Bits and Pieces of my life

Where did I leave off last time? I had just left WI to start my new job in SD. I was nervous and a bit scared, but excited too. I had my car loaded like a college student’s dream. It’s amazing how much you can fit into a Saturn.

The trip was uneventful, and I managed not to cry. I had left my home, husband, daughter and all my pets, and headed out on my own. I had never been on my own before in my entire life. There were a few times I had to take care of the kids by myself while my husband had some military training, but staying home with my kids while my husband left was nothing like leaving myself.

My daughter would be moving out by the end of the month, and then my husband would be alone with the animals in WI. My daughter teased me about leaving the “nest” before she did.

We had the WI house listed for a bit before I left, and the realtor was very good about calling me and keeping me informed of her plans to market the home, but when I left the state, she pretty much dropped out of the picture. I won’t go into a lot of the details, but it soon became evident that she had misled us as to the listing price, and her plans on marketing the property. When the property finally got listed online, she had the footage wrong, used very poor pictures and had typos in the write up. I was so disappointed, if I had been looking; I would have passed the place up based on what she had done. It really was terrible.

I was settling into my job, and after two months (mid March to mid May – the best time of the year to market rural property) of not a single inquiry on our house, we dropped the price $20,000. The realtor told us we had it way to high to begin with (she was the one who recommended the first price). She got real snippy with my husband (when she would even return calls). I kept sending her emails, and then she’d respond a few weeks later saying her email service was acting up.

I was doing ok with my job. There really wasn’t anything about it that I was not prepared for professionally, but the strain of living in an area where I knew no-one and nothing was taking its toll. The workweek consists of 4-9 hour days, with 4 hours on Friday, and I started working 6-10 am Friday, then would hop in the car and drive 500 miles to our home in WI. One hour from Chamberlain to Mitchell, another hour to the SD/MN border. Two hours to Albert Lea, and the “corner” then another hour into the Twin Cities. If I was lucky, I’d not hit too much traffic and make it to WI in another hour, but if I wasn’t (as was often the case) it would take another two hours to go the last 80 miles. Ok, it would take me 1 ½ hours to go the next 40 miles, and a half hour on the last 40 miles, once I got into WI. That last bit was the same drive I’d been making for the last several years, so I was use to it.

After we dropped the price on our WI home, I still had hopes of finding a buyer before July, and having my husband moved before fall. He was very anxious too. He boss was retiring at the end of the new year, and the “new” boss would be starting in the fall to learn the ropes for a few months before taking control. The Powers That Be had not settled on a choice yet, so things were very unsettled. My hubby wanted desperately to be out of there before that happened.

We had a similar setup in WI as we have here in SD. Right before I left, I gave away the chickens and tried as much as I could to set things up to make it easier for my husband to handle the place on his own. His work schedule was always a bit lighter in the summer, and he rarely got sent out of town. And our son was willing to stay in WI on the occasional weekend that my hubby drove to SD to visit me. We planned that I would drive three weekends to WI, and he would drive one weekend to SD. That gave us a bit of time to start looking at properties out here too.

I’m going to sidetrack a little bit here(ok, a LOT) and talk about my job. This only pertains because it related to my, well, for lack of better words, emotional instability. I was on my own for the first time in my life. I knew no one and had no connections in the community. I even had to learn how to check and add oil to my car!!!! But back to my job – my employer had made an arrangement with my predecessor that he would stay and train me in, and leave once everyone (including me) felt comfortable with the transition. Looking back, I don’t know if this was a good thing or a bad thing. It was good in that it gave me someone to talk to. We shared an office and I “leaned” on his friendship quite a bit. And before anyone thinks “Oh, I know where THIS is going” it was not like that at all. This guy reminded me so strongly of one of my brothers, it was uncanny. The person I was replacing was single, a year older than me, and we actually shared the same birthday. He also has the same first name as my husband. We both were accountants, so we had that in common too. I was desperate for a friend, and he filled that need. We talked about way more than just the job, but it helped me to feel less lonely. Did I mention he was single? There’s probably a good reason, one of them being he is about the most anal person I’d ever met. I think his main goal was to indoctrinate me into HIS way of doing things enough that I would not change a thing. That wasn’t going to happen, but during the time we worked together, I kept my mouth shut about changes I would make, but made all sorts of plans for the future. He’s a really nice guy, just very “particular” about how things should be done. And he was also very good friends with the boss, or at least that is the way he saw things.

