My last blog entry...

This will be my last blog entry for this blog. Too much has happened in just a short time.

The long and short of it all is that my husband, who I had jokingly dubbed "Pig" here (because of the Chinese zodiac sign for his year of birth), and I will be getting a divorce. This was not something I ever wanted out of life, but the decision has been taken out of my hands when he informed me he would not be leaving his mistress. Now, I am regretting a number of things, especially my choice of zodiac names for everyone.

At the time, I thought it would be amusing to have Pig, Horse, Rooster, and Pig Jr. be the members of my family. Now, it hurts too much. Well-meaning individuals have been referring to my husband by his blog name. I know they are just trying to be supportive of me in this trying time, but I have no desire to call him any names, but especially not "Pig." That had been, at the time, an endearing nickname. No matter what my feelings are towards him at this moment, he is still the father of my children. They were conceived in love. There had to have been something redeeming about him at some point in time, or I would not have married him, let alone had three children with him.

To those who have sent me their love and support since hearing this news, I offer you my thanks. I have no idea how I am going to get through the days and weeks ahead, but I will do my best to pull myself together for my children. For those that formerly communicated with me through the online game of KoL that my husband and I played, I am leaving that game. If you wish to contact me in any other way, please find the Murphy Brawn Facebook page that I had set up to post links to this blog. You can leave me a message there, if you like. Please be advised though: That is a public page, so anyone can see it. That means I do not wish to see any name-calling there, even if you think it is to support me right now. Regardless of his indiscretions, he is still the father of my children.

Most likely, the children and I will be moving in with my parents in just a short while. My husband will be finding an apartment elsewhere. I will have to find a good divorce attorney, dust off my archaic resume, find a job, get my act together, and find a more permanent place for the kidlets and I to live. I appreciate more than anything that my parents are willing to take us in right now. Otherwise, I have no idea where we would go. I have no paying job as a stay-at-home mother. Even the car is in my husband's name.

We are currently under contract and waiting for our closing date in October on the sale of our house, so we would have to be moving out no matter what. I am glad I found out what I did before we purchased another house. I have no idea what is to be done with most of our things. Paying for storage is expensive, and it is unlikely that either my husband or myself will have room for much. Most of what we already have boxed and in storage has items for both of us, so it will all have to be gone through before we go our separate ways. I wish I had found out earlier, so the yard sale we just had early yesterday could have contained more items. Now, the thought of another sale this time of year simply fills me with dread.

A bizarre part of my brain keeps thinking it's a relief I will not have to cook with a set of pots and pans I cannot stand. They were a wedding gift from my in-laws back when my husband did all the cooking, so they were a style that he loves. What an odd thing to fixate on at a time like this.

Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers. This is going to be extremely difficult for everybody involved, but especially our children. My husband and I both want what is best for them, and I truly hope it stays that way.

Thank you all for your support.

Dancing Birds

In the middle of the chaos that is my life these days, I had one of those unexpectedly joyous, yet fleeting, moments that catch us unaware. While I was in my car and stopped at a red light, glaring at pretty much every driver around me for simply being there, I saw a flock of birds swoop down in the sky ahead of me.

While I watched, the flock split into two distinct groups of birds. Each group flew as one while being partnered by the other half of the birds. Each half moved as if they shared one communal hive mind as the two groups flew around and around each other in fantastic whirls. It was as if two swooping, swarming, flipping, flying, absolutely amazing dance partners took over the sky right in front of me. Their choreography could not have been more perfect.

I don't know how long I sat there, dumbfounded over the beautiful dance I was witnessing. I do know that nobody honked at me, so either we were all collectively entranced or the moment was shorter than I would have guessed. Time certainly seemed irrelevant at that moment.

Life needs more of those moments. Or perhaps we need to learn how to fully embrace them as they come. They might be few and far between some days, but it would be a crime to miss them once they arrive.

So much for daily entries once the kidlets went back to school...

