Winter's Breath
Approaching Winter caught up with us today with the first snow. Now we have to look closely at the weather forecast before making trips to and from Salt Lake.

We had our home on the market only 4 days and when we reached Portland last week, there were three offers on the house, one of which we accepted. These days there are bunches of hurdles to cross when you sell a house. The home inspector arrived today in the middle of a blinding snowstorm and who knows what he might have found in our nearly 40 year old home. Then "the buyer" as they were referred to by our agent showed up with their real estate agent and walked through the house with their whole family and we got to meet them and show them the house some more. We finally decided to duck out and go to Costco and let the home inspector do his thing. When we returned they asked about buying the piano, so I hope there were no show-stoppers. We head back to Salt Lake tomorrow with loads in the truck and the car and return in a couple of days.

The Cannibal Pumpkin

I found a picture of a cannibal pumpkin almost a year ago and have been waiting ever since to carve such a pumpkin. We brought a pumpkin up to Carrie from the Salt Lake garden and found a small pumpkin just the right size at the farmers market in Portland this morning, so having the opportunity, I set out to carve a cannibal pumpkin. As it turned out, it worked pretty well and I may have time to carve another when I return to Salt Lake.

Outrageously Beautiful

I thought that the fall leaves had passed us by until Carrie and Kurt took us to the Japanese Gardens in Portland. There the leaves were ablaze, right at their height, and while we had to occasionally wait until the sun popped out from behind a cloud, the photo ops were there aplenty. Anyone staying in Portland should put this at the top of their list to see. Photographers who sell their pictures taken in the Japanese Gardens have to buy a special license to do so, and there were plenty of professional photographers there with us.

Orygun

We took another trip and load to Utah but didn't stop there, but rather after a couple of days, went on up to visit Carrie in Portland. The minute we crossed the border from Idaho it started to rain, so the state lived up to its reputation. We've been in Oregon for most of a week and had the opportunity to visit our old friend Jan in Albany and to take a trip out to the coast. The attitude to take in Oregon is that if it is raining, you still go out and do whatever it was you had planned; if you stayed inside when it rained, nothing would be accomplished.

The Sandia Tram

The real estate office had a couple of tram tickets so we took advantage of that to take a ride after the house was finally staged. It was a absolutely crystal clear day except that there was a 30mph wind and the temperature was 40 degrees at the mountain top, about 25 degrees colder than at the bottom. Mountain ranges over 135 miles away stood out clearly.

Tramway - the Morning Walk
Through all the packing and getting the house ready, we still continue walking, down to a pedestrian bridge that crosses Tramway, the north-south highway on the east side of Albuquerque. The picture looks back up at our neighborhood in the middle of the photo. From the bridge, we continue south to a convience store/gas station where we pick up a newspaper before walking back home. Though the Tramway photo doesn't show it well, autumn is advancing and many leaves are turning yellow. One sure sign of fall is the flowering sage which can be found all along the pathway.

What's nice about today is that the house is staged for showing, and for now the repairmen are gone, having done their thing. It is somewhat a day of rest and getting ready to travel up to Utah and Oregon. Of course the garage is perfectly stuffed with packed boxes and furniture and we'll have to work that down.

Off and Running
The for sale sign got put up today and after another round of repair people tomorrow, we'll load up and do another road trip to Salt Lake. If I had known what one goes through to get a home ready for sale around here, I might well have dug my heels into the sand and declared that we are staying in Albuquerque.

After two months of doing jobs around and in the house and packing and carrying loads of packed boxes to Salt Lake, we called in the real estate agent. But that wasn't all. Behind him came the home "stager" who did a two-hour walk through, designating what furniture would go in each room, and what pictures would be hung on the wall. Then the realtor's handyman, and a window person to replace the front left window in the picture. Then the termite inspector who found no termites, but did get splashed on the head by a drip from a leak in the roof as he was peering into a floor vent. Of course, the roofing company came up to fix the roof as we had a warrantee. Then the carpet cleaners came to clean the living room and all of the bedrooms, and that afternoon, the home inspector did his thing, discovering a burned out wall socket and other sockets without an electrical ground.


The home stager also wanted flowers in each room and since we were planning to be away for awhile, we bought artificial flowers and put them everywhere.

The garage is stuffed full of things to take to Utah, plus furniture that was deemed excess in respect to showing the home. So with a little lock, we'll pack a load into the truck mid-week and head up to Salt Lake. Then we'll probably go on up to Portland to visit Carrie and some other friends.

I'd be more than pleasantly surprised if we got an offer for the house by the time we got back, but we'll see how good this real estate agent really is.