Then the Darkness Gobbled Up the Moon

Being married to G is like being married to the Nat Geo Channel.

There are lots of some times when I get snarky about his nerdiness scientific interests, but the truth is that without him I would never know of anything that ever happens in outer space and I would be stuck with a crappy phone camera because I never would have paid for a DSLR. I wouldn't know about the Mars mission or the International Space Station or tonight's total eclipse of a super moon.

A super moon occurred tonight; the moon looked a lot larger because it was like 31,000 miles closer (than usual) to us. And the eclipse occurred because the Earth got between the sun and the moon. We have now reached the extent of my knowledge. At about 7:00, I threw down my Virgina Woolf book, we hopped in the Jeep and made a Sonic run. We then careened all over the immediate area until we found a deserted office park to camp out in for a couple of hours.

I slurped my diet cherry limeade while G read various statistics from NASA's website and then tore off the roof of his Jeep so he could climb on top and take pictures.

So, you know, a typical Sunday night around here.

The rest of the weekend was a combination of productivity and regular rounds of napping. The busy week? It takes all the energy out of this introvert. Not joking. I had so much grading to do (for my class and the grading job) that instead of taking one 3-hr nap today, I broke it up into three 1-hr naps. I have mad math skillz.

Other happenings:

Chopped about 3.5 inches off and dyed hair darker brown

New dec of the season

7-layer dip for the Hogs/A&M game. Almost won.

What Lucy does while I do homework

What Lucy does while I grade

Ok, these papers aren't going to grade themselves. Here's to another busy week.

It's almost October! Can you believe it?

TGIF, people!

Hello, Fall

Denver cooperated and gave us some fall-like weather to usher in the season's first day. And by 'fall-like', I mean it was actually below the 90's. For once. All my beautiful potted plants have died, which is what happens when I forget to water them for days at a time and it's Sahara-level hot outside. But, alas, it's almost time to stick a million pumpkins out there anyways.

Lucy hates the fall festivities. Decorations annoy her.

I usually have class tonight, but it's Yom Kippur and while my teacher is repenting, I'm rejoicing that I get a night off. Bunny Mama needed a break. Even if it's just to grade. 50 papers are no joke. I may or may not have flipped off one of my classes today. They're cool with it.

So, I'm doing laundry and watching long stretches of Big Bang Theory in between grading papers. I need to hustle, though, because I pick up about 50 more papers tomorrow (for the extra grading job: read: vacay money).

We finally finally resumed Lit Society last night and it was so nice to get it going again, Frasier and Niles style. Nat King Cole was nice enough to read a Virginia Woolf book for us to discuss, since I'm a slacker and couldn't fit in any other reads. And I got to love on this one.

Ok, enough procrastinating. As soon as I return these papers, the honeymoon period of the semester is over. I'm a hard grader. There will be an adjustment period now.

Drink a pumpkin spice latte for me!

The Wheels Are Coming Off

I was doing fine the first couple of weeks of the semester, and then I ran into a wall. Hard. The sinus infection started it - I couldn't work out, I needed even more sleep than usual, I couldn't summon the basic energy level needed to do things like fix my hair or perhaps wash the occasional load of laundry...

And, you know how it goes: once you get out of a routine, it's almost impossible to get back into it.

So, I haven't been working out, I haven't been cleaning, like, anything in the house. My car's a mess; my back pack's a mess; and my mind's a mess. Exhaustion is a real thing.

Wake me up when it's over

It was so awesome that G's cousin visited us this weekend, but it consumed whatever scarce reserves of energy I had hiding out in my body. Stick a fork in me; I'm done.

Just in time for 50 students to submit their papers this week. I will never crawl out of the grading. If anyone needs me, follow Lucy to the stack of papers she's chewing on, and start digging. I'll be buried somewhere underneath it.

But! On Sunday we explored the mountains for a while, saw some elk, went to a craft fair in Estes, watched Fantastic Mr. Fox, and ate a lot of food. Contrary to my whining on here, I really can't complain.

For the past two days I've set my alarm for early in the morning so that I would get up and work out. For the past two days I've chuckled to myself and hit snooze until bolting out of bed at the last possible minute. Something has got to give.

Tonight is Lit Society, so a few glasses of wine and some Virginia Woolf convo will set me on the right track...

(Read Mrs. Dalloway immediately. And then read To the Lighthouse. You'll thank me. I'm enjoying the VW class even more than the Jane Austen one, if you can believe it.)

A Day in My City

G's cousin is visiting us this weekend. We've known about her trip for a while, and have been planning to show her some of Denver's highlights, and then this past week was so stressful. I joke about being an introvert, but there is a word quota, people. And I reached it by like Tuesday afternoon. As the week wore on and so did my classes and student conferences and workshops, I started to stress out about this weekend because all I really wanted to do - and let's be honest - is sleep.

Then I realized, this is such a great problem to have. Trying to balance work that I love with family that I love? I can do that.

