Hours of Daylight – 10:55

I got the news in the usual way; google/nytimes.com, sitting at my desk in the treehouse at Ordway Center. Hunter S. Thompson killed himself. There it was, just like all the other atrocities i read about every morning. I probably skipped right by it the first few scans of the screen.

Three days later i can’t get it out of my mind.

We’re deep in the heat of battle over our future living situation in Boise, Idaho. Offer, counter offer, another counter offer. We’ll get the news on our latest offer today. I fully expect it to be negative. The sellers want what they want. That’s fine, but they’re also dictating when they want it. Seeing as how Annette and i are about to move across the country with all our shit and two cats while trying to make an April 11 start date for her new job the occupancy date is pretty much a deal breaker. Had they come back with no movement on the price, but agreement on the closing date, we probably would have signed off. But offering a token decrease in price and pushing the closing date forward a full month, thus guaranteeing a giant hassel for us, seems less like a negotiation and more like a “fuck off.”

We’ve countered with a two part offer: give us April 1 and we’ll up the price to just a hair under what you offered, or give us May 1 and we’ll still up our offer, but we’ll hold back the $5,000 the month of homelessness will cost us. The closing date is the deal breaker… if i were them i’d focus on that. Like i said, if they’d kept the price at 305 but agreed to the closing date we’d be in contract right now.

And beneath all this, the knowledge we’ll start packing this weekend, finalize on a mover, and deal with the idea of a three-day cross country move in two vehicles with kayaks on the roof with yowling cats, there is the contant toothache of HST’s death.