Oh! What a week!

 0800 October 13. Mrs J and I are finishing breakfast when the phone rang.  Mrs J answered and it was our realtor, my fingers immediately crossed in the hope he had a bit of potentially good news.  (Yes, Beans, good news is always potential until it actually occurs.  We're not there yet.). But the realtor asked if our Dogs could be gone from the house for about 4 hours without rioting.  I said sure with enough rib bones.  The cat however...

But he then dropped the big one, he was going to be showing the house to 2 different potential buyers.  

OK, then, we'll handle the dogs.  (We just sat them down in the living room and explained how important this was in trying to sell the house.  We also told them how we'd show them parts of town they hadn't peed on yet, so they could mark new territory.  Tails went into full flogging mode at that.  Cat, however, wasn't impressed. ) 

Ah well.  

1200 October 14. The showings went well, very well.  The first showing of the day was the second showing of our house to a couple from  Colorado.  This time the wife came along, that may have made a difference as they told our realtor they'd be making an offer when they got one on their house.  That's definitely good news, but a long way from a signed contract.

Still, better than nothing.

When the realtor told us about the second showing, something had me a tad bit more confident.  The two viewers live about 15 miles south of us in a medium sized city.  He relayed to us that they were not comfortable in the neighborhood they were living in,  too crowded, noisy, close together...Well, none of that is a factor on our 30.9 acres.

Our property

 They said they liked the property and, to me, it just feels like a better fit for them.  They also told our realtor that they were very interested.

We shall see what will be!

0800 15 October. Well, it's a couple of days and things are speeding up.  We did get an offer from the people in the vicinity.  Yes it was a very low ball offer.  We went and visited our realtor about what he thought the house would sell for, his price and mine were almost exactly the same.  So we had him put together a counter offer which still allowed for some negotiation above our high end sale price.

As I mentioned above, we shall see what will be!

0800 16 October. Given the activity going on, we realized we've got to get the move-out side of the move started.  Getting stuff ready for movers is now in progress.  We're also headed over to College Station sometime in the next couple of days for an out and back.  We've got a couple of properties that we're interested in, but the photos are not all that satisfying.  We’d like to do a walk through and see what the truth is in the listing. We also reminded the selling realtor that Mrs J’s travel schedule has a River Cruise tour in Portugal in November and a Disney cruise in December for our family, so scheduling the sale and move will take some planning and mid-January would be the earliest jumping through all the hoops could be accomplished. 

So, progress, but, unfortunately, circumstances changed that moving schedule.

0800 17 October. Things quickly started to roll.  The folks from south of us called this morning  and said yes.  The only drawback (such as it is) is they need to move in in Mid December.  Their Daughter is in a difficult pregnancy and needs to be in one of our guest houses where it's peaceful and quiet.  That's the determining factor on the sale.  I think we're probably gonna have to borrow Santa's sleigh to move our "stuff" to College Station by the 17th of December. 

So, gonna be a "fun" couple of months and Mrs J and I may sleep through the cruises.  But...we are officially under contract for essentially our asking price.

0800 18 October. Now the priority is getting things sorted on what we're taking, what we're donating and what we're junking.   Mrs J is being ruthless.  Sentenced me to cleaning out my workshop.  Talk about cruel and unusual punishment.  If offered the opportunity to criminals to avoid capital punishment by cleaning the workshop, I think they'd just go ahead and end it all.  Unfortunately, that is not an option for me.  

0800 19 October.  Actually once I got started, I made quite a bit of progress. 8 large black trash cans full of "stuff" (swahili for "junk") were taken to the dumpster. All the tools and good stuff I want to keep are in Plastic boxes with snap on lids.  Back wall and work bench back there are pretty well ready to go.  Stuff along the right wall are still needing some dumpster/no dumbster decision making.  But progress is being made. 

 

C'est la vie! Most of the stuff along the right is small and hand tools, so that will be packed into shipping boxes as we're taking it with us.  The packing process has progressed about halfway up the right wall just on the far side of the crumpled Lowes (plastic) bucket.  Still a lot of junk to be thrown out but ... progress.

Update: Right wall has been de-junkified.  Found quite a few tools that I didn't know I had (e.g. I now have 4 contour gauges. I'm sure they'll all come in handy when I gain three more hands.) 

But, we're under contract!  Never imagined that things would change so fast.  Still a lot of hoops to jump, but we're making progress and will be on our way or will be soon. But, it ain't over until it's over, so fingers are crossed (unless I'm carrying out trash, which means they aren't crossed very often).

1600 Oct 19: The Buyer asked if she could bring her daughter and the daughter's husband by and look at the property.  We said OK.  They seemed happy with the property and were satisfied that it would accommodate the daughter's pregnancy requirements.  So...Finally...All happy all round.

