Happies

Something old, something new
One of Curious Girl's former teachers holds Fabulous Friday as a way to make a little extra money. For $20 or $25, she hosts a small group of kids at her house on a Friday night, from 5-9 or 6-10, feeds them dinner, has fun activities, and a movie. Her 11 year old daughter helps out, and the kids just love it. Curious Girl had the idea to have Fablious (as she calls it) Friday here, but we decided that Super Saturday would be better. So a week ago, we hosted our first Super Saturday. CG invited 5 friends, and had loads of fun getting things ready. Preparations involved random recollections of Fabulous Fridays past, the better to outline the very precise outline of the evening (parental preparations thus involved gentle encouragement about the need to invite friends and let them play). We decided on a craft (painting pumpkins), we decided on activities (playing in the park next door, having a scavenger hunt), we shopped for scavenger hunt prizes (criteria: cheap but not useless: I found some Halloween coloring books, headbands, and pencils at the dollar store).

The kids arrived and immediately started playing in our yard. A couple of parents hung out for a bit, and our neighbor brought over some slices of cake for dessert. CG wanted to serve sandwiches for dinner (PB &/or J, or grilled cheese; some kids opted for yogurt and sliced cheese instead). Politica and another parent took the kids to the park while I got the sandwiches and salad, and fruit prepped). The kids had fun decorating pumpkins with the paints and glitter and yarn. After dinner, we got out flashlights--CG insisted that the scavenger hunt have an outdoor, in the dark, component--and the scavenger hunt was a big hit.

Later that night, CG's former teacher called to see how the evening had gone. I loved having a group of kids over, without the added stresses of a birthday party. One friend asked Politica, "Does Curious Girl do this every Saturday?" and yesterday, after soccer, another guest was telling me his ideas for crafts for the next Super Saturday (not sure how well this would go over: the suggestion was to paint rotten baseballs!). CG was just bursting with pride about being a hostess ("I'll go out in the yard with First Arriving Guest, Mama, and then you can meet the other friends and send them back to me." Later on, she jumped up: "Mama, remember I said I'd help you serve water!")

We watched "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!" after dinner (on blankets, with pillows and popcorn), and all in all it was a lovely night. I like being a family of three, but I love having the house full of kids. I am enjoying watching the friendships CG is forming now. But I missed her good friends from Old Hometown: I kept thinking how much fun it would be to have Historian Friend and Friend Who Needs a Pseudonym's kids over. I went to bed feeling both hopeful and nostalgic, thinking about old friends, seeing possibilities for new friends here.

And with a lovely abstractly painted pumpkin on the back porch table.

All hands on deck
I had the chance to meet up with Reverend Dr. Mom and BabyJ and her mother, which was super fun. You can see the hand photo we took on their blogs--proof that my girl is growing big! I can't believe how large her little hand is.

We had coffee and popcorn sitting at an outside cafe, and when a friend of Rev. Dr. Mom's walked by and said hello, we realized that the friend is also a friend of someone I know professionally. Small world. The friend asked us how we all happened to have met, and we all looked at each other, with a "ok, who's got a good story that doesn't involve spilling the beans about our pseudonymous blogs" sort of look. I said, "Oh, we have mutual friends," which is true. Curious Girl and Baby J got on famously--turns out Baby J loves to play peekaboo and clap, and Curious Girl was very encouraging of Baby J's clapping progress.

Moving is pretty disorienting, but a bloggy meet up was another reminder that this new place is a new source of friendships.

We're going to try hosting Super Saturday once a month. Next week, we're having dinner with a friend of Friend Who Needs a Psuedonym. Another friend has proposed that we trade babysitting monthly, so each set of parents can get a date every other month. We're creating new social routines here, and that feels good. The leaves may be falling off the trees, but I'm starting to feel a new beginning here. It's good.

Losing my mind, finding a place

Moving is hard. No matter how much organizing happens while packing, things don't end up in the right places in the new house. The rooms in the new house don't match the rooms in the old house, and we still haven't quite figured out where to put everything. We've made the strategic decision to spend a lot of time out of doors while the weather is good (figuring there's plenty of time to unpack the basement boxes when the weather gets cold). But that means we're living with a level of disorganization in the house that doesn't always feel easy. Politica and I are both coming home from work just bone tired, and that makes it hard to do what needs doing around the house--although I should say that Politica has continued to do a prodigious amount of painting.

************************

Some days, I think that my brain has ended up in a box that we haven't yet unpacked. That's one of the reasons for the bloggy break here: I keep looking at things, thinking "Oh, I could blog about that," and then I can't get the energy to get a thought developed. This too shall pass, yes?