What a month it's been! Between the kidlets going back to school and everything going on with the sale of our house, I've been insanely busy. I have to laugh every time someone asks me what I am going to do with all my free time now that I have all three at school full-time. "Oh, not much. Just packing up an entire house to try and move God only knows where because we can't find anything short-term in town. Oh, and trying to recover from some sort of bizarre bacterial infection that's not strep, but gave me funky white spots on my tonsils and is making me more tired than I should be. Aren't you jealous?"

Gotta love the ignorant.

The kidlets are trying to cope with all of the moving plans by either denying our house will actually sell or by embracing it fully. For their sakes, this had better all be over within the next two months, as is our current plan.

Pig Jr. has had multiple accidents at school and even more at home, which is unlike him, but makes sense with the turmoil of starting kindergarten and all this talk of moving.

Rooster has been sobbing for months now every single time moving is mentioned, except for this morning. "I can't wait to move!" When asked why, she responded with, "Because then I can get away from Lacie." Two and a half weeks into school, and she already has someone trying to boss her around in her classroom. Lacie had previously tormented Rooster in kindergarten, so this is not a total surprise, but I had been hoping that little devil spawn would mature a bit over first grade. (I'm sorry. That's not very nice of me. My apologies to devil spawn everywhere for giving them a bad name by comparing them to that child.)

And then there's Horse. She desperately wants her own room, yet does not want to leave the only town in which she remembers residing. Horse is also in these awful tween years where she's not a little kid anymore, but she is also not really old enough to be as independent as she would like. She has been asking me if she can walk home from school with her friends, which I am okay with provided she stays within visual range of my overprotective eyes. Not for nothing, but there are at least four registered sex offenders living in our one square mile town, along with known gang activity. No stinkin' way am I letting her walk home at her age without me knowing exactly where she is and if she is safe. On the other hand, I want her to spread her wings a bit, and enjoy whatever time she has left with these friends. Well, today, another friend asked her if she could walk home with her, and Horse told her no because she only wanted to walk with her other friends. This does not fly in my world. Adding another girl who is already a friend to a group is an option. Deliberately excluding a friend is not. To be fair to Horse, she claims she thought her friend was asking her to not walk with anyone else but her, and she had already told her other friends she would walk with them. I am not entirely sure I believe my daughter. She is not exactly the most truthful kid on this planet, and she inherited her mother's complete lack of tact in certain settings. I would not put it past her to deliberately rephrase things to make herself look better.

I am done with this school year already, and it's still only September.

Telephone in the School District

I walk my kidlets to and from school almost every day. A lot of people in town tell me I'm crazy, but I look at it as if this is a total of three miles' worth of walking and exercise that I would otherwise miss. It also gives me extra time with my kidlets, and helps them to wake up a bit before starting their school day. To me, these are all good things. At least I consider them to be good things when the weather is beautiful. I do question my own sanity when it's either freezing cold and sleeting or roasting and humid.

On the walk home from school today, a couple of middle school students stopped us. They both knew at least one of my kidlets by name, and we all knew each other by sight from simply seeing one another hundreds of times at the elementary school over the years. Both boys looked exceedingly concerned, so I asked them if they were okay. It might take a village to raise a child, but I was the only adult around who was in a position to help if needed, unless you counted the guys cutting down tree limbs two houses away, and those were hired men who were likely strangers to the two sixth graders.

One of the boys immediately asked me if I knew what happened at one of the parks in our town. I told him I had not heard anything, and asked why he was asking. Both boys piped up to say they heard there was a shooting at the park, and that the teachers had told them whatever happened was too violent to tell them. They claimed all after school activities had been cancelled due to this supposed shooting. One boy stated he did not want to go home because he would have to be there alone.

Hmm. I had not heard anything. I had seen an emergency vehicle fly through the center of town, but I had no idea if it wound up at the park in question. I certainly had not heard any rumors flying at the elementary school. Having been a teacher myself during September of 2001, I could say that it is not uncommon for teachers to be told they are not allowed to mention anything about tragic events that are still unfolding. (We were told to not tell our students anything on 9/11, which I found exceedingly difficult as I did not immediately know if my husband was even still alive. Thankfully, he was.) No one wants to start a panic amongst the students, I suppose.

