When we first started looking at houses, and I prequalified for a ton of mortgage, I never really considered the process to be all that stressful (except for the prequalification itself, which was nerve-wracking, since I’ve never owned anything as large as a house). It was tedious sometimes, and sometimes it was nice looking through those houses, but I wasn’t terribly concerned with where I wound up as long as I liked the house and grounds.

Then we started looking at properties.

For most of the day, I’ve been dividing my attention between work that needs to be done for month end and property listings. Two and a half acres here, 14 acres over there, and 20 acres out yonder. Here’s nine acres, there’s ten over there. Some have houses, some have mobile homes. Some are fully cleared, with pasture land, some are half cleared with wooded areas running wild.

And then, there’s the one I want, which no one wants to touch to finance, it seems – at least no one that we called today. We’ll be calling a few more places tomorrow. Having something at your fingertips that remains just ever so slightly out of reach for the moment is the worst sort of aggravation. It reminds me of the itchy sensation that crawls up the numb left side of my neck, which cannot be scratched and which jolts me from that rare, deep sleep I manage to get sometimes: annoying, and not much that can be done about it except let things take their course. Just like those episodes, though, it’s stressful and leads to worrying.

I’ve read memoirs and writeups from people after they’ve successfully gone through treatment for cancer and come out the other side. Many of them are poignant, with a new outlook on life, a new appreciation of all the little things. I find myself wondering, sometimes, why I am not so poignant, why my outlook on life now – while appreciative that I didn’t die – is fairly the same as it was before, with the same kind of worries, the same kind of joys in my family and friends. I have no touching tales to tell about how I found myself, how I found others. Is that a sign of being too self-absorbed, or a sign of not caring? Either way, it can’t be good.

Ah, and the dentist. Nice guy. Referred me to an oral surgeon with more experience treating patients who have gone through radiation treatment and all it entails. That oral surgeon also has a panoramic xray machine, so we can get some good xrays of my jaws and choppers. The visit will have to wait until we return from San Antonio, though, so our look to see if there really is anything suspicious in the left mandible will be then. My surgeon, recently returned from New Zealand, doesn’t think there will be anything out of the ordinary, but as they say, always better to check than to let it go.

A friend of ours is a bus driver – Greyhound, not school – and called the other day to tell us that he’s moving to Wyoming to drive trains loaded with coal instead. He’ll be joining us for half the trip to San Antonio, and will leave us when we get to Baton Rouge. I’ve always loved trains, and many years ago thought it would be the height of fun to work with them. Instead, I content myself with knowing that one day, the train sets I have packed away will be happily chugging around tracks near the ceiling in some room in some house. Everyone needs a hobby, right? Or three or ten.