I have begun this post four or five times, discarded what I wrote, and started over. Once I decided not to write a post at all and instead watched the first hour of "The Runaways". (Sadly, I cannot recommend that movie--this from a girl who wanted to be Joan Jett when she grew up.) I debated with myself, a not-very-productive argument. It went something like this: If I tell 'em the big thing, I have to tell 'em the first big thing, and I don't know if I should throw the first big thing out there...but I can't tell 'em one without the other or the whole thing makes no sense. (Makes no sense, kind of like that last sentence...) At last I consulted one of my besties. "Not to sound all Nike or anything," she advised me, "but just do it."
So. Here it is. All of it.
The First Big Thing: I am getting married!
Yes, you read that correctly. Married. Me. Typing it makes my fingers all tingly. I am getting married. Holy crow. I've never been married, so this is uncharted territory for me. You know that feeling when you lean just a bit too far back in a chair and you almost fall but don't? Yeah, that's pretty much how I feel all the time now, every day. And while that might sound like not such a good feeling....trust me, it is. It's the best. That feeling makes me dance in the shower. It makes me laugh out loud while doing something perfectly ordinary like mashing up potatoes for supper. It makes me randomly stop in the middle of what I'm doing to stand, stock-still, and just breathe in and out for a minute and whisper wow....just wow.
Okay. Enough of that mushy malarkey. This is a houseblog, for the love of Pete.
So here's The Other Big Thing: I am selling the Kelly House.
I hope no one hurt themselves falling off the chair after reading that. Really. I hope no one choked on a bit of ham sandwich or an ice cube. Maybe I should've given y'all some warning. Better prepared you. After all, I've had a couple of weeks to wrap my head (and my heart) around the idea and it still freaks me out. See, it's okay to be freaked out. It's even okay to say things like "Oh lordy" and "Are you sure?" because these are, after all, tough times to sell a house. Especially when you never planned to sell that house because you stalked it for years before you bought it and had a five year plan to restore it and just now finished the outside and just now made some real headway on the inside and you thought you'd live in it forever and ever---Excuse me for just a moment while I cry a little, okay?
There. I feel ever so slightly better. It's hard to let go of the Kelly House. AJ (my husband-to-be) knows this. He understands when I get teary-eyed talking about all the work I've done on the house. He is proud of me and what I've accomplished and he knows that, in a very big way, the Kelly House is part and parcel of who I am as a person. To his everlasting credit, AJ has never once said, "It's just a house." He knows that the Kelly House is more than just a house. It's proof of my independence and stubborn determination and grit. He gets that. Which has a lot to do with why I love this man so much.
So, work continues on the Kelly House, though the plan now is a different plan than the one I had even a month ago. More on the new plan as we go along. And, the blog continues as well, for as long as I own the Kelly House. Y'all have been with me this far, so I'll hope you'll stay to see how the story ends.