In Which I Play a Game and We Break a Bed
Feb. 14th, 2020 08:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aI. The Gaming.
Last Thursday I just wasn't yet up to trying out a new game store in Hawaii. It just felt too stressful, at a number of levels: I'd have to park my large car, Julie, in a small parking lot; I'd have to meet a whole bunch of new people in an unfamiliar environment; and I'd have to make a long drive home in the dark on the two-lane highway. So after my dad and I rushed around to Home Depot, getting wood to build bookcases, and after I got home to find Kimberly still have major problems with seizures, I just threw up my hands and decided that I didn't want to go out.
Apparently, it just took me a week to gather my gumption, because yesterday I felt fully ready to brave the new game store, even though my dad and I rushed a bit to get some swimming in on a rare nice day in the last few weeks, and even though Kimberly was again having some cognitive problems due to her non-motor seizures. So, after some dinner, I headed out at about 6.30 for their 7pm board game night ...
I'm pretty comfortable driving to Lihue now. But, it was getting increasingly dark as I got closer to town, so I had to really pay attention here and there. So it was a little tense, but not bad.
I pulled into the parking lot, and the first (angled) space was free. No problem.
When I headed out later in the evening, I did find out that the parking lot is indeed kinda tight. Going down one of the main rows on the way out, all of the trucks and SUVs that fill non-tourist Kauai really were sticking out into the aisle so that I felt like I had to go really carefully. But, despite the tightness, the parking lot is overall larger than I'd thought (I'd only seen about a third of it on Google Maps), so hopefully it won't be an issue.
Into the game store! (8 Moves Ahead!) I was a few minutes before 7, but I saw a group of four people already playing Zombicide. I lurked for a minute or two, and the fellow who turned out to be the owner, Terence, asked if he could help me, and I told him I was there for the board gaming night.
Fortunately, Zombicide is a game where you often have extra characters to fill out a scenario, so I got handed off the archer and was able to dive straight into the game.
Yay! Very friendly!
So that was my first game of the year.
Zombicide drags a bit. I think the game probably ran 3 hours total, from 6.30-9.30 or so, but it was good getting to play again, and it'll allow me to write a Zombicide case study for Meeples Together. (I'd played once previously, but it was eight years ago, so though Zombicide is mentioned several times in Meeples Together, it wasn't fresh enough in my mind to write up a full case study previously.)
I was a bit concerned about a turnout of just four players (Terence, Derek, Jason, and one woman whose name I never caught), because that small of a group makes it harder to get your favorite games on the table, but Terence told me it was a quiet night and 8-12 players was more common. And indeed two more folks showed up before I left. So, yay.
Apparently the board gaming is more likely to start at 6.30 than 7.00, so I'll show up a bit earlier next week, and Terence encouraged me to bring my own games, so I will. (Actually, I have no games unpacked right now, other than the few I got for Christmas; but fortunately I've got clear labels on the boxes that at least highlight the big ticket items.)
One surprising problem: most of the game distributors don't show to Hawaii!
Terence says that he's currently working with Asmodee and GTS Distribution in Honolulu. Obviously, Asmodee gives them a lot of games, while GTS seems to have really erratic products from a bunch of different companies.
I'd saved up a small list of new games I wanted (Wingspan, Castles of Burgundy 20th Anniversary, Las Vegas Royale), so that I could purchase them at my new game store, and I passed them on to Terence via FB this morning, but I have a suspicion they're not available.
So I'll have to explicitly find a few things to buy there. They've got Z-Man under Asmodee, so that's probably my most likely choice. I'd love to pick up Pandemic Legacy Season 1 if I could find a group to play it through. We'll just give it some time ...
And it gives me an excuse to get Lovecraft Letter.
And one bit of unpleasantness: while we were gaming a somewhat disheveled young man came to the door and told the owner that he wanted to see him outside.
As Terence was going outside, the man ranted: "YOU CAN'T KEEP OUT OF YOUR STORE. IF YOU DO, I'LL PUT YOU OUT OF BUSINESS. IT MAY TAKE ME TEN YEARS, BUT I'LL DO IT."
Yeah, problem people in Hawaii. Yay.
But it's not like I'm seeing them every day, like in Berkeley.
But then we're pretty much out in the suburbs. Speaking of which ...
So, the drive home: it was OK.
I left 8 Moves Ahead at about 9.40, which is later than I'd generally planned. I'm going to bed at 11 nowadays, so I'd like to be home by 10 to have time to rev down and get sleepy.
