Book Review

I'm trying to write a book review, and I'm not doing all that well. I liked the book, mostly, but there are all these things I feel like the author should have addressed, and didn't, and I'm not sure how to really address that in a review. I know that I really need to reserve judgment and just say what the book does-- I need to remember that this isn't an analysis paper, it's a review. It doesn't help that I'm distracted by the joys of moving. I think we've found a new place to live, so that's good, but until I see signatures on a piece of paper, I'm not counting on anything.

Crazy Two Weeks

This has been the craziest 2 weeks ever. We sold the house, we surprise, surprise, actually found a different house that we want to live in, made an offer and got accepted-- so life has been a whirlwind of paperwork and phone calls between the agents and the mortgage lenders and the inspectors. Not to mention the chaos of regular life-- trying to spend a good amount of time at the Writing Center, teaching, grading papers, trying to work on my dissertation, and get my book review turned in on time. Oh, and I have 2 weeks to pack up all our stuff and get out of this house and try to keep my daughter from freaking out about all the boxes.

I love my life-- and I feel blessed beyond belief that these are the "problems" I have and not things that are oh so much more serious-- but I'm still looking forward to the non-traditional chaos settling down, some.

Olive Oil

Today I want to express my appreciation of olive oil. It is truly amazing all of the things you can do with this food product. Most people use it for cooking. I've also used it to ward off ear infections, but today I discovered the most useful at the moment use for olive oil-- removing oil based paint. One might ask why I needed to make this great discovery?

When we decided to put our house up for sale, our agent recommended that we paint the garage door-- so my husband sanded it down, primed it, and went to clean up to paint the door-- what we both learned that night was that he bought oil based primer-- and that oil based paint can quickly stain a nice white washtub-- so that night we got out the gasoline and cleaned up our big mess. 5 months go by-- we've now sold our house and we have to get rid of paint so that we can move-- You can't throw away liquid paint-- you have to dry it out-- well, we don't have that much oil paint left, so we poor it on some old cardboard in the garage with hopes that it will dry. So, this afternoon was a beautiful day and I ask my daughter if she wants to play outside-- I open the garage door and she immediately runs in, slips on the not dry paint and proceeds to get paint everywhere-- Well, unlike my husband's hands and my laundry room tub-- I am not willing to bathe my baby in gas-- so out come the holistic treatments. For the record-- olive oil and salt work amazingly well at getting oil based paint off of skin-- It gets it off of denim ok too, but cotton, not so much.

So much for getting any work done today.

Maybe a sold house

I write more mental blog posts than physical ones-- that's not a good way to keep a blog-- much harder to keep track of.

I think we might have sold our house-- which will be cool if it happens, but i'm not overly confident at the moment. We went to Ohio this weekend to visit my sister and her family-- a much needed trip-- and our realtor called us with an offer, that we accepted over the phone-- but then the buyer was having financing issues. So, now it seems like he's coughed up the cash, but we have another couple potentially interested in the house, and since we haven't signed any paperwork yet, we could in theory accept a different offer. It's weird-- I was so excited it was all going to happen, and now I realize how much work it all will be that I'm a little hesitant to believe that it might actually be sold.