August 1, 2010

A Transfer & Selling Our House


After we got home from Michigan, my husband and I started our annual planning of what house projects do we tackle this year. When your house is 83 years old, there is always a project waiting to be done. With our never ending list in our hands, we decided to do some outside painting, work on the chimney and line the sewer pipe with one of those new sleeve thingies. Everything was moving along pretty smoothly, we had Roto-Rooter in the basement lining the sewer, the chimney mason was slinging concrete and contractors wandering around giving us estimates on the painting we want done. And then it happened...

"Hey babe!" calls my husband, "They want us to move."

"Oh yeah? Where to?" I ask. "Back to Michigan?"

"Umm...no...they say Houston," he replied.

"Well, it probably won't happen," I said.

"Actually, they've got the funding to move us. Umm...I guess we need to sell the house," he murmured.

Smarty pants that I am...I thought I could handle baking, blogging, getting our house ready to sell, showing it, selling it and the hundreds of things it takes to get all this done.  I was so wrong...

I discovered several things about myself during the last few months. First of all, I am not in any way shape or form related to the Energizer bunny.  Second, caffeine is not a replacement for sleep...yeah, I had to learn this one yet again. You'd think college would have cemented it for me, but no...I had to learn it one more time. Third, I discovered I can be quite testy when not so great/not great/bad things happen beyond just the standard 3 in a row...like when it's in the multiples of 3, say 3x7. Now, it was probably a side effect of all that Espresso I was inhaling. But, holy cow! There just has to be an end to all the loonier aspects of moving.

I've been able to get back to doing a little baking, now that we have a closing date set for our house. I've been baking a lot of muffins and scones to get us through the breakfast house. It's really hard to do baking that's very involved, as I had to keep the kitchen scrupulously clean.

However, I did discover the morning the house went on the market just how long a gluten free sourdough starter will last without feeding in the refrigerator...30 days. That's it... On day 29, it will look and smell fine, but on day 30 watch out...a weird white fuzz will cover your starter and funky acetone aromas will take over. 
And no...the smell doesn't depart from your fridge easily...

more to come...