But slightly late might have been good: as I'd expected, the later it got, the quieter the streets were. So, there were still plenty of cars on the highway, but I wasn't facing a constant stream.
I'm getting better with all the headlights in my face generally, but sometimes it's just as you come around a turn or over a hill, and it's still totally blinding. Bleh.
A month ago I couldn't have made that whole drive back from Lihue (just 11 miles!) without being totally exhausted, but I was OK last night.
Even though for the last few miles I had to contend with headlights and rain!
(It's Kauai.)
II. The Bed Breaking.
So, breaking the bed.
Back when Kimberly and I got married, we did a trivia game at the dinner, where individual tables could contest for how well they knew us. One of the questions was something like: "Shannon and Kimberly have engaged in this activity in every room of the house other than the kitchen."
The answer was a lot less salacious than the question: "reading".
And so it goes with our breaking the bed.
After feeding the cats and signing some more paperwork for our realtor, I managed to settle down at about 10.30pm, and read a bit of The Incredible Hulk by Peter David Omnibus and Smiley's People. I was actually feeling like I could sleep at 11pm.
So Kimberly and I wandered off to our ablutions and bed.
We both settled into bed and starting wiggling across our huge new King bed so that we could lie together for a bit while falling asleep.
And then ...
I should note, this is the bed that we waited FIVE AND A HALF WEEKS for. It looks like we ordered it on January 5, after we decided we weren't going to find one locally. It was part an immense $3.5k order meant to Wayfair to fill out what we then saw as our two most critical rooms: the bedroom and the living room. The living room tables arrived in a couple of weeks (including a coffee table that we rejected, but more on that momentarily), while the bedroom furniture was the only thing we've purchased to go on a boat, with commiserate delays.
Wayfair kept playing silly games with the dates, pushing them back from late February to late March over the course of a few days after our purchase, and then when the furniture got on a boat, the delivery dates moved up. We finally received the nightstands on February 5th and the bed and Kimberly's drawers on February 12th. Not bad.
The wood was all "manufactured", as has been the case with about half of what we've purchased in Hawaii and that doesn't always survive travel. One corner of Kimberly's nightstand was definitely damaged and there was a notable chip in the chest of drawers. I wasn't pleased, but they weren't problematic enough to reject them and wait more than a month for replacement.
And then ...
Wiggling across the bed, Kimberly and I heard some type of CRACK and the bed dropped. And then we started hearing CLUNK, CLUNK, CLUNK like bowling pins going over in slow motion. We were now doing our best to wiggle our way off the bed without putting weight on it, an almost impossible proposition.
After I got off the bed, I hefted up our mattress and found total chaos under the bed.
Keep in mind, we'd never seen under the bed before, because we had Wayfair assemble it.
But first up, there were just four slim slats of plywood making up the "platform" for our mattress. No center support, which everyone says that a King platform should have. It looked totally inadequate.
Each of those slats was supported by two legs under it. "supported" in quotes. Unfortunately, the manufacture of the legs was horrible. Even if the hex bolts going through the legs and slats were totally tight, the holes for the bolts were too big and they could move about 30 degrees off of center. Oh, and there was metal inset into each leg that the bolt screwed into, and those insets weren't affixed in any way: they could just pop out. Oh, and those hex bolts weren't actually tight: every single one was still loose, and so you could move the legs more like 45 degrees off of vertical as a result.
So there were legs all over, no longer attached to the slats and one of the slats had broken the sideboard that it was attached too, falling to the ground as a result.
As best as I can guess, our slight scooting across the bed had caused one or more of those legs to slip out from under the slat, and then when the weight came back down on it, had popped off entirely. Likely just one or two did that, and it set off a chain reaction.
Despite it being after our bed time at this point, I spent a while fooling with hex bolts and slats, before I came to the conclusion that even if the bed had been assembled tightly, the instability of the legs was just a disaster weighting to happen.
We are, by the by, extremely grateful that neither cat was hurt, because that was a real possibility. Lucy, in fact, was investigating under the bed the previous evening while I was laying down. If she'd done that again last night, she could have been badly hurt or killed when the bed came down.
(This possibility left me and Kimberly more enraged than the actual breaking of the bed.)
And, I was saying that we rejected a coffee table already from Wayfair. We got one with a lift-top and it wouldn't latch right, and so Wayfair gamely shipped us a second one, and when it had almost the same problem. We determined it was crappy design and/or application of that design.
