we had a nice mess of fish to bring home and eat. Halibut is delicious grilled in foil packets, by the way.

 

 Junior ‘caught’ the strangge catch of the day, and I must be the most gullible person ever. Towards the end of the trip, someone on the other side of the boat had hooked his line. He fought with it for a little while, thinking it was hung up on the bottom. Eventually, up comes this light-colored plasticy-looking thing, and for the life of me, I couldn’t resolve what it was in my head. I thought it was some sort of kid’s toy, with a foot hanging off the end, until everyone quicker than me told me to look closer at it. It still took me a little bit to realize that it was a joke, that they’d put it on his line on the other side of the boat; I didn’t catch that until I heard someone talking about it. Hey, it is the San Francisco Bay, after all. Who knows what you’re going to get?

Because I might be crazy, in addition to heading in to our busy season and buying a house, I booked us on a weekend flight across the country and back.

 

  

Junior’s folks were visiting his sister and neices for ten days, and he hadn’t seen them for a few years either. His mom and I were talking about it when I got the bug in my ear to go too. So we did, even though I don’t get luxuries like “vacation.”

 

  

We spent all day Friday flying from California to Pennsylvania, getting up at 1:30 AM to leave for the airport. We spent a day with his folks being tourists in Washington DC, and then spent all of Sunday flying home, getting back to bed at 1:30 AM again. We got about ten or twelve hours of sleep between Thursday and Monday morning, which really added to the insanity.

 

  

It was a good trip though. I haven’t spent much time on that side of the country and Junior had never been. It’s amazing to us dry Californians just how green the East Coast is. It didn’t even look like they watered their lawns, yet everything was green and manicured. The differences in the buildings and types of houses were very striking to us too; you just don’t see a whole lot of townhouses over here, and houses sprawl out horizontally rather than climb vertically. Our kids would love to have a basement, something kids over there take for granted. We seem to like to live farther apart from each other, and more isolated by privacy fences too, in the west. It seems strange to me to go out to grill on the back porch only to wave at the neighbors doing the same thing twenty feet away.

 

 

Although we had rented a car, we chose to take a bus tour to DC so we didn’t have to deal with driving in traffic or parking. I hear parking there is kind of horrible. It looked like an old-folks’ tour at first, but the bus didn’t fill up halfway, so we spread out and relaxed. It wasn’t one of those tours where you all dress up alike and listen to a tour guide hold forth at each stop either; this was really all about the transportation. The driver/guide dropped us off near the museums and we spent half a day at the Natural History Museum before being shuttled off to the various monuments.

 

  

Once we got to the touristy stuff, our driver was still good. He’d tell us a few things while on the road and then turn us loose again. It ended up being perfect for us, since Junior’s dad has a bum knee. We got to see a little bit of  everything without too much walking.

 

  

One of the things I found remarkable was how easy this trip was, with regards to the people. A trip like this and being sleep-deprived can put a huge strain on a relationship, but there wasn’t any of that between us. I keep marvelling over how much I like his folks too; there would have been no way in hell I’d have gone on a trip voluntarily with my last set of in-laws, but I genuinely like being around these people. I do wish his neices had gone on the tour with us, but they’re teenage girls and were just not interested. It would have been nice to get to know them a little better, but at least I got to meet them.

 

 

By the time we got home, we were absolute zombies. Junior doesn’t like to fly, but got a few catnaps on the planes. I was in the middle seat the whole time and don’t sleep all that well sitting up anyway, so I didn’t get one wink of sleep in transit until we got back to our own truck. Then I conked out most of the way home. 

 

  

We got home in time to trade the travel stress back for the house-buying stress, but at least we had us a little adventure. If you’re going to burn that candle at both ends, you might as well do it up right, no?

When we started seriously looking for houses a couple of months ago, we really liked the first one we set foot into. It felt weird to make an offer on the very first one, but it suited us just right, so we did. Unfortunately, so did someone else, for some amount higher than ours.

 

  

Oh well, life’s like that, so we moved on. We saw a lot more houses, and even found one that would do, but it wasn’t as good as that first one. We made an offer on that second-best one knowing that we’d have to put some money into it to get it whipped into the kind of shape that we wanted. That offer sat for a while, as it was a short-sale house, which is more complicated than either buying from a person or from a bank.

 

  

On a whim last weekend, while we were out checking out some open homes in the neighborhood, we drove back by the original house. And a sign was back up in the yard. We asked our realtor to check on it, and sure enough, it went back on the market on Monday. So by Monday afternoon, we renewed our original offer, just initialling the date changes.

 

  

After all of this hurry up and wait business, weren’t we surprised to hear back from that seller by Wednesday? They made a counteroffer to our offer, but at least it wasn’t about the money. Suddenly they seem in an awful hurry to get this house closed, so they weren’t giving us much time for our inspections.

 

  

We countered with a more reasonable time, and sure enough, today they accepted it. We’ve made a deposit and scheduled inspections. I’m going to go take a water sample tomorrow, and we’re also going to finalize things with our mortgage broker. It makes your head spin, how quickly it goes from slug slow to fast, fast, fast, but we’ve only got about a week to get all of this together. We’re for damn sure not going to let any holdups be from us, so we’ll be burning that candle on both ends this week.

 

  

We close escrow in the middle of September, one weekend before opening day. We’ll be at both, so there won’t be much sleeping going on for the next month. We do have to pack, after all, somewhere in that time, and go fishing. Priorities are important in this family, after all.