I asked the two boys if either one needed help contacting their parents, since I had my cell phone on me, or if they needed us to watch to see if they would make it home safely. They declined, but one walked with us as we finished our walk home. (He lives a couple of houses up the street from us.)

After walking into my house, I immediately contacted a friend of mine whose husband is a volunteer firefighter in town. I figured if anyone I knew would have heard of an emergency call, she would have. Apparently, there was an emergency near the park in question, but there was no shooting. Those middle schoolers were worried over a rumor that had essentially been a game of telephone run amok.

You know that game? One person starts out by whispering something to someone else, who then whispers it to another person, who relays the message further, and so on and so forth, until the very last person announces the message they heard. "I love the color red" becomes "Rainbows are awful things unless you own a unicorn" or something else totally unrelated to the original statement. That's what must have happened here. One person said something about the park in question, and the next thing we knew, the middle schoolers are asking about a shooting that never took place.

The saddest thing about this whole telephone situation, in my opinion, is that we live in a society where kidlets know a shooting could actually take place at the park where they play. I am just grateful that turned out to be a rumor instead of the truth.

Adventures in House-Selling, Part VIII

This should really be titled, "Hurry up and Wait." That seems about what we are doing at this stage of the game.

We waited after the home inspection for our buyer's list of demands...erm...things she wanted addressed. We waited for her attorney to tell us whether our concessions were acceptable to our buyer. We waited for our appraisal. Now we are waiting to find out if our appraisal is high enough that we can continue with our sale. After that, we will wait to see if our buyer gets her mortgage.

In the middle of the waiting for selling our house, we are also waiting on the buying end. We waited to see if another seller would accept our offered price. We waited for a counteroffer when it was rejected. We waited to sign the contract once the details were agreed upon. We waited for the seller to also sign. Now we are waiting for the two attorneys to reject the contract and put in their own legal mumbo-jumbo during the attorney review period. While waiting, we are also worrying that someone else will swoop in and offer him a better deal and leave us out in the cold.

Some of us are getting a bit tired of all this waiting.

In the middle of all of this, the kidlets returned to school. They, too, are waiting. They are waiting to find out whether we will be moving at all, once, or twice this school year. (If our buyer cannot buy for whatever reason, we are giving up on this whole idea, refinancing, and looking into putting an addition on our too-small house. If everything goes smoothly on the selling end, we will move at least once into an apartment of some kind to wait out the time until we close on the next house, whatever that one will be. If the house we were admiring actually becomes ours, another move will take place.)

Our eldest does not want to move, but does want her own bedroom, so she will likely be the most willing to go along with one or two moves. Our middle kidlet does not want to move at all, and she tells us this at every opportunity. We might have to bribe her with a visit to Grandma and Grandpa's house as a means of preventing her from handcuffing herself to our current house. Our youngest has not said anything on the subject, but has had three accidents since school started last week, so he is clearly dealing with enough stress from just starting kindergarten. I shudder to think what his reaction will be if he is uprooted from the only home he has ever known.

The good news is that in another month or so, we will know for sure whether or not we are going to go through with the sale of our house. We will cross any other bridges when we come to them. What is meant to be will happen. Now pardon me while I go hurry up and wait to see what will be.

Adventures in House-Selling, Part VII

We are not entirely sure what our attorney Mr. Law is actually doing to help us sell our house. We know we will have to pay him for his services, regardless of whether the house actually sells. However, there are days we really, truly wonder what he is doing to earn his fee.