**************************

Things lost, which have to turn up eventually:

• car keys (the second set to each car, packed in a Very Safe Place that is apparently so safe I can't find it to unpack it
  
• a silk screened long sleeved tee I bought Curious Girl at the Gorgeous College Town Farmers' Market, which has to have ended up in some odd place in the house or car
  
• a binder of recipes, which must be in some box in the basement that is not labeled "kitchen" very clearly

Things I miss about my old job:

• office staff. It's taking forever to get the staff search organized here, and there's a heck of a lot I don't know that a good staff person will know (or will know how to find out).
• a hallway full of colleagues. My new space is a little remote, for now.
• good tech support. New U has a somewhat slow process for handling technical questions, although I'm happy to have my new space located right next to the office that handles faculty technology/teaching questions. That will be a great partner for me, and it sure is nice to just bring my laptop over and get help with some things (if not some of the other things the Slow Central IT Office has to handle).
• a computer on my desk. One is coming, but it's not here yet.

Things I like about my new job:

• very cool new renovated space. this is the nicest office I'll ever have, most likely. My chair office had floor-to-ceiling windows on two walls, which was cool, and a stunning view of downtown at night, but this office is all new, freshly painted, with brand new furniture! Very nice.
• recycling. New U is way into environmental issues. We can recycle virtually everything on campus. In fact, here in Germany recycling is mandatory, and the program is so broad and easy. I'm amazed at how much less trash we're producing.
• the view. My office doesn't have a view to speak of, but once I"m outside there are lovely views of lake and mountains.
• the student culture. New U has a much younger student body and they are all busy organizing themselves with lots of public rallies and informational tables and activities. There is something profoundly unnatural about this many same aged people all together, but there's an energy to it that I'm really enjoying.
• Wellness programs. The university wellness programs for staff and faculty are interesting--there's a masseuse who can be scheduled for massages in your office (which you pay for, but sometimes departments schedule her for the day to be available in the building). There's a program that will pay me $15 in credits (at the coop, or a bookstore, or a movie chain) for walking to work or biking to work 3 days a week for 4 weeks. This is a health-minded place.

*********************

I keep thinking to write a post about CG and kindergarten, or the feel of this place, or the feel of the house....but somehow, between the brain-in-the-box and the last stages of unpacking, the prose isn't flowing so well. That will change, too--but apparently, not tonight.

Random Sets of Two, Illustrating that Things are Coming Along, however slowly

• Two ways to tell we are not in Former State anymore: the local NPR station won the "best radio station" vote in the alternative weekly annual "best of..." poll; there was tofu, samosas, and felafel at the local fair (along with various permutations of fried dough that are the same the country over)
• Two things I am happy to have working in the house: the stove and the washer
• Two things we don't yet have: a shower that really works, and a dryer
• Two things I'm happy for: drying clothes in the sun, and gorgeous geography
• Two sports Curious Girl has played at since we've arrived in Germany: triathlon (the course designed in collaboration with our 4, 6, and 7 year old neighbors) and roller blading
• Two things I'm envious of already: the enormous backyard of some friends (who host a Friday night marshmallow roast in the summer, now that their backyard-overlooking-the-quarry has a fire pit and amazing play structure all done); the 1920s era woodwork of other houses.
• Two things I like about our not-full-of-character house: the weird glass enclosed entryway, which is an awesome place to grow plants, and the bathtub in the hall bathroom, which is long enough for me to stretch my legs out in
• Two things I am hoping for: my work brain will re-emerge from whatever box I left it in, and the boxes will somehow get unpacked.
• Two more things I am hoping for: time to write (school will start, which has to improve things), and time/space to cook.
  

Bonus adorableness: CG had a nosebleed around 4:00 this morning, and I sat up with her for about half an hour cleaning it up and helping get it stopped. Once the bleeding slowed, I had her just sit holding a tissue up her nose while we both started to doze a bit. She was muttering to herself, and I asked her what she was saying. "I'm just teaching my tissue a little Russian."

Settling In

• We have arrived in Germany.  Curious Girl refers to all the children on the block as "my friends," even if she's not met them yet.
• Tonight, a family we'd met the previous night on their evening walk stopped by to see if CG could play.  We all walked to the park together for a few minutes of playtime, and the girls were busy making plans for an all-day play date tomorrow.  We parents suggested they enjoy the little play date they were actually having and New Friend turned around and said, "But we just met and when you just meet someone you want to have playdates all the time!"
• We now have rules about the use of an ocarina in the car.
• The previous owners left behind a soccer ball.  CG is way into the soccer ball, and we play soccer multiple times a day.  We have a running game going now where she is the leader of the Red Team, and the Red Team is playing the Yellow Team.  To get her into pjs tonight, I had to ask her, as team leader, to organize everyone getting into sleeping uniforms.  She hopped to it.
• Nothing in this house works right, unless it's been updated by Politica and the crack team of workers she's had at the house.
• Politica totally, completely, utterly rocks.  She has been working long days, overseeing tons of construction, and it looks awesome.  CG's room is a thing of whimsical beauty, the new floors throughout the house are stunning, and her color choices on paint are great.  I can't imagine how she has gotten so much done in so little time.
• After about 5 minutes of driving here in Germany with CG (who had popped into some game with the ocarina, I think playing school so that she could explain what different whistle sounds represented in the school day), Politica looked at me and said, "how did you do that?"  Clearly, we divided tasks well here, as spending three driving days with Little Miss Imagination was no big deal for me (although trust me, I'm happy to be out of the car).
• I need to go unpack some more. 
• It is great to be back with Politica, who totally needs a splendid vacation.

