The Realtor

Sometimes things just click and you feel like you are on the right path.

I had gotten a football schedule on the bottom of a magnet for a realtor at least a year ago..probably more along the lines of 2. I promptly ripped off the schedule and put the realtor's card on the fridge. During these 2 years, I've purged the side of my fridge repeatedly, tossing pizza delivery and ambulance chaser magnets that seem to accumulate there. Every time I thought to toss the realtor, something told me not to. I had also received plenty of mailings and calendars from other realtors, which all got tossed into the trash without a second thought.

Frank had gone to a party about a year ago and met someone who is a realtor. She seemed nice and a mutual friend had recommended her, so Frank got her card and held onto it.

Last week, we decided that it was time to have the house looked at by a professional who would suggest a selling price that the market could bear for my home. There was no sense in going forward with thoughts of moving if the house didn't sell for what we thought it would. Frank got out his card for the realtor he met, Heather, but I pulled the one off the fridge and after looking at the two, I told him I'd rather he call Nancy. He called Nancy and got her voice machine. He then suggested we call Heather and I told him no, I wanted him to call Nancy's cell phone. He asked why I was so adamant on calling this lady and I didn't really have a good reason, I just did. He called her and they chatted for a few minutes. When she asked for our last name, she thought it was odd that she was working with another family nearby who had the same last name. (We do not have a common name, nor a common spelling) Next she began to query Frank on how we got her number. When he explained, she was even more confounded. She hadn't sent that schedule out to just anyone and never in a mailing that she could remember.

We set an appointment and she came by to meet us. We felt instantly comfortable with her. She looked over the house and confirmed what I had thought would be a reasonable sale price for this house, even in this market. While we chatted, we found we had many similarities and clicked on many levels. When she asked what we did for a living, and I told her my job and what kinds of things we were involved in, such as the opera and the symphony, she perked up. She said she had gone to the most recent production of Tosca. Frank explained to her that she had indeed, witnessed his stage debut and what his part had been and she remembered. Again, a strange and small little connection. Right before she left, she mentioned that she'd had some work on her shoulder. It was one of the only days it's rained around here recently and she seemed a bit achy. We thought nothing of it, said our goodbyes and felt good about the meeting.

Later that evening, our daughter came home from one of her jobs. She is currently interning with a Physical Therapist since that's what she's going to college to study. She saw the card and info Nancy had left us on the table and asked if that was the person who had come to meet us. We told her it was and she said, "I know her, she's a patient of ours." We had never mentioned our daughters name or where she worked to Nancy. The only mention was, "Our daughter is going to college and is really angry that we are considering moving from "HER" home."

The weekend passed and on Monday we got a call from Nancy who was just checking in with us. Frank mentioned that we had someone in common and before he could tell her, she said she knew! Now it was our turn to be confused. She had gone to visit her therapist and was talking about coincidences and things such as having two clients with the same strange last name less than 5 miles apart who didn't know each other. When she said the name, the therapist told her that it was even stranger, because our daughter was his internist and Nancy knew her.

It's those little things that tell me I'm on the right path and that I called the right person!

Remembering

I went house hunting on Sunday. I've been flapping my jaws about moving for about 2 years now, but this week I did something about it. It's a baby step, but I did it. I called a realtor (remind me to tell you that odd story one time) and met with her to discuss the sale-ability of my current home. Depending on her estimation of a sale price was the determining factor as to if I should even be considering any of this. She came back with a figure that roughly matched what I thought I could get for the house. Step two was to go out and look at what there is in my price range. Granted, homes go on the market and come off all the time, but if there really doesn't seem to be a consistent amount of homes I'd even be willing to look at for certain prices, what's the point? We chose to go look in Pennsylvania and upper Maryland. I found a few places I was interested in and found towns where I felt comfortable. A good first volley into the moving realm.

Yesterday was also my eldest son's birthday. He turned 22. We had a very nice celebratory dinner with him and his fiancee, Deb, at Long Horn, joined by a family friend. It was nice to see him. He works so much that I only get to glimpse him now and then. Happy Birthday, Frank.

Today is the anniversary of my mother's death. She died in 2004. My father had preceded her in death by 11 months, passing away in August of 2003. When they died, I took most of the photos, with the intent (I still have this intent) of scanning them and making copies for my siblings, but while putting them away in a safe place, I felt I needed to make a memoriam of some kind right then. This is what I made....

The Kitchen Table Monster

Every now and again I start a project which somehow morphs quickly into a Kitchen Table Monster. I have done so, yet again.

