The Landlanders may be relocating after all! We are now under contract to sell our house. A huge relief for me and Tom, and an unknown relief for the cats and dog -- this means they likely will not have to vacate the premises for showings anymore!

The Landlanders are very, very busy these days. Still processing/negotiating inspection results/responses; still showing our house (crating up cats and loading them, plus the dog, into the car while the house is shown); still in limbo because of the aforementioned situations.

On top of the real estate issues, which occasionally leave us sleepless, I have started back to teaching, on top of working in the Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society archive, PLUS I am in training to start teaching online for Kaplan. My head is spinning such that even when physically exhausted, I can't relax enough to nap in the occasional spare minutes I can find. *sigh*

Hopefully we will see some house action on one or both fronts before long!

We've been through the home inspection process yet again. This time we used a different inspector, as our first inspector is currently recovering from surgery. We followed his recommendation to get the second inspector, and he gave us a dry and somewhat dark overview of the house. Lots of little nagging maintenance issues that have to be addressed.

So we've submitted our requests to the sellers and are hoping to find common ground; this is where the seller of our first contracted house became unreasonable and the deal fell through. We are hopeful this time will go much more smoothly.

We actually made it. After losing the house on Monday, we looked at "the rebound" on Tuesday, made the aforementioned offer, received a counter offer, countered that, received the second counter, and signed off. Under contract on the last day to qualify for the tax credit!

Now Tom has set up the inspection for next Tuesday. Once that's behind us, all that really remains is for someone to buy our house. I'm surprised we didn't get any offers in April, given that our house should appeal to first-timers who had hoped to get the tax credit. Supposedly the Realtor community says our house shows well and is a good house for the price, so hopefully the right buyer will come along soon....

Last night we proposed to the rebound.

Actually, we made an offer on the second house, which is way more hip and attractive than the last one. It's not as large, in square footage or lot size, but it's in much better condition and is ready to move into. We're optimistic and hope to know something by the end of the day today.

Feels like I haven't uncrossed my fingers since 2009.

Last Monday I had my appendix removed. Hence the lack of posting on this blog. During the week I was in the hospital, Tom got the house ready to show twice, and on my first day out one of those visitors came back. So three showings last week. We were feeling pretty good about our real estate situation. All we needed was the seller's sign-off on the house we were under contract to purchase and we'd be on our way.

No dice. We learned at about 3:00 last Wednesday, after much foot dragging, that the seller wasn't planning to do more than $500 worth of repairs (we had submitted two pages of requests, based on the inspection report), but that he would split the cost of mold remediation with us. (The mold was the biggest issue, but the seller's estimate was only $3,100.) We declined that offer and gave him more time to consider.

Then Saturday afternoon a little after 4:00, we learned that the seller was not on board with the required repairs, despite his agent's belief that he was. He was only ready to commit to part of the inspector's recommendations, leaving all electrical and plumbing, for example, for us to do. He had conceded to take care of the mold problem, but no more. (The upstairs toilet and sink didn't work, which he was unwilling to repair.)

So we wanted to get some estimates on how much it would cost us to make such unforeseen repairs, and since we learned all of this on Saturday afternoon, we requested an extension on our formal response so we'd have a few weekdays to try to line people up. This was a technicality, really, since the seller had not responded within the contracted time limits at any point thus far, and when he requested an extension after time had expired earlier in the process, we granted it (and he still went over by several days). So we requested this week to get the numbers together and get back to him (not to mention Monday was Tom's first full day back at work since my week in the hospital).

He said no! Wouldn't give us an extension past the 4:20 Monday afternoon deadline! After all this waiting and getting half-answers via email, not official documentation, he wouldn't give us time to get estimates (plumbing, electric, HVAC at minimum, plus we'd have had to have the floors and ceilings repaired so should have had those estimates, too).

I officially voided the contract with the request for the return of our earnest money at 1:15. After a few hours of grief, we've moved on, and today we went through another house. Tonight we'll process our offer to submit to the new sellers!

After the open house this weekend (which we all cleared out for, with the exception of Simon, who stayed hidden the whole time), I took some photos of our yard. The highlights are posted on my blog and on facebook, but really belong here.

Poor Flynn. He gets sick when he travels. And poor Tom, who was cruising around with the cats when it happened. And then poor me, who held Flynn while Tom cleaned him up. I ended up with puke-prints all over me. We're afraid this scene may repeat itself during the open house on Sunday, and/or every time the house is shown....