What a week! Thank you, Lord, for keeping me calm and sane!  Please continue to help until it's official.

Been a helluva week. If you're still reading this it's my normal Monday publishing and therefore.... 

Peace out y'all! 

  

 

 

 

 

 

Oh...What a week!

 Well, Campers, it has been quite a "Special" week down here. Special being the Swahili word for "Tough".  But, Mrs J and I managed to make it through and in spite of the "Challenges", there were some good outcomes.  So being the "look at the bright side" kind of guy that Beans has taught me to be, I'll start with those episodes first.

As most of you are aware, Summer isn't over until September 22 this year.  Now, I know, some of you are already breaking out your parkas and snow boots.  Down here in the great state of Texas, we start thinking about doing that when the temps get down in the 60's.  We had a 100+ degree last week, but at least it was a humid 100.  

Which wouldn't have been so bad if the AC in my woodshop hadn't decided that I didn't need any cool air anymore, but that I needed a sauna.  Silly machine!  So we called the repairman.  This was mid-afternoon, I was kinda expecting a visit in a few days. 

Surprisingly, he said he could be there at 5PM if that was OK.

Not surprisingly, I said "YES, Bless you!"

He showed up right on time and got to work.  Now, I am pretty religious about cleaning sawdust out of the filters regularly and they were only slightly dirty when he opened up the AC.   He blew them out again, just to make sure, but no bueno.

He said he'd have to go deeper into the machine, something I had no idea how to do, so hadn't.  Sure enough some tubular fan or something was pretty well covered in sawdust.  He said it shouldn't be a hard thing to get it working, but he'd have to take it apart.  Was I ok with that?

Why, yes...yes I am!

He got to work.  Since it was late afternoon and hot and the AC wasn't working, we were both pretty sweaty quite quickly.  I asked him if he'd like some cold water.  He said "Please".

So, I went into the house and got a couple of bottles.  On my way back, I ran into a slight problem.  Which brings us to the second topic of this post.

 

See that loop of yellow grass going across the middle of the picture. Well... That's when things last week started going south.

 

There I was...walking back to the Woodshop carrying 2 bottles of water.  Strolling along when I felt a tug on my right foot. No big deal, except about a nanosecond later I'm looking down at the rapidly approaching ground.

 

I realize I'm not going to stop the impact, so parachute landing fall training from Undergraduate Pilot Training sprang into my mind. I rolled to my left.  It was somewhat like I'd been trained in that the first thing to hit was my calf, then my thigh, then my hip, shoulder. Unfortunately, I must have forgotten the part about protecting the head as my forehead hit the ground.  I was stunned for a short while, more concerned about my head than anything else.  Took a look in the mirror I have in the shop to look under things.  Slight bleeding from my forehead, but not effusive.  Very sore, but alright.

 

Or so I thought.

 

The next morning I wake up sore (I wonder why) and go take a shower.  I'm soaping up and realize I've got a tennis ball sized bump on my hip.  A little sore and a little bruise colored.  No big deal.

 

Things get worse as the day goes on, finally that afternoon, I surrender and ask Mrs J to take me to the ER. I was the only patient there.   I explain my gymnastic episode to the Doc.  She sends me to the XRay/Cat Scan Tech who does his business.  Says nothing's broken.  Thanks, good news finally.

 

Now I'm still in a pretty high level of pain, so they give me some pain medicine.  Meanwhile, the ER has apparently gotten really busy and I don't see the Doc again for about 4 hours when I send Mrs. J out to see if they haven't left for the day or something.

 

They hadn't, they just got swamped.

 

We finally get released about 10PM, by the time we get home the pain and bruising has gone down from my hip past my thigh and knee and starting into my calf. The next morning there hasn't been a lot of improvement so I call my regular Doc and explain the situation and ask for an appointment.  I get one fairly quickly.  He takes a look and says it's not life threatening, nothing's broken, just painful. He also says I'm showing signs of Sciatica. So he bumps up the pain medicine and schedules me for a return visit this week.  I still have difficulty walking, my hip still hurts, so it's been a heckuva week

 

So...That piece of Texas grass was strong enough to bring a 195 LB 6' Guy to the ground.  But...There is a upside to that piece of grass.   We have 4 acres of lawn around our house.  My workshop is not in them.  Our two riding lawn mowers had broken down for the count a while ago. Mrs J had, unsuccessfully, been doing a bit of research on Lawn Mower repair guys in the area.  All we had found to this point required you to bring your mower to them.   We do not have a trailer to bring them to the repair shop and pushing a lawn mower through a couple of more acres is no longer on my "wanna do" list.  (Which can be and often is overridden by Mrs J's "gonna do" list.) Fortunately, after this whole "Flying Wallenza" episode went by, she found a guy who would make house calls.  He came by the next day, spent a few hours, and voila' we now have two working riding lawn mowers. That would be the upside of this adventure.

