In every hobby, there’s always inside jokes that start off with a shred of truth. I’d seen a lot of jokes about tabletop gamers and hoards of dice that I didn’t understand until Shawshank and I started to get into Warhammer40k. Knitters and crocheters know the allure of more yarn for future projects, with some online shops offering to spoof shipping invoices to make orders seem like gifts or prizes instead of impulse buys. The jokes are funny because of how true they are.
When I was little, my dad had a boat. It was a 36-foot Post Sport Fisherman. Like a lot of “boat guys”, he had a couple of small, plastic novelty signs in the boat. One said something like “A boat is a hole in the water, surrounded by wood, that absorbs a man’s money”. The other said the following:
The two happiest days in a boat owner’s life:
The day he buys a boat, and
The day he sells the boat.
I don’t think I understood what that sign really meant until the last few years – both signs, actually. Buying the house was happy – we were so happy to be out of my mom’s basement after seven years. Home ownership can truly be an absolute money sink, especially when you buy something that’s about 130 years old.
I’ll miss the house only a little – probably just the idea of the house, really, the “happily ever after” factor. Shawshank lit the spark on a slow burning fuse in the spring of 2016, and “happily ever after” blew up on a chilly November morning in 2018. I’ll miss having a sense of space that’s just ours.
But…. I’m just so tired of dealing with it all. You have no idea. I will be so happy when it’s sold. Things are almost officially done, which is good. I’m still not 100% certain if I’ll stick around for the actual closing or not. My last paycheck dropped into my account this morning. While it wasn’t a full paycheck and didn’t include my banked vacation, it was still about $400 more than I expected it to be. This makes me a lot less anxious about surviving the next month without work.
However, I don’t want to deal with this buyer anymore. Yesterday was supposed to be the appraisal, which is really the one last thing that needs to be done. Unfortunately, we still don’t have handrails done. The buyer’s boyfriend doesn’t know how to put them in himself, so he has to wait until he can have someone help him. They begged to have the appraisal date changed from yesterday, to give them a chance to install the rails. Now, the appraisal won’t happen until Friday morning.
On a more positive note, we do have confirmation that the buyer’s funding is good to go as soon as the appraisal is complete. As long as the appraisal comes back positively, then we should be all set to close on my birthday in February.
That puts me at almost exactly one month until I’ll have to find something else to bitch about.
