Cash Deposit

<scrunch> <scrabble> <toss> <flip> Oh!

Hello!

Excuse my long absence from these pages, but I have been literally buried in mounds of paperwork and have just now managed to tunnel out for a bit of a breather.

The most recent events on The Road to Brookwood Court have us embroiled in the process of Applying for A Mortgage.

Portentious and important stuff, yes?

I had no idea.

Now it isn’t as if we’ve never had a mortgage before. In the last 10 years, we actually had two - one on each of the home we have in Florida. And while I certainly remember there being paperwork involved, it paled in comparison to the reams and reams of papers needed to apply for a mortgage today.

And it isn’t only tax statements and bank statements - those you would expect. It’s proofs of insurance and copies of deposit slips and copies of all the checks you’ve cashed in the last two months and copies of the credit card accounts you’ve paid off and letters from the bank and letters from the tenant in the rental house and and and and....

Every day it’s another email with requests for more information.

And why? It’s not because we’re asking for an overly large sum of money. Nor is it because our credit rating is bad.

It’s because THE GOVERNMENT requires it. THE GOVERNMENT needs to see every check I’ve deposited in the bank in the past two months, even the 10.00 rebate check from the oil change at the Ford Dealer.

But it’s the cash deposit that almost did us in. A while ago I deposited some cash into my checking account. You remember cash don’t you? It’s the green paper that you can use to buy thing with? Comes in different denominations and usually has the face of a President on it?

Well, I happened to have some cash and- not realizing the danger -  deposited it into my checking account.

“Oh well this is just a real problem,” my nervous mortgage consultant told me. “We might have to produce an affidavit explaining where this cash came from, otherwise THE GOVERNMENT thinks you’re laundering money."

Holy Freaking Cow.

After I spent about 10 minutes railing against THE GOVERNMENT and how they needed to stay out of my f#&*(%^ business, my husband looked at me over the top of the reading glasses he was using to read the fine print on even more papers.

“Careful,” he said. “You’re beginning to sound like a Republican."

Sigh. Now that’s a real reason to fear the cash deposit.

Never mind, we will not let these ridiculous rules and regulations deter us from our final goal. We will continue to collect all the minutiae required in all the acceptable formats.

However, if I don’t surface until after the closing, you’ll know I’ve been consumed by the monster that is THE GOVERNMENT.

But I won’t go down without a fight.

The Road to Brookwood Court

16287 Brookwood Court.

That’s going to be our new address. Has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?

We crossed the last hurdle today, after something of a heart-stopping moment when we read this sentence in the condominium association by-laws:

 No owner shall keep more than one dog or cat on the premises without written permission from the Board of Directors.

Yikes.

We’ve spent the last two days trying to find out who to contact and writing e-mails to get the necessary approval from the Board, all within the five day time frame. Meanwhile, our realtor tells us that a cash offer has been put on the house, so there is another buyer waiting anxiously in the wings should we change our minds.

Sorry.

Ain’t happening.

A few minutes ago we received word that Magic and Molly were officially sanctioned residents of Country Club Village.

It’s ON, people.

We’re moving.

Sunday Scribblings #5-Why I Live Where I Live

While I'm in Florida this week, I'm posting some old pieces from the archives that seem relevant even today, lo these many years later.  This was written during my first month of blogging, back in 2006, and is something that's still on my mind. What an ironic topic for my first foray into Sunday Scribblings, because it's a question I've been asking myself quite frequently for the past five years, as in "Why in God's name do I live where I live?" The answers for me, as I suspect for most of us, are varied and complex.

I started out asking this question seven years ago when my son moved to Florida. I was born and raised in the midwest, specifically, southeastern Michigan, so my realm of living experience is confined to a geographic radius of about 25 miles and the extremes of weather we experience here - everything from chillingly damp autumns, to bitterly cold winters which seem to seguae into warm, humid summers. The deep snows of that first winter my son was gone just intensifed the emptiness of my nest, and I clomped through the icy drifts muttering angrily to myself, "Why in the world am I living here?"

I continued to ask myself that question with increasing frequency, particularly after we purchased our own "second home" in southern Florida, just a short drive away from my son and his wife. But I've noticed that every time we visit there for a few days, I find myself both dreading and wishing to return home. Dreading it, because my house here is old and grungy, while my house there is new, posh, and clean. My neighborhood here pretty much matches my house, and suffice it to say, my life here just trails right along in those same decrepit lines.

