So yesterday morning my realtor calls me up, says 'the gods of real estate must be with you' because the buyer for the house I want backed out, a day after the seller's agent said there was virtually no chance of that.

Excited, I head to her office, after stopping at the selling agent's office to pick up about 120 pages of disclosures, and we go through them. There are a few questions which we need to contact the city planning office about, and we make plans to meet up again in the morning to draft the offer.

9:30am and I'm at her office, going through forms, deposit checks, disclosures and contingencies, when her cellphone rings. I knew it the moment I saw the lights flashing on her phone, and it was confirmed by the overly-loud voice emanating from the headset, past her ear and into my own: They sold the house hours before I was going to place a bid.

Again.

Since we were already well in to the offer form, we decided to finish it and put it to them, in case Accepted Offer #2 fell through.

At this point I don't care one way or another. The positives and negatives are about equal. I know, though, that this is just the moment speaking through my mouth attached to my head which is already frustrated by an office move last night into a space we still need to reconfigure to make it conducive to creative work. A whole slew of friends are going to see Circus Contraption tonight but not I, because I was too busy to think that I might be able to take a breath of my own on Friday, and in truth it's the right choice, because I'm still running big deficits on both my work and resting tallies.

I'm also running a big deficit on my fun quotient, but I guess I can just convince myself that this is all a game and try to improve two tallies at once.

As I type this post standing in front of my cube-to-be, powerbook sitting on a packing box on a desk that may or may not be mine, I can't recall the last time my life was in such flux.

Oh wait, yes I can. It was only a year ago.

Okay, so maybe life isn't so bad right now.

Come back safe and soon, Rachel.