My birthday was pretty much a non-event. Not that it matters, since I've given myself the best birthday gift ever: a new house. And not just any house — the house I've been dreaming of for a long time:
But of course you just don't buy a house, put a big bow around it and you're done. You have to do the escrow thing, get the loan(s) approved, remove contingencies and prep the old house to sell. So I spent my birthday in escrow.
Pretty annoying too. I got a call at 7:37 a.m. (for me that's the crack of dawn) from the insurance company guy who examines the properties and he can't go see it at the time everyone else agreed to (everything has to be coordinated between the seller, his realtor, my realtor and, hopefully, me). So I call my realtor and make absolutely no sense trying to explain this and wind up falling back asleep until 11:00 (this week has exhausted me). Then I finally get up in the SoCal heat and manage a half hour exercise session (I'm reviewing 15 Minute Workouts for Dummies for the site this week and had the second half of the DVD to do). Showered and ran over to my least favorite place in the world, Target, to buy curtain rods and cheap curtains in my slapdash attempt to make my old house look homey enough to get multiple bids in a slowing real estate market. Then I sweated at home and worked on getting a backup insurance quote until Brian came home with flowers and a card. After thanking him sweetly, I handed him a "to do" list and told him he couldn't take me to my birthday dinner until he'd at least finished the shelving unit in the bathroom and put up the curtain rods in our bedroom and his music room. So he changed the reservation to 8 and went to work, only to discover that the shelving still doesn't fit around the toilet. (Sigh) Then I insisted that we look in on Sherri's cat first to make sure she hadn't expired from the heat in a non-air conditioned home. Muffin was fine, and we were just 15 minutes late to Camillo's, my favorite "fancy" local restaurant. Then on a whim we went into Pasadena without checking the showtimes in the hopes of catching the last showing of Pirates of the Caribbean and made it with time to spare. Brian kept falling asleep during parts of it which was no surprise since he's been up since something like 4:45 a.m. I kept trying to find the story between the special effects, without much success. (It was entertaining anyhow.)
Whoever said that life was more about the journey than the destination never had a birthday in escrow.
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