72 Showings

The housing market is in a very strange place right now.   It's a seller's market in a way that just doesn't happen very often.   There are a number of factors at play, much of it that is in some way related to the complexity of a year we've had since COVID-19 lockdowns began.   The net result is if you're selling your house, prepare for a whirlwind.  

My son's preschool teacher is selling her house.   She was the first teacher my son ever had and we've kept in touch.   She and her husband decided to build a house and they've gotten to the point where the construction is far enough along that they need to put their current house on the market. 

They have worked long and hard to make their house look as attractive to potential buyers as possible.  My husband put the house on the market today at noon.   Tonight, after only half of a day on the market, they have 72 showings scheduled, which will begin tomorrow.   They also already have one offer, sight unseen.  

There is about one-third of the inventory of houses for sale that would be in a normal situation, which is contributing to the number of showings, but only to an extent.   I had a friend joke earlier that he was almost tempted to sell his house and go live in an apartment, it was such an opportune time. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son came to the basement after school to work on his typing at his computer.   I was watching a live stream about 3D printing on YouTube because my friend was in it.   My son came over and nicely said, "Mom, you know all those times you ask me to put on my headphones?  Do you think you could return the favor?"

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My son's teacher sent home some special cream for my daughter's burned and scabbing arms.   As I was putting it on her tonight she said, "I call this one 'key'" because it's shaped like a key."  When you have so many scabs that you start naming them, you know it's bad. 

The Grief of Loss

My daughter has had a thing with loss for some time.   Things are gone forevermore all the time.  When you eat the ice cream, there is no more and it's okay.   When the toilet paper has run out, well, that's not as okay, but it can be replaced.   And yet for some reason when things are gone or lost that might have been able to still be an entity in my daughter's life, she can become overwhelmed with grief. 

The first time we saw this happen was with a rock in Hawaii that she bonded quickly with.  My husband threw it over the railing and back to the river when she suddenly said she had to say goodbye.  She couldn't part with it.   Only it was gone.   The grief from that lost rock was intense and went on and on.  To this day, she still remembers that rock she held for thirty minutes.  Maybe less, because it was set aside while she was playing in the water. 

We can take pictures and have memories retained in a way that my daughter can't.   That's not to say she doesn't have memories that are just as rich from her other senses.   But she's also dealing with the loss of her vision as a whole.   And there is some connection with the two, Dhruti has said. 

My daughter had asked for a very large 3D printed egg.   I think she'd forgotten, but I'd been working on it.   Large models take a long time to print but I'd gotten the first half completed.   The top failed about thirty percent in, finishing up with a stringy mess of filament until I came in and stopped the print.  

When my daughter asked tonight about the egg she was happy to feel the lower half and then intrigued with the failed upper half.   Could she tear the stringy bits off it?  I told her she could.  Once she had the top cleaned up she decided it was a hat and walked around with it for about ten minutes, playing with it this way and that.  

Then she asked if she could break it?  I said she could do anything she wanted with it.   So she sat on it.   She got a satisfying crunch as the bottom dropped out, leaving a big hole where the top of the egg would have been once the model had finished being printed and rotated right side up. 

Suddenly my daughter realized what she'd done.   She'd broken her hat.   She almost immediately got very upset.  It wasn't fake emotions, these were real grief tears.   She begged me to fix it and I said we'd print a new one.   No, this was the one and it had to be fixed. 

I got out the 3D pen on her suggestion and patched the broken egg up.   She became calm and normalized again.   I never know when the grief of loss will strike.   This time it was easy to fix. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son had his first class at Code Ninjas today.  He came home so excited about programming that he went straight to the computer, logged back in, and programmed two more little programs.  One was an animated graphic of a baseball being pitched to a batter that then swung to hit the ball, followed by a cheering crowd.   The second was a program that arranged letters on the screen to spell his name.   It has to be a good program if you come home and want to keep working. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   While I repaired the broken egg with the 3D pen tonight, my daughter played darts.   I know, a blind child playing darts.   She's careful though and no one was close.   She's working on her throw—to get a dart into a small round area on the wall.   And yet, she was doing it and even hitting the dartboard from time to time.   She was very excited when this happened and asked me to tell her what score she got.  

Oh Dear

Oh dear, I'm tired.   I'm supposed to have something to write about every day and today while a lot of things happened, none of them were particularly interesting and I didn't set out with this blog to just narrate my day.   So I'll explain a thing or two about the children and head to bed.

The Big Boy Update:  My son never liked to color.   Children like coloring with crayons, but my son didn't write well initially and didn't prefer to color at all.   Now, rather suddenly since this school year started, he loves drawing.  He found a book on birds that's more of an adult coloring book than a children's one and he's been meticulously coloring in the segments of each bird with the large color pencil set I got him at the start of the school year that he keeps in order of color in a cloth pouch that rolls up and keeps all the pencils organized.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter came to me with a splinter today and instead of being panicked about it, she held her foot very still and I got it out on the first, painless try.   If she could have just done that the first time she got a splinter, it would have gone just as easily.   But fear makes us do interesting things, even if they're not in our best interest. 

