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.