Putting our house on the market has made me feel like a jerk for every time I took a stroll through a for-sale house knowing that I probably wasn't going to buy it. It's kind of like stringing someone you don't like along for a month knowing full well you're going to dump him in not too long. Don't act serious if you're not going to be serious! Come on! This house is lovely and in a great location and has a new roof--buy it! What's wrong with you?

Granted, we've only been on the market for about a month now, but still, I think most sellers hope that their place will be snapped up. We bought this place so quickly after it went on the market that the sellers still hadn't found a new place to live yet. But still. Suddenly we know what everyone else feels like when they're trying to sell their place. A desperate yearning to have it all be over with and not to be screwed too badly in the end.

I mentioned this longing on Facebook and some people had a few ideas on how we could expedite the process. One is by bribing potential sellers with food and/or alcohol. Now, as much as I would love to put beer out for sellers, I could see how that would be a little confusing ("Are these for us or are these people having a party later? Is this a trick? Where's the recycling?") and I do not have it in me to bake cookies at random intervals for groups of strangers (plus, I'd eat them all. I know this and you know this.)

So, I put out a thing of Lindt truffles, because my cousin Bill told me that that was what sold them on their new house, and when they put them out when trying to offload their old house, it did the trick. So this will be the first thing people see when they arrive in our living room:

See how I even put them on a tray that conveniently provides a place to put the wrapper?

Someone else asked me if I'd buried a statue of St. Joseph yet, and I mentally smacked myself on the forehead. Of course! This is probably why we hadn't sold the house yet! Six years ago, when we bought this place, I was digging around in the front yard "weeding" or something (I don't really do plants) and I found a statue of St. Joseph buried upside-down. In case you're unaware, St. Joseph is the patron saint of realtors (in addition to the patron saint of a happy death, so think of him in your time of need), and so people, when trying to sell their home, often bury a statue of him upside-down in their yard to help sell their home. I guess it's upside-down so that it's harder for Joe to dig himself out and crawl back inside to his nice, warm home. This is where I should reiterate that sometimes I think Catholicism is just really cuckoo-bananas. Anyway, when I found the statue, I threw him in our storage closet because I figured that I might need to re-bury him one day. I had completely forgotten about him until this week.

So, here is St. Joseph, all cleaned off, next to our spade (let's call him David. David the spade. Do you get it? David Spade.)

Here he is next to his new resting space:

Goodbye, and godspeed:
There was some disagreement when I studied up online about whether St. Joseph should be buried in the front or back yard, but I decided to go with front, where I found him. It worked that time, after all.