Same problem here. This wasn't just one bad leg. It was the fact that they're manufacturing all of their legs in a way that they're not stable, with parts that just don't fit together quite right.
And by they, I mean the manufacturers that Wayfair works with, but the problem is that Wayfair clearly does totally inadequate quality-control of the products that they sell. The coffee table and the bed both had foundational manufacturing problems.
So, that's a problem for Wayfair.
I did worry if we'd put too much weight on the bed, because we have a sort of heavy mattress, but looking at it in the light of day I'm pretty sure that we had less than 450# on that bed, even with our heavy mattress. If a bed can't take that, it's *)(@#)*ed.
(I looked it up, and the bed says it has a 600# capacity.)
I managed to get the mattress up against a wall so that it wasn't a hazard in the night, and then Kimberly and I staggered to our couches to do our best to sleep.
Because there was a huge, broken bed in the middle of our bedroom and nowhere to put the mattress.
Those couches are from CostCo, I should note, not Wayfair. Everything we've gotten from CostCo has been great quality, if not always precisely what we would have wanted.
Before we slept, we talked about our "ask" for Wayfair in the morning.
My first take was "they haul away the bed and give us a complete refund for it and its shipping and they give it to us in cash, not a credit on their website, like they did when they gave us a partial refund on the coffee table".
But as we were lying on those couches, not sleeping, I said, "We should demand a refund on the whole bedroom set, because we got the rest of it to match that stupid bed." (And we were also unhappy with some of its quality and the damage.) Kimberly agreed.
It took me about two hours to fall asleep.
But it was that bed crashing down that was the problem, not my late gaming.
I'll give this to Wayfair: they have good customer support that works under the general assumption that they want to help their customers.
Kimberly called them this morning, presented our ask, and they agreed.
We're being refunded the $2200 or so that we spent on the full bedroom set and shipping.
The local people are going to come and haul away the bed.
We couldn't get them to haul away the nightstands and chest of drawers, but they said we should just give it away. So, we can use it for the moment while we're getting new furniture, and then give it away.
(We'll start out by asking the person that we gave the first coffee table to. Or maybe just drag it out to the Habitat for Humanity thrift store.)
And, yeah, now we probably won't had a bed until late March or early April.
But we've got a mattress again: I disassembled the bed and got it out of the middle of the room this evening.
III. Meanwhile in Berkeley
So it turns out that the attempt to steal the plants in our front yard really happened and was part of an organized plant-theft ring. A., one of our former neighbors, looked into it on Nextdoor and found several other locals who'd had front-yard plants dug up and stolen. And then they all appeared at a local laundromat in new landscaping.
She says that the laundromat has always been pretty scuzzy, and that it's not a surprise that the owner hired people that were stealing plants to do landscaping for him.
As I said to Kimberly: it's lucky I'm not in Berkeley right now, because I wouldn't take kindly to that sort of violation by a local business.
There have been continued minor problems at the Berkeley house. The biggest was that our realtor couldn't get our heater working. Which sorta freaked me out because we had the whole system replaced on December 19th, less than two weeks before we left.
Turns out that PG&E had turned off our gas AGAIN for work on the street (something that they also did a few days before we moved), but they came out very promptly to get the gas back on (this time), and all is well again.
The house went on the MLS on Wednesday, and Barbara had the realtor tour on Thursday. She said there were LOTS Of attention. and she thought the open house on Sunday would be really good. So, fingers crossed.
The whole system for selling houses in the Bay Area makes me uncomfortable, because you list at a price well under the comps, and then depend on bid-ups to get you to where the house should be. So, we're listing at a price that would be very disappointing if that's all we got, and it's like stepping out into the void, hoping there's an invisible staircase there. But, throughout my adult life I've done my best to defer to the experts who are there doing the work, whether it's the moderators on RPGnet, the storyhosts on Skotos, or my realtor. So she tells us what she wants to do, and we say OK.
There are supposed to be two open houses on the next two Sundays, then she'll accept bids afterward. And hopefully we'll get a great price in the range of estimates we've seen, and hopefully it'll be toward the top, because if so then I'll definitely have the ability to work on my lesser-paying projects, like more Designers & Dragons, if I choose to. (And that's the plan.)
Fortunately, with all that going on in Berkeley under our agent's oversight, I can't really get too worked up about it, because we're a thousand miles away.
So, the days slip by, and word comes in our from our realtor, and I just have a moment of the stomach dropping as I hope we have good news and not a problem ...
