SHHHHHHHH! 

I have been keeping a secret from you. Two really. I think it’s time to come clean. I have been emboldened by Karen Copeland, a writer who shared her struggles about being honest in the blog-o-sphere. Sometimes it is easier to write about that which is funny, or at least funny in retrospect, than it is to contemplate the scary that is the now or immediate future. As most of you know, I have been trying to buy a house…well…find a house first and then buy it. Who knew finding it was going to be the easier of the two prospects?*

I did it. I found the perfect, tiny house in Grandville, Michigan. Perfect in that it was way over budget and still had toxic gas seeping through the floor boards.** (Everybody chant: Mediation is Salvation!) Okay, so it was perfect in that it was still on the market and would actually pass an inspection. Why didn’t I just wait and see what the spring influx of housing would bring? Because, I was running out of time.

I have been juggling two major life changes. I have only told you about one of them because, to be honest, if I think about the second one, over which I have absolutely no control, I want to vomit. So instead, I have focused exclusively on the house purchase to the point of wearing blinders to the other big, scary thing in the hopes it would go away. It hasn’t and it won’t; and the stupid thing is, I knew that. I’ve known it for about four years. What I hadn’t known then was that I would be in a race between buying a house and facing the ‘Big Scary Thing’ and that the race would come down to a matter of days between the two cataclysmic events. Today, they collided.

I have been waiting on tenterhooks for a call from the mortgage company regarding the closing date. And waiting…and waiting… I finally get the call and I am chatting with my broker before he takes off for spring break. Bad news, he’s going out of town. The good news? I get to close this week. Yay! Which is critical because, if I didn’t, my two big secrets were going to meet and it was going to get ugly.*** And then I get the call…

“Hi, this is Shelly from Dr. ReallyDutchName’s office. I’m calling to let you know your total hip replacement surgery has been scheduled.”

I am mid-conversation with the terminally perky nurse who is informing me that my surgeon will be slicing and dicing me open at 1:30 p.m. Monday and that, oh, by the way, I can’t eat or drink anything after midnight the night before…the man hates fat people and this is his way of ensuring I know, at least once in my life, what raving hunger feels like…when my phone interrupts to tell me that my realtor is calling.

I get off the phone with little Miss Ray of Sunshine RN and find out that my closing can take place either Thursday or Friday this week, which would I prefer? So there you have it. Thursday I will be buying my Barbie Dream House and Monday I become the Bionic Woman—thus fulfilling two lifelong goals. Now I just have to figure out how to move into the new house without leaving my bed. The universe is a perverse bastard sometimes. 

Asterisk Bedazzled Footnote:

*Those of you who have read the past few (thousand) whiny posts about my poor judgment in housing prospects are rolling on the floor laughing. In review: Bad House#1, Bad House #2, and Lament for a House

**I got over my fear of mutant radon when faced with the fear of not finding a home in time.

***Like day-two in re-hab ugly.