I don’t think I really needed to have him stick around as long as he did, but one of the staff was going on sick leave for back surgery, and he was able to do her job during the four weeks she was off, and then a special project unexpectedly got dropped into my lap, and he decided it would be better if he did it, than have me struggle with it. I felt I could have done it, but he didn’t actually give me the chance, and I was use to not arguing with him. We worked together from April 14^th to July 3^rd. But the part that is important is that during this time, I almost never talked directly to my boss. My predecessor told me that he and the boss were “like brothers” and he spent a lot of time in the boss’s office, discussing all sorts of things. I found out it was sort of a joke around the company, can’t find him? Bet the door to the boss’s office is closed . . . My boss is a wonderful person, and about the perfect boss for my style. But during this time, the boss relied on the outgoing person for his information as to how I was doing. My Boss is quite a bit younger than I am, and a very talented individual. He had come in several years earlier, and really turned the place around. Unfortunately this meant a bit of cleaning house, so some people within the company thought of him as somewhat ruthless. I could see it in my own staff (four women, mostly around my age). The boss would walk in, and they would get nervous and edgy. No one else in the company seemed to be so in awe of the boss, and I wasn’t working directly with him to figure things out for myself.

And my predecessor, even though he said they were “like brothers” would drop whatever he was doing if the boss walked into the office. And whatever the boss wanted, no matter how trivial, would be attended to PERSONALLY right at that moment. And he would tell me “never be late to a meeting”, “never ask for more time to get something done”, and a few other things. I was developing a real strange persona for this new boss of mine, and really wondering what I’d gotten myself into. I had been sharing a lot of personal information with my predecessor, and one time asked him advice about asking for some time off and he told me point blank to NOT discuss personal things with the boss. He then told me a story of a previous employee who did, and how the boss got so sick of hearing him, he got fired. I kept thinking, this guy (the boss) seems so nice on the surface. The few interactions I had with him, I could not reconcile the two. But I’ve worked with real “passive/aggressive” personalities, so I figured I’d just never seen the fangs and claws come out yet. By the time my predecessor left, I had a very skewed idea of what my boss was really like. But he seemed very happy with my progress – and I tried hard to keep him happy, always a bit nervous that I’d do something and feel those hidden claws. Ok, to put it bluntly, I was afraid of my boss, and thought he was the LAST person I should ever get any slack from for personal issues. He had let me work early hours so I could travel home, but had made it clear that it was a TEMPORARY situation, one he hoped would not be needed for very long.

One of the first meetings I had with my boss after I was on my own, my boss told me “Now that you are on your own, I expect you to make changes to get this department straightened out and running right” Ok, my predecessor spent 2.5 months trying to get me to do everything the way it had always been done, and my boss just told me he expected me to change everything . . . Not really a problem, I saw way too many things I intended to change right from the start. The first thing I wanted to change was to get my staff to stop being so darn jumpy when I walked into their area. They shared a large room with an open layout instead of cubicles (this was their choice, they liked working together). If I walked up to one of them while they were busy at some task, waiting for a good point to interrupt them, they’d suddenly notice me and literally jump to attention, apologizing for not noticing me earlier. This does sort of matter later in the story, but for now, lets just say that I had a lot of “reprogramming” to do with my staff. They were use to someone who expected them to treat him with utmost respect, and they told me some stories of serious “chew out” sessions if they weren’t properly respectful. Number one disrespect was asking “why”. And making mistakes was a “really bad thing” in fact, I was told very often by my predecessor not to do this or that (usually referring to the boss) because it would be a “really bad thing” but I never could get him to tell me what that meant. He would just say “don’t do that, if you do, it would be a really bad thing”.

