Buying A House @ MindSay

I'm going to spend hours tomorrow signing autographs...




Okay, not quite autographs -- just my signature.

And it won't be book jackets or autograph books or hefty chests -- it'll be documents.

Lots and lots of documents.

Tomorrow we make settlement on our house.

But hey, at least it'll be good practice for when I never do book signings.

What have I been doing since my last post?

Waiting.

A guy from a literary publication contacted me, saying he read an article about me in Rosebud (see chapter 20 for details) and wanted to report the article in his own magazine.

How cool is that?  After running around the apartment, arms flailing, blood pumping, I sat at my computer to see what he needed. 

I filled out a bio like he asked me to, answered some questions like he asked me to, and then…

Waited.

It's been two weeks since I e-mailed him the answers and I haven't heard back.  Is my story going to be in the next publication?  Who knows.  All I can do is wait.

And last Saturday, the day before my first wedding anniversary, my wife and I went looking for houses.  We found one, we liked it, we went to see it again.

We decided to put an offer on it. 

So we print out all the documents and spend the evening signing them.  One after another after another.  Boom boom boom.

I get to work extra early so I can fax everything over to the realtor in time for her to get the offer in by 10.  I stick the papers into the machine, I type the number.

Nothing.

I try again.

Nothing.

I pitifully ask for help.

The fax machine is not my friend.

But fortunately we have another, so I try that sucker.  And wouldn't you know it, that one doesn't work either.  It's an epidemic.

But that's okay, because we can scan the documents and turn them into PDFs and e-mail them over.

If only the person who has access to the fancy printer would get in to work already.

Minutes tick by.  I keep trying to fax.  It keeps not working.  More minutes go by.

And hour goes by.

And finally she's here, and zip, we go straight to the machine.  It reads the documents hungrily.  We've got ourselves a PDF.

Oh wait, it's too large to e-mail.

We rescan.  Three smaller piles worth.  Three new files.

Oh, these'll go through the invisible e-mail wires, but veeeeeeeery slowly.  So I wait, and I wait, and I see the little "sending" icon on my computer, and I wait.

And I know that every minute that goes by an offer could be coming in from someone else.

But finally the realtor has all the documents!  But she has a meeting to go to.

"I'll send this right after lunch."

Uh, my stomach is killing me.  That other offer could be coming in right now.  The house could be disappearing from our grasp.

But "right after lunch" comes around, and I think the offer is in, and I know we aren't going to get an answer back right away (and if we did it'd probably be an answer we didn't want) but I'm still anxious anyway.

Waiting.

And then the phone rings at 5:00. Boy howdy am I nervous.

But for no reason, because there's no answer yet, because she hasn't even put in the offer yet.  There's a line on one of the forms that got cut off, so I have to rewrite my initials and send it through again.

So I do that.  But no, we BOTH need to initial.  So I forge Kristina's three letters and send it through again.

Okay, that's it, she's good to go.  The offer is in.

And now?

We wait.

And I know in that time another offer has come in.  I just know it.  How could it not have?

But even so…

…we wait. 

I could have an article printed about me in a literary magazine, and I could be the proud owner of a lovely new home in Levittown, Pennsylvania.

I could.  After the wait.