We got the word yesterday that the lady who looked at the house has decided not to make an offer. She is “passing on it” in her words. We are relieved, grateful, and more relaxed about what is going on with us right now.

Given that it looks like we won’t be able to move to California as quickly as we’d hoped, this is a very good thing. We will wait to put the house on the market until June or July, when we have a better sense of what is going on with the US Postal Service.

We had a great weekend, with lots of connections with family and friends for the Easter holiday, and now we have more to celebrate because we will be staying in this great house for a little while longer!

Our house is not officially on the market, but we had a showing yesterday. The mother of one of the other agents at the Real Estate office is looking for a home after living in a condo. She spent about 45 minutes here with her son, asking lots of questions. Unfortunately, she has no interest in the basement (a 1000-square-foot family/rec room with lots of space for parties, games, and relaxing) and even wants to move the laundry upstairs into a hall closet or into one of the bedrooms.

Now I don’t fault her for wanting to make the house her own, if she really wants it, but it’s hard to imagine someone paying top dollar for this house and not using 1/3 of the finished square footage. The Evansville housing market is funny about valuing a house at price-per-square-foot. The finished portion of the basement is listed in the total square footage, but the price per ft² is calculated only on the upper floor(s). That makes our house a lot more expensive per square foot than other homes in the area, and will make appraising difficult. It would be great not to lose money this time, especially since we’ve been in the house such a short time, but sacrifices must be made.

In other news, Steve G has received responses from most of the postmasters in the Sacramento area, none of them good. The USPS is in the midst of a jobs reduction, so many people are looking for new positions to replace ones they’ve lost. Someone in Steve’s availability is not going to be considered until all those other people have found new jobs or left the service. It may be the end of the summer before he can be looked at.

What will we do if we sell the house before then???

Steve W lost his job on Monday. It was a surprise, but not completely unexpected. There was a sense that he was on the way out, based on some of the messages that were being sent during his status sessions with his boss. Target likes fresh minds that are willing to be molded into perfect team members, and Steve just didn’t fit that mold. His sister Carol had the perfect response: we are free spirits, and we just don’t fit in most corporate settings. She’s right – the best corporate jobs Steve had were the ones where the reins were loose and there was a lot of creativity and freedom.

The situation has made us wonder what is next for us. We have started talking about the possibility of moving back to California. Steve G might have some difficulty transferring with the Postal Service, but he has done it before. There aren’t any supervisor or manager jobs in the area where we plan to move to, so he may have to back to being a letter carrier.

We are going away this weekend to do some more thinking and talking. More later…