Last week, Mr. Law told me I had to get copies of certain paperwork to him immediately so he could forward copies to our buyer's attorney for our buyer to review. Verbally, Mr. Law told me we were going to be offering our buyer a $500 credit towards some water-damaged wood repairs that need to be done for our Florida room. (Think concrete back porch, but with metal walls that have the option of putting in either a bunch of windows or screens, depending on the season. The only wood is actually in the frame, which is covered by aluminum.) He also said he would forward the various receipts we had, including one where our hot water heater was inspected, one to prove we treated for termites even though the mud tunnel the home inspection found was actually from decades ago, and another to show we had treated for the supposed carpenter ant infestation in the Florida room. I got the copies to Mr. Law, as requested. We were therefore expecting to hear back from our buyer to see whether everything on the home inspection contingency is now met.

This morning, I opened up my email to find a forwarded letter from the buyer's attorney, demanding that we treat for termites, treat for carpenter ants, replace the hot water heater, pay for a home warranty for our buyer, repair the damage to the Florida room, and install a rail up to our unfinished attic because its absence will interfere with our ability to obtain a Certificate of Occupancy from our town. (I was told verbally that we passed our inspection, and am supposed to pick up that certificate from our town's office tomorrow afternoon.)

There were a few things wrong with that letter, the most glaringly obvious being that we already took care of half the things on the list and were waiting to hear our buyer's response about the rest. I called Mr. Law and asked him what on earth that letter meant since I thought we had already addressed most of those issues last week.

Apparently, Mr. Law never forwarded copies of anything to our buyer's attorney. Now, however, he wants to double the credit we will give towards the wood repair. (This actually annoys me, given that the damaged wood had been found when the home inspection company physically ripped a row of siding off each side of the frame of my Florida room. Until that point, we had no idea there was a problem.) Mr. Law said he will take care of forwarding all of those receipts to our buyer today, and indeed I did just receive a CC of the email that proves someone in his office did just that. Finally!

After this morning's conversation, Mr. Law called me back later to ask for the wood destroying insect report or clearance or something involving the carpenter ants. I told him I gave him copies of everything I had received. Mr. Law told me I needed to call the treating company and ask for the form he needed, so I did. The treating company told me they did not write the wood destroying insect report (WDIR, apparently) in the first place; they only treated the Florida room. Therefore, our attorney needs to send a copy of the treatment paperwork to the company that tore apart our siding, and have them issue a clearance letter about the carpenter ants. I relayed this information to Mr. Law, and he said he could do that.

Now I have two new things over which to fret. First, will Mr. Law actually send the paperwork to the correct company so we have the clearance we need for our closing? Secondly, will that hideous company accept the treatment paperwork as sufficient evidence of treatment, or will they insist on coming back out to re-inspect? We just nailed the dang siding back into place and caulked it all up yesterday. Darned if I want them to come back out and pull it all up again!

I think I might actually be relieved if this deal fails to happen. We're losing a ton of money, getting nickeled and dimed to death after this inspection, and don't have many options when it comes to buying our next house anyway. The one potential option we have is unlikely to come to fruition given our contingency to sell first anyway, it's already the cheapest available house in a very expensive area, and every single person we've talked to about it has put it down as a bad idea because of its oil heating, high taxes, and lack of a garage.

Regardless of our options for the future, we at least have our house right now. If our buyer balks over anything and backs out of the deal, it's not the end of the world. At least that's what I keep trying to tell myself between massive freak-outs and chocolate-eating binges.

Adventures in House-Selling, Part VI

I should have, perhaps, entitled today's blog entry either, "The Home Inspection from Hell," or, "Your House Knows You're Abandoning It." I wish I was joking.

Three days ago, our buyer had her home inspection. From that point on, pretty much everything went to hooey.

First of all, the buyer, her realtor, the inspector, and others who I am not entirely certain who they were or why they were there all showed up an hour early without any sort of notice. Her realtor, if no one else, carried with him a cell phone with our realtor's cell number available to him. When I called our realtor in a panic, since the girls had just finished their lunches and I still had a few chores left to accomplish before leaving with them, our realtor was just as surprised as I was. I left the house in the responsibility of the buyer's realtor while my realtor did what he could to get someone from our team over there.