And in two weeks or so, we'll maybe be accepting an offer.
Last Thursday I just wasn't yet up to trying out a new game store in Hawaii. It just felt too stressful, at a number of levels: I'd have to park my large car, Julie, in a small parking lot; I'd have to meet a whole bunch of new people in an unfamiliar environment; and I'd have to make a long drive home in the dark on the two-lane highway. So after my dad and I rushed around to Home Depot, getting wood to build bookcases, and after I got home to find Kimberly still have major problems with seizures, I just threw up my hands and decided that I didn't want to go out.
Apparently, it just took me a week to gather my gumption, because yesterday I felt fully ready to brave the new game store, even though my dad and I rushed a bit to get some swimming in on a rare nice day in the last few weeks, and even though Kimberly was again having some cognitive problems due to her non-motor seizures. So, after some dinner, I headed out at about 6.30 for their 7pm board game night ...
I'm pretty comfortable driving to Lihue now. But, it was getting increasingly dark as I got closer to town, so I had to really pay attention here and there. So it was a little tense, but not bad.
I pulled into the parking lot, and the first (angled) space was free. No problem.
When I headed out later in the evening, I did find out that the parking lot is indeed kinda tight. Going down one of the main rows on the way out, all of the trucks and SUVs that fill non-tourist Kauai really were sticking out into the aisle so that I felt like I had to go really carefully. But, despite the tightness, the parking lot is overall larger than I'd thought (I'd only seen about a third of it on Google Maps), so hopefully it won't be an issue.
Into the game store! (8 Moves Ahead!) I was a few minutes before 7, but I saw a group of four people already playing Zombicide. I lurked for a minute or two, and the fellow who turned out to be the owner, Terence, asked if he could help me, and I told him I was there for the board gaming night.
Fortunately, Zombicide is a game where you often have extra characters to fill out a scenario, so I got handed off the archer and was able to dive straight into the game.
Yay! Very friendly!
So that was my first game of the year.
Zombicide drags a bit. I think the game probably ran 3 hours total, from 6.30-9.30 or so, but it was good getting to play again, and it'll allow me to write a Zombicide case study for Meeples Together. (I'd played once previously, but it was eight years ago, so though Zombicide is mentioned several times in Meeples Together, it wasn't fresh enough in my mind to write up a full case study previously.)
I was a bit concerned about a turnout of just four players (Terence, Derek, Jason, and one woman whose name I never caught), because that small of a group makes it harder to get your favorite games on the table, but Terence told me it was a quiet night and 8-12 players was more common. And indeed two more folks showed up before I left. So, yay.
Apparently the board gaming is more likely to start at 6.30 than 7.00, so I'll show up a bit earlier next week, and Terence encouraged me to bring my own games, so I will. (Actually, I have no games unpacked right now, other than the few I got for Christmas; but fortunately I've got clear labels on the boxes that at least highlight the big ticket items.)
One surprising problem: most of the game distributors don't show to Hawaii!
Terence says that he's currently working with Asmodee and GTS Distribution in Honolulu. Obviously, Asmodee gives them a lot of games, while GTS seems to have really erratic products from a bunch of different companies.
I'd saved up a small list of new games I wanted (Wingspan, Castles of Burgundy 20th Anniversary, Las Vegas Royale), so that I could purchase them at my new game store, and I passed them on to Terence via FB this morning, but I have a suspicion they're not available.
So I'll have to explicitly find a few things to buy there. They've got Z-Man under Asmodee, so that's probably my most likely choice. I'd love to pick up Pandemic Legacy Season 1 if I could find a group to play it through. We'll just give it some time ...
And it gives me an excuse to get Lovecraft Letter.
And one bit of unpleasantness: while we were gaming a somewhat disheveled young man came to the door and told the owner that he wanted to see him outside.
As Terence was going outside, the man ranted: "YOU CAN'T KEEP OUT OF YOUR STORE. IF YOU DO, I'LL PUT YOU OUT OF BUSINESS. IT MAY TAKE ME TEN YEARS, BUT I'LL DO IT."
Yeah, problem people in Hawaii. Yay.
But it's not like I'm seeing them every day, like in Berkeley.
But then we're pretty much out in the suburbs. Speaking of which ...
So, the drive home: it was OK.
I left 8 Moves Ahead at about 9.40, which is later than I'd generally planned. I'm going to bed at 11 nowadays, so I'd like to be home by 10 to have time to rev down and get sleepy.
