Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

house

do start believin’

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A week ago I had just finished commuting home for the first time to my new house. Presently I am the merch guy for Filmstar as they split a bill with The Shondes at Tritone.

That’s the life, at the moment.

That, a seemingly unlimited amount of cardboard boxes in various states of unpack, and a steely, unflinching resolve to spend money on things like towel hooks and toilet seats. Whatever it takes.

We moved with no issue whatsoever, aside from only sleeping two hours in a 36 hour span. After all of the wacky settlement hijinks it was a bit of a letdown, where “letdown” means “totally awesome gift from serendipity.”

Things have generally been serendipitous lately, in a broad Alanis-Ironic reading of the term. I like to think it’s universe-funded payback for all the not-being-nasty I’ve done in the last year.

It’s hard. I’m nasty by nature. Or, at least, by nurture.

My high school graduation was 1/10 this big.

On Tuesday we walked into Trenton Arena, late for E’s brother’s graduation, to discover his face displayed on a jumbotron singing “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Apparently he was the only tenor confident enough to bring an appropriate amount of NJ rock to that Journey classic (by way of Glee), and so wound up singing Steve Perry lead at his own high school graduation to a half-full arena’s worth of crowd.

And now I am in an increasingly packed rock club, selling merchandise and recording video for my wife’s band while she rocks out in a rather short skirt which I heartily endorse. Later we will go back to our house, and sleep on a mattress on the floor. Tomorrow I will finish setting up my new recording studio and start playing music again.

This is the life.

No Sleep ‘Till Blue House

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You know when you get something new and all you want to do it touch it and be close to it and love it?

That thing is our new house. It has its share of faults to find and fixes to make, but it’s ours, it’s blue, and it doesn’t share any walls with anyone.

I can safely say I’ve never been quite this excited by any new CDs or sheet music books.

However, we cannot touch, be close to, love and – most importantly – live in our blue house quite yet because there are still several rooms of packing in our old house standing between us and that beautiful, fulfilling moment.

It’s like Christmas. We know the gift has been bought for us. We know it’s hidden around here somewhere. We just have to get through some awful, boring time between us and the gift. The gift we bought for ourselves.

Okay, that wasn’t a great metaphor. I’m working on hour twenty-two on a 16-ounce coffee and a slice of pizza here. Cut me some slack.

We had two dalliances with the house earlier today, but we won’t be actual residents of said house for another 14 hours. Fourteen hours of packing, AKA the longest 14 hours of my life until one of us either gets pregnant or passes a gallstone.

Did I mention I shattered part of a molar on Monday night? And that I’m probably not going to sleep until our bed is located inside of our new house – again, something to the effect of 14 hours from now?

Lest you hear any further complaining from me, E’s mother just shared that when she bought her first home she was 9.5 months pregnant with E, and E’s dad inexplicably decided to bring their settlement costs with him in cash.

No amount of wrestling with change machines and broken molars and packing for 24 hours straight can top that.

Freak out! Le freak, c’est chic.

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It’s my first post as a home-owner!

The events leading up to our settlement at eleven this morning were unexpected and rather ridiculous.

Actually, I’ve discovered that any adventure I am allowed to take charge of that involves both cars and big-ticket-purchases becomes ridiculous, regardless of the relative simplicity of its intended result.

Honestly, I don’t know how I do it. I choose to believe it’s the fault of my inner OCD Godzilla. What for most people would be a simple point-to-point drive with a check in hand he transforms into a travelling circus of oddities to satisfy all of his many obsessive requirements. I have no choice but to comply so that he remains sated, lest he begin to devour portions of my soul and gall bladder.

I feel the need to document the whole madcap venture while it’s still fresh and ridiculous-seeming – and while E can confirm that it is the god’s honest truth and I have not exaggerated a single word even a little.

[Read more…] about Freak out! Le freak, c’est chic.

T-Minus 210 Minutes

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We are buying a house in three and a half hours.

I joked on Twitter that I would treat my time off from work for the move as time to pretend I was employed as a full-time blogger. That plan might have worked, except I am presently employed as a full-time home-packer, -mover, and -buyer, which leaves precious little time for blogging.