I should point out that our realtor was the one who did not want us there. He said there were too many times where he has seen the seller get bamboozled by the buyer and home inspector if the seller was actually present. Why agree to things because you can't handle saying no in person? That's what lawyers are for. Leave the naysaying to them. The fact that the buyer's realtor wanted me to stay also made me feel the need to leave. He gave me the impression that he would make slick used-car salesmen look like they are all on the up-and-up.

I probably should have stayed. Upon my return, I discovered my microwave (which is not involved in the sale) had been used and the time set. We never set the time on that thing, and the clocks we have around the house are all set fast to help my husband get to the train on time. They set the microwave to the correct time instead. They broke our indoor-outdoor digital thermometer (also not part of the sale), which we were thankfully able to finally fix after exchanging all of the batteries and letting it completely reset. They shut off our basement dehumidifier (once more, not part of the sale). They messed around in the back of the toilet tank so it did not flush properly (Okay, fine. The toilet technically comes with the house. But why mess around with its innards?). It took me two days to figure out the problem and correct it. But the worst was yet to come.

Yesterday, we received a copy of the letter our buyer's attorney sent to our attorney. In it, we were told she had some demands to make before any of us even received the written inspection report. One of the things sounded as if she was going to demand a termite treatment based on the claim that they found an old mud tunnel in our detached garage. First of all, we get termite inspections yearly, and nothing has ever been spotted. We do use a pest control service to receive quarterly spraying to try and prevent creepy crawlies from entering our house, but we never had to treat for termites. Secondly, an old mud tunnel might have been there for decades, even since before we bought the house. It does not imply any termites are currently in residence. Thirdly, I called our pest control service immediately, and they sent someone out to investigate. No evidence of past or present termites was discovered, including any mud tunnels. Regardless, since this was something we are sure they put in the inspection report, we have to have the property treated because the mortgage company will demand it even if the buyer does not. That's over fifteen hundred bucks right there.

While I was outside talking with the termite guy, I decided to take a look at our back porch, or what we call our Florida room. The buyer's attorney had claimed there were active carpenter ants and water damage that needed to be addressed. Well, we already had the pest control plan, so it was easy to just place a call and schedule a treatment day. However, we were baffled by the claims of water damage, so I went to look around our Florida room to see if I could spot anything or if we would have to wait for the official report. Boy, could I see it!

It turns out that someone for the buyer, whether it was the home inspection person or their bug guy, had pried up these metal siding slats at the bottom of the Florida room. They physically pried the siding away from the exterior of our house and left it pulled out like that. They even bent one of the pieces, so it is not likely to ever look normal again. Sure, we can now see how there is rotted wood there, which we did not know about previously, but they took away just about every option we had towards getting it fixed.

If they had simply knocked on the siding and said it sounded hollow so they suspected water damage, or bug damage, or whatever, then we could have just told the buyer we'd give her a credit of some monetary amount and it would be her problem. She could decide to back out of the deal if that didn't work for her, but at least we would not have three of the four sides of our back porch now exposed to the elements.  We now have to get it fixed before it rains. Not only that, but because of the location and the damage the company did, it is likely to be a much larger problem and cost more to fix than it would have before they ripped everything open. For example, I honestly cannot see any water damage down one of the three sides they opened up, and it is only minimal damage on the second side, yet we now have to fix all three sides, which is likely to require a complete overhaul of our Florida room.

The rest of the house, upon hearing me on the phone all afternoon with our realtor, the inspection company, and their bug guy, suddenly realized what this all meant. We are trying to abandon it, at least in its inanimate mind. It got back at us. Our less than three-year-old bathroom fan just up and died. I suppose it's possible the home inspection people messed around with it, too, but we have no proof of that as nothing is noticeably out of place like we have with the glaring gaps around our Florida room's border.

Oh, and our buyer also wants a new hot water heater and the right to add whatever else she wants to add upon receipt of her written inspection report.

I'm about ready to tell her she can take a flying leap and hope I can make this all up to my house before it completely goes kablooey on me.