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 me 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.

I really liked the country house. Junior was sort of noncommittal about it, but I liked its personality.

There were only two little issues with it. It had an older shake roof, which just isn’t done in California any more, and freaks out insurance underwriters. We’d discussed having the seller replace the roof for a higher offer, and she seemed amenable.

The other issue was so small-seeming. We were walking next to the driveway, and I spotted two ieces of pipe coming out of the ground. I asked what those were and the answer was an old farm fuel tank.

Oh, crap. Underground contamination was the core of my career for the previous decade, after all, and I know damn well what kind of trouble you can get into trying to remove a tank. The agents did a little talking between themselves, and the seller thought she had a letter from the local environmental agency giving an exemption for removal due to its size. She wasn’t willing to mess with taking it out, not with an exemption in hand, and I don’t blame her.

Now the question was whether or not we were willing to take the gamble of counting on the exemption holding up for the next twenty years. Environmental regulations change from year to year, after all, and almost always to the more restrictive side. If we were to find a mortgage company willing to lend us the money with that ticking time bomb on the place, and the regs let us keep it for twenty years, what were the odds that we’d be able to sell it without taking it out ourselves?

So that was that for that place. It was a nice house, in a nice area, but not worth the potential risk.

So we went to look at another one this morning. Also on an acre, and it had a nice pool, pretty high ceilings, and a lot of landscaping. Still, it didn’t call to us like the Yuppieville house. We’ve still got an offer in on that one, so we decided to let it ride. We hadn’t seen it for a couple of weeks, so a quick drive by refreshed our excitement for that house. It’s a little more work than one that would come fully landscaped, but at least this way, we can get things how we want them.

So now back to the waiting game. We’re still the only offer and things seems to be going forward on the short sale, so I feel optimistic about things. Even if it falls through, we’ve still seen a few that we think we could be happy in, so we’ll be all right.

When we started looking for a house, we sat down together and made a mental list of what qualities we wanted in a place we’re going to live for at least the next ten years.

We both are country people, and if possible, we wanted a place in the country. An acre parcel that had been split off from someone else’s orchard and stil surrounded it would be perfect, but anything that gave us a little elbow room and freedom from neighbors peering in the windows would do.

We wanted to raise the kids in the country; sure there’s a trade-off when it comes to lots of kids in the neighborhood and good bike-riding streets.

We wanted room to have a shop and maybe a pool or some pens for 4-H livestock, so that set our basic size requirement to about an acre.

We wanted to be between his work and mine, although he acknowledged that it’s more important to be closer to mine since I’m the one who’s on-call all the time. Ironic that, since I’m the one who actually doesn’t mind a little bit of a commute.

We wanted a house big enough for the six of us, but it didn’t have to be monstrous. The kids can share rooms as long as there’s enough living space in the rest of the house for everyone to get away from each other once in a while.

But what’s available around here isn’t quite what we were looking for. We ended up mostly looking in Yuppieville, a big subdivision really, although the lots are at least acres and the houses are all custom. You can at least have things like shops and steers, but it’s not a farming community any more. It has pretensions of being one, and it sure used to be, but these days the only crop around there is baby Yuppies. It’s crawling with McMansions, some more pretentious than others. That’s what we were looking at because there just wasn’t anything else around.

The one we have an offer on is a McMansion all prettied up to look like a country house, in fact. You walk inside and it’s that typical big open space, high-ceilinged look. It’s nice, and we do like it, but we’ve strayed a little bit from our original goals. No matter how much decorating we do to that house, it’s always going to show those bones.

So when a true country house went on the market this week, our agent called us. I happened to have time, so I drove by to see if we should go look at it. And it’s ugly from the front, but we’re learning to see through ugly into the truth of a house. This one was worth looking at, even with the horrible early-80s Spanish-style chunky stucco on the surface.

We walked through it on Sunday, and the first impression was also sort of shocking. It’s decorated before its time even, with that gold-leaf wallpaper that you saw in the 70s, not the 80s. Get in past the entryway though, and things improve. The kitchen has updated appliances, and even though the cabinets are really dark colored, they’re of extremely good construction. The living room has a gorgeous brick fireplace going all the way to the ceiling. There’s a loft opening right onto the living room, and it’s done up as a grown-up playroom, a concept that we could really get behind.

