Greetings from the Land of Boxes, or Mrs. Schroedinger's Stuff

Sorry for the silence. Rumors of our thingumywhatsit have been exaggerated. We been a bit busy.

So, where was I?

Right. Offer on house made and accepted. Since then, we've had the place inspected, and the inspection report came back satisfactory (quite). We asked for a couple of corrections on the house, and the seller went along with those. Appraisal has been done and the bank appears happy with it. The house is no longer listed on MLS even as pending inspection; MLS thinks it's already sold. (!)

Now is the time of dark sorceries and veiled incunabula: rate lock, good faith estimate, loan processing, underwriting, escrow...it's all one big black box mystery to me, but it seems to be chugging along. Successive magisters of numismatic and fiduciary arts get our various bits of paper, ask for new ones, or more of the old ones, and mutter their incantations over them. Nobody has asked us to kill a black cockerel yet, but I won't be surprised if they do.

We've given notice on the apartment. We've scheduled movers. We're investigating getting a gas line pulled to the house so that when we replace existing appliances we can go to gas. (Wants a gas stove, she does.) Just today I put in the request to initiate electrical service. It seems very much as if this is actually going to happen. I am caught in a weird superposition / phase space between disbelief, terror, and complacency.

And now my life is boxes. Boxes, boxes, boxes. Boxes at work for the building move. Boxes at home to pack stuff into. Boxes in the car to go to storage, or coming home from various kind friends providing spares. But what I really want to know is, once your life is in boxes, can you know whether you have a life at all without opening a box?

Note to self: Do not pack cat.

Weird Old World, part the next

When Hal dropped me off this morning there were several large trucks at the flagpole blocking bus traffic, surrounded by clusters of busy, clean-limbed youths of all genders. The trucks were blazoned with things like "University of Western Kentucky College of Engineering Team" on the sides of them. And the clean-limbed youths were carrying canoes. Concrete canoes.

Yes, it seems that the UW is playing host to the American Society of Civil Engineers' 20th Annual National Concrete Canoe Competition" this year.

Celebrating twenty years of concrete fun. Because abstract fun is so much harder to appreciate.