Ojala, I am home. With my boys and my mommy. Yep, Mommy lived through her first 10 days in Costa Rica. It was wonderful and horrible. Wonderful because she got to chill sin [SEEN, without] the boys around creating chaos and sin me around barking orders. Horrible because, with the rolling blackouts, she was incomunicado much of the time. But that is all in the past. I’m home, it’s raining like a sombitch so no more blackouts, I sold not one but TWO houses so, ojala, there will be groceries again, and I’ve now recovered from the jet lag. True, there’s only two hours worth of jet lag, but it takes its toll. All’s right with my world. Again.
There are about 1000 topics rolling around in my head – I got a lot of catching up to do. I made a terrible discovery while I was away: not only can I not DO two things at one time except pat my head and rub my stomach, I can’t BE two personae at one time. For the past two months or so, I’ve been REALTOR®-Woman instead of Blog-Girl®. The two cannot exist in the same body. Even though God knows there’s room. I should break up my Who Is Saratica page into personalities because I’m not all those people at once.
My REALTOR®-Woman mission is mostly accomplished: Sam and Janet are under contract on a GREAT property in Key West. We just have the fun stuff left to do, like inspections, investigations, blah blah blah. Here’s the funny thing. You know how you travel round the world to marry the boy next door? Well, S&J and I searched the web, crawled the MLS everyday, visited properties, did spreadsheets, dug up info. Dug and dug and dug.
A note on the digging: Not only am I Chatty Cathy in print, I am the Agatha Christie of REALTOR®s. I find out so much about a property, I often talk buyers out of buying a property… Just plain dumb. But I can’t resist the urge. I shoulda been a detective. To be more specific, since I love blood and guts, I shoulda been a C.S.I. Just what I need: a whole ‘nother personae.
So S&J&I do all this searching and digging… meanwhile one of my favorite property management customers, Gil, um, died. He was not well, it was expected but fast, all very sad. The estate was planning to sell the property all along: four units in old town, just what S&J were seeking. I’d kept in touch with the estate, but they were very hush hush.
As often happens in my business, they saw me as REALTOR®-Woman, someone not to be trusted and only out for the big bucks. (Somedays, I wish I were like that.) But Gil was my customer for almost eight years. We were friends. He was the most civilized person I’ve ever known, after my father. Doing business with Gil meant going to his house, sitting around admiring his HUGE collection of blue glass objects, having a soda, chatting about life, then about what was happening with the property. Very Costa Rican.
And Gil trusted me: I paid all his bills, had online access to his checking accounts and his savings account which were substantial. After he died, I kept emailing the estate and telling them I had access to all this money and they needed to change the password. Six months later, they finally did. Anyway.
During this trip, I gave the estate one more call. Couldn’t hurt. I’m also persistent. Ojala! Serendipitously, they had it listed with a REALTOR®-Ass in Boca Raton who didn’t return phone calls, didn’t have a sign on the property, who lied to me when I finally found him and said it was listed in the Key West MLS which it wasn’t… that kind of thing pisses me right off. So I tattled on him, got him fired, got to show the property (which I think is priced too good to be true) to S&J who are no dummies: they bought it. See? Travel round the world, marry the boy next door.
Yes, I am a tattle-tale. Always have been. There’s the ugly side of the cute personae thing. Not a snitch: I would never tattle for money or glory. And I would never break a confidence unless someone were going to get hurt. So if you are a creep, don’t tell me your secrets…
Home again. It’s lovely to be back. When I’m in Key West, I love it there, love seeing my friends, having all those luxuries (like KMart and the Tropic Cinema) at my fingertips. Good roads, addresses, I know where stuff is. It’s easier living in a first world country then living in a developing nation. But there’s also a hardness to life there that ain’t here. It’s lovely here. I’m happy to be home.
With my mommy, my boys. And my dogs. My People. Yesterday said people went for their daily constitutional. Film worthy: Part 1 and Part 2. You WILL need dramamine for this one. I went a little circle-crazy with the camera this morning. Just gleeful, I guess, being home with my people.