A Million Little Pieces Of My Mind

Those of us who are aware of the changes the New Age brings us have already noted extreme alterations in our feelings, habits, and lifestyles. Of course, all these things happen in the course of things anyway; but in this time they are happening at an accelerated and exaggerated pace. As a practical example, there's Our New House.

I never expected to own a home. I've never really believed in "home ownership" anyway. After all, the bank or mortgage company owns it, not me; and if the city or state decides to put in an airport, widen the highway or open a shopping mall where the house is located, it's gone. Besides, historically I've moved to another city every few years. So why bother to "own" a house when renting is so much easier? With a rental you don't have to worry about repairs or maintenance and if the place gets really dirty you can move instead of cleaning it.

Besides, I've never made an effort to develop good credit. I don't even possess a credit card. I've always felt safe from identity theft, because I pitied the fool who stole my identity. So, I figured, I would never qualify for a mortgage and didn't bother trying to get one.

But then my daughter Jenny decided to plant some trees.

For the past four years, my husband Michael and I have rented a house from our best friends, Barbara and Peter. Our friends had bought the place in East Mesa without considering how long their commute into town would be. They then bought an in-town condo but wanted to keep the Mesa house for their retirement or maybe sooner. But they didn't want to rent it to strangers. So they rented it to us (although it's hard to imagine anyone stranger than we are). Through the past four years, the characters with whom we've shared the house have changed: three of my daughters, our grandson, my son, his fiancée, my ex-wife, three dogs and two cats have, at various times, lived there. At the beginning of August, it was Michael and me, Jenny and her son Zach, and my son John and his fiancée Rachel.

The first week of August—the 8th, to be specific—Jenny asked about planting trees in the back yard. The yard had never been landscaped and I had gotten used to it's being barren; but apparently it had increasingly bothered Jenny until she just couldn't stand it anymore. Still, I pointed out that we were renting and it never pays to make "improvements" to a rental. The cost isn't likely to be worth the short-lived enjoyment, and the landlord usually takes it out (sometimes at my expense) when I move, anyway. So I recommended against it.

When I got back home from that weekend's adventure, there were trees planted in the back yard.

Which Barbara soon heard about, and was dismayed because she hadn't been consulted in what was a change to her property, as one might expect. Jenny would have to remove the trees.

However, this brought into focus for Jennifer that what she really wanted was a house of her own, or at least more her own than a simple rental could be, even when rented from friends.

Now, at this point I want to make an apparent change of subject, even though it really isn't.

Despite my interest in 2012 and the predicted changes leading to the New Age, I don't really keep up with the literature on the subject. One of the realization of the New Age is that we don't need the guidance of others; we can feel everything we need to know in our own hearts. However, that doesn't mean that we will bother to access all knowledge. We are apt to miss things here and there, especially things of which we were so unaware as to not think of wondering about.

And so I was unaware of the buzz in the New Age community regarding the enhanced magic of certain calendar dates, especially in this year with its proximity to 2012 and Earth's alignment with the Galactic Equator.

Specifically, August 8th—that is, 8/8 in the Western calendar—brought about an energy focus that resulted in many people re-examining what they want their lives and spaces to look like, at least in areas that are home to the Western culture that uses that calendar. Think about it: Did you come to any conclusions around that time that resulted in big changes you are now experiencing?

In our case, that was the very day Jenny planted her trees, an act of trying to personalize her environment that eventually resulted in much more than she (or any of us) expected.

Okay, so back to the main story. Jenny asked me what I thought about buying a house, and I gave her my logic as presented at the beginning of this essay. She asked if I minded if she investigated the possibility of my buying a home, and I gave permission, certain that she would find I couldn't but also certain that knowledge is always worth enhancing.

By the end of that week, Jenny had discovered that I was qualified to get a mortgage; she had located a lender, and also a "buyer's agent" which is like a real estate agent except he or she works on behalf of the buyer (us) rather than the seller; and he or she is not paid a commission and so does not benefit from jacking up the price.

By the end of the next week, we had looked at two homes, both within a mile of our current home so that Zach would not have to change schools or friends; both larger than our somewhat cramped current quarters. (The house is lovely but not really intended for five adults and a kid.)