Wonder and Mystery

We're here in Gorgeous College Town. Curious Girl, chatty in the early morning, asks if enchanted is a bad word. No, I say, it means magical, and there could be scary magic or good magic. Oh, she tells me. "I was thinking about The Enchanted Garden and I didn't know what enchanted meant. From the story." Not quite sure what story she was thinking about, but it tickled me that she was laying there pondering vocabulary.

Onto the next subject: weather. "Is it summer here?" Why, yes. "Is it summer everywhere in the world?" No, just in the northern hemisphere. When it's summer here, it's winter in Australia and South Africa and other countries on the bottom part of the globe (with apologies to alternative map makers everywhere, she gets top/bottom better than north/south right now). "But it's summer in Where We Used to Live now." That's right, it's summer everywhere in the United States. "We are still in the United States? We are? Yay!!!!"

And she bounded happily up the stairs to find Historian Friend and kids (who clearly need pseudonyms!). Leaving me to sit here in bed and marvel at how kids make their way through the world so well, when clearly there are so very many ideas that make so little sense to them. I mean, can you imagine getting ready to move and not being sure whether you were switching countries or not (which for CG, is also all about what language people speak, which makes renewed sense of a series of questions about what words people use to say hello in Germany."

The Best Years of Our Lives

Notes from the road, written after our first day (blogger locked me out of the blog last night and I couldn't post these then):

• OK, this was only a day, and it only occasionally felt like a year, but I lost count of how many times Curious Girl and I listened to "The Best Years..." from the Shrek soundtrack. I figured if she was happy, I was happy. And we were both happy. Shrek had some darn fine driving music.
  
• CG does have an ability to entertain herself. We didn't even play music for the first 2 hours of the drive--she was very busy talking to the cats, singing to herself, and doing Important Things on her Dora the Explorer lap desk I found at a used bookstore.
• The trip was really lots of fun, except for the last 20 minutes of whiny wondering if we were at the hotel yet, and the 20 minutes of tears associated with The Tragic Accident of Beloved Baby Blankie. She made a tiny cut in the blanket when she was cutting strips of paper. I think it's repairable.
• CG gave the cats awards (foam stickers on their cat carriers) because they were so good in the car. She also made up a game involving stickers and points for spotting cars ("Mama! look on the other side of the road. There are a lot of cars there. I know you can find a red one. You can!"). Keeping track of my points, stickers, and eligibility for prizes she was designing took up a lot of time back there in the rear of the car.
• Really, it was the valium. I shudder to think what the drive would be like without the cats on valium. The cats are now taking up most of the king-sized bed in our hotel room (this sociability also due to the 1/2 dose of valium I gave them earlier this evening).
• I had to adjudicate one argument between Curious Girl and Baby Sis, but eventually, Baby Sis helped CG with her coloring homework and all was fine. At the hotel, I met Belle in the elevator, and we magically got transported to Belle's castle to sleep. CG never goes anywhere without imagination.
• We went swimming in the hotel pool when we got here. There was a little girl watching us swim, and she exclaimed to CG, "You are a beautiful mermaid! I know you are! You're a mermaid!" CG is quite delightful in water, it is true.
• We at lunch at the Restaurant of Ronald McD. I told CG she designate one day of our trip for such a meal, and she was pretty darn happy about it. (me, I realized that eating a fil3t o' f!sh sandwich once every 20 years is too frequent.) But for dinner, she picked Japanese, and we had sushi and udon soup.
• All our stuff is on the truck. Actually two trucks, as the ridiculously large truck the movers brought didn't hold all our stuff. And this after we have downsized! Ridiculous.
• Younger cat is seriously picking on Elder (Very Aged) Cat. That is no fun.
  
• At the dinner restaurant, there was a fountain. CG wanted a penny, but all I had were quarters, and I didn't want to sacrifice quarters for the fountain. "Have an imaginary penny," I said. She demurred, and I sadly thought that reality was crashing her fantasy world. "I can throw it?" she asked, though, reconsidering. "Imaginary pennies can make real wishes. Take this imaginary penny and throw it." Off she went, and came back somewhat outraged: "I made a wish and it didn't come!" What had she wished for? "I wished for Mommy to be here, and she didn't come!" I said wishes don't always come true right away, but we'll see Mommy soon. Just a few more days.

Now I'm visiting friends, and will take the weekend to relax and let CG get some energy out (while Politica toils on the new house, which is getting our stuff delivered in the morning. yikes!)