Zip was fantastic. She's great in the car. And Biscuit cried but was otherwise good. (Alice was asking about her commission for her work showing the house.)

Tomorrow afternoon an agent is showing our house (with Alice's able assistance). We get our first experience of fleeing the premises with Flynn, Biscuit, and Zip. Not sure exactly what we'll do while we're away, but we will certainly high-tail it outta there!

What does one do during an open house? Or during a showing? We will have at least two of our cats, plus the dog and whatever odds and ends we've scraped together, and we'll take both cars and go somewhere. Two-plus hours of driving around with Flynn and Biscuit in one car and Zip in the other, in varying degrees of distress and displeasure. I want to be in the Jeep with Zip and let Tom have the potential pooper/puker (Flynn!) in his car!

Yesterday an agent from another agency called our listing agent to ask a few questions about our house: When the roof was installed, how much updating the wiring and plumbing have had.... Hopefully our answers were satisfactory and we'll have someone come see it!

Both of our astrological forecasts indicate favorable conditions. I'm looking for positive encouragement wherever I can find it!

Fingers will probably be frozen in this crossed position until both sales have closed.

Saturday morning we had the house inspected. It went well! My parents came down and got to go in the house for the first time. The amazing thing is that I took ZERO photos.

Our house has a lockbox on the side door and flyers attached to the For Sale sign out front. No activity over our first weekend on the market, but it was Easter weekend, so we didn't expect anything to happen. No concern -- yet.

Our house is our agent's featured property at the moment. We were included in this week's slideshow for the "agent caravan" that RealtySouth puts on. Yes!

Also, open house is tentatively scheduled for a week from Sunday, April 11. Eeeeee!

A big shout-out to our friend Kristy for helping with the scrambling mad-dash to get the house presentable enough for Skip to walk through. I am so glad she came to visit! (It was like God had sent me an angel.) The house seems bigger (and is cleaner) than it has been the whole time I've lived in it.

Now we have to maintain this cleanliness AND tidiness, and hopefully our buyer will walk through the door before long!

On Friday, Tom gave the listing agent the earnest money to accompany our accepted contract. He also told him that we would like to have him list our current house for sale. So tomorrow (Monday) we are going to talk to/meet with him about listing it. I am READY to have a sign in the yard!

Over the weekend I worked on cleaning our kitchen and half bath. On Saturday I did a fair amount of nail-splitting scrubbing for which I should probably have been wearing gloves. I was rather achy by the end of the day and am surprised I can move today. But because I felt OK today I did it again, this time scrubbing/scraping the floor tiles in the half bath. The tile is ugly and worn, but with clean grout it looks much better than it did. I'm concentrating on the half bath, which is my bathroom, because the litter box is in there. So, let's just say the floor could really use a good cleaning.

Between us I think we also washed 5 loads of laundry and [Simon just got in my lap and is draped over my right arm] that's about all I can type now.

Last night I located a tree on ancestry.com that had a part of my family in it that I don't have much information on. I emailed the owner, and she wrote back this morning. In her message she linked me to a pilot search project at www.familysearch.org that had resources I haven't seen in one place before. More data from Alabama death certificates than can be gleaned from the index available through ancestry.com; it also has scans of Texas death certificates, and in both cases parents' names are given, when known. And it's available at no charge! AWESOME.

In all the house excitement, I almost forgot that Tom raced in the Locust Fork Classic over the weekend. He placed third in the master's class in one of the slalom races (and he hurt his back in the other, but that's another story). Hooray for Coach Land!

Offer accepted! We're nearly under contract! Now we just need to sell ours....

Today I cleaned our refrigerator, inside and out. Even the freezer. I stripped it of its hundreds of magnets, then started scrubbing. I used my favorite cleanser first: Mrs. Meyer's honeysuckle. I had to bust out some Formula 409 for the trickier spots, in part because I didn't want to waste the good stuff on stubborn goo.

I can't believe I am blogging about cleaning my fridge. Is there a name for this point I've reached? Old?

Also, Sunday has come to a close with no word from our realtor. *Sigh.* Hopefully we'll get good news about our offer tomorrow, and hopefully we can officially list this house by the end of the week.

I blogged about McKenzie's belated birthday celebration on my blog, although it deserves a mention here as well. Rather than try to cross-post, I'll direct you to Jennifer's musings from 18 March. There are pictures of leprechauns, cake, and McKenzie and Isabel wrestling Hank the horse.

We should know something new about the house situation on Sunday. I'm probably going to consult planetary positions to ease my mind while waiting (not that I don't have 1,000 things to do to preoccupy myself over the weekend).

