New Floors and Dad's Birthday

Floor men here today, for the second time. Hopefully they will finish with everything. They came last Thursday but didn't finish, said they would come back on Friday but never showed. It's been our experience that contractors are bad about not doing what they say they will do. Don't know why that is, but the only reliable people we've used are the driveway crew and our plumber, who is exorbitant with his charges, but always comes when he says he will. So, I guess that's what we pay for -- reliability. This will be the last time I use this contracting company. But then it seems that if you hold a company up to too high of a standard, well, after a while, you run out of places to call. Especially around here where we are limited in construction companies anyway. It's one of the drawbacks to living in a rural area.

On anther note -- it certainly has gotten hard to buy a house in the last two years. We still don't have a definite on the New Mexico place. I'm waiting on the inspection report, have only had a verbal report, and would like to see the pictures and written document before we make a decision about what to ask the seller to do before closing. I've informed our real estate agent that we might be asking for some repairs, and it seems that the seller and her agent have put a hold on everything, will not even order the survey until she sees what we're going to ask her for in the way of repairs. It's supposed to be such a buyer's market, and yet it seems to me that between the lending institutions and the hoops that a buyer has to jump through, it's just not an easy thing to buy right now. There's a big difference between now and when we bought this house, the one we live in now, in the summer of 2008. I think part of the problem is the NM house hasn't been on the market long enough. If she had been trying to offload for a year or two, then maybe she would be more willing to go the distance to sell the place.

In the meantime, we celebrated Daddy's 86th birthday on Friday. He came here for a steak cookout. I made a spice cake, which turned out pretty good. Daddy is so limited in food he can eat, between his diverticulitis and kidney disease, most sweets are off his list of acceptable food - nothing with nuts, nothing with seeds, nothing high in potassium. I think he had a good birthday, but he seemed a little odd to me, depressed maybe, or like he wasn't feeling as good as he pretended. I told him about the house in NM, showed him pictures. Maybe that was what got him down. Don't know.

And through all this house business, birthdays, new flooring, I feel the novel slipping through my fingers again. I try not to dwell on it. This is just more of the sort of thing I've been battling for the last ten years. I guess I'm just not willing to give up my life for the work anymore. Time just seems so short.

Onward ....