Randomness

• 45 boxes of books have the movers thinking our shipment will be overweight
• Overhead last night: "If you put your finger up your nose, you have to wash your hands before you touch the baby."
• Also overheard last night: "I think it will be fun to meet new people."
• The driver told me that reverends have the most books of anyone he moves. Reverends also have the lousiest furniture, he says, but that's OK because they don't seem to care about their furniture. But they do love their books. Songbird and Rev. Dr. Mom, any comments on that score?
• Curious Girl is registered for kindergarten. Her teacher's name is kind of fancy. And our new street address is on Ornamental Tree Variety Terrace. When I told her the teacher's name, she said, "Oooh, fancy! I guess Germany likes fancy words. Maybe Fancy Nancy lives there."
  
• I have about 60 thank you notes to write, which are clearly not getting written before I move.
• I just drafted the last report I need to write.
• The house looks a lot bigger with stuff moving out. As the movers take things, I'm discovering little chocolate easter eggs. A colleage had given me a bag for Curious Girl, and she found them and organized an easter egg hunt the other morning. We repeatedly divided them, hid them, and then searched for each others' eggs. Except she kept forgetting how many she had hid. Which is handy, because I'm a little hungry.
• Curious Girl and Neighbor Girl have opened a lemonade stand. Lemonade is free to movers, but they wanted $10 from me. I gave them .30 each, and they said OK. CG has been dying to have a lemonade stand, so I'm glad she's having one today.
  
• I'm having dinner with Mississippi Friend and Curly Haired Cousin tonight. I don't want to say good bye. I have really, really good friends here, and I am really, really going to miss them. I wish I could be more eloquent on this point, but I can't. This part sucks. At least we get to visit Historian Friend on the way to Germany (she's usually here, but is somewhere on the way, with her kids. Yay!)
  
• But I do want to get on with all this. At breakfast, CG said, "Yay! we're moving tomorrow!" It feels good, now, just to be getting on with it.
• Politica and contractors are making great strides on the house, which is getting nicer by the hour. I'm very proud of Politica for handling the house on her own.
• Let's hope valium-laced kitties are happy travelers.
• Elswhere is moving now, too. Let's hope we all have good moving karma.
  

The Updates, they keep coming

• Lists suit me at times like this
• I can't tell you how relieved I am--and how comforted I am--to read the comments on my posts commenting on my own reactions to family events of late. Working out my guilty feelings about considering what I need to do for work and the move and considering the logistics of parental visits isn't easy, and it helps to read your reactions here.
• One of my colleagues said, upon hearing about the surgery, "what are you doing here?" and that probably helped kick my guilty feelings into overdrive for a while.
  
• We are still negotiating on House #2. We asked the seller to address 7 factors (a few relatively clear cut and likely not too expensive, like fixing the garbage disposal and getting the kitchen drain to work, but some others a little bigger, like properly grounding the house's electrical system and fixing the windows that are cracked, inoperable, or have lost their seal). The seller wanted to get estimates on the latter factors, and will have her response figured out by tonight. So Monday, all should be clear Her realtor told our realtor that we would likely be happy with the seller's response. She's already agreed to do the small things, and if she meets us in the middle on everything else, we're happy. In fact, even if she refused everything else we'll probably go ahead.
• I like that I have a good realtor, dealing with another realtor, and a reasonable seller. House #1 sure was nice, but dealing with high maintenance FSBO sellers is stressful.
• We had dinner last night with Historian Friend and her family. One of Curious Girl's latest stress relievers is to say that she is not moving, that she is going to live with Historian Friend (who she has taken to calling Mom, or Historian Mom). Over the past two years CG has gradually been asserting that she is Historian Kid's Big Sister, but this move to identify with a whole 'nother family sure is interesting. "When you move to Germany, tell my school that Curious Girl doesn't live here anymore. Tell them she moved to another family. But we'll come visit you every day!" she said.
• Well, CG is up, so time to spring into breakfast/mothering action. Happy Sunday, all!
  

Inspection

A little house news: the inspection happened today, and we've gotten the summary by e-mail. It's a little discouraging, although I'm hoping that we'll rebound, as this house was feeling increasingly right for us. But the inspection report reminds us of all the reasons why Politica thought we'd never love th house: there are various hinges not working right, there are cracked windows, there are some rotting clapboards around the house, there are windows that don't open, and various other signs of a house that was not built incredibly sturdily in the first place and that hasn't been particularly well-maintained. We already knew we'd start redoing the bathrooms and kitchen appliances and flooring. The inspection report reveals problems with electricity (the biggest issue is that the main fuse box isn't properly grounded), and a host of various other problems that will take time and money to fix. Sigh.

We'll be working on our response to the inspection later--hard to know what the seller's going to want to do, but we'll find out.

Next, the appraisal. Still waiting on that.

We have an agreement

to buy this house for 323,950. Almost halfway between what we offered and the list price. Next up: inspection and appraisal. We're not celebrating until we get through those steps, as we are still recovering from the premature happies on the last house. Not to mention the fact that we're regretting having sold the couch that couldn't fit in The House That Got Away. It would have fit in this one.