We've made our last counter on the house we made an initial offer on a month ago. Fingers crossed that it works out this time!

If I weren't representing the whole family here I'd have trouble choosing which lovely template suited me best! This site, www.shabbyblogs.com, is my new favorite place. It's like the way I used to feel about Anthropologie: I want to live there.

There is no laptop in Landland. This BlackBerry is my only link to my email and the rest of the world! I feel so helpless. And really it's not terribly different from yesterday, or last week, or a month ago, when I had my laptop but it was slow and frustrating and aggravating!

Somehow, having a blank spot on the desk -- coupled with knowing that I might have to restore all my data and track down all the software I need -- makes me feel small and disconnected and anxious.

But I know Scott will make it right! He'll get the malware removed and the service packs installed and the system back up and running at sufficient, if not stellar, speed!

Here are the highlights (and lowlights) of the Land weekend:

• Wayne picked McKenzie up for me, so Zip and I drove straight to their house for the weekend
• We had dinner with Charles, Lila, Wayne, and Kathy before heading up to the Mulberry Fork so McK could camp with Tom for the weekend
• McKenzie and I got stuck in a traffic jam on I-65 for an extra hour
• Mom, Dad, Charles, Lila, and I went to cousin Traci's wedding.
• I got to hold my cousin Amy's 10-month-old daughter while the rest of the womenfolk cleaned up after the reception.
• Then I joined McKenzie and Tom at the kayak race, just in time to watch Tom win the downriver race! Go, old man, go!
• Had delicious Full Moon Barbecue at the awards banquet (although it was f-f-freezing). Tom collected his awards graciously.
• While driving back to my parents' house, the headlights on the Jeep went out. Total darkness. Very scary, but Wayne and Charles came to get me.
• We think there's a short somewhere in the steering column, which can be fixed or lived with. Zip and I came home, then Tom came home, and then our weekend came to a close!

Tom and I have gotten McKenzie hooked on Criminal Minds now. (Fortunately we haven't seen any rape-related episodes while she's been with us.) After the first weekend she watched the show with us (which we now refer to as "our program," like we're retirees), she decided that she would be J.J. We agreed, and that led us to this breakdown:

• McKenzie would be J.J.
• I would be Garcia, with a dash of Prentiss
• Tom would be a hybrid of Morgan, Gideon, and Hotch

Too bad we don't have a Spencer Reid. We all love him!

I'd like to have a glimpse of the future. Just a tiny peek at where I will be a year from now -- literally. Where will we live? If I could just see that next year will find me in another house, with the contents of our storage unit and all our stuff from my parents' and Grandma's basements back under one roof, then the process of finding/getting that future house would be a lot easier. I need to start working with the idea that it WILL happen and stop fretting about wondering how and when it will work out.

Forget going day by day; I need more hours in the week. Each day needs about 2 more hours in it for everything that needs doing to get done. Maybe 4 more hours, so we can get some extra sleep hours, too.

Everywhere I look there's something that should be fixed / cleaned / packed / otherwise addressed. Like the places where the old sink attached to the tile in the bathroom, but the one we have now attaches lower, so the filled-in holes in the tile are visible. And then there's poor Tom getting high on noxious paint fumes while putting the last coat on the walls of my closet, so that I can then sort through the remaining hanging clothes and see what I can part with (having done this 3 or 4 times already).

And then there's my job, and my uncooperative laptop, and that dissertation still hanging over my head.... Have to remember to pray at some point each day that someone makes an offer on our house. And practicing random acts of good karma, to stay on the safe side.

The good news is that I knocked out several file boxes full of magazines! It hurt to chuck all those Martha Stewarts and Country Livings that moved from Massachusetts to Georgia and then to Tuscaloosa with me, especially the ones that were addressed to Miranda Mathews. (She got Country Living; Abby Mathews subscribed to A&E's Biography magazine.) Now I simply have a couple of folders' worth of articles instead of multiple bins of complete issues.

Have to remember to keep thinking about all we've accomplished, not all that we have left to do!

Why do I have so much stuff? Am I really that materialistic? Or that much of a packrat? Am I -- gasp! -- a hoarder?!?

1. I have a lot of things that are meaningful to me.

2. No.

3. No.

4. NO!

I do not hoard. I simply do not discard in a timely manner. If I followed the OHIO (Only Handle It Once) principle with mail, receipts, and all my other paperwork, a huge percentage of the crap I'm complaining about would not be in my home. It would have already gone out with the trash/recycling.