But slightly late might have been good: as I'd expected, the later it got, the quieter the streets were. So, there were still plenty of cars on the highway, but I wasn't facing a constant stream.
I'm getting better with all the headlights in my face generally, but sometimes it's just as you come around a turn or over a hill, and it's still totally blinding. Bleh.
A month ago I couldn't have made that whole drive back from Lihue (just 11 miles!) without being totally exhausted, but I was OK last night.
Even though for the last few miles I had to contend with headlights and rain!
(It's Kauai.)
II. The Bed Breaking.
So, breaking the bed.
Back when Kimberly and I got married, we did a trivia game at the dinner, where individual tables could contest for how well they knew us. One of the questions was something like: "Shannon and Kimberly have engaged in this activity in every room of the house other than the kitchen."
The answer was a lot less salacious than the question: "reading".
And so it goes with our breaking the bed.
After feeding the cats and signing some more paperwork for our realtor, I managed to settle down at about 10.30pm, and read a bit of The Incredible Hulk by Peter David Omnibus and Smiley's People. I was actually feeling like I could sleep at 11pm.
So Kimberly and I wandered off to our ablutions and bed.
We both settled into bed and starting wiggling across our huge new King bed so that we could lie together for a bit while falling asleep.
And then ...
I should note, this is the bed that we waited FIVE AND A HALF WEEKS for. It looks like we ordered it on January 5, after we decided we weren't going to find one locally. It was part an immense $3.5k order meant to Wayfair to fill out what we then saw as our two most critical rooms: the bedroom and the living room. The living room tables arrived in a couple of weeks (including a coffee table that we rejected, but more on that momentarily), while the bedroom furniture was the only thing we've purchased to go on a boat, with commiserate delays.
Wayfair kept playing silly games with the dates, pushing them back from late February to late March over the course of a few days after our purchase, and then when the furniture got on a boat, the delivery dates moved up. We finally received the nightstands on February 5th and the bed and Kimberly's drawers on February 12th. Not bad.
The wood was all "manufactured", as has been the case with about half of what we've purchased in Hawaii and that doesn't always survive travel. One corner of Kimberly's nightstand was definitely damaged and there was a notable chip in the chest of drawers. I wasn't pleased, but they weren't problematic enough to reject them and wait more than a month for replacement.
And then ...
Wiggling across the bed, Kimberly and I heard some type of CRACK and the bed dropped. And then we started hearing CLUNK, CLUNK, CLUNK like bowling pins going over in slow motion. We were now doing our best to wiggle our way off the bed without putting weight on it, an almost impossible proposition.
After I got off the bed, I hefted up our mattress and found total chaos under the bed.
Keep in mind, we'd never seen under the bed before, because we had Wayfair assemble it.
But first up, there were just four slim slats of plywood making up the "platform" for our mattress. No center support, which everyone says that a King platform should have. It looked totally inadequate.
Each of those slats was supported by two legs under it. "supported" in quotes. Unfortunately, the manufacture of the legs was horrible. Even if the hex bolts going through the legs and slats were totally tight, the holes for the bolts were too big and they could move about 30 degrees off of center. Oh, and there was metal inset into each leg that the bolt screwed into, and those insets weren't affixed in any way: they could just pop out. Oh, and those hex bolts weren't actually tight: every single one was still loose, and so you could move the legs more like 45 degrees off of vertical as a result.
So there were legs all over, no longer attached to the slats and one of the slats had broken the sideboard that it was attached too, falling to the ground as a result.
As best as I can guess, our slight scooting across the bed had caused one or more of those legs to slip out from under the slat, and then when the weight came back down on it, had popped off entirely. Likely just one or two did that, and it set off a chain reaction.
Despite it being after our bed time at this point, I spent a while fooling with hex bolts and slats, before I came to the conclusion that even if the bed had been assembled tightly, the instability of the legs was just a disaster weighting to happen.
We are, by the by, extremely grateful that neither cat was hurt, because that was a real possibility. Lucy, in fact, was investigating under the bed the previous evening while I was laying down. If she'd done that again last night, she could have been badly hurt or killed when the bed came down.
(This possibility left me and Kimberly more enraged than the actual breaking of the bed.)
And, I was saying that we rejected a coffee table already from Wayfair. We got one with a lift-top and it wouldn't latch right, and so Wayfair gamely shipped us a second one, and when it had almost the same problem. We determined it was crappy design and/or application of that design.