Flying the Drone

My husband bought a drone.    Well, another drone.   He has one that he's had for a good long while now that he uses to get footage of real estate houses from above and their surrounding area.  Then he saw a video.   It always happens like that these days.    Someone sends a link to something and once you see it you have to tell someone else.   And sometimes, if the thing you saw was interesting enough to you, you do something about it. 

If it's a recipe, then you might cook it.   Or you might buy it.   In the case of this drone, it was the latter situation.   And I have to agree with my husband, I don't even have that much interest in drones, but after seeing the video, I wanted him to get it too. 

This drone has several modes, the first one when you get it is the safest mode.  In this state, its self-preservation is full-on, and it's almost impossible to crash or hurt it.   It just won't let you do anything to harm it.   You can unlock the more adventurous modes, but to start, the safety is on, so to speak. 

Tonight, my husband asked if I wanted to come outside and fly the drone.   When I went outside, I saw my daughter with the headset on (although even she admitted she couldn't see anything really.)  She was driving the drone all over the place and was exceptionally happy.  

It was so high up it was just barely a buzz in the sky, but she was driving it.   When it was my turn I went down the street to visit my best friend's house and then I came home.   It was easy and intuitive and the headset made it even easier to use. 

I had to hand it back over to my daughter, who couldn't see anything but wanted to drive the drone nonetheless. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son emailed a friend today and asked him if he wanted to come over to play in our backyard.   Nicholas showed up a bit later and they played with masks on before he went back home, six houses down the street from us.   This is the first time my son has coordinated his own play date through email. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter very gently carried the tiny little drone in the house tonight after flying it, calling it something like "baby drone" and being so happy to be able to be involved with this fun thing her father was doing.  

On How Sharing is Fun

I have a problem.   I think I may have mentioned it before, but if I haven't let me tell you all about it now.   When I say "problem" I'm being facetious, it's not really a problem in a bad way, it's the kind of thing my husband and children tease me about as well as my online friends.   I don't mind, though, it's all good fun. 

The thing is, I love filament.  3D printing filament.   Kilograms of spooled plastic in all kinds of colors.  Some of them transition through a rainbow of colors, some are silky, others are matte in finish and of course then there are the sparkling, glittering and even twinkling filaments.   There are filaments gravimetrically infused with clay or cement.  There's a filament that can be reshaped after printing like clay when heated up.  There are extra strong filaments, some even with added carbon fiber.  Specialty filaments can have rubber-like results, one filament foams when printed, puffing up and then, of course there is the dissolvable filament, which has a special job of supporting other filaments when printing and then melting away, exposing the final print later.  So many filaments.   So many colors.

I have an online friend that I've never met.  We may meet someday as his son lives close to where we do, but for now, he's a person across the screen, typing back and forth to me about anything and everything related to 3D printing.  We talk about filament a lot.   There is nothing nicer than picking the perfect filament for a model and watching it spring into life on the print bed. 

He was talking to me today about some filaments he was considering ordering.   A kilogram is a lot of plastic to order if you're not sure you're going to like it.   Most filaments are very economical, but even so, there are far more filament choices out there than anyone could possibly have.   The question he had was if it was worth the price difference to order a particular brand.   I already had that particular filament.   And then it occurred to me: we could do a filament swap.   

I could mail him samples of filaments of the brands or colors he was thinking of getting.   I could put several in a little package and he would be able to try the out without having to buy any of them.   There are some models that use a lot of filament, take hours and hours or even days to print, but many models just take a small amount of fiament to print. 

It would be enough to determine how well the filament prints, what the true color was in person and how any additives change the appearance of the fiament.  In short it would help make any decisions on buying full spools. 

I was excited about this.   I love sharing and helping.   I could both share and help out one of my friends simply by sending samples of a few spools.   I can't do anything about it now, because we're currently in the car on the way home from Florida.   It feels like we've been cramped in the vehicle all day but I've just been told we have three more hours to go.  

Tomorrow, after unpacking, I'm going to start figuring out what filaments my friend might be interested in,   I'm definitely putting some surprises in rhw package. 

The Big Boy Update:  In the car after a long bout of travel my son said, "My foot is hungry.   I can feel it rumbling."   We told him him we were coming up to a planned stop shortly.   He went back to his iPad and then announced a few minutes later, "Dogs and cats are a lot more alike than it seems."

The Tiny Girl Game:  My daughter wanted to play hide and go seek in the hottub with me yesterday.   She said the game was in your mind though.   It was more like, "Mind and Go Seek," she said.   The area t hide was anywhere in the backyard. On your turn you picked a place to hide.  It didn't matter if you were small or even tiny,   You could hide anywhere.   The other person guessed and you gave hot and cold directions until you found the hiding person, or small dog, or in mouse.   It was a lot of fun.  