We made an offer on the first house. We were told by our agent, Julie Rogers, to expect a reply within 48 hours. We never got one. Julie's explained that the owners were, themselves, real estate agents and possibly not really serious about selling the house, just testing the waters so to speak.

That first house "showed" better than the second. The second, on E Natal Avenue, was actually better suited to us in terms of layout, but was dirty and had been painted weird colors that seemed to come from the "Mismatch Paint—No Returns!" shelf at Home Depot.

But with the first house out of the picture, we made an offer on the Natal house.

That, too, took longer than 48 hours and there was another story. The family who had owned it had been transferred to another town, and their company had taken over selling the house because prices had dropped so much that the family couldn't move unless their employer subsidized the sale so they wouldn't lose so much. The company wanted to sell it, but several people had to sign off and at any given time, one was sick, two were on vacation, and the fourth was being sued.

But by August 29, our offer was officially accepted.

Meanwhile, in the New Age world, the next magic date was 9/9/09, a time of both completion and new beginnings. Considering that the street name, "Natal", means "new beginning" it should come as no surprise that it was on September 9 that our lender, Jody Davis, came over with a mound of loan papers to sign. Our hunt for and offer on the home was completed; putting through the paperwork for the mortgage was the beginning both of the next step to home buying and the 30 years of payments I was agreeing to make.

Jody told us that the latest it would take to complete the VA loan would be Oct. 6, but that it could happen sooner. Julie didn't expect it to be sooner, and thought it might be later. Jenny, Michael and I hoped it would be sooner, and began packing. Soon the house was a maze of boxes. We couldn't find anything, and began taking more and more of our meals out. The dogs entered a state of depression; they couldn't find their favorite spots to lie down. One of the cats hid so well we didn't see her for days; the other was often narrowly rescued from a deep nap inside a box about to be sealed.

The new house was missing refrigerator, washer and drier. I bought all three from CraigsList ads.

One of the New Age blogs described what to expect during this time:

For the most part this amounted to a month of mania…infrequent bouts of bliss coupled with prolonged bouts of crying, raging, fear, anxiety, boredom, restriction, poverty, sickness, insomnia and of course, my favorite…relentless fatigue.

Well, obviously that couldn't be a more precise description of what we, ourselves, were experiencing!

We entered the month of October. I was sure the closing would occur on Friday, the 2nd, but it didn't. So then I was convinced it would be Monday, the 5th, and scheduled my appointments accordingly. I needn't have bothered. The "absolute last date" of the 6th came and went. Michael was anxious to hire movers, but I couldn't tell them what date to come, and they required a number of boxes in order to give a meaningful estimate, and every hour someone would find more stuff and our number of boxes would grow by 1.

Finally, on Wednesday the 7th, I was called in to sign the closing papers. However, that did not get us the keys to the house; the title company first needed to receive the actual wired money from the lender, and more from the seller's company (they were paying the closing costs) and then had to file the title with the county recorder's office. And then we would get the keys. Another day, the title company rep, Carrie Thompson, assured me.

So, did we get the keys Thursday, the 8th? We did not.

We got them at 5pm on Friday, after I had given up on the idea of moving in that weekend at all.

Jenny had not. She was determined to move on Sunday. She figured, a day to thoroughly clean the carpets and another half day to paint the house should be plenty of time!

Michael did start the carpet cleaning operation on Friday evening and worked through the night, while I dismantled his and my computers and did some last minute packing of bathroom and kitchen stuff. As soon as he completed a room and the carpet had dried—thank the gods for Arizona's dry air!—Jenny began painting. When he got off work, my son John joined in; so did ex-wife Mary and even John's fiancée. Note that John and Rachel had decided not to move into the new house with us, and Mary had her own apartment; but they pitched in to assist anyway. John used to be a professional painter so his skill and advice were invaluable.

The next New Age magic date was, of course, October 10th: 10/10. As the previously-cited blog described it:

Fortunately, with the exception of that irrational full (harvest) moon on the 4th, October (beginning with the 1010 gateway), is looking to be a much more hopeful month of transition in terms of moving forward again, reconnecting with our soul families, attracting more aligned opportunities & new beginnings.

Even though we didn't move in until Sunday, Saturday the 10th is, in fact, the day we really made the Natal house "ours".

