Ye Ole House in Towne

We got an offer that we accepted on the house. Yay! They don't want to close the deal until April 16, though, so it's strangely anticlimactic at the moment. It will be more exciting on April 16. The house has only been on the market for a little over two months. How, you may wonder, did we do it, in this economy?

Home sellers take note:

1. Price the house at $50,000 less than what it's worth.

2. Take advice from the people who post comments on your blog.

3. Stage the house with many monkeys in diapers.

4. Make your real estate agent wear a Buck Dollars Hat for good luck at every open house and showing.

5. Magical thinking.

6. Be sure to list any features which might be especially appealing to a Madison, Wisconsin buyer.

auditory hallucinations part 2

We have an old telephone that doesn't work very well. If you plug it into a phone line, all of your conversations are scratchy. We've upgraded to the wireless phones recently, and LIttle Z uses our old phone as a toy. It's not connected to a phone line.

The game usually revolves around someone on the other end who is sending Little Z some monkeys with diapers. Little Z usually "answers" the phone (the game begins!) and says a lot of unintelligible things into the phone, but usually one can make out, "guy," "monkey," "diaper," and "Okay, bye!" and then she hands the phone off to me.

I often have a moment, just before I put the phone to my ear, when I'm terrified that I will actually hear a voice at the other end of the nonexistent "line". I think it would be a gruff, masculine voice. Maybe he would even talk to me about the monkeys. Should I ever hear that voice, I don't know if I will scream in terror or simply talk to the man about those long overdue monkeys in diapers.

I heard that auditory hallucinations aren't as bad of a sign of mental deterioration as visual hallucinations. At least, I think that's what I heard.

When Little Z was a baby (she's only 2 1/2 now, so not so long ago) I would go to her when she was crying. Then, sometimes, after I went to bed and was trying to go to sleep, I would think that I was hearing her crying. I would check on her, and she was sound asleep. But I would still hear her crying. Even when, logically, I knew she was not crying and she was sound asleep, I would hear her. It was clearly some sort of auditory hallucination, but I could never talk myself out of it. I could look at her and see her sleeping, and the second I looked away, I heard her crying. I would fall asleep sometimes and feel like I could hear her crying in my dreams.

Now, with these little chickens, a similarly odd thing has happened. Laying in bed the past couple of nights, I could hear the chics chirping. The really crazy thing about this is that they live in the Organic Machine House, a.k.a. the Barn, and I live in the house, and (it being winter) all of the windows are closed. There is just no way I could actually hear them. But of course, I heard them none the less for knowing that I couldn't hear them.

I could tell myself that my husband's nose must be whistling, but I still fell asleep to the mild sounds of baby chickens.