I develop a certain metaphorical or actual amount of frothing at the mouth when someone tries to add an unknown to the critical path of a project I am managing. (The critical path is the longest path of required tasks to reach the completion of a project.)

My co-workers know this metaphorical or actual frothing look well. It’s not a bad thing – it’s my show of aggression towards something unknown that could delay my goal. A rogue task has slipped into my territory, and I have to scare it off unless it’s bigger than me (i.e., essential to the project).

Let’s just say that the house-buying process is all froth, all the time. I am like my own fucking cappuccino machine.

I know that our Realtor and mortgage lender are both project managing very effectively. I adore them. When this is all over I’ll probably write an effervescently effusive post recommending them to the internet at large.

That said, I just can’t help myself. I still need to know the timing down the the minute, and the dollars down to the cent. When one of those minutes or cents change, I get frothy.

And, if you’ve ever bought or sold a house or witnessed same, you know that variance of a couple minutes and cents isn’t entirely uncommon – especially on the day of settlement.

We are three and a half hours away from being home owners, and I have reached latte macchiato levels of froth.

Even your emotions have an echo AKA The House, pt. 3

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Last you heard E and I were driving back from the Realtor’s office minutes before midnight on a Wednesday, having just put in a bid on a house on the craziest day of my entire life.

It was all so unreal, the idea that on day two of our leisurely renewed search we might have found our new home. While E was excited, I was my typical logical negative – there was already a bid on the house, and our offer was abrupt and left a scant 48 hour window for response.

Knowing our seller lived in Europe, my body seemed to assume noon would be a reasonable time to hear from them, so it began my Thursday by waking up at 5:30 a.m.

While I was logical negative on the outside, I was all tenterhooks and carbonation on the inside. I was exhausted, and felt like a carcass, but my insides were saying “gogogo.”

So I jogged into work. And when I got there, before the lights in the office turned on, I did a few minutes of situps. Just to defuse the energy.

Another early-rising co-worker found me that way on Friday.

“Peter, is that you? Why are you here so early [walks into my cube] and why for fuck’s sake are you lying in the middle of the floor doing situps?”

I didn’t have a solid explanation for her. While my brain was being a guarded pessimist, my heart was already living in a new house, becoming a new me – ready for a recording studio and a jogging route and all of those either ideal-life things I have been waiting forever for.

E and I were desperately trying not to pester our Realtor – I think we checked in a single time on Thursday, even if we were pestering each other with constant questions and doubts. Without an answer by noon on Friday (7pm in Paris, where the seller might live, I thought) I was beginning to despair.

Oh well, logical negative me mused, it was a great learning process, but I guess the house just wasn’t meant to be.

My phone buzzed at 2:23 p.m. – our Realtor’s number flashing across the screen. I regarded her name coolly, trying not to betray the butterflies, hummingbirds, and other arial creatures buzzing in my stomach and poking at my esophogaus.

I picked up.

“Peter, it’s Lynn.”

As in all crucial moments in my life, seconds turned to epochs. I swear, I do not just write that all of the time for clichés sake – I really do go into Matrix-style bullet time when I’m awaiting a major decision that might alter the course of my life. I could pin a fly to the wall with a thrown push-pin, while in the roiling depths of my ribcage my tiny OCD Godzilla is surely growling the interminable music they play on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire while awaiting the correct answer.

Is that suspenseful enough for you? Do we need a cliffhanger? No? Okay. Approximately three quarters of a second later, she followed with a second sentence.

“You got the house.”

I let out a war whoop and talked through some details before hanging up the phone to call E to share the news. After that the surreality set in – one bank would trade our house to another in a process that had kicked off less than 72hrs before – a timeline so brief that I had literally told only four people face-to-face that we put a bid in!

Naturally, bursting to tell the good news, I turned to Twitter:

We have a house. WE HAVE A HOUSE. omg.

That was four weeks ago today. Two weeks from now we will be completed moved in, repaired, and ready for a weekend of unpacking.

That isn’t quite the end of the house story – I have fun details and perhaps some advice to share about mortgages, inspections, and contractors. However, I think I need to wait for a few checks to clear and papers to be signed before I disclose some of the other bits.