 

And that bastige hunk of grass is mulch now.

 

Oh, and the AC in my shop works perfectly now.  So...I'm back to woodworking.

 

Given all the "not so fun" we'd had last week, Mrs J. and I did manage to have a bit of fun Saturday.  We went to a wine tasting at our long time friends, the winemakers, at Texas Hills Vinyard winery in Johnson City.  The husband passed away a couple of years ago and the wife has since sold the winery.  The new owners kept the name and kept her on as an advisor.  She is retiring now and this was her Sawadee.  A tasting of 7 of their best wines going back several years.  They were phenomenal!

 

Given that most of the tasters were connoisseurs of Texas Hills wine and we all knew each other, the story (ok lie) tellings that went on, assisted by the wine. were phenomenal also.  Many of them are going on the upcoming river cruise Mrs J has set up.  It's in November on the Douro River in Portugal.  Looking forward to having a lot of fun with "the gang" again. 

 

One final bit of possible good news,  We had a couple come by a while back and look at our house and property a couple of times.  A few days ago, Mrs J got a call from our realtor who said that the couple had just called him.  He told us that they were in the final stages of signing a contract for the sale of their house, expecting that signed document within a week or so.  Once that was done, he said the couple would start the process of putting together an offer for us.  Mrs J had talked to the couple on their two viewings of the property and said they were very nice and upfront about liking the property.  

 

Still a long way from closing, but closest we've been so far.

 

We shall see what we shall see.

 

Peace out, y'All! 

 

Wow! What a Great Weekend!

 I've had a lot of Good to Great weekends in my lifetime.  Some were exciting, others just extremely relaxing.  One or more of Family, Friends and Flying were usually involved in the enhancing the weekend outcome.

This past one expanded the definition of the word "Great".  We traveled over to College Station for two reasons.  First was to see our Grandkids again (Yes, Beans, also to be with our Daughter and Son-in-Law of course).  Our oldest GrandKid is the GrandDaughter.  She's a couple of months short of 4YO.  Lovely, Friendly, and Smart (as a whip), a joy to be around.

Our GrandSon is a couple of months short of 3YO (Their BD's are only a day apart.). He is amazingly smart.  He speaks in complete sentences which are understandable.  If he hears a sentence he can repeat it and he seems to have filed it away so the context is there if he needs to repeat it again in conversation.   I would read him one of his books.  He could repeat the verbage while pointing to the word he was speaking at that moment moving to the next when he started saying that one.  The rhythym of the reading wasn't perfect, but much better than I expected from someone his age.  

One of the other reasons to visit the Daughter's Family was also accomplished.  Since both adults have jobs, they need a sitter during the day.  Which leaves them with no sitter at night, so they can't go  out and have a little adult recreational time.  We assisted them in accomplishing a little time off from parenting and reacquanting each other as loving adults.

We had fun, the grand's had fun and Mom and Dad had fun!

Win, Win, Win!

While the Family reunion was a big reason for visiting, it wasn't the only one.

Since we are planning to move to College Station, we also wanted to look at some houses.  We had engaged a Realtor via phone a few weeks ago, telling her what we were looking for and why and what constraints we had. (The biggest one being selling our current house about 150 miles away).

She did her best and fortunately (mixed blessing...Hard to sell ours, prices are down for buyers) the market isn't all that hot right now. So, quite a few houses on the market.  Wednesday, we got a call from the Realtor handling the sale of our current home saying he had some folks wanting to take a look-see.  We did a quick simplifying sweep of the house moving things into closets, drawers etc, just so it looked a bit better.  

We loaded up the dogs and cat and went to City Park and walked them around for an hour.  Got the call from the Realtor that it was safe to come home.  He also mentioned that they really liked the house and were considering a contingency offer of 60 days for them to sell their existing house!

Yay!!!!!!

So, that's my first order of business today.  Did they actually make the contingency order?  

Why?  Because our excursion with the College Station Realtor showed us a couple of houses we really liked this weekend. That set the other half of the Real Estate Cycle in motion. 

We'd like to make a contingency order on the house we REALLY liked if it's still available or one on the one we also liked a lot if not.

 

This is the Street View of the house we really liked.

Front porch looking out over the front yard

My Cell Phone pictures don't even begin to do it justice.  Just beautiful! It was formerly owned by a retired Army Lt Colonel who became widowed and put their home on the market.  Very nice, neat and well kept.  Much as I expected when I was told about the owner.