About a year ago, I decided to reduce clutter and paper around my house. In my kitchen, I had saved just about every copy of a magazine I get called Taste of Home, and then an offshoot magazine called Simple and Delicious. But no, that wasn't enough! I also had select issues of Vegetarian Times, Low Carb Energy and a few others. I decided that it didn't really make sense to keep every issue, just because there was one or two recipes in each that I liked. During this time, my eldest son came to forage in my kitchen for something to eat. He doesn't live with me anymore, but resides about two blocks away and will now and then come home to raid the fridge. I don't mind at all, because it means that I get to see him for awhile and catch up, but one day he was talking about cooking and it dawned on me that not only could I get recipes that appealed to me, but I could cut some for my son as well and make him a cookbook of the things *I* know he already likes to eat! I went through every magazine, cut the recipes that I wanted and donated the mutilated remnants of the pretty pictures to a local elementary school teacher who was looking for food pictures.

Time passes. Uh oh, is that a KTM I hear??

I bought the items I needed to assemble my son's cookbook... paper to mount the recipes, a 3 ring binder, food stickers to artfully place in blank spots and plastic sleeves...and began to mount the recipes. Naturally, I found recipes that I wanted as well, or a few that were on the backs of others that I needed so I set aside a pile for copying which grew and grew and grew. After spending a whole evening doing nothing but figuring out how to cram as many recipes on top of my scanner as possible, to maximize paper usage, I finally had my two piles of recipes.

Time passes. Wow! It's getting pretty big!

Once I had everything copied, I realized I now had to RE CUT all the recipes that I had copied. Sigh. I spent another evening clipping apart the copies and then I managed to put together my son's cookbook during the next week. By this time, I was sick of looking at the recipes... so I put them in baggies and got busy with something else.

Time passes. Kitchen Table Monsters, when left in baggies, tend to grow extra large.

Enter boredom and a period of ennui. I looked around and realized that I had time and could finish that recipe project I had started. Woo hoo! This time I decided that my desk was too small for this job, so out to the kitchen table I went, with my binder and paper, stickers and plastic sleeves. *I* am more anal than my son, so *I* knew *I* was going to have to sort these recipes by category - sweets, appetizers, beef, chicken, poultry, dressing and sauces and so forth. And of course they would each be color coded by mounting them on different colored paper.

That was a week ago and I am officially finished with sweets and sauces and deeply into poultry right now.... of course boredom and ennui still keep popping up and I wander off to do something else, or shockingly enough, something I'm supposed to do, but I'm making some progress.

I slay thee, Kitchen Table Monster!!
And as promised.. music to slay the monster by....

Excuses

I love music. I thought I might try to find music clips I could include in my blogs now and then to punctuate what I'm thinking or writing about and thus, share my passion with whomever is listening.

For the past two weeks, I've been in a brain fog. Not sure why, and can't think of any reason for it, but I have been. I've been going to bed at 2am or later and getting up between 8-9 am. Then, somehow, I get basically nothing done and my day is gone.

This song talks about the excuses you tell yourself (and others) about why you can't succeed at anything. This past Friday, I was feeling particularly down and I started talking to Frank about why I'm not farther along in the things I want to get accomplished and I realized that there really wasn't any excuse for not just doing them. I think people sometimes get so comfortable with where they are, and get so used to telling themselves that they can't, can't, can't, that they convince themselves of that fact. Besides, inactivity is so much easier than putting forth effort, physically, emotionally and in thought.

I have a friend who travels out of the country. Last year, she began to worry, long before she left, that her legs wouldn't be up to all the walking. For two years she has had the same concern. Granted, she does have a medical condition that can cause pain in her legs. The first year, she said things like, "if my legs hold up, God willing." or "I hope my legs will be ok". This past year she started saying she was old and that she wasn't sure she would be alive and began saying even stronger things about her legs, like " my legs won't".

When she got back from her travels recently, she was tired, but the elation and energy she put forth when she started telling me about how she rode a horse to the top of a volcano and then back down again made her seem as though she could accomplish anything and gave her a radiant glow. I heard no excuses as to how her legs couldn't.. just that she did, and she was amazed and proud of her accomplishment. I pointed out to her that just because she's 73 and she does have some difficulty, doesn't mean she can't do the things she wants to, and didn't this example show her that she really can do things?

I'd imagine with a medical concern there may be things that you simply are not capable of doing anymore and I can understand that, but where do we cross the line from actually not being able to do and simply convincing ourselves that it can't be done? Think of the people who are told they will never walk again who are up and about months later.

