Tales from the Shark Tank

Our counter-offer has been accepted; the earnest money is in. The buyer wanted to know if we minded closing sooner than the deadline he himself chose. Mind? As far as I’m concerned it could be yesterday. We will be free of the obligation in less than a month. I’ll be perfectly happy with that.

The paperwork is signed; our counteroffer is in. The phone has rung three times this morning, and each time I’ve jumped, wondering if it’s our realtor. That’s not at all characteristic of me. The quietness with which I go about my business has actually gotten me in trouble at a couple of jobs, because the Powers That Be don’t see me bustling and think I’m not working. But today I’m really not accomplishing much beyond looking at the snow and waiting for the phone call that will tell me if we’ve got someone to buy our house. I think I’ll go make bread. I need to do it anyway for the feast(s) to come, and it is appropriately mindless.

Our house in Indianapolis had its first official showing yesterday. That evening we had an offer. We counter-offered today, and will hear the result tomorrow. I hope it goes through. At this point, I just want to stop making payments on two houses.

I have a new “baby”. No, unfortunately, it’s not a human. It’s a computer. I am the proud possessor of a new laptop. I hadn’t intended to make such a purchase for another year, but my current one is showing signs of evil intent (red tinge to the screen, for you geek-types), and I figured out that it would cost a whole $100.00 more to replace than to fix. So when my birthday money arrived, I made a phone call, and lo, the UPS delivery man knocked on my door this morning and just utterly made my day.

So I have betaken myself to a lovely little establishment that is kind enough to offer free WiFi access (this would have taken me all day on dial-up) and downloaded all the things I had and liked on Nimue. That includes Firefox, Thunderbird, a firewall program and a spyware/ virus killer, and I’ve been playing with my new toy. The screen suits me far better, being a bit larger and kinder to middle-aged eyes, and that’s without the red-shift. Keyboard is going to take some getting used to, and I shall be installing my usb mouse as soon as I can. But I no longer have to choose between plugging in my mouse and plugging in my printer, and the general “feel” of it is very comfortable and very good. All in all, I’m very happy indeed. And when I name this one, I’ll let y’all know about it.

This house, which is quite comfortable even when the temperature drops or when the wind gets enthusiastic, becomes quite cold when both occur simultaneously. This is no great surprise; insualtion was not a concept when it was built, and while the owners did what they could with blown-in insulation between the walls, there’s a limit to what that can accomplish. Like many people, I simply put on layers and start going through multiple mugs of hot liquid. On the other hand, my outer layer of choice isn’t exactly the standard sweater or fleece vest.

I don’t usually think too much about it, as I grab something warm that fits over whatever I happen to be wearing, but today my landlady dropped by to give me a copy of her 5th grade world history textbook. They’re doing a unit on the middle ages, and I’m going in to do a one-woman guest-lecture/ demo. It behooves me to know what their book says so that I work with it rather than against it. But when I answered her knock at the door, she laughed. “I should have expected this” she said. “You did tell me you had as much medieval stuff in your closet as everyday clothes.” And when I realized what she was referring to, I laughed myself. That outer layer that fits over everything? It’s a short black half-circle cloak. I have the fabric for a green one, too, that I’ll likely make up in the next couple of days. One cannot have too many cloaks, after all.

It’s half past November. It started out incredibly foggy, it’s been raining since mid-morning, and now we have a windstorm that has me half expecting to see a house come flying by to land on a Wicked Witch. In short, it has not been a day conducive to taking off to do something fun just for myself. The end result is that the day’s not been anything particularly special. But the fact remains that I entered the world two weeks after everyone expected me on this date some years back. (Yes, I’ve been late ever since.) How old is this woman, you ask? I’m 21 (base 23), and no, I’m not going to translate that for the math challenged. Suffice it to say that the closest portentious birthday, one of those ending in zero, will mark half a century. Gotta figure out how – and where – to throw a proper bash for that one, I do!

But this is a little one, a minor one, one to note and then go on. It is one to plan how and when to play with my husband’s birthday gift to me, a lovely cookbook on Jewish breads, how they evolved and the lore that goes with them. I think the first one I’ll experiment with is a challah in which the strands are filled with a mixture of poppy seed and carmelized onion. That seems suitably festive, and yummy besides. Much, much better than the cake I didn’t bake for the day.

Winter has arrived in northern Indiana, literally born in on the wings of the wind. Yesterday brought 40+ mph winds to scour this flat country, bringing me a very direct understanding of the solid line of trees planted on the west side of many fields and farmhouses, and an appreciation for the solidity of this house in particular. I have experienced such winds in more modern houses, and felt the walls vibrate. Not this one. This one was steady as a rock; the only thing that it noticed was the occasional tree limb hitting the side. Otherwise, the only sign of wind perceptible from inside was the sound of it. I went out walking in it, being the sort to glory in a good stiff wind, and found it could push me around. I am neither small nor light, so that’s pretty impressive.

Today the wind is calm, but the last few leaves have been blown off the trees and the air is very cold. There are sparrows hopping up and down the branches of the maple outside the kitchen window, eating the box elder bugs and ladybugs made sluggish by the chill, calling to each other as they do. That tree would be a perfect place for a birdfeeder, I’m thinking, and I’ll probably put one up here soon. I was planning to rake up the leaves and bag them today, but it doesn’t look like I’ll be doing that. The wind blew them all into the field and forest that surrounds the house; there are only a few piled up on the east side of the house and barn, and those I can take care of quickly. What I will be doing is picking up sticks, as the same wind that played leaf-blower for us took down a number of smaller branches from the multitude of trees around the house. It made me look around more closely. I hadn’t noticed before, but every tree here angles slightly – or in the case of those that stand alone, not so slightly – to the east. Clearly the prevailing winds are from the west, and they are strong and frequent enough to change the way the trees grow. We live very near a freshwater inland sea here, and we have the same winds I remember from living on the Pacific coast. They will bring us our weather, clouds and clear skies and changing seasons. Today, they have brought us winter.