On the bright side, we have furniture coming our way, courtesy of the storage facility currently holding a lot of my father-in-law's furniture.

Not so bad.

And I got some writing done today, on a piece I've been putting off for far too long. I really like writing, and it's good to remember that.

Maybe I Should Just Start Twittering

I don't know whether it's pathetic to feel like live blogging our negotiations, but here it is: the house lists at 329,900. We offered 315,000 earlier today, and the seller has responded with 325,900 and the news that she's replacing a shower head (whee!). We're countering at 320,000, and will get the disclosure info on the property tomorrow. I wish the seller had come down a little more (can't we get a break in this overall crappy housing market, which is clearly crappier here than in Germany?), but still, a promising enough beginning.

And on the "it can't possibly hurt, can it?" front, when people in my knitting group told me that I should bury a St. Joseph statue in the back yard because it would speed my house sale, I laughed, and then said, "well, why not?" One of my knitting friends brought me by a statue. Curious Girl looked at it and said, "please help our house sell, thank you" and put him upside down facing out in the rear vegetable garden. My mother is praying to St. Jude on our behalf.

Time to Update the Real Estate Scorecard

Because I know you're all on the edges of your keyboards wondering what's happened, and because Politica and I truly appreciate all the comments on our housing posts so far--both the kind wishes for good decisions and the comments about your own housing choices and energy costs and whatnot--here's an update on where we are:

• Before Politica left Germany on Friday, our realtor called around to our top choices to feel them out with verbal offers (since it was all verbal, we could essentially talk to everyone). So we leared a lot.
• The realtor/owner of the 6 bedroom, asbestos-in-basement, high energy bill house was not willing to consider our offer. Tom is quite right that there might be other ways to reduce energy than by replacing all the windows (starting with turning down the thermostat!) but we were unwilling to pay top price for that house, given that the energy situation seemed like an unpredictable cost, at the very least.
• The owners of the most expensive house were willing to deal with us. We had made them an offer of $30K below asking price, at a figure that was our very top mortgage figure (in a budget that still included quite a bit of monthly savings for travel, entertainment, and some other discretionary spending, as well as the indefinite carrying of our current mortgage). We found out yesterday morning that they countered with a price $5K higher than what we offered and a closing date of a week earlier (which would increase our closing costs with added interest).
• So yesterday we spent a few hours trying to figure out what our reaction to this counter offer was. We had mixed feelings, and finally decided that our mixed feelings meant that this wasn't the right house for us. A couple of factors: this house is 3600 square feet, and that just felt too big for us. It's 3600 energy efficient square feet, but still, that's a big, big house. It's on a major-ish road, set back up off the road, and it consequently doesn't feel like it's really in a neighborhood. It's a gorgeous, showpiece house, but it just feels like not quite the right house for us right now. I'd love to have its kitchen, but taking on an enormous backyard (of the sort that might well lead me to higher a gardener for the first time in my life), and a maximum mortgage, for a house that is on a road big enough that CG wouldn't really be able to ride her bike around in the immediate neighborhood just didn't feel right. When we thought "What happens if someone else buys that house?" we both felt a sense of relief, even if it also felt kind of exciting to picture ourselves in the showpiece.
• So we've reframed the not-expensive house in the neighborhood that I had originally wanted to live in. True, Politica had said that we'd never love the house. It's a 1968 construction with cheap pine doors and not a lot of built-in character. And we think that there are likely to be some inspection issues to deal with. But the house is on a quiet street, just a house away from a walkway into a city park with tennis courts and playground; it's quite near 3 families with kids who we already count as friends from the visits and playdates over the course of the past year; it's walking distance to the elementary school we feel really good about; it's only 2 miles to our campus, so I could ride my bike sometimes (once I get my quads in shape for that hill!) or take the city bus. It's a little far for walking (at least for a working parent who has to get a kid to/from school and wants a regular-sized workday in between) but it will require far less driving than the suburbs will.
• This house is in the school area we most wanted to be in. We've toured 3 elementary schools, and while it's probably true that CG would do just fine in any of them, we had really positive reactions to one of them, and less positive to the others. They all use a responsive classroom model, but the one building just seemed so full of kid-centered, warm adults. The suburban school that everyone raves about (including people whose judgement we otherwise trust) struck us as too quiet. I liked its open physical spaces and the art/music programs, but the classrooms seemed too full of desks and not enough open space (especially for the K-3 rooms), and if CG turns out to need a lot of special ed services, we might well move there later. But it just didn't sing to me, and neither did the school in the walk-to-campus neighborhood, which cites student privacy as a reason why visitors can't see classrooms with kids in them. The work on the walls seemed cool, but I was left with a "well, this might work" feeling.
• All that said, we're not considering this one over until it's over, and the written offer has yet to emerge. Our realtor should be writing it up today.
• This house may not be the house of our dreams, but it's good enough. It's cheap enough, relatively speaking, that at some future point we could buy another house in our neighborhood and move--we won't be so extended with this mortage that we can't consider moving for a while. It's in a kid-filled neighborhood with built-in friends for us and CG. It's in the school area we feel drawn to. Looking narrowly at the house, this property is the least interesting of this current group. But looking at the house in its neighborhood context, it's a property that offers us the kind of life we hoped to get in Germany. It's a little dark, but paint and new flooring can make a big difference there, and we would have both a sunroom on the second floor and a Florida room on the first, and there's a playset in the yard for CG.
  