Attitude adjustment. Check.

Death by chocolate is a must for company

Fall is here. We roamed around downtown Denver for a few hours before the Rockies game. We showed her 16th street, focused on Larimer street (food!), and then checked out the renovations to Union Station. After spending a good hour in the Tattered Cover bookstore, of course.

I heart Larimer Street

 

We ate lunch at The Market because I know it's a super popular hang out for some of my students. What a great place for coffee and food! (AR peeps, it's like a bigger version of Arsaga's that also serves all kinds of food.)

And then we checked out the renovations made to Union Station. I think they did such a good job preserving the building but adding in enough shops, restaurants, and stores to make it a bustling part of downtown.

 

 

Then we headed to the game. The Rockies won! And we lucked out because walk-up tickets for club-level seats were half off. Score.

Ok, must double fist the coffee and read a few pages of the next Virginia Woolf book (To the Lighthouse) before everyone wakes up and it's time to head to the mountains.

Enjoy your Sunday, peeps! Fall is here! Laaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

TGIF, people!

All that lost knowledge you were looking for? Here it is.

Lucy Weighs in on the Fall Decorations

Jumping the Gun a Tad

In between sweating, yard work, and reading The Narrative of Frederick Douglass all day, I managed to get a start on decorating for fall. I must give G credit: It does feel a bit weird and too early to decorate, with the temp in the nineties and all, BUT!, I can't get anything "fun" done during the week and we're going to have company next weekend and then it's practically the end of September so one's gotta do what one's gotta do in order to embrace the autumnal goodness.

Also? First Pumpkin Spice Latte of the Season. All logos aligned properly, of course.

Because it wasn't quite hot enough, I turned on the ole' oven and baked my first batch of pumpkin bread. This will tide us over for the week. With coffee? Breakfast of champions.

And while I did manage to start up the exercise routine today, and unpack all the pumpkiny goodness, I did not manage to actually decorate. Mainly because these weekly papers aren't going to write themselves, and if I get to play for several hours on Saturday (wine on the train!) then I must make up for that on Sunday (endless slave narratives!).

So, the kitchen counter will look like this for a couple of days and I'm okay with that.

The twice weekly 4:00-a.m. workouts will resume this week, now that the sinus infection is - thankfully! - in the past.

Pretty soon it will be all owls and pumpkins all the time up in here. :)

Train Ride!

This Saturday was about 1,000,000 times better than last Saturday. This time last week I was in the dregs of a sinus infection, reading page after page after page of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and waiting on the last of our payments on the VA house to clear.

Today? Today I was drinking wine on a train!

Have you heard of this? The two-hour train ride takes you deep into Royal Gorge, CO. Depending upon the time you reserve, you can eat a leisurely breakfast or lunch (we ate lunch) in a private booth, then make your way to one of many open, outdoor cars to take in the amazing view.

In all honesty, it was us and several large groups of senior citizens. (They get very grumpy when waiting in line to board. The lady behind us referred to some ladies in front of us as - I kid you not - both "hotsy-totsies" and "old cripples" simply because they got to board before she did. She was not messing around.)

A wine flight of local specials!

Even G hopped on the alcohol train! (<--see what I did there?)

We spent the first hour inside, taking it easy in our booth. And drinking. I'm not going to lie. It's so nice to be able to taste again. Then we headed out to get some pics as fall begins in the mountains.

This is an incredibly high "bridge to nowhere." It's a walking bridge that simply crosses the gorge. We are going back so we can walk it!

And! And! You can zip line across the gorge! We are sooooooo going to do this. We've decided we'll zip line across, then walk the bridge back. Done and done. It's going on the 2016 list, people.

 We saw some rafters, deer, and mountain goats.

The days are getting shorter, the air is getting cool and crisp, and bunny mama may be able to decorate for fall tomorrow! Bring on the pumpkins!

Sold

Although we sold the house a few weeks ago, the reality of it is just now sinking in. The dust has started to settle and the sale has been (thankfully) eclipsed by the busy-ness of school and work, and I can talk about it here without losing my mind.

Let me preface this by saying that the housing market in VA is not what it is here in CO. I work with a girl who had 40 people come the day she put her house on the market here. The offers were so competitive and the market was so good (this was a couple of months ago) that she got a sweet, sweet deal.

I have another friend (you know who you are) who recently sold her house to an acquaintance. From what I understand, there were a few conversations with each other, some paperwork with realtors, and the deal was closed.

Our experience was very different.

When we made the decision to move to Denver, it was fairly abrupt. Due to timing of several variables, we had to quickly put the house on the market (to rent) and were "lucky" to get a seemingly stable and responsible family respond right away. Even better, they wanted to rent the house for three years. How great was that?

