Liralen's Adventures Through Life

The last two weeks have been a little crazy. We've been working all along to get everything ready for showing the house. There were three stages: the first when Colleen showed up and gave us a quick run through of everything she thought we should do, things that we could kind of take or leave. They were as big as getting everything that was natural wood painted either white or gray and moving my entire library out of my office to things as small as the orientation of my second monitor. We got a lot of those things done. Including the miraculous cleansing of the carpets and tile.  The tile was so white, Jet came in saying, "For a while, I thought you'd spilled flour all over the kitchen floor!"  We didn't have all the woodwork painted, because not only were all the kitchen cabinets natural wood colored, but all the window casings, all the railings, all the doorframes, all the edging at the bottom of all the walls, the fireplaces were encased in natural wood for...

There are pros and cons to living in a home that is staged for an open house and for showing.  The pros include it being very very easy to pick up everything that's out and getting it out of ones way, there are actually very few things out. The cons are pretty much all the things on the other edge to that particular blade. We are selling the house here, the one we've lived in since Jet was three, and which is the one he remembers the most. Our realtor is the same one who introduced us to Colorado when Xilinx hired her, and Colleen Vandendriessche of PRO in Boulder is very high energy and has a very clear idea of how things should go. For a while, she was thinking we'd do better renting the old house instead of selling it, and if our financial situation was like nearly anyone else's, she'd be right, but we aren't.  And she was very gracious about asking her tax guy and accepting his answer that it might not be the right thing for us. It's good. It's b...

I keep trying to write up the Puerto Rico trip and I keep tripping over the feeling that doing it linearly doesn't do it justice.  At all.  But it's what I'm so used to writing, so I keep trying and then deleting it again. It actually started when Jet was six, and John went off to Biloxi with people from our United Church of Christ church (UCC Longmont) to help with reconstruction after Hurricane Katrina and I joined him in following years.  But that was a long long time ago, and you all already know about our crazy left-wing denomination that does what that radical Jesus of Nazareth said despite Roman rule. Those crazy things about taking care of the poor and the hungry, about defending the powerless, and loving other people like oneself; and what Micah said, before Jesus, about doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God. But that's thousands of years ago. Maybe it really started when Carol said, "What are we going to do about Puerto Rico?...