I attended a high school where most of the kids wore ropers, so if I say that something isn’t my first rodeo, who knows, I could mean that literally. Take, for example, running a household where my husband is away working for months (or years) at a time. Been there, done that. My husband’s phone had started ringing once or twice a day, then three or four times a day then almost nonstop, but most of the offers were coming from other parts of the state or even other parts of the country. There were offers from the Bay Area, Southern California, the East Coast, even Hawaii. The closest offer to where we were living came from the other side of the state. My husband had worked on jobs all over the state, the region and even other parts of the country, so during all of this interviewing and preparing, I got ready for the possibility of him being gone again, though it had been some time since that had happened. Since he had a considerable commute from Vancouver to Portland, I already took care of a lot things while he was at work or in transit. It was a bit of an adjustment but it was not unmanageable. The hardest part would be the kids adjusting to him being gone and me having to throw away, repair and pack up (and potentially store) almost two decades of stuff while preparing my children to leave the only home they remembered. And reading everything I could about real estate and what it may take to get every cent we could should the need arise to sell the house. That we built.