Did I mention my predecessor being a bit anal? He got upset with me for not returning to cell A1 before saving and exiting a spreadsheet. He showed me how some of the staff didn’t get the staple in the upper left corner where he wanted it. I could go on and on about how this guy was stuck in such a rut it was unbelievable. At least he had the courage to realize it, and was leaving the profession and going back to school. His father had been an accountant, so that is what he did, and after 20 years, he realized he hated it. He’d been with this company for 9 years, and during this time he had developed routine to a fine art. If the staff made a mistake, they got chewed out and called incompetent, if they found a mistake he made; they didn’t dare bring it to his attention (insubordination). If they had ideas, they kept them to themselves. In a small community, good jobs are hard to find, so even though they didn’t really like the working conditions, they put up with them. They were treated like they never had anything worthwhile ideas and only rudimentary intelligence.

In fact, they were all highly skilled and capable. My department consisted of the payroll administrator (not HR), the purchasing agent, and two general accountants. (Though their job titles called them all “clerks”). Two had four year degrees and one had two years schooling. Three of them had more years experience in their fields than I did. I started working with them, letting them have input and I got them to STOP jumping when I walked up to their desks! Not that I’m the ideal supervisor, but I was such a change from what they had, they thought I was wonderful. The bad part was my predecessor had such a low opinion of his staff, that he had constantly told the boss about how awful they were, disrespectful and contentious. My boss, who never had reason to deal directly with the accounting staff - since my predecessor would handle any of his requests personally, had no reason to disbelieve him. And the staff had been reprimand enough times for not being friendly enough, that when the boss DID walk into their office, they would get real nervous. The boss took that as a sign of disregard, not outright fear.

Ok, so much for the side story, but I think it is needed to understand why things got so crazy at the end.

Back to the personal side. When I moved to SD, we expected to get an offer on our WI within a few months, and then we would start looking in SD. By June we realized our WI realtor was a dud, but she had already threatened to sue us if we tried to break the contract. So we figured we’d have to wait it out until October, then re-list with someone else and start over. There was no way my husband could have maintained the WI place with the animals over the winter. His schedule gets very full, and with the new boss coming on, he expected it to be even worse than previous years. And I was thinking it would be a nightmare to try to store all our “stuff” if we sold the WI place and had to move it all before we found a new place in SD. The horses could be boarded, and the inanimate objects stored, but what to do with my pond fish and all our cats?

A lot of the problems we dealt with would not have arisen if we didn’t have our cats. I would never put my cats on par with my children, but they are family none the less. I started looking for property to rent, and it became obvious it would be easier to find a place to buy than rent. I didn’t think that would be possible, but I know there are lots of creative financing out there, so I started talking to the local Wells Fargo bank. We’ve been with Wells Fargo for years. Ok, we’ve been with companies Wells Fargo has bought out for years. We started with First Federal, which got bought by Norwest, which got bought by Wells. I also talked to one of the other local banks, and they sent me some paperwork and said they would get back to me. On the other hand, the people at Wells Fargo took a personal interest, and I started working with a loan officer out of another branch, and they put together a plan for me in which we could get permanent financing to buy a place in SD without having to sell our place in WI first. And they pushed it through too. We restructured our secondary debt, refinanced with a second mortgage on our WI property, got enough cash for the down payment and ended up with enough credit to qualify for a $150,000 mortgage, well within what we wanted to spend on a place in SD. BTW, the WI property had to be appraised for this to work, and the appraiser told us the realtor had been nuts to even suggest the first listing price. We’d already figured that one out for ourselves. The appraisal, like most, came in where it needed to be to make the bank happy.

Maybe the bank would have jumped through the hoops for anyone, but I can’t help thinking that the fact that I had control of the purse strings for one of their top depositors may have helped things along. We do “share the wealth” with two local banks, and my position sure didn’t get me any special treatment at the other bank. Not that I’d let my personally dealing affect my business decisions . . .

