And Then I Cried Over The Sad Mop

After a whole lot of second- and third-guessing ourselves as to what the hell we should be doing, Ish and I are now in contract on a house we love in Napa.

We were very wishy-washy about the whole moving thing, you may have noticed, until the right house came on the market; then we knew. If all goes well -- and omg, there are a lot of things involved in financing a house, and mortgage rates are all very weird now as is the approval process and plus with fun new rules coming into effect because of the stimulus bill and you have not lived until you're getting cc'd on emails you don't understand from your realtor, mortgage broker, tax attornies from two different firms in two different states, and a CPA thrown in for good measure -- we remove contractual contingencies next Wednesday and close about two weeks after that.

Meanwhile I'm preganant and content to speak about nothing except the wondrousness of coconut popsicles.

This past Friday was also my last day at work and that's just really weird. So now I'm home and looking about 80 million projects straight in the eye and cowering. There's fun stuff I want to do, like arrange a song or two for my a cappella group. There's huge, big stuff like start the website I've been babbling about for a year. Oh, and those books I want to write. And then there's the whole "packing" thing.

I refuse to start packing, however, until we have reached the "everything is in order, here is the closing date and time" point on the house. Packing anything up before then just seems like tempting fate, and I really don't like to do that.

However. So that we don't get saddled with closing costs and mortgage payments AND extra rent, we did give notice to our landlords. And as these things happen, our apartment is being shown THIS FRIDAY. HAHAHA.

On the one hand, it's not like we're showing a place we're trying to sell. I don't care if this place gets rented -- it doesn't impact us one way or another. On the other hand, people I don't know will be traipsing through my home for the sole purpose of deciding whether or not it's the kind of place they want to live. Strangers will be wandering through the place I live and judging it, judging me, and it's hard to not care.

Especially because one small coat closet and one mid-sized clothes closet is not enough storage for two grown adults and all their earthly possessions. So while we don't even have that much stuff, the stuff we DO have is everywhere, all over every surface, because there's nowhere else for it to go.

And I know that strangers will assume we are disheveled packrats and I hate it.

Plus I'm not even being rational, but what if these strangers go into full-on snoop-and-judge mode? What if they open the kitchen cabinets and see that my pots and pans are just thrown in there, not stacked neatly (um, because how DO you neatly stack pots and pans?)? What if they open the fridge and cast disapproving glances at that salad dressing that's been there since July? WHAT IF THEY JUDGE MY POPSICLES?

The point is, it's not a big deal and I just need to suck up and deal and perhaps find a happy medium between "not packing" and "decluttering" but it just gets a little overwhelming and Oh hey, I haven't checked Twitter in 4 minutes, I wonder what's going on there!?

And please keep in mind that I am not even remotely sane these days. Between the I-don't-know-what-it-is-about-pregnancy that makes me totally, totally spacey and the hormonal roller coaster, I am a big heaping mess of a woman.

Example:

You know those Swiffer commercials? Where the woman is at the grocery store and is contemplating buying a Swiffer, and the woman working at the grocery store tells her it's a miracle product and she'll never go back to her old mop? Then her old mop appears from around the corner, looking dejected? (Yes, it looks dejected. Even though mops don't have facial features of any kind or anything, the mop looks miserable.) And then the song "Baby Come Back" plays and it's supposed to be funny?

Because you know how MOPS DON'T ACTUALLY HAVE FEELINGS, NO MATTER WHAT CHEESY LOVE SONG IS PLAYING?

Cried. I actually cried. At the sad mop.

You want to know why? Because the sad mop reminded me of the scene from Toy Story II where the song "When She Loved Me" comes on. It is the saddest song in the entire universe. It is about a toy a little girl gets when she's little and she loves it so much and then she gets older and little by little forgets about the toy and it winds up alone and unloved and under the girl's bed.

"When somebody loved me, everything was beautiful. Every hour we spent together lives within my heart...when she loved me."

You can bet I sobbed like a baby watching that, however many years ago. And not JUST because I felt bad for all the unloved toys in the world. But because I made the catastrophic mistake of realizing that sometimes the same thing happens to pets, that sometimes when kids get older they don't play with their dogs (note: I'm now crying as I type this, not kidding) as much. And the dogs don't understand why. Because they're just dogs and love the kids as much as they ever did -- dogs don't understand that kids have different responsibilities and priorities as they grow up. Dogs just love.

JUST LIKE THE MOP AT THE GROCERY STORE.

***Comment of the Day***

Why? Because it made me laugh right out loud.

Corrina said...
Harry Carey died when I was pregnant (the baseball announcer). I barely knew who he was but spent an entire week with red-rimmed eyes telling everyone that he had died. No one else cared. Poor mop. Poor Harry.