• So I hope it works. Making this offer just feels like a me-and-Politica kind of decision in a way that the showpiece house didn't. It's financially conservative and attentive to the neighbhorhood's social ties and CG's school. And that just feels right today.
  

German Houses, Round 3

ETA some significant potential negatives I neglected in last night's fatigue. AmFam, I'll try add a few photos into this post later today so you can see a bit of what we like.:

A disappointing turn in our house-hunting: the house we'd found appraised for way under the asking price, so we're back to looking for a place to live in Germany-the-pseudonymous. Politica has been househunting this week, and the options are:

• a very expensive house in one of the best of Germany's neighborhoods. Very large (over 3000 sq ft.! more house than we need), but just beautiful, with a huge yard. Good things: lots of space, lots of light, lots of public and useable space on the first floor, all new windows, lovely kitchen, we could walk to work and walk to CG's school. Bad things: it's expensive, we're not sure we can get it for what we can offer, and it might require a gardener for the backyard. So some house maintenance costs might be in a higher bracket than we're used to. Price note: this house is expensive, but it's huge, and in terms of price-per-square foot, it's actually the second cheapest.
  
• a not-quite-so-expensive house in a very good German neighborhood, same school area as the expensive house. Large house with 6 bedrooms (more than we need, but 2 are in the attic and we could just close that part of the house off or use it for storage). Good things: Politica just likes this house, it seems to call to her. Walkable to our work and CG's school. bad things: asbestos in basement, it's overpriced (one of the most expensive houses per square foot even if we make a low offer). What I forgot to mention in the first version of this post: this house has a lot of windows, and they're all old. The current owner spent $6000 on gas last year, and her reported electriciy bills are way higher than the other houses we're looking at. Replacing all the windows in this house would be a significant expense. Plus it's on a busy-ish corner.
  
• a not-expensive house in the neighborhood we originally wanted, in our top choice elementary school area. Good things: location (right across from a walkway to a park, in the elementary school area we wanted originally). bad things: we are never going to love this house, and it's likely to have inspection issues. It doesn't seem well-built or well-maintained. but it's $100,000(or more) less than the other two houses.
• a modern house in the suburbs. Good things: excellent value (the best value-for-price of all the houses Politica saw--way cheapest per square foot), lots of public living spaces, great master bath soaking tub, protected land behind the house. Bad things: suburban living (with apologies to suburban readers!): no sidewalks, need to drive everywhere, and just not what we envisioned when we thought of moving to Germany.

So wish us good deciding, please. Good house-selecting vibes gratefully accepted.

So Far, So Good

Despite some despair on Thursday and Friday, it looks like things are working out with the house we want. We're paying a little more than we'd hoped (but within our budget), and we still have to do the inspection, appraisal, and close on the mortgage, not to mention the house. But we've agreed to the sellers' counteroffer, and that feels good. Mississippi Friend would say, "Don't put your mouth on it," and she'd be right. So I'm going with so far, so good.

Houses, Again

• We are in the midst of making an offer on a house, in the city neighborhood we want.
• It's a FSBO, not yet listed anywhere, but our realtor walked through it this morning and says it's pretty much got everything we want. We've seen his photos and the photos the seller prepared, and Politica has driven the block the house is on. So we're going to make an offer.
• Our realtor called the sellers this evening to find out a fact he needs to fill in on the offer, which is offering them full price. The only thing we're asking them for is half the closing costs (although I don't know they know that yet). The seller said that they would want two weeks to respond to the offer, so they can list it on the FSBO site on the weekend.
• We are now feeling cranky about the sellers. I understand that sellers want to maximize the price they can get for a property, and I realize that the first people to see a house and make an offer might make the seller think, "oh, I could have gotten more." But it seems quite greedy to simply want to take time to see if a bidding war will ensue.
• Our offer will give them until Friday. I hope it works out. This house feels like a very us house. I'll get to see it, I hope, next week, if things seem to be working. We've moved up quite a bit in the price range we decided to consider, but I'm not sure I want to move up higher.
  
• In any event, thanks for all the house comments. Politica and I talk about these things endlessly, and it's nice to have you all listening and commenting. I'd happily throw an ice cream social for all of you, were you all here, rather than in the computer. (but hey, poke pro could take care of that!)
  