On Saturday morning at 10:30, my friend Greg Coppens arrived as planned. Greg is a professional handyman ("Greg-of-all-trades" is how he puts it) and I had hired him to change the arch into the former owner's den, into a regular doorway with door into what would be Michael's massage treatment room. While he and I went to Lowe's to buy the door, John attacked the TV nook, which had two shelves where we needed just one. John was to remove the lower one to make room for our free-standing widescreen TV, even though the shelves had been built as integral parts of the wall. This involved not only cutting away the unwanted shelf, but filling in the resulting holes with sheet rock and spackling, so it would look as if the shelf had never been there at all.

Michael began painting our bedroom, which the previous owners had made a ghastly yellow. (All their colors were basically bright Crayola colors; every room was different, and there was no subtlety whatsoever.) Jenny concentrated on the upstairs hall, which was a dark brown, while Mary worked to cover the neon yellow-green or chartreuse of the guest bedroom with a coat of white primer. Jenny also painted hers and Zach's rooms.

I kept trying to paint but was sent on errand after errand: For more paint, for brushes and rollers, for pizza, for sodas. I also brought over the computer equipment, but could not set it up until the movers brought the desks. I connected the washer and drier (had to buy a drier vent kit and install it) as well as the refrigerator icemaker (which, as it turns out, doesn't work anyway—I'll have to get a guy to look at it).

Somewhere the day ended and too soon, Sunday began. We were still painting when the movers arrived. Jenny, who had made the arrangements, met them at the old house where they stared, aghast, at the countless boxes piled up to the ceilings of every room. "You should have asked for three guys!" the lead mover protested. "And a bigger truck!" There were two guys and a 32-foot panel truck. There was also some doubt as to whether they could move any sizable portion of this stuff for the $250 they had quoted over the phone.

Jenny set them to work and they jumped to it. They started at 2:30 pm and continued, without a break or a meal, until 11 PM that night. So it was hard to complain that the charge was $650, $400 more than I'd been expecting.

Every box was marked with what room to which it was to be delivered. However, the movers couldn't possibly get the job done if they did that, so they stacked all the boxes in the living and dining rooms of the new house, which left the way clear for them to at least put the actual furniture in the appropriate rooms.

They assembled the beds. I hovered around them, making sure each item of furniture wound up in the right place, and in between carrying boxes upstairs. I discovered that, alas, not every box was marked; I left the unmarked boxes downstairs.

Michael was still painting our bedroom. I did the edging of the new, lighter paint in the formerly brown family room. The movers set the TV in front of the remodeled TV nook which wasn't yet quite dry. John finished the work on the door that Greg couldn't complete Saturday because of required drying time.

Sunday night we all slept, for the first time, in our new house.

Monday morning, I woke and knew immediately there was no way I was going to work. I called in dead and resumed carrying boxes upstairs. Everyone's nerves were fraying. Michael yelled at me for putting his heavy office boxes in front of his bookcases. I yelled at him for being an ungracious asshole. I got his computer connected and running, but when I connected mine, it made a horrible grinding sound and I shut it off.

Good times!

Tuesday morning, the work was basically all done. I was so sore I would have had to rally to die, but I couldn't miss another day of work.

While we were going through the experience, it seemed to have the grace and precision of colliding asteroids. But now that we're on the far side of the experience, I have to admit that it all went amazingly well. Everyone we've spoken to is amazed that we did so much in just a few days. A typical reaction came from Julie, our buyer's agent: "I moved into my place six months ago, and we still haven't unpacked!" The neighbors across the street can't believe we've already remodeled. They, Greg, and John all want any of the previous owner's curtains we don't keep.

As my New Age blogger points out:

For the rest of October and into the new year we will be modulating…vibrationally upgrading everything remaining in our lives, aligning with our new beginnings in all ways, and to varying degrees we will continue to exist between worlds…experiencing more… forward movement toward our intended outcomes, feelings of "anything is possible", support for our visions, and with increasing levels of creativity, expansion & inspiration…

When my sister, Louise, heard I was buying a house, she sent an email that said, "Hell must have frozen over and I didn't notice!" Yes, indeed, it is a New Age, and anything is possible. Our new house is proof of that!

As much as we've done, the place isn't quite ready for photos yet. Give me a couple weeks for that. But I will post them here as soon as possible. And even that may wind up being sooner than expected!