It is Sunday, March 1 and there are only 299 days until Christmas.  I have already started getting the CD’s ready.  It is the birthday of Frederic Chopin, Rebecca Lee and Ron Howard.  On this day in 1 BC the revised Julian calendar started in Rome, in 1692 Sarah Goode, Sarah Osborne and Tituba were arrested for witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts and in 1912 Isabella Goodwin was the first woman detective appointed, in New York City.  In Bayonna, Spain it is Pinzon Day, in South Korea it is Independence Movement Day and in Ohio and Nebraska it is Admission Day.

The lovely Elaine and I have started the arduous process of looking for, finding and buying a house.  We have decided that it is time for us to move closer to our family.  In the past four years we have lost all our parents and there is really nothing left for us in this area.  We want to be closer to my son and his family so we can become a burden to them sometime in the future.  That seems to be the legacy that families hand down over the generations.  Great grandparents were taken care of by grandparents who were taken care of by parents who were taken care of by us kids.  Now it is our turn to pass on the problems.  Not that we anticipate being trouble anytime soon, but we want to be ready.  We are not looking forward to packing and moving now, but I would hate to think what we would be like if we waited 15 or so years.

“Bill, did you wrap the dishes so they can be packed?”

“What?”

“Did you wrap the dishes so they can be packed?”

“Yes the wrap was delicious and it was packed, but it needed more cheese.”

“You don’t need to worry about the breeze, they will be in boxes.”

“Okay.  I’ll take care of it as soon as I wrap the dishes.”

So we contacted a realtor (or realator depending on who you talk to) down in the area we are looking to be in and gave him a list of wants and don’t wants so he could start looking.  After a day or so, the lovely Elaine decided that “we” should amend the list because maybe we were too restrictive and were eliminating possibilities.  I felt that the list was fine, but acquiesced rather than fight that battle.  With the new list in his possession, he set out to find us a place.  A few days ago we went down and spent a couple hours with him looking at potential residences.  These locations were selected based on the “new” list of needs we gave him.  Having seen them, we rejected them and ultimately the wise and wonderful Elaine decided that the original list was fine and that we would stick to it (which explains why I did not fight the battle previously mentioned).

Marianne, our dear daughter-in-law, has been looking for listings and houses that are for sale by owner in an effort to assist us in this challenge.  We are fortunate to have her help because she is diligent, knowledgeable and is aware of what to watch out for.  She knows us well enough to know what we want to avoid and can steer us in the right direction.  She also realizes, but is too polite to come right out and say, that we are neophytes to the house buying game and need all the help we can get.  Keep in mind that we bought our current house 36 years ago.  It was purchased privately and we have never dealt with a real estate agent before.  So, with her as our guide, we have ventured out into the unknown.   

As I said we have been to some homes already and several things have become apparent.  The first is that older people have no clue when it comes to decorating.  We went into one house where the dining room was on the small side and the furniture was on the large side.  They could only put five chairs around the table because the sixth one would have blocked the walkway.  They could have reconfigured the room to fit everything, but I suspect they had it the way it was in their old home.  We were in one house where the wife had hung a window curtain over the sliding door on the shower “so it would look nicer.”  Then, just to be sure it did the job she wanted, she thumb tacked the curtain to the walls so it wouldn’t move and expose the door.

On our original list we said no multi-storied townhouses.  We did not want to have to do stairs and we did not want to have sections of the house we would not use because of the stairs.  We are also not big fans of vaulted ceilings.  Our amended list allowed us to go see townhouses.  The two we saw had more living space on the second floor than was available on the first floor.  The only area that had more space was the basement.  

The living room had vaulted ceilings with pot lights in the ceiling.  If a bulb burned out, I would have to get one of those long arms with the suction cup on the end to change the bulb.  I could see a number of broken bulbs in my future as I worked to master that skill.  What made it more interesting is that the entryway had a two-story ceiling with a chandelier hanging in it.  It was a big thing with a large glass bowl covering the bulbs.  I pointed it out to our agent and asked how that bulb would be changed.  He shrugged his shoulders and said, “I don’t know.  I guess you’d have to hire someone to do it.”  Townhouses have been taken off the list, again.  I will keep you updated as the journey continues.

Our fact this week tells us that humans use a total of 72 different muscles in speech.  After listening to our governor and other politicians, it is obvious that none of those muscles are in any way connected to the brain.  Quite the opposite, if you know what I mean.