German Houses Redux

Trying to move long distance is not a lot of fun. I'm expecting Politica home from a house-hunting trip any minute now. I haven't gotten the full scoop yet, but so far we have learned that I'm drawn to green spaces and she's drawn to more of a city neighborhood feel. That's OK: I rather like the city neighborhood she likes, too. Too bad we can't seem to find the right house. (Note to Universe: you could send a house anytime now. We'd be very grateful.)

At the moment, the options seem to be:

• move to small suburb, which is very small, and very homogenous, both in terms of income and race, and have a short commute on a not-so-interesting road. The upside? A neighborhood full of kids, with reasonably spacious houses that are new enough to have modern conveniences like large closets and family rooms but old enough to be reasonably well constructed. Reasonable size backyards.
  
• move to Germany (the pseudonymous one, which really needs a new pseudonym, but it so cracks me up to hear CG still making this confusion that I'm having trouble coming up with a better one), which is pretty diverse in terms of income, not so much in terms of race. The downside? so far, very hard to find a house we like.
• rent, but finding a rental actually doesn't seem easier (although I've not yet tried very hard).

So far, Politica has seen two houses she's enthusiastic about: The One That Turned Out Not To Be For Sale, and The One That's Listed for $119,000 more than We Hoped To Spend. Then there's the bad floor plan on the busy road, the OK house right next to a crisis pregnancy center/transisional housing/rehab center, the perfectly functional and modern house in the suburbs, The Hobbit House in the suburb's little center....this is very frustrating, and I beg your pardon and indulgence for whining about it here. It's a mysterious housing market--the neighborhood we really want to move to seems to be FSBO central in which houses get snapped up almost immediately, and houses are for sale without really being listed (Politica saw two or three houses that she just heard about from someone while she was visiting around). Sigh. This too shall pass, right? People do manage long-distance moves all the time. But still, sigh.

Getting Used to Leaving

My department surprised me last week: at our student honors ceremony, I got flowers, and four of my colleagues--an associate chair, my two predecessors as chair, and one of the writing program administrators--made amazingly beautiful remarks. "It's better than retiring," one of my colleagues noted later. "When you retire, no one who preceded you is around to speak." It was interesting--and so moving--to hear what people said. My predecessors, Long Serving Chair (who hired me), said that I'm really organized, not simply because I need to be or like to be, but because I can see into the future of situations and I use organization to present that vision to others. Shorter Serving Chair (the chair when I got tenure) also spoke about my organization, and about his memories of the dinner we had during my campus interview. He said he was proud of the work he'd done helping to hire Politica and me back from Big Sky State U, and that while he knew at the time that we were meant to be at current U, he was now forced to see that New U is the right place for us (and Curious Girl). My writing program colleague joked that she'd taught me to say no, and I'd taught her to delegate, so we were a great team. She'll miss me as a colleague in writing but also as a friend, and talked about how special it is that she plays a wonderful role in CG's life (CG calls her Tante Colleague, and she's really like another grandparent to CG). Our associate chair said that I'm a good chair because I work hard, dream big, and support other people in achieving their dreams.

I was pretty speechless--we're having a department party after the semester ends, and I had planned to have something to say there, and I had remarks ready for our last department meeting. But after all that, mostly, all I could say was "you're welcome" in response to that big departmental "thank you."

Politica laughed when I came home and told her about it, laughing mostly about the being organized part. "I am organized! I just use those powers at school more than home," I insisted. The fact that I have somehow lost my parking permit twice this year is no reflection on my organization.

I was touched that so many of my colleagues mentioned CG in their remarks. My department has been a very family-friendly workplace, and I'll miss having colleagues who've been so interested in my kid. I'm going to miss having colleagues who have known me so long. I know I'll build good new relationships at New U, but I'm realizing just how much I'm going to miss, moving from the place where most of my career has taken place.

I feel a little freer now, though. This surprise helped me move into leaving, really leaving. I'm having secret transition meetings with my yet-unannounced successor. Earlier in the semester I was feeling a little badly that a few key projects aren't finished yet, but today I realized that it's OK. It's not the chair's job to finish everything. These projects--like a promotion and tenure criteria document--belong to the department, not to any single chair, and in the life cycle of a department, some things need to move from spring to fall. I'm leaving various projects in various stages, and that's OK. It's a sign of a healthy department (or so I tell myself), that we have ongoing business. The department is going to be fine. And I'm feeling fine now, too, fine to be leaving. It's been hard this year, knowing all year that I was going to be leaving. I had a verbal job offer from New U in June 2007. That's an unusually long time for an academic position to be open and waiting. I've been making plans for the new job while doing the current job. Things are tipping now, slowly, towards the new job. Somehow, the ceremonial surprise helped free me up for that. And that may be the most moving thing of all about it.

Given all the emphasis on my organization, I tidied up my bookshelves and cleared the top of my desk off. I know my colleagues weren't speaking about organization only in terms of office tidiness (in fact, I doubt they were thinking of that at all, given I have had a slew of Politica's things in my office this year and a growing collection of empty boxes making a grand mess). Still, it seemed like my office should reflect the department's description of me. I wonder what my new office style will communicate to my new colleagues. But that's a post for another day...