There’s a lot of storage there for a house of this era, even if not as much as the Yuppieville house. Yuppies do like their pantries, and I have to admit that I do too, but there is more than enough room for me in this kitchen too.

We’d have to build a shop over in Yuppieville, and possibly a pool too, if we really wanted one. There is no landscaping at all in that backyard. Junior doesn’t mind that so much as I do; he looks at it and sees that he gets to design it. I lok at it and see money and work. This place has a small pool, but a nice one, and a standing shop. It’s not the shop he would build himself, but it’s already there and better than nothing.

Things need work in this place, but almost everything that does is cosmetic, and we could absolutely live in it while we plug away at one piece at a time. Once we started thinking about the things we could do to this place to make it ours, I started to get more excited about it. The other one, we could repaint all we wanted, and it would still be somewhat generic. If we start making changes to this house, there will be nothing generic about it.

The bones of this little house suit us better in the long run, I think. The money’s about even when you consider how much work it will take to bring each to what we want, if not a little bit in the Country house’s favor.

I think the ultimate deciding factor for us is what kind of people we are and what kind of life we want to live. We could have a long and happy life in Yuppieville, sure, but at heart we’re Country people. We’ve both lived in town and out, and independently came to the conclusion that that’s who we are and who we want to be.

So after we check on some more details and maybe go take some photos of the Country house, we’ll make an offer on it. If it’s accepted, we’ll withdraw the offer on the Yuppie house, which hasn’t had a response yet anyway. If we’re going to take our lives in a particular direction, this house would be a good way to help it along.

 

It’s a dirty job, working third shift, no matter what job you’re doing.

You’re opposite from the rest of the working world. You’re trying to sleep while everyone’s up and about, running their leaf blowers outside your window and letting their dogs bark. Normal people don’t get so much of the lawn equipment noise at 2 AM, but your dead of night is fair game. You can’t exactly go run errands when you’re awake, because things like the Post Office close at five, right when you’re getting up.

You’re opposite from your family too. Juggling kids is really challenging, and forget about sleeping with your spouse. The rest of the family needs to adjust to, to learn to be quiet while Daddy’s sleeping. There is no vacuuming during the day; the noisy stuff is saved for the rare evening time when you’re both up.

Your body gets jacked up, especially when you’re trying to adapt to the changes. If you happen to work a four-day week, you get a little more time during the day, but only because you shift your sleeping schedule back and forth weekly. That often leads to 24 hours awake at a time, weekly, and that’s no good for your system. You’re always tired, always trying to catch up on sleep, and never quite making it. You have to learn to deal with being a zombie, and so does your family.

In the winter, you never see the sun, even more than the typical office drone. It’s dark at five when you wake up, it’s dark for your whole workday, and in this valley, it’s foggy on your commute home at 8 AM. The sun peeks out around three in the afternoon, but you’re not there to see it. It gets depressing.

Everyone else in the world works one calendar day at a time, but not you. Your workday spans two. So you technically get three days off a week, but you work early in the morning on the first one and in the evening on the last one. You feel shortchanged.

There are a few good things about the shift too; the peace at work, the more relaxed working environment, but they don’t balance out the downsides. It’s not a desirable shift by any means. And you do at least get dinner with your family, even if it’s your breakfast. You didn’t get that on second shift, not with having to go to work in the early afternoon.

But you do what you have to do. You put in your hours on the lousy shift and do your time waiting for a better one to open. You pay your dues. And maybe, in ten or fifteen years if you’re lucky, you’ll get to climb all the way up to first shift and rejoin the rest of the world.

Since a short sale can fall through at any time, or take six months, during which time we could find something even better, we keep looking. One popped up online this week, so we went to see it on Saturday morning.

 

 

From the front, it wasn’t bad at all; obviously a repo house, so the crispy lawn is par for the course. No big deal. Lawns can be rehabilitated, and at least half of the places we’ve looked at have been in the same boat.

 

We walked in the front door, and were immediately bombarded by the smell. Overwhelming old animal smell dropped this house’s points way down. Once our poor noses adjusted somewhat, it was possible to see that the layout of the place wasn’t that bad, even though the carpet and padding would have to come out, and the colors on the walls were hideous. 

