I'm not supposed to have fruit at breakfast, and no fruit juice at all, but otherwise, fruit is okay, ditto dairy. Now that I've added bacon to my morning meal, my weight loss has slowed down. :-) Although, I agree, this would probably be a healthy way to eat all the time. Though I do miss bread. And rice! On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 11:53 AM, TypePad

The dining room has been a priority! I was really startled when we first started looking at two-bedroom condos (4 years ago) to see how many of them didn't have room for a dining table at all -- just a nook that might seat four people at most, if you squeezed. Don't they expect people to eat??? We regularly have 6-10 around our table (more for community meetings than formal dinners, but still), so finding a house with a dining room that can seat 8 comfortably and 10-12 if you squeeze has been a priority for us. One house had a beautiful stove with six gas burners and a serious hood above it -- it wasn't necessarily the most perfect house in other ways, but that six-burner stove was definitely enticing. :-)

Heh. Y'all are definitely making me feel better about the closed door idea. :-) The Victorian sadly sold on Saturday (it was probably more money than we should have spent anyway, so maybe it's a good thing). But there are several other options. We'll see...still waiting to sell our condo first...

Hang in there -- I teach at a college, and my returning students tend to totally stomp the traditional age students in classes. :-) Your professors will love you.

Thanks for all the advice, folks. A few things: - we decided that we weren't willing to live with the risk of carrying a double mortgage. If we had a lot of spare cash, maybe, but who does? - a couple folks suggested contingent offers; we could try that, but the impression we get from our realtors and online is that at least in our area, people are very reluctant to accept contingent offers -- there's just not much in it for them. I guess we're not ruling it out entirely, but it seems unlikely to work - we're reluctant to rent out our place; Kevin did that once before, with his first condo, and in his experience, it made it really difficult to sell. Your renters aren't going to be thrilled about clearing out regularly for showings, and you don't have much control about how clean they keep it. In the end, he had to get rid of his renters before he managed to sell that condo (the whole process took about two years (!), and the market wasn't as bad as it is now, so he's definitely gun-shy about our odds of selling this place quickly now) So tomorrow are our first showings on our place, and Sunday, we have our first open house. We're going to take another look at the Victorian, along with a few other houses. Maybe if we see others that seem like good possibilities, we won't be quite so intensely longing after the Victorian house, and won't be so crushed if we don't get it. :-)

Thanks for the kind words, Kristin. And lisa, if you happen to see this, since I don't think it's likely that God exists, your concerns aren't really so relevant to me. And if He/She/It does exist, I can't believe They'd be so petty as to care who we're sleeping with, especially when there are so many real problems in the world.

This is the sort of thing where you could make amazing progress if you just had a day or two dedicated to it. Consider hiring a cheap sitter for a day, and then be strict with yourself, spending eight hours just on processing stuff. I bet you'll feel immensely saner afterwards, and it'll make at least the next six months so much more pleasant and manageable.

Amy, there's nothing wrong with taking care of folks in general, of course; I'm a big fan of nurturing, and even of doing a little extra during the holidays. But I do think there's something to be worried about, when it's women who take on a disproportionate amount of the household labor. As they almost always do. The cultural pressures are so heavy (and mostly invisible), that for me, it takes a lot of paying attention to keep from slipping back into those unequal patterns and habits. Which then leaves me exhausted, and on a deep level which I'm not always even aware of, resentful and bitter. Here's an interesting statistic for you -- unmarried women live noticeably longer, on average, than married women. But married men live longer on average than unmarried men. To me, that implies that if we're not careful, it's easy for women to end up neglecting their own health and needs, for the sake of their spouse, but that on average, men don't do the same for the wives. I grew up in a household that was deeply divided along gender lines, and while my dad certainly worked hard outside the home, it's my mother who stayed up late into the night, cooking and cleaning. A lot of her labor was self-imposed -- my dad certainly didn't ask her to have a hospital-clean house. But she thought she needed to keep it that way in order be a good woman, a good wife; that's what her cultural training dictated. I don't want my daughter to grow up seeing me behaving that way; I want to model better behavior for her. If there's extra work to be done in the house over the holidays, both her parents are going to stay up late doing it.