All well and good when said, but what about those days where I don't feel *I* can? I just have to remember that life is never a flat line and when I feel like I can't, I need to turn to things that let me know that I can. Thus, I'll listen to this song.

Space Shuttles and UAV's

I woke up this morning, groggy. I tried to stay awake and hang out with Sr. and Jr., but I just couldn't keep my eyes open, so by 10:30 am I was back in bed.

I woke up at 12:07pm from a strange and deep dream. This was like a dream I had the morning of the Columbia Shuttle explosion, where I had dreamed that an astronaut was found, but the head was if not fully, almost severed from it's body. There was more to that dream, but long story short, when I woke up and turned on the TV, the shuttle had exploded. Go check out my blog on April 4, 2006 entitled "Strange Dreams and Long Days"

In this dream, I was at a neighbors house, enjoying their company. (In reality, they are just long term neighbors and we've never been to their house for socializing, but their son is in the Air Force.) I had gone outside and heard a noise in the sky and looked to my right, which would be south- southwest, and saw, hovering in the air, the space shuttle and it's dock kind of hanging in the sky, as if it had just reached the apex of an upward thrust and then it dropped back down, leaning to the left. It did not seem to have any control over it's motion, but seemed to be more like it was falling. The dock looked a bit odd, because it was not the full array of framework, but looked like a minimal framework instead. I knew something was wrong.

Next, I saw something coming from the same place where I had seen the shuttle. It looked a bit like a B2, but it wasn’t. It was white, had some lights, had a band of red, white and then blue on it’s two leading edges and looked almost as tho it was hovering. I got the impression that its was looking for something. (When I got up I searched on the web and the thing I found that MOST matched what I saw was a UAV project called Pegasus or a Black Manta (TR-3A)). Right after the UAV headed off towards the place where I think the shuttle fell (which is in the direction of the NSA – since I live VERY close by), I saw another aircraft, this time it was flying quickly in the same direction these other two craft were, but it came more from the southwest and went over the house to disappear in the same direction as the other two craft. (When I searched for that I found my dream craft looked most like a Predator UAV, or something called an SKUA- or high speed target drone). Then I saw a formation of jet aircraft speeding overhead, fairly low level and I started yelling for Frank to come out and tell me what all this aircraft was and why? (In reality, my husband is an aircraft nut and when I woke up, I described the shapes and markings I saw and he instantly knew where to start hunting to help me identify these aircraft, because really, I have no clue what is a what!) He wasn’t responding to my calls, so I started walking down the street to see if I could get a glimpse thru the trees at smoke or lights or something going on either at Ft. Meade or NSA. I couldn’t see anything, because houses and walls that are not there in reality were there in my dream and I remember being very frustrated that I couldn’t see any further than I could. I do remember that one of the structures blocking my view was like a partial wall to a house, with the rest of the wall missing, but a clear view into someone’s living room. They were sitting in a chair, watching the news, but I was too busy trying to get around these obstacles to notice what the news was about. While I was searching for a line of sight, I heard the sirens from many fire engines going off in that same general direction and that scared me enough that I had to wake up.

I rolled out of bed and with still blurry eyes and a fresh vision in my head I went to tell Frank what I had seen, so he could tell me if any of these crafts really existed.

Sr. and Jr. were in the office, looking at something and when I started telling them my dream, they were both taking guesses as to what aircraft I might have dreamed about.. and then my son told me to look up Project Stargate, which supposedly had been run out of Ft. Meade.

I debated on posting my dream, but it’s probably nothing. However, if it is something, I’d rather someone out there in the cyberworld maybe got a clue from it. I sure as heck have no idea!!

Parking Corn and Well Spaced Bunnies

Today, I went to a strip shopping center. You know, the kind that has a line of stores and a sea of black asphalt for parking with cylinders of concrete from which tall light poles emerge. There, sprouting from the base of this one cylinder of concrete, located practically in the middle of the massive parking lot was green a stalk of corn. I didn't check to see if it had produced an ear, but it was large enough to have done so. It seemed amazing to me that 1. a corn kernel ended up at the base of the cylinder, 2. there was enough dirt for the kernel to sprout and 3. no one had broken, hit or torn the stalk out yet. It was so great to see, I had to take the picture above.

On the way home, we had to go on the ramp from route 29 to route 32. Frank noticed a small bunny on the side of the road... and then another.... and then another... and another.... and yet another, each one spaced about 30 feet from the other. It was just strange to see...!!

Maybe I Should Get One for Sackofpotato

Bumbo Mania!! The little seat the baby is sitting in is called a Bumbo... who knew....