Good News

I have had a difficult time with life the past 6 months or so- ever since finding out that I was going to have to be the ESL Dept. Chair which is a job I NEVER EVER in a million years wanted to have. To top it off, I've been really struggling to lose the Clomid weight, which for some reason will not come off, and and I've been feeling unwell a lot- mostly headaches and chronic indigestion. Acupuncture really helped with most of that, except for the losing weight part- argh!!!!- but it was too expensive to justify doing. I've been totally stressed out, and on top of that, dealing with the world's biggest pile of crap divorce in my home. Even though hubby and I are doing as good as ever, having to live with my SIL + her toddler, and being constantly stuck in the middle of her divorce is really difficult. There are a lot of stupid creepy parallels between their divorce and my parents' divorce, so I kind of have to relive the worst time of my life every day. And she doesn't pay rent. And my dog needed butt surgery. Sigh.
About 2 weeks ago, I realized that it had been weeks since I had heard a single piece of good news in my personal life. There had been plenty of good things happening to those around me, but not much pleasant information in my life. Just complaints from parents and fellow teachers, problems with the rental property, complaints from Andrei's teacher, complaints from Andrei's mom, problems with my students and their families, drama with Ana's ex, yadda yadda yadda it may be the most selfish thing I've ever done, but I actually started praying to just get some good news. No specifics. Just something, anything good.
Well, I guess my selfishness worked. We finally started getting some good news. Luis got his bonus at work for the first time this year. The dog doesn't have cancer and the vet only charged us $135 for her entire treatment including medicine, office visits, and the surgery. The best news of all is that yesterday Luis got a call from IHC asking is if we would please sell our rental property to them. This is fantastic. I've wanted to get rid of that albatross for years now- in fact we moved out of there hoping for a quick sale with the idea of putting the profits into our current property and paying the mortgage down. Way, way down. It didn't pan out.
Three years ago group of about 30 property owners in our old neighborhood banned together and tried to send a message of solidarity to the hospital that we weren't going to be bullied into selling our neighborhood piecemeal to them- that we were going to hold out for something better than just the market residential value of our homes. The proximity to BYU and the quiet streets lined with ancient oaks seemed to be worth a little more than the going square footage rate. They offered, we counter offered, they offered again, we counter offered again. We had a 2 year contract signed with our realtor which expired this June. We are the last house on our block that is not owned by the hospital. 2 years ago, they offered us more than twice what we paid for the house.
I think if they agree to pay us 10% more than what they offered us last fall (our final asking price), we're going to take it. If we wait until eminent domain we might get more for the property, but that means finding an attorney and paying those fees, haggling in court, dealing with inspections, etc. and dragging this mania out for years to come. If not, we'll continue renting it out and sucking profit out of our renters one month at a time... so it's not like we're in dire need of selling the place anyway.
The reason why I really want to sell, however, is so that we can roll over our profits into our second property and I can go back to working part time (hopefully teaching), or we can take a home equity loan to pay for Luis's MBA program that he really wants to do, or I can get my M.Ed., or we can invest our profits into starting a family business (something Hector really wants to do and keeps pushing us to try). Any way you look at it, selling our house would be VERY good news.