The Steamboat Pilot & Today

Steamboat Springs — When the going gets tough, some folks go shopping. Some people give it up to a higher power, while others head off to see a shrink.

Me, I open a bottle of wine and after the second glass, call a psychic.

Let me explain.

For the past six months, all I’ve heard is that it’s a “seller’s market.”

No inventory; name your price. This seemed to be true. Houses were flying off the market in 48 hours, sometimes at more than the asking price.

Then I decided to put my condo on the market. As soon as the “For Sale” sign hit the ground, things started to happen.

The morning of my first home showing, I awakened to discover a bear had gotten into our bear-proof Dumpster. After carbo-loading, he recycled the contents on my front yard.

Bear scat.

Bear poop.

Bear excrement.

Yeech!

In the 17 years I’ve owned my condo, has a bear ever unloaded in my yard? Nope.

At 7:30 a.m. I pulled on rubber gloves and cleaned up the hubcap-sized waste along with fast-food wrappers, plastic bottles and other trash the bear tossed around in the parking lot.

Fun!

Now time to clean and get ready for my first set of potential buyers. In a furious blaze of activity, I rearranged clutter so it looked important and the clutter that looked like clutter was stashed in my car, inside the stove and inside the washer and dryer. I even made chocolate chip cookies and chocolate chip banana bread to leave for the Realtor and her client.

I was exhausted and ready for a nap, but there was nowhere to take one. It’d been so long since I’d sold a house I’d forgotten about the constant cleaning. I’d also forgotten about a little known condition that occurs as soon as you are under contract for a new house.

Two-mortgage-stress-a-phobia-itis.

Symptoms of this disease include but are not limited to: Wailing and whining, calculating net worth of household items on eBay, checking family tree for rich relatives, investigating modeling opportunities for the dog, and a few too many calls to my patient and kind mortgage man.

A quick Google search on “two-mortgage-stress-a-phobis-itis” revealed a distressing long-term prognosis: Binging on chocolate chip cookies and banana bread, an inability to talk about anything else and, in extreme cases, having to give up self-employment for a high paying job … next to impossible in Ski Town USA.

This is when I decided to pour the second glass of wine and call my friend the psychic. Let me state the obvious here. I am not a logical person. Early on in this real estate process a friend suggested I do a cost-benefit analysis to help me decide between two properties. Given the choice of constructing a spreadsheet or finding the phone number of a psychic, what would you choose?

I thought so.

A good psychic (not the kind found at a carnival or who has an 800 number) can cut right to the chase and give a thumbs up or down. Just imagine your mother blessed with divine power and no baggage and you’ll know what I’m talking about. After 15 minutes on the phone, I felt better. She assured me happy endings were in my future. My condo will sell in a timely manner. I will not have to face writing a classified ad for the paper to make my condo sound like the one for you. Now selling! Won’t last long! Act now, don’t delay!

But just in case you’re interested, it’s still available.