Real Estate, as an industry, is hard for outsiders to understand. How do agents get paid? Don't they all make a gazillion dollars? Why don’t they all look like the Property Brothers, aka werewolves?

Ghosts don’t scare me. Haunted houses do not make me shiver (for the most part). I’m not afraid of the dark or of things that go bump in the night. What I live in dread of are crazy people who look just like you and me and who want me to help them with their real estate transactions.

I choose to believe that most people who lead happy and fulfilling lives do not have a lot of fond memories of high school. At the very least they would certainly not say that those days were the best days of their lives. Or maybe I'm just jealous.

Facebook is wild. I have a theory that it reconnects you to people you were probably never supposed to see or talk to again. In my case, that would be pretty much everyone I went to high school with.

Like most good real estate agents, I send Christmas cards out to past clients. Sometimes those cards get returned for various reasons, but the most common reason is that my former client went and sold their house without me.

I am sure that when our alien or robot overlords finally come to relieve us of the mess we have made of this third rock from the sun on which we reside, they will spend the rest of eternity trying to make sense of the thing we call love.

It was during a fairly serious downturn in the real estate market that I began to think of writing again.

Be careful what you say you will never do.

The only roommates I ever had were in college, both in my freshman year. After that year, I did everything in my power to ensure that I would never have another roommate again as long as I lived.

I have heard it said that life is just junior high school with money. I wish.

There is no doubt that, in many ways, I married my father. My husband is a hard worker, a straight talker, and fervent protector of the people and things he loves. He also loves fart jokes.

Growing up, we had lots of different kinds of pets. When we lived in the country, we mostly had country style pets: outdoor cats and dogs that called multiple houses home.

It goes without saying that our society is obsessed with youth. As a person who feels 16-24 internally, but is pushing half a century externally, this is constantly drilled into my head.

The two most famous people I have met in person and talked to are James Earl Jones and George Jones.

I have never wanted children. Yes, I had baby dolls, including my beloved Pebbles who stuck with me through a terrible haircut, having her arm ripped off by my brothers, losing her clothes, and eventually being rehabilitated at the Doll Hospital in Bell Buckle at the insistence of my grandmother. But Pebbles was a doll, not a living child.

One thing my father and I both learned the hard way was to never ask my grandmother for something we didn’t really want.

I love to watch Dateline, and every time I do, I jokingly wonder aloud to my husband if this will be the night we would finally see the episode on my brother Tom.

During my junior year abroad in Germany, I received a letter from a person I didn’t know. It was very thick and the return address was a prison in Nevada. I was intrigued, but also concerned. How in the world would someone in a Nevada prison get my mailing address in Germany?

And then I remembered my brother Tim.

When I was around 3 or 4, