Tired of Waiting...

... for an offer on the house that never comes and perhaps never will.

... for the bank to finally do its part and analyze our case for loan renegotiation/reduction (who knows if they ever will either).

... for myself to stop dragging my feet and sending out some job applications (yet, I am yet to work on those -- I still want to stay home with my boys).

... to go back to normal life, and not have to keep the house perfectly stage at all times.

... to get my cat back (we didn't go pick him up yet in part because it requires driving to Northeast Philly, we should take care of that this weekend).

... and for many other unrelated things...

Yesterday we used the dishwasher for the first time in nearly two months. We definitely needed it because we had guests for dinner (friends from Massachusetts and their gorgeous baby boy) and my brother-in-law and his family arrived to spend the night and ate before going to bed. Up to now we had been washing the dishes whenever we used them and putting them to dry in the dishwasher so we could have a spotless kitchen at all times.... Blah, that was getting old! Tonight we began to load it again after putting the dishes away. That feels like a good step in the direction of some normalcy.

I'm not really feeling depressed anymore, I just feel kind of numb. I can't even pray, you know, because I don't know what to pray for! For a miracle new source of income to appear and enable us to keep the house? For a good offer and buyer to this house that we're really sad to leave? You know, I have to convince myself that this situation is actually the "new normal" in our lives, but it's hard. Really, I'm fine, but I have to confess that I never imagined, not in a million years, that we'd ever go through something like that. It's the hardest thing that's ever happened to us, at least to me. We're still a loving, happy and blessed family, but I think it's sad to simply have to lose the house and all the investment we made in our 8 years of home ownership. And the uncertainty of it all takes a toll on us too.

And weirdly enough, it feels worse because the original cause our personal crisis is NOT related to the world's economic crisis. K was laid off back on "Black Wednesday 07" as part of: 1) internal politics and 2) the after-effect of an academic study's result that ruined the profitability a major medication of the particular big pharma he worked for [I know, super long sentence, sorry about that]. Then, he was re-hired, and he voluntarily quit to go back to academia.

Buying this particular house was our only major mistake -- one I naively imagined would not become this problem it is now.* And, of course, it's at this point, -- and only here -- that our trajectory and the economic and mortgage/real state crises collide head on.
* See this post about the economic crisis. It's not a bad post, but what I said at the end of the first paragraph is just coming back to bite me in the head. I can't even cite it here, or read it, for that matter, because I feel so foolish and downright stupid!! Feel free to check if you want.

All right, enough whining for now. I will try to balance it out with more cute photos soon, OK? Thanks for listening.