German Houses

Curious Girl continues to confuse Germany (the real thing) with Germany (the place we're moving, where we are right now, looking for houses and me doing some preliminary set up for next year). "Can we go to the Hello Kitty street?" she asked last night as we drove home from dinner. The Hello Kitty street is in Berlin, near the Hackesche Markt: there's a Hello Kitty store near by, with a sign on a lamppost close to the train station. We used that sign to guide us down the street to the apartment we rented for a week last summer.

We are also house hunting. We know what neighborhood we want to live in, but there aren't any houses for sale there. Well, there are two for sale, but one is on a majorly busy street and the other just doesn't have the kind of layout we want. So we can't decide whether to wait and see whether more houses come on the market in this neighborhood, or whether to set our sights on another neighborhood.

So we've been looking in other neighborhoods, trying to decide whether we should live someplace more suburban (where the housing is much cheaper), whether we should live in a cute small town 15-20 minutes away from the campus we'll be working at (and whether we should live in the suburban part of said cute town, or in the center, in a smaller house that's walking distance to the center of small cute town). Or would it be better to be closer to the area's Distinguishing Geographic Characteristic? Or to have a view of that Characteristic?

Germany isn't the most diverse spot in the US, but the cute small town is less diverse than the not-so-diverse-and-way-more-expensive city. Tough choices.

Maybe this means we've just not yet found the right house. And we're definitely overthinking this all. I hope some clarity will emerge when we sleep on it.

Germany

So here's what I haven't been blogging about for the past few months: we're moving. New jobs, new house, new part of the country. A couple of my colleagues read this sometimes, so I didn't want to spill the beans here before things went public at work.

We're moving.

I'm still trying to get my head around this, despite the fact that I've known since June that things were likely going to shape up this way. June is a funny time for an academic interview, but for a variety of reasons I can't explain on a (presumably) pseudonymous blog, we ended up with some off-cycle interviews, and amazingly, have managed, again, to end up with a pair of tenure-line job offers. A pair of tenured job offers, in fact.

So, we're moving, and I'm a lame-duck department chair, which is an interesting role. Last year at this time, I was going through my first round of performance reviews with my large (60+) department, and it felt like the first in a long series. I approached the reviews with the sense that I was going to be the chair who'd shepherd the assistant professors through tenure, who'd (hopefully) coach a few associate professors through their second promotion. Now, we all know I"m leaving, so that throws my role into some confusion.

I get reviewed by the other full professors in the department. One of them asked me last week, Why do we review you? If you view performance reviews as supervision, it doesn't make sense. But if you view performance reviews as a way of gauging how individual work helps add up to the department's collective work, it does make sense. This is the most cat-herding part of the year, because some people welcome the performance review, some are constitutionally opposed to them, and some just don't give a fig either way. So I write my reviews partly with an eye on the colleague's attitude toward it all, partly with an eye on their career trajectory. I'll still meet with everyone to talk about their reviews--after all, their career paths don't stop for a year just because the department chair is changing.

*******************************

Why Germany in the title of the post? I need to think of a pseudonym for New Hometown, but for today, it's Germany. We visited Germany--the real Germany--last summer, and one of the cities we saw in Germany has a name that, if you are a small child and transpose sounds and then change a few sounds and rhyme them, sounds a little like New Hometown. It took me several months to figure this out, as it explains Curious Girl's questions like "Do they speak English in New Hometown?" "What if I go to school and I can't understand the people?"

********************************

We're downsizing. It's likely we'll end up in a smaller house than the one we have now, and I figure that's only a problem if you try to have stuff that exceeds the function of the smaller house. So I'm sorting through things. I just found library bookmarks from my hometown library that I probably got in 7th grade. I cleaned out a jewelry box and found the gold honors medal I got for graduating 8th grade. Actually, I didn't get it at my 8th grade graduation. I had the top grades in my class, as I recall, and thus qualified for a $300 scholarship for high school. But because I had won a scholarship from another source, the school didn't give me the $300 scholarship. They gave it to the next kid down. I didn't mind that so much, but I did mind that I left graduation without so much as a card or certificate or little medal that went with the award. I stewed about that for months, and finally my parents said, "Well, write to the principal." So I did, and she came to the house after dinner one night, apologized, and gave me this little medal. I didn't throw out the medal, but I think I might. I can't figure out a good decision rule about memorabilia. I don't want to erase my past, but I'm not sure the 8th grade medals need to come to Germany. (That said, another thing I have to decide about is the box of little medals and pins that my favorite uncle--now deceased--did save from his high school and college. I'm not sure what to do about those.)

But I was rather pleased to unearth my "Books, like friends, should be well-chosen" bookmark. I loved my hometown library.

Wish me decluttering strength, please.