This was pretty risky, and had they suggested a bridge loan, I would have declined. Interest rates were at 40 year lows and starting to edge up, and I didn’t want to get into something and then end up getting a much higher rate

As soon as we had all the financing in place, we started looking for property in SD. Most weekends I made the 500 mile drive from my apartment in SD to our home in WI. We only visited about 4 properties during our search, though we considered a few more. There just was not much out there that fit our needs. The house we now own came on the market the end of June, and I met with the realtor on my way to WI and checked it out. Honestly, I was not impressed with the house, but then the owner showed up and took us in his truck and showed us the back property. I took lots of pictures to show my hubby. The realtor took me to another property, but that one had more updates to the house (which I didn’t like, and we both agreed were not done well), the outbuildings were in horrid shape and it only had 10 acres, for a similar asking price. It was the 4^th of July weekend, and I had taken a few extra days off to spend with my husband. I looked at the properties on the 3^rd, and then drove home to WI.

We looked over the pictures and talked about the property. It was much farther from my work than I had hoped (84 miles) but it had a lot to offer, and so did the town it was near. It would provide my husband with much more opportunities for employment, and there was also the consideration that if I decided to change employers in the future, I had much more options living closer to Sioux Falls (we are closer to SF than to my employer). The last thing I wanted to do was get myself in a position where I’d almost have to move if I wanted to change employers.

My husband was interested in looking at the place, and I knew the realtor was staying in town for the 4^th, so I called her and asked if we could see the property on the 5^th (Saturday). She said that would work. I had driven to WI the evening of the 3^rd, and we headed back to SD the morning of the 4^th. Got back to my apartment in time to watch the fireworks over the Missouri River, and then next morning set up to meet the realtor at the farm.

We spent a lot of time looking over the property, took more pictures and said we would discuss it on our way back to WI. And we did, we talked about it all the way home, and into the night and the next morning, but we still were not certain if we wanted to put in an offer. Sunday I made the trip back to SD (2,000 miles in four days) and that night we talked more and decided we would put in an offer Monday morning. It was pretty scary thinking of buying a second house before selling the first, but I felt confident that the Lord wanted us in SD, and things would work out somehow.

We put in an offer, they countered, we countered, they countered again, and I managed to talk my husband into accepting. He was real close to saying no to the whole deal, but we were dickering over a few thousand dollars, and it wasn’t going to make a big deal on our end. It can make a bigger difference to the seller, as any decrease lowers the cash they are going to get. In the end, my hubby and I were both happy with the deal, but neither of us were going to get real excited about it until the papers were signed. We’d been hurt too bad when the deal fell through for us before. I think in the two months we waited for closing, I only drove by the property once, even though I passed within 5 miles of it every trip I made to and from WI.

I continued to drive back to WI most weekends, and started packing things up and hauling them out to SD. I had been hauling boxes out with every trip, packing up and making the WI place less cluttered with each trip. We didn’t live in WI long enough to accumulate much, so it wasn’t difficult to do. Well, we didn’t accumulate much in the house; our barn and shop were full. But that stuff wouldn’t fit in my car anyway.

By now, we’d pretty much given up on our current realtor. Our 6 month contract with her would be up in October, only about a month after we would close on our SD property. Everything went easy on our SD deal, no problems, no hang-ups and on August 27 we become property owners in SD.

I’m going to skip over the whole move thing. Anyone who has attempted to move a hobby farm 500 miles, across three states, with almost no help, will understand - It’s a lot of work!!!! I was giving a moving allowance, so we got everything we rented or hired out paid for. We hauled everything ourselves except the three horses and the Oliver 1800. Our pour 85 Chev ½ ton made way more trips than we expected, with our 18’ stock trailer. It took us about two months to finally have everything moved, and still one more full trailer load when my husband moved out here for good. The idea of having an auction and selling everything instead of moving it sure is appealing! I know now I could have gotten a lot more leeway from my boss to help make the move smoother, but I was still under the assumption that I should keep as much personal problems out of the picture. He didn’t realize until after it was all done that I was moving a small Farm, not just from one suburban house to another.