Fast forward two years (almost exactly a year ago) when we start planning on getting the house ready to rent, and G made a preparatory trip to check out the house. He wanted to make a list of repairs, to get us going on this process, with the intent that we could fix anything that needed it while the renters were still living there. And then we could put the house on the market before the busy summer season. The renters knew he was coming. It turns out that they had two cats and a ferret running free throughout the house, and they had ruined - and I mean ruined down to the house's foundation - the carpet. The house smelled to high heaven and there was a large hole in one of the bedroom walls. It turns out one of the teenagers had been doing flips in the house and his head went through the wall. And they just left the hole there.

Mind you, they were living in these conditions. In our very nice, very pretty, very expensive house. A thousand miles away from us. We did not handle this well. The last year has been hard.

Some pics of just a tiny portion of the damage:

Once we got over the shock of how they were treating our house, we worked with our property management company to recoup money from them, in addition to their security deposit, that would cover new paint and new carpet once they moved out. The house was in such poor condition that the tenants couldn't fight us over it. They knew they had to pay.

And now it was clear that there would be no way to prepare the house and show it while they were still living in it, obviously. Now we knew that we would have to wait until they moved out, in early summer, then schedule the painters and landscapers and carpet people as close to each other as we could (since we would now be paying two mortgages) and get the work done before putting the house on the market. This delay, we knew, would cost us at least a valuable summer month - from listing in June to listing in July.

We thought it was handled. We thought it was under control. We were wrong.

G spent a week in VA early this summer, supervising all the work that was done as soon as the tenants moved out, and taking care of a lot of "small" things himself. It was during this time, in June, that we got all the paperwork ready to list the house. We took care of all the repairs that we noticed, but overall the house was in good shape. We were ready to off load it!

There are not many "look on the bright side" moments of this whole ordeal, but one of them was that the house was only on the market for one week before we got two simultaneous offers. This is a good position to be in, as you can at least have some leverage and a potential bidding war. We accepted an offer from some good people and the actual house selling process began.

And I mean process.

In addition to the buyers scheduling a house inspection, which is a typical part of it all, we also had to request an HOA inspection to be done. So, in addition to the hefty annual dues we already paid our HOA, we had to pay more in order for them to conduct their own inspection and basically approve our house to go on the market. It was at this point that G almost had an aneurysm. During their inspection, they found some wood rot - on the very top trim border, by the roof - on the back of the house (that faced the forest). Until we got this fixed--and it wasn't a cheap fix--we were not cleared to proceed with the sale.

That was rough. But, we started the process to fix it and meanwhile the buyers initiated their inspection.

Their inspection only revealed a few things, but they were costly and time consuming--which is a bad combination. We spent seemingly hours every day on the phone with contractors in Virginia. There was some water damage behind the wall tiles in one of the bathrooms that needed to be fixed. Which required tearing out all the tile, fixing the wall, fixing the drywall, and replacing the tile. Not cheap. There was also some erosion-type activity on one corner of the yard, that had to be inspected by a certified erosion specialist and then had to be fixed by a licensed erosion landscaping company. Not cheap.

Keep in mind, too, that these were projects we had to track every single day. Paperwork, emails, phone calls, consulting with our realtor so he could consult with the buyer's realtor because the buyers should pick out the bathroom tile, since it was about to be their house. They should pick out the new landscaping rocks since it was about to be their house. But, you know, we were footing the bill. And, you know, they could still back out at any time.

Although none of these types of improvements are rare when selling a house, as the weeks went by it began to feel like we were paying to customize the house for the buyers. Every request and question and comment began to grate. And our attitudes, understandably, got worse and worse.

All of July and August sucked. That's all I can say about that. September hasn't been remarkable, but it's starting to look up. :)

All I can say is that the expense was shocking. It was way, way more expensive than we ever dreamed, and although the house sale did turn a profit, all of that "profit" went to pay everyone (and apparently everyone's brother as well) who even had a bit part to play in the house sale. We've never seen so many people come out of the woodwork asking for money for...well, everything.

So, not only were we not making any money, but we weren't breaking even. And we were reminded of it several times a day, constantly with the emails and phone calls and questions and paperwork and more questions.

And then. Then it was discovered that a pipe had burst, unbeknownst to anyone, under the back of the house. It needed to be fixed, which would require drilling through the basement floor and digging under the back of the house, and - you guessed it! - it was not cheap. And of course, no one involved (including two house inspectors, two national plumbing companies, and a home owner's insurance rep) had ever seen or heard of anything like that happening before.

So. The house is sold. We wanted to sell it this summer and we did. We can now get our feet underneath us and plan a vacation for next summer. But we both still have nightmares that we're back in the middle of it. Whenever we get a random call from our realtor or some type of unexpected email, our hearts skip a beat. The truly unfortunate thing is that we loved that house--it was our first house--but it became such a pain and such a financial burden at the end that it is very difficult to think past that. Maybe in the future...but if so, it'll be a LONG time.

And that's that. I'm glad we're down to just one house. :)