But in spite of all that, my life here still seems to call out "home" to me. This old house and neighborhood have sheltered me from my first days as a young wife and mother, through raising my child and watching him fly far away into his own life. My friends are all here, the things I do that enrich my life are here - in other words, everything that is real resides in this weatherbeaten, slightly run down place. In Florida, life is almost too good to be true. As beautiful as that is for a while, it leaves something to be desired, somthing gritty and unpolished, something that you can work to clean up and rejuvenate. Something that makes life worth a little more in the end.

As much as I talk about my dream of "starting over" in the sunny south, I'm not sure I really want to jettison everything I've built in this place I've called home for the past 30 years. I live here not because it's paradise, but because it contains so much that I hold dear and couldn't bear to live without. Here is the little dent on the wall where I threw one of the ironstone dishes from our wedding china in a fit of anger at my new husband as he walked out the door, and here is the gorgeous red maple tree we planted on our first anniversary and daringly made love underneath on our 25th. There are the little scratch marks on the pantry made by our first cocker spaniel puppy when she was trying to get at her dog food, and the rhododendron bush outside her favorite window where I buried her ashes fifteen years later. Here's where I find the remnants of those stickers my son plastered on all the closet doors, as well as the cherry tree he used to climb into and read poetry. These are more than memories, these are artifacts of my life. They remind me of all the things I have experienced and survived.

I live where I live because it's home.

Clutter Control

I'm on a mission. I've been cleaning out closets and drawers all over my house, muttering the words "be ruthless" as I try to decide what stays and what goes. As of yesterday, my hall closet is a mere shadows of its former self. For the first time in umpteen years, I can get a pair of gloves off the shelf without having a virtual storm of hats and gloves and scarves raining down on my head. And the towels and cosmetics in the bathroom linen closet all have their own separate and pristine stations.

Today I'm tackling my "office" - the room I call my own for reading, writing, meditating, and occasionally sleeping (when my husband's snoring gets out of control). The winnowing process in this room could be painful - after all, this is where my books and notebooks and folders with ideas jotted on scraps of paper all end up.

How do I decide what's worth keeping and what should be consigned to the circular file?

"The relationship between clutter and creativity is inverse," wrote Jeff Goins, in a recent blog post titled Your Clutter is Killing Your Creativity. "The more you have of the former, the less you have of the latter. Mess creates stress. Which is far from an ideal environment for being brilliant." 

Does mess create stress for you?  I know it does for me. Because my personality places a premium on neatness and order, my brain gets fatigued in cluttered environments. When I'm surrounded with haphazard piles of papers and books, I can feel my mind go into a frenzy. Where do I start? What do I look at first? Should I clean up this stack, file these documents?

These kinds of thoughts adversely affect the prefrontal cortex of the brain, the area in charge of executive functioning - the way we apply our thoughts to the completion of goals. When the goal is writing and creative thinking, it's wise to keep this area of the brain as clutter free as possible.

So I'm off to put my prefrontal cortex to work on a system of organizing and ordering all the creative objects floating around my office space.

How about you? Do you think clutter affects your creative ability? Or do you thrive amidst artistic disarray?

Nesting

Thirty years ago about this time I was experiencing a phenomenon known as "nesting"...that period before a woman gives birth when she succumbs to a flurry of housekeeping chores.  Cleaning, arranging, preparing the perfect safe and beautiful space to shelter a new life.  Oddly enough,  I find myself  with the urge to nest once again, to draw my feathers close around me and settling into a safe and cozy corner.  I'm not sure what's responsible for this feeling, but there's a clear and definite desire to be home these days, to stay inside with my family and my things around me, to remove myself from the rest of the world with all its demands. 

If I'm honest, this isn't a new feeling.  I've noticed this tendency to withdraw from society for quite some time, and in fact, I've found being out in the world increasingly exhausting for the better part of a year.  I think it stems from a generalized dissatisfaction with my life - at least the one I live in the outside world.  The one that involves work and errands and traffic and cold.

But when I'm snuggled in my little nest, I'm happy as the proverbial clam.

Perhaps my need to nest  is a way of preparing me for something big, some wonderful new change that's about to occur in my own small corner of the world.

Let's hope it's love-ly.