The other problem we have is that we both let things pile up, and we ignore the piles. I don't like washing dishes, so they tend to pile up in the sink. Tom doesn't always see that I have bagged trash ready to go out, so it doesn't make it to the curb. Then there are the things neither of us wants to deal with (usually relating to money), so we don't confront whatever it is right away.

Couple this with the fact that our house is too small for our possessions (since we merged two households of stuff plus inherited furniture and wedding gifts) into one space previously filled by one such household. *sigh*

Still deciding what to do about the house situation. Seller holding firm on price; our house still not officially for sale (but unofficially, yes it is). So until we get my closet painted and everything put back and the last of the cleaning complete (and maybe even the new exhaust fan installed in the bathroom), no news on the home front.

This morning we made an offer on the 1926 house. Still in the process of getting ours on the market, which should happen by the first of next week. Last few fixes and tweaks to be made over the weekend. I am so ready to be out of here!

It's beginning to feel real. Signing and initialing all the buyers' points in the offer was almost surreal. We knocked that our last night and emailed it back to our agent, who expects to have a counter for us to consider by end of day tomorrow.

!!!!!!!!!!

We're thinking we're about to have a house on the market. This will be my first time selling a house (and buying one, when we get to that). I'm nervous about making this house seem spacious when we're busting at the seams. This won't be fun, but if we get to move to a home of our own that we actually fit in, it will be worth it. Positive thoughts...

Tom and I looked at another possible new home today. "New" in relation to us; this one was built in 1926! It needs a fair amount of aesthetic work to bring it to Land-ready, but we wouldn't need to add on or move walls or anything structural. Smoothing the ceilings (instead of the swirly textured imprints it has now), refinishing the hardwoods, and painting the walls would pretty much do the trick. And I think I can live with the near-primary wall colors so long as we had the floors and ceilings "corrected" before we moved in.

Oh, wait, we would have to carve out some closet space from the massive master bedroom. But as renovations go, that's pretty minor.

We came straight back to work after we saw it this afternoon and haven't really gotten to talk about it yet. But I think we're going to go ahead and get our house on the market, since selling our current house is required. Wow.

I am still crazy about both the house plan we designed to build on our lot and about the bungalow on Hargrove we have seen several times. But the Hargrove house would require adding a master closet and a garage, because there is virtually no interior storage and there is literally no outdoor storage. And the bedrooms are so small we couldn't have a nightstand on either side of the bed in the master! With a full-size bed! Not a king or even a queen. So the Hargrove house really isn't quite what we need.

Our house plan, on the other hand, is exactly what we need in terms of layout and space design. However, we can't afford to build it. So it remains shelved for the future, when our financial situation is different (retirement/new job for Tom, "real" job for me, etc.).

Which brings me back to today, the 1926 saltbox-style house we saw today. I feel good about it. Looking forward to talking it over with Mr. Land.

It's no secret that I hate Valentine's day. The day designed to make people feel bad, have their hopes dashed, and spend unnecessary money. When you're alone it stinks, and when you're with someone you have pretty good chance of having hopes dashed/disappointing your sweetheart. Plus it makes it nearly impossible to get a table to go out for Tom's birthday dinner (2/13).

That said, I love conversation hearts. Actually, now I must say, I loved them. Apparently NECCO changed the colors/flavors without consulting me. In years past I have bought bags and bags of them, then separated them by flavor (because no one wants to get a white one with an orange one -- mint and orange, ew!), and then snacked on them for the entire month of February. No more. Now we have only nastiness. Blue raspberry? Lemon-lime? Come on! Yellow is supposed to be banana! Green should be lime, not apple! WHY?!

As a general rule, I'm not opposed to change. Even when it comes to candy I hold dear. I don't mind eating them in Spanish, so long as they're the right flavors.

The one thing I liked about Valentine's day, ruined.

This Land family is into history. And "history" can be very loosely defined as a record of events (hence "prehistoric" events happened before a human recorded them). Tom and I both work in archives, and we are both actively engaged in genealogy research. So why do I find it difficult to maintain a blog?

This is a great way to record the events of our daily lives. And Blogger/Google will host it until any electronic apocalypse. So this is my pledge to record our history here. (Future genealogists, rejoice!)

The Landlanders are kind of hung up on the show "Criminal Minds" right now. Love, love, love it. And love that we've caught it after it went into syndication, so we can watch whole seasons! No waiting a week between episodes! Thanks, A&E!