 

 

The kitchen wasn’t horribly designed either. For once, most of the appliances were there, although if you started looking closely at them, you’d notice that they were the cheap end for their sizes. I found that odd; spend a ton of money building a nice house, and put in a gas stove with supports barely strong enough to hold a stock pot off the flame? Weird. 

It was when we started really looking that the flaws became so apparent. The dog shit in the kitchen was one thing, but the sheer amount of mouse shit spoke to a serious infestation. This wasn’t just a house mouse or two; this was an invasion on the scale of Normandy.

But still, all fixable, although the money involved to fix it all was already over our budget, considering the asking price of the house. Ugh, or the time! We do not want to spend that kind of time on a place.

Step out into the backyard with me, and see the last straw.

 

 

 No, not the ambitious and obviously interrupted outdoor kitchen project. That was kind of a neat idea, even if poorly executed.

 

 

Not the firepit either. I kind of liked that. 

 

  

No, take a close look at the pool. Is this a pool for children? It’s got a swim-up bar, with stools at what would normally be the shallow end. 

 

 

Except there is no shallow end. It’s all deep, except for those stools of doom lurking right under the surface waiting to break some kid’s neck. This is a party place for adults, trying too hard to be Vegas-like and pathetically failing. This is not a house where the kids could have fun, and since we have four, this house was out of the question for us. 

This isn’t the worst repossessed house that we’ve seen, although it is the worst that we’ve actually gone in. We’ve peeked through the windows of some and seen holes in the walls and electrical fixtures ripped off; we don’t even bother looking at those. A good deal could be had by someone willing and capable of putting in the tie to fix them, but we are not those people. Capable, yes, but not willing. So as a horror story, it’s not much, but it’s definitely not for us. It did make me appreciate all the more the one we have an offer pending on. I really like that one, and it won’t take much to make it liveable.

The house hunt has been wearing on us. I flip through the online listings every few days, and talk to our realtor weekly. I examine the real estate ads in the paper religiously. We drive through neighborhoods, jotting down likely-looking addresses. We obsessively stalk one place that’s been repossessed, waiting for a lockbox to appear that would indicate that it’s on the market now.

It’s getting old.

But on Friday, I was wasting my time as usual flipping through realtor.com, and I spotted one that raised my eyebrows. Our agent had been going to show us this house a few weeks ago, even though it was out of our price range. We got busy and skipped it. This week the price had been dropped right into our range, so we made an appointment to go look at it.

 

 

   

Turns out, it’s a short sale, which effectively means that the owner is losing it and is trying to unload it before the mortgage company takes it back. The owners typically owe much more than they can get out it, so their bank has to approve any sale and eat the losses. And the losses can be big, into the hundreds of thousands these days, especially if they had a second mortgage. Our agent told us sometimes the second-mortgage bank will only get three or four thousand dollars out of a hundred thousand dollar loan.

 

 

   

We’re hoping that a bank would rather deal with eating the loss now and have to mess with it less than if they repossessed it and then had to do all of the sales themselves, and eat the losses, because prices aren’t going up. This way, they don’t have the costs of selling it themselves, or of having it sit for months or years not making any money at all.

 

 

   

The banks don’t have to play by the rules though. They don’t have to respond to an offer within the usual three days, and in this situation, they don’t even have to consider offers one at a time. If someone else comes in with a higher offer in a month, before they’ve committed to one, we’re likely hosed. It’s an even bigger gamble than usual, and much less certain than buying either from an owner or a repo house.

 

 

 

But we liked this house, even though there’s nothing done with the backyard. There’s a lot of room for a shop and even a pool if we were so inclined. And we’re not just dicking around here; we really are shopping, so we made an offer on it yesterday. We’re not holding our breath and we’re going to keep looking at other houses. That’s one of the good things about them taking so long to evaluate responses; if we find another one that we want more after the ten days they have to answer us, we can go for that one instead without penalty.

I’d like this house; it would suit us, but we’re finding that there are quite a few places out there that will suit us. For now, for this one, it’s wait and see, so we shall wait.