How to buy a house in California.

Here is what we did all week. Count the money, count the money, count the money. Count it up, down, sideways, every single direction. Hell. At least there's some money to count, although some of it gets pulled out of a magical hat. And some of it's invisible. Here's who helped us count. The realtor. The other realtor. Not the other realtor. The loan lady. The accountant. The financial guy. The loan lady some more. We counted our money, money from my family, money that wasn't even money. Money you pull out of the hat. Money you pull out of a monkey's butt. We counted all night and all day, we did math by hand and by the little calculator in the phone with sharpies on 100 pieces of paper that now live on the floor and the chair and the couch in special piles.

These are the spreadsheets.

Finally the spreadsheet said, ok, you could buy a house.

Here is how you buy houses in California. Nobody sells their houses. Then all of a sudden, someone sells a house. Everyone wants to buy it! Everyone must have that exact, specific house. Which costs one hundred million dollars. Even if it's a little grandpa cabin with no heat sitting on a little hill with power lines running straight across the view line. Where the road isn't really even a road and you can't even hardly turn from the road to the road or even see the road, actually. Where someone remodeled the counter by just making a nice shiny floor on top of some cabinets. And who doesn't want a washer and dryer conveniently located to your living room couch? But, you know. A good well and a long forest that goes all the way to the creek are on it too. And another little cabin. So two million people cram into the open house while one realtor sits on his giant pile of money, from a pile we didn't even count, and looks at everybody out of one glass eye and squints and doesn't speak a word because his lips are sewn shut.

Then everyone stays up all night and counts their money in the spreadsheets til their fingers are black and sharpied up all the way to their elbows and eyes are red with blood spouting out the corners. And then they throw the final number up into the sky and if the someone who sells the house catches it with a net and it had the highest number, then this is who buys the house.

Everybody yells, Bingo!

How about in the middle of this you come home and your dog can't walk? A border collie who is usually bouncing off the walls and you come home and she says none of her legs work no more? So carry the no more walking dog to the car and to the doctor and it's decided that all her joints have inflamed themselves, perhaps from something something autoimmune. Bilateral distal joints, as in all of them, front and back legs and also the hocks. Also a fever, a fever that makes dogs sad and small and curled up in a ball until they're invisible.

Bingo!

So that's how our week went. Banksy is improving but we don't know what's wrong with her. And I don't care as long as she gets well. She just lays on her little rug under the desk mostly. One idea is a vaccine reaction since she had a leptospirosis vaccine. That's a scary one and we'll just say no in the future, even though it's a thing around here. She can walk today, and has just started bouncing again and just brought me a ball, so I am hoping she's on the mend.

The house, we don't know. It is probably unlikely. There's not even room for a dogwalk, but I don't even care because of the woods out back. We will wait. We'll find out when we find out.