Apparently I'm the one who can't handle an update, or at the very least find time to actually write one.

Truth be told, I've had plenty of time to write one. I just haven't had the creative juices due to being exhausted from the time I've been unavailable to write. I've either been staring down yet another half-unpacked box-o'-crap(tm) and wondering why the hell we even brought all that with us, or having an emotional affair with the guy in the paint department at Home Depot. I've had so many intimate discussions about finishes and types of primer that I do believe he's planning on buying me a promise ring.

I've destroyed so many baby trees in the last few days that I'm guaranteed a direct hit during the next lightning storm on account of being a horrid environmentalist. I might as well buy an SUV and throw pieces of Styrofoam out the window as I'm driving it for all the saplings I've suffocated in lawn bags this week. I have enormous guilt over this, this blasphemy. And yet I realize that dozens of year-old maple trees sitting less than a foot from my home's foundation is a recipe for some hefty flooding once those roots get fresh and hit second base with the concrete.
Thankfully there are plenty of trees in the yard. So many that I couldn't begin to count them. The people who built this place in 1946 obviously valued their privacy and comfort. We have enormous hedges and big, beautiful, shady trees everywhere. It's blissful.

Please remind me of that when I'm crying in pain as I'm raking up the 10th bag of leaves this fall. This house holds many physical burdens in store for The Maven, I just know it. I've met my match.

Speaking of which, I can no longer refer to this as ' the new home' or, as I jokingly called it all of last week, ' the summer home'. I said I would write down the sordid affair, so I will. Does it sound boring? Tough cookies. Eat away those feelings of frustrating. It's what I do at the end of a long day and I still manage to keep this fit figure of mine.

We were supposed to sign away our old home on the 13th of June, sign for our new home on the 14th and move in the 17th.

Instead, we received a phone call letting us know that our buyer was delayed in the signing of her property so our signing would be pushed back a day. Geekster worked his monetary magic and managed to swing some bridge financing (read: nearly $19,000 on the line of credit on top of what was already on there - thank you generous loan officer!) in order to buy our new home, and we signed for both homes on the 14th.

Ah, but wait. The fun doesn't stop there.

After getting the keys for this place and doing a little jig of joy, we received word that our buyer did not, in fact, have the money for her downpayment on our old home. She was waiting on her buyer to come up with the financing to purchase her old home and the bank was hesitant to give her bridge financing.

We spoke with our realtor who said that the deal could possibly fall through altogether if this didn't get resolved. At that point we would be forced to begin legal proceedings against our potential buyer in order to put the house on the market again.

Oh, and in the meantime we'd have no only two mortages, but also the enormous debt load from our bridge financing.

Fun.

We moved on the 17th as planned. Happy Father's Day, Geekster. Have two homes! Financial burden is my gift to you. Well, that and some (very inexpensive) BBQ utensils. Love you.

Let me tell you, it's hard to get excited about your new home when you're still carrying your old one. It's even less fun when you buy a fixer-upper like we did with plans to use the proceeds of the sale of your previous house to start fixing up the new one. Instead of doing renovations, you're trying to convince yourself that all that wood paneling is, indeed, quite lovely.

Last Monday we spoke to the realtor again. She suggested we wait until Wednesday - a full week after the sale was supposed to happen - before making any decisions. I told her that we, being the kind, generous and understanding people we are, had no desire to press charges or put our home back on the market. That we would work with our buyer for as long as we could manage it financially.

It all sounds so very lovely on the surface, but it's a terribly selfish move. Having gone back to clean the old home the day after we moved, it was never more apparent that the staging of furniture and scented candles really did cover up imperfections. Without those things we'd have a fair bit of cosmetic work to do before we could sell it again easily. All of this with money we wouldn't have because it was all tied up in bridge financing.

And lawyers? Expensive. Maven don't play that.

This is all karma, children. It's karma from my incessant bragging over selling our home in less than a week. Do you hear that faint hissing sound? That would be my ego deflating.

On Tuesday our buyer sent us her email address and phone numbers through our realtor. I sent her a note letting her know that we were rooting for her (and us, but I was polite and didn't say that) and that I really believed everything would work out (because if it didn't I would end up in the nuthouse beyond a shadow of a doubt ... again, the politeness thing though). She wrote me back a very nice email and let me know that she was signing for our house the next day because her financing had come through.

I wanted to believe her because I wanted to stop stressing out. It's bad for my skin, you know, as is apparent by the colony of zits on my cheek the last few days. Instead I tried to put the entire thing out of my mind and went out Wednesday morning - the supposed morning of the supposed signing - and ran some errands.

I came home to the ' For Sale' sign gone from the front yard of our new home. This wasn't a good thing because I nearly missed my turn. People need to warn me when they're going to do these things. I was a little huffy and about to have a word with Geekster when he mentioned that the realtor had just come and gone. The sale had gone through and there was a gift on the counter for us from her.

Know what it was? A bottle of champagne. Apparently really good stuff, too, according to Wikipedia. It's sitting in my diningroom looking self-important and raising our property value just being there. It's going to be there a long while, too, considering that recovering alcoholics tend not to drink things like champagne. I plan to serve it at our housewarming party in a few weeks to my non-alcoholic friends. I'll buy some vintage sparkling apple juice for Geekster and I. I hear 2006 was a good year.

So the nightmare is over. No more summer house. We were able to buy paint and a table saw and I'm shopping for a breadmaker. This house is begging me to make my own bread.

And none of the bad stuff matters anymore because tonight I saw a deer. It was in my neighbour's yard across the street. The gremlins and I were outside when I proclaimed 'Look! A deer! Intrepid, do you see the deer?'

Intrepid, who is ten and doesn't care what his mother has to say half the time and doesn't wear his hearing aids the same half of the time, glanced up briefly and said 'Yeah, mom. I saw the dog.'

'Not "dog", sweety. Deer! Look at the deer!'

And with that we were all transfixed on the beautiful creature who paid us no mind, grazing on the young foliage across the street.

I quickly stopped filling bags of baby trees and backed away from my overgrowth.

Funny how a deer can make things all better.