Chay Chay Chaynge

I was sitting at my desk with two senior citizens sitting in front of me and I was puzzling over a sticky piece of foreclosure business that had to be attended to. Doom was looming on the horizon and I was wracking my brains trying to figure out how to slow down the train in order to mitigate the damage from the inevitable trainwreck that was coming.

As we're sitting there in silence -- me thinking and them doing whatever it was they were doing, Mrs. T looks over and says, "You've changed your hair, haven't you." I glance up to see her looking at me out of the corner of her eye.

"Um..." I tried to switch gears and think back to what I looked like the last time she saw me and couldn't remember. So, I did the easy thing and agreed. "Yeah. Yeah, I thought it was just time for a change."

Previously I had quite long strawberry blonde hair that was very unkempt and ragged at the ends. In my younger days it was a really nice coppery red that everyone complimented me on. Over time I'm finding that it's fading to a very lovely shade of red-gold that is pretty, but that I hate immensely. So, now instead down to the middle of my back, it's just a little bit past my shoulders and is chemically enhanced to something a little closer to my original color.

Hanging out there in the air reverbating against the oldbodies were those words "just thought it was time for a change..."

Mr. T squints at me as I'm getting back to my Very Important Paperwork and says, "I bet you're not having any more fun than you were though."

"Well... no, I guess I'm not."

He thought that was really funny and obviously doesn't understand women despite having lived with one for what I approximated to be 150 years.

I was probably going somewhere with all this, but don't really know where now because I was struck by the absurd reality of the fact that I'm typing this on a laptop propped up on my bathroom sink and my child is sitting in the bathtub drinking a tupperware container full of bathwater that has Sponge Bob bubble bath in it. A product, by the way, that smells like rotting fruit.

I feel compelled by a strong urge to stop him, but as I have stopped him on repeated occassions in the past and he seems to have a leaky memory (or to have inherited my stubborness and cavalier attitude about rules, that "rules apply to me only on a case by case basis") it makes me think I am fighting a losing battle.

My mother keeps telling me, "Pick your battles." That's all well and good but so far nobody has given me any guidelines about how to pick them or which ones are the important ones. To me they all seem very important or I wouldn't bother.

No, cutting my hair hasn't done a damn thing for me. But what the heck.

Love Me, Love my Singing

I was sitting in J's room a couple nights ago reading him a story about Twinkle Star, a kind of vapid tale that I'm not really sure he understood or found all that interesting since it didn't involve dogs, cats or biting insects, all three of which he seems fascinated by.

I waded through a few pages of this story as he lolled around in his crib patiently staring at me and at the end of the story was the actual "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" song which one is supposed to sing for the grand finale.

Being a good sport, I did oblige at which point he sat up and looked at me, shook his head and said, "Uh uh."

I stopped, slightly taken aback and asked him if he wanted me to stop singing. He didn't say one way or the other and as I often don't understand what he tries to get across to me, I plowed ahead as all devoted mommy book readers must.

Again he shook his head and said, "Uh uh."

So, I asked again if he wanted me to stop singing and he just looked at me. I began to suspect the worst, that he really did want me to stop.

Afraid of what the answer would be I asked quietly, "Is Mommy's singing bad?"

To my horror he nodded in the affirmative.

Well, I probably don't have to outline the many ways I find that simply awful. (Although, I will.) How can a baby not LOVE his mother's singing? How does he know good singing? And to further quell any rising doubts one might have about my singing... it's NOT bad. I may not be the next American Idol, but I can sing without making the neighborhood dogs howl.

All in all, though, I think I handled it really well. I told him I appreciated his honesty and that it would take him far in life, but thought that on the road to success he would do well to learn a little tact along the way.

And then I made up a story about him going on an adventure to the Moth Village and he seemed to like that alot and stayed awake all the way to the very end to hear about J coming home to his mother who baked him a blueberry pie.

Just wait until he figures out THAT'S a big fat lie. He doesn't know yet what a big disappointment I'm going to be in the Domestic Arts Department. Poor guy.

No problem. I'll just move those...

Being in real estate has its hilarities and horrors. I wonder if this is especially true with rural real estate. I have no big city real estate to which to compare.

I live in an area where people have very little money -- low income, no cash, no savings, bad credit and a strong desire to own their own little piece of planet earth.

While I cannot say this is true of everyone where I live, many of the people are not super savvy about consumer issues, especially real estate.

I was sitting in a continuing education class today (required yearly to keep my license) listening to the instructor talk about surveys, survey marks and other related topics. Most of what he talked about I already knew and my mind wandered to a situation I had about a year ago.

My mom (who was at the time also my broker) and I had created a miracle to put a buyer and seller together, but in the process there was a misunderstanding about a structure on the property and whether it stayed or was to be dismantled and carted away with the owner. In all the brouhaha, the buyer became increasingly agitated when she began to see things were not going the way she wanted them to.

Meanwhile, the surveyor had gone out to the property to survey approximately an acre and a half off to be sold from the three total acres that was held by the seller. The survey was drawn. The stakes were in the ground, we were just moments from the closing and the seller rushes through our front door all afluster because of something the buyer was doing on the land.

Apparently, the buyer didn't like the results of her survey. The property was a corner lot in a subdivision. When the roads were cut through the subdivision and dedicated to the county, part of the land for the road was taken from the property being sold. It showed on the survey that 20 or 25 feet of land along one side of the property was held as county right of way.

The buyer considered this her land and didn't like that the stakes were on the other side of the road because that part of her land was "unusable" (being that it was road and all). So... no problem, she just moved that set of stakes 25 feet to the other side of the road and then moved the stakes on the other side of the property out a matching 25 feet onto the neighboring land and considered the matter settled.

Oh if it only worked that way. I have a nice little lot at the back of my yard that I would love to own. I could do a stealth mission in the middle of the night and move my back markers. For that matter, maybe I should move my markers all the way down to the southern Louisiana border. That way I could say I have oceanfront property.

Or in the famous words of Mister Rogers, "Would you be mine? Could you be mine? Won't you be my neighbor?" By tomorrow you might be!