The contingency we would need on either would be based on the buyer of our house actually selling his house and signing the contract to buy ours. At that point, assuming both houses are still on the market, we could commit to the house we liked. Hopefully, the one pictured above.

Lots of if's, and's and but's in the situation, but...it is progress.  We haven't had anybody else visit us and show any serious interest.  At least, if this goes through we can progress to the next step. We shall see.  Lot's of prayers going skyward nowadays.

So, we drove home Sunday, and as we're driving along, Mrs. J's phone rang.  It was Little Juvat, LJW and Miss B calling from England.  Ain't Technology Great?  A phone call from halfway around the world into a car travelling at 75 MPH. (Yes, Beans some of the Highways in Texas are 75.)

In any case, they wanted to video chat, but that was a bit much for the bandwidth available to the phone in the car, so we asked them if we could call them back when we got home in about an hour.

Sure!

So we did!  The phone was answered by Miss B and the video came up immediately.  She was sitting there wearing a T-shirt which said "Big Sister".

 

Yep, Grand Child #4 is on the way, a late January, early February due date.

So, as I said...It was a very GREAT Weekend.  Hope your's went well also. 

Peace out, y'all! 

juvat 

Monday Update

  

Well, Campers, it's that day of the week. So maybe a little Jimmy to get us started.

Source

 Monday! You know....The one you dread because you're still in the "work=pay" grind.  Now, according to Sarge, that's no longer the problem for he and I. So he says.

But, there is a little bit of a hiccup there, see...I'm married and no longer working (for pay).  Back in the day, if there was something that she thought needed to be done, I could say, I'll take care of it over the weekend.  

That worked occasionally, not often, but...sometimes.

Now, however, no excuse.  

In all seriousness, retirement has been pretty nice.  I do get a lot of things done around the place.  I get to spend quite a bit of time in my workshop.  My Chef skills are also improving. 

And, I am down about 10 LBs (Mrs J says she thinks it's more.  I like her way of thinking!).  So...I got that going for me.

As to this weeks posting.  My last post talked about the flood just south of our property.  At that time, the count was 125 dead and more than a hundred missing.    The rescue effort got a lot of help from volunteers from pretty much all over the country.  The team we put up in our guest house came from Michigan, Florida, Illinois and Louisiana.  Virtually everybody involved in the effort came by private vehicle, with cadaver dogs and/or their own equipment.  No pay, no expenses.

Those are Heroes in my book.

Their Search Dogs have Business Cards! 😆😆😆

The cadaver dogs had a very hard job, wading around in the horribly poluted water with raw sewage. logs and yes, bodies all around.  I've got a lot of respect for their owners also.  Not an easy job and hard on the nerves.  Quite a few little girls lost their lives among the others.  Finding them had to have a lose/lose impact on the searchers and their dogs. As to the bodies, may they all rest in peace in the Lord's arms. 

In any case, the searching is significantly reduced but still going on. Many of the searchers are back at their homes. The "final" count is 135 dead.  The number of missing has dropped significantly from more than 100 to 3.  So a bit of "not quite as bad" news. 

Thank You, Lord!  

I'll switch topics to a bit of, hopefully, good news this week.  We got a call from our real estate agent asking if he could bring someone by the next day to look at the house.

Well, Duh!

So, the next several hours were spent mowing, vacuuming, scrubbing, putting extraneous "stuff" in the attic, mucking the horse barn, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Well, turns out the folks interested live in Colorado, are about our age and also retired.  Their retired interest is caring for orphaned kids.  So, they were looking for a fairly large property.  They had engaged a real estate agent in town to look for that and do a film walk through of it.

Yes, Beans, ~20" rain will turn the grass green even in a Texas Summer!

 

Our property has 10 bedrooms total in the 4 dwellings.  All the bedrooms can handle at least 2 kids each (one can handle 8 comfortably). So, should meet the buyer hopeful's needs.

So we've got the house inspection by their real estate agent ready in the nick of time, we loaded up the 4 dogs and 1 cat into two cars and drove to the Sonic Drive In in town until given the all clear.  Yes, Beans, the look on the attendant's face when she brought up the burgers  and Atticus was sitting in the driver's seat made my day!

In any case, the Colorado folks told their agent they were very interested in the property and are making plans to fly over here and take a look in person in the next couple of weeks.

The Catholic upbringing in me caused me to leave no prayer unturned (to mix metaphors). 

Yes, the statue is buried in our back yard.  We'll be bringing it with us when we sell.

We'll see what we will see!  Fingers Crossed!

Peace out, y'all!