Same problem here. This wasn't just one bad leg. It was the fact that they're manufacturing all of their legs in a way that they're not stable, with parts that just don't fit together quite right.
And by they, I mean the manufacturers that Wayfair works with, but the problem is that Wayfair clearly does totally inadequate quality-control of the products that they sell. The coffee table and the bed both had foundational manufacturing problems.
So, that's a problem for Wayfair.
I did worry if we'd put too much weight on the bed, because we have a sort of heavy mattress, but looking at it in the light of day I'm pretty sure that we had less than 450# on that bed, even with our heavy mattress. If a bed can't take that, it's *)(@#)*ed.
(I looked it up, and the bed says it has a 600# capacity.)
I managed to get the mattress up against a wall so that it wasn't a hazard in the night, and then Kimberly and I staggered to our couches to do our best to sleep.
Because there was a huge, broken bed in the middle of our bedroom and nowhere to put the mattress.
Those couches are from CostCo, I should note, not Wayfair. Everything we've gotten from CostCo has been great quality, if not always precisely what we would have wanted.
Before we slept, we talked about our "ask" for Wayfair in the morning.
My first take was "they haul away the bed and give us a complete refund for it and its shipping and they give it to us in cash, not a credit on their website, like they did when they gave us a partial refund on the coffee table".
But as we were lying on those couches, not sleeping, I said, "We should demand a refund on the whole bedroom set, because we got the rest of it to match that stupid bed." (And we were also unhappy with some of its quality and the damage.) Kimberly agreed.
It took me about two hours to fall asleep.
But it was that bed crashing down that was the problem, not my late gaming.
I'll give this to Wayfair: they have good customer support that works under the general assumption that they want to help their customers.
Kimberly called them this morning, presented our ask, and they agreed.
We're being refunded the $2200 or so that we spent on the full bedroom set and shipping.
The local people are going to come and haul away the bed.
We couldn't get them to haul away the nightstands and chest of drawers, but they said we should just give it away. So, we can use it for the moment while we're getting new furniture, and then give it away.
(We'll start out by asking the person that we gave the first coffee table to. Or maybe just drag it out to the Habitat for Humanity thrift store.)
And, yeah, now we probably won't had a bed until late March or early April.
But we've got a mattress again: I disassembled the bed and got it out of the middle of the room this evening.
III. Meanwhile in Berkeley
So it turns out that the attempt to steal the plants in our front yard really happened and was part of an organized plant-theft ring. A., one of our former neighbors, looked into it on Nextdoor and found several other locals who'd had front-yard plants dug up and stolen. And then they all appeared at a local laundromat in new landscaping.
She says that the laundromat has always been pretty scuzzy, and that it's not a surprise that the owner hired people that were stealing plants to do landscaping for him.
As I said to Kimberly: it's lucky I'm not in Berkeley right now, because I wouldn't take kindly to that sort of violation by a local business.
There have been continued minor problems at the Berkeley house. The biggest was that our realtor couldn't get our heater working. Which sorta freaked me out because we had the whole system replaced on December 19th, less than two weeks before we left.
Turns out that PG&E had turned off our gas AGAIN for work on the street (something that they also did a few days before we moved), but they came out very promptly to get the gas back on (this time), and all is well again.
The house went on the MLS on Wednesday, and Barbara had the realtor tour on Thursday. She said there were LOTS Of attention. and she thought the open house on Sunday would be really good. So, fingers crossed.
The whole system for selling houses in the Bay Area makes me uncomfortable, because you list at a price well under the comps, and then depend on bid-ups to get you to where the house should be. So, we're listing at a price that would be very disappointing if that's all we got, and it's like stepping out into the void, hoping there's an invisible staircase there. But, throughout my adult life I've done my best to defer to the experts who are there doing the work, whether it's the moderators on RPGnet, the storyhosts on Skotos, or my realtor. So she tells us what she wants to do, and we say OK.
There are supposed to be two open houses on the next two Sundays, then she'll accept bids afterward. And hopefully we'll get a great price in the range of estimates we've seen, and hopefully it'll be toward the top, because if so then I'll definitely have the ability to work on my lesser-paying projects, like more Designers & Dragons, if I choose to. (And that's the plan.)
Fortunately, with all that going on in Berkeley under our agent's oversight, I can't really get too worked up about it, because we're a thousand miles away.
So, the days slip by, and word comes in our from our realtor, and I just have a moment of the stomach dropping as I hope we have good news and not a problem ...
And in two weeks or so, we'll maybe be accepting an offer.