It's not often I wake up with the inspirational song pre-selected, but it came to me in a flash, before seven thirty this morning, when a white bag of pudding came flying through the sky, and landed on my soft underbelly. About a month ago, we finally made the switch our veterinarian recommended to me (twice) and started feeding only canned cat food in the evening, and not leaving a steady supply of dry food overnight. Jackie is morbidly obese, and this change might finally help her drop a pound or two. But it means all the cats think they are starving by dawn, and they can't stand to see a human comfortably sleeping when we could be waiting on them hand and foot. They start by getting restless around six a.m., and by seven they are dancing in circles around the bed, taking turns punching us in all the sensitive places and stepping angrily on my hair. If they can make noise by rattling the blinds in the windows, or by having verbal disagreements with each other, all the better for them. When they grazed all night long, we weren't subjected to this ridiculous dance, but no human shall know peace as long as five cats are hungry.
Yesterday my mother and my long-distance padre questioned our decision to pry up all the deck boards, clean them properly, and then stain and seal them before resetting them. I was too tired and too intoxicated by petroleum distillates to have a cogent answer. Today I have it. Remember the show Designed to Sell? Families would get the services of a designer and a couple carpenters, plus a two thousand dollar budget to fix up their houses before putting them on the market to sell. They addressed years of deferred maintenance and freshened up design to make things look clean and modern for prospective buyers. This is exactly like that. We want this house to seem turnkey, so we not only get a good offer, we get a quick one. Before we bought the Park, it had sat on the market for a year and a half. It started out way overpriced, as housing prices were crashing, and once it had been around for months, needing multiple price cuts, it got a little "what's wrong with that place" stink on it. I have no intention of letting that happen again. This place is wonderful, and I won't let it linger on my watch.
I entered an unfamiliar world today. I'm not an aggressive driver, thus my only speeding "ticket" was merely a warning. This is not the case for everyone who resides in my home. I've never before sat in a courtroom to watch a line of people filing calmly up to the clerk to prove they had rectified the conditions that earned them citations (like failing to provide proof of insurance). When the man got to the front of the line, he was told to wait for the judge, since his was a speeding ticket. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, he got the same offer as the others, a reduction in fine and (I think) fewer points off of his license. It is another strange little dance I witnessed today, ticket-court-clerk-adjudication-pay-leave-repeat. Over and over, no big surprise, no ill will. I don't want to return to this land, but at least I know enough of it not to fear the unknown anymore.
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