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Hello Hawaii and Goodbye Sacramento Winter Storm
There is a huge monster winter storm heading for Sacramento tonight that I will miss because this Sacramento REALTOR will be sipping a Makers Mark at The Four Seasons in Lanai, Hawaii, when it hits. This is just the first leg of my solo 2014 winter vacation. The photo on this page was shot by my team member and friend, Barbara Dow, when we enjoyed a 10 days in Maui for my birthday this past June. You can see the island way off in the background, and that is the island of Lanai, where I will be later on today. This is my personal reward for a year well done.
Supposedly it will be dinner-time in Lanai about the time the Sacramento winter storm blows its way into town, and I hope it’s not a disaster. The last really horrible storm we survived was in January of 2008 when a tree fell on our home in Land Park. We lost all power, most of our fish died, and we wandered around Pancake Circus on Broadway dressed like homeless people.
Now we have no fish anymore because I flushed the last one down the toilet. I waited forever for that angel fish to kick the bucket. It refused to give up the ghost. After months and months of hanging on and waiting for that last lone fish to croak, I finally decided that was it for the fish tank. It required a lot more work than I had time to devote. I would take matters into my own hands. I scooped the fish out of the tank and dropped it into the toilet. I stood there for a few minutes and watched it swim around. I reached for the handle. The minute I depressed the handle, I changed my mind but it was too late. The fish got caught up in the swirling current. He was gone. I felt awful. Very sad. Tears. But you know, it had to be done.
We don’t have any birds, either, who could freeze to death when power goes out during a Sacramento winter storm. We gave away all of our birds, found better homes. Not that my husband minded much because they chirped and sang all the time, which I enjoyed and he did not. It left an empty hole in the house without the birds because I’ve raised birds — cockatiels, parakeets, canaries — for 30-some years. I love their songs and nestling my nose into that warm feather scent, as odd as that might sound. But there was nobody around the house to take care of them when I work so much, so we had to make adjustments to our lifestyle. It wasn’t fair that the birds didn’t even have names. They deserved better.
But our cats, well, I make time for them. No matter what. Cats are essential to my well being. I could not envision a life without cats in it. My husband already knows the drill with the cats for a winter storm in Sacramento because we’ve talked about a plan. Stuff them into pillowcases if one must and run for the hills if the house is about to flood.
My husband lives by the Boy Scout Motto, so I’m confident he can handle whatever can come up while I am gone. Still, it doesn’t mean I won’t worry about him, the cats and everybody else in Sacramento.
Closing an Escrow Against the Odds
I may have been riding ponies and yelling giddy-up last night but this morning my birthday is over and I’m just another old fart whose day of glory has passed. No more 20-year tawny for me today, me — who had the brilliant thought that if one glass was a fine way to end the evening, a second glass might be even more fun. Instead I have built-in radar that says, nope, you, young lady, need to go directly to bed, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Put that head on the pillow, NOW.
I am thankful for my built-in radar because it keeps me out of danger. I have pretty good gut instincts as well which I, at times, rely upon. It’s the reason we closed an escrow on Friday that probably would not have otherwise closed this month.
This was a transaction initially scheduled to close within the first week of June, not the end of June. Mid stream, the mortgage lender switched the financing from conventional to FHA because the buyer did not qualify. The underwriter discovered a foreclosure on record some 7 years past for one of the buyers and disqualified the buyer. Yup, guidelines can make provisions for waiting periods but underwriters can do what they want.
Then the file sat at the lender because everybody thought somebody else was working on it, or at least that’s the mortgage lender’s story and he was sticking to it. He went so far as to pull out the my-grandmother-died card, or wait, that might have been another transaction and these are probably guys without grandmothers, I may note. I dunno. What I did know was I had a very unhappy seller due to the financing for the buyers. She expected to close. She had to make another mortgage payment she wasn’t planning on making. She asked me for options.
The solution she liked best was to sell the home to another buyer. So that’s what we did. We signed a back-up offer with a second set of buyers and issued to the first buyer a Demand to Close escrow. The buyer’s agent was horrified. Said she had never received a Demand to Close escrow in all of her years in real estate. It won’t be the last, I offered. Not in this real estate market. The lender has the ability to make any file a priority, and it may as well be ours. They managed to pull a rabbit out of the hat and closed.