The Lighthouse Experience

We return home tomorrow and for the entire trip we've spent here with my husband's family, we've stayed at their house.  They have a pool and a hot tub in their back yard, Nana cooks and there are family members to play with, so it's been a very good time.   It turns out we didn't need to go anywhere.   But today, we decided to visit a local lighthouse, climb the steps to the top and see what we could see. 

That's the trick though, isn't it: it's a seeing thing.   My daughter didn't complain, but I suggested something to her.   I said I wanted to do the entire lighthouse with my eyes closed.   I could get an understanding of what things are light for her. 

I think she thought I was crazy and she didn't really think it was a good idea.   She didn't want to have to teach me or guide me.   I told her I'd get her brother or father to guide me and she could work with Papa maybe. 

We arrived and when it was time to start walking through the path of trees towards the lighthouse I took m son's hand, asked him to take care of me, and closed my eyes.  I have to say, being dragged along by my son along the path was scary.   Shade disappeared and we were in some clearing, then he turned sharply.  I knew there were other people, but I had no idea where.   I didn't know if there was a tree branch or other thing I would run into.   I told him about pulling me behind him if things got tight and narrow, that if his body could safely move through the space, me moving behind him would keep me safe too. 

He got me there with no incident and while I wanted to keep my eyes shut, we had a bit of time to wait as only a few people could go up at once.   I talked to my daughter about the special Indian Ficus tree that was close to a hundred years old, we felt the name plaques and dedication bricks that indicated donors helping to keep the lighthouse going.   I explained they were setting up for a wedding and that was the sound she heard around us.   Then it was time for us to ascend the lighthouse. 

It wasn't a large lighthouse, but there were a lot of stairs.   I started outside and had my husband help me.  It was stumbly at first until he got me over to the handrail.   From that point on, handrails were my guide.  Inside the lighthouse, I realized we were ascending the main structure once we started to wind quickly with the stairs.  

Everything was fine until I hit a mid-flight landing where there was a window.  I couldn't tell where the next railing was and while I knew it wasn't an open area you could fall down, it felt like it.   I made it to the top and experienced with everyone else some intense wind.   There were spots you had to bend down to not hit your head and thanks to my husband's guidance, my head remained safe.

Once at the top, I was on my own to traverse around the perimeter.   The railing wasn't curved, but in straight sections, rather like a dodecagon or some other-sided shape.   I asked if the spot where I stuck the toe of my shoe out went straight down.  It did.  But I moved on until I got to the end and then I came back and we descended.

My husband wanted me to look at the top.   I didn't.   He wanted to show me pictures tonight, but I didn't want to see them.   I said if he wanted to tell me what the lighthouse view was like, he could describe it.  That was the experience I wanted.   The memories I wanted to have didn't involve seeing. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son the other day when he realized I was running out of energy and was going to take an afternoon nap, said in the most positive of ways, "Oh, I love your sleep schedule.   You can explore the far corners of the day."

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  When we were at the base of the lighthouse I still had my eyes closed and had been led to a tree where both children were climbing.   I was holding on to the trunk when a man asked if both my daughter and I were blind.   They had a blind daughter, he said.   I opened my eyes and we had a very nice conversation about their daughter who sounded just as tenacious as my child.  She had gotten near-perfect scores on her SAT test and was currently in college.   She was so independent she hadn't even come home when COVID-19 happened.   It's always nice to hear a success story like that.    

Human Snow

The burns my children sustained from our mismanagement and irresponsibleness the first day we were in Florida continues to look bad.   My son is starting to peel now.   His back and shoulders are exhibiting a kind of human "snow" as he flakes and peels with bright red skin apparent underneath.   He's not in discomfort and hasn't needed to have more than moisturizing lotions or aloe vera applied to his skin.   He's not even asking for it because he's not in pain by it, we're just trying to put his skin in the best position to heal.  

His sister, on the other hand, is in a different position entirely.   She had a far worse time.   Her skin is far fairer than his and she suffered much worse burns on her shoulders and upper arms.   I remember this happening to me when I was a child once, and it was terrible.  

She was burned on Monday and since that time has had a long-sleeved shirt on anytime she's outside.   Getting clothes on and off her has hurt terribly.  Touching her shoulders makes her scream.   She blistered all over the area and is starting to have the skin peel off now.   Only what's peeling off isn't like her brother's snowy skin, it's too many layers of dermis, and what does peel off leaves underneath it a layer of skin that's raw and painful.   

I tried to put aloe vera today after she got out of the tub, but she couldn't take it.   I slathered her shoulders with vaseline, trying to just protect the skin.   I told her this wasn't just a sunburn, this went beyond that.   She wasn't trying to get out of sunscreen and we weren't intentionally not putting it on.   It was a bad oversight though for everyone.   I think she'll always remember after this week's experience.  

The Big Boy Update:  My son said to me tonight, "Why are palm fronds such a beautiful thing?  And why are they so easy to draw?"

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was demanding and mean early on in the trip.   She had a few attitude adjustments and for some reason she's suddenly started seeing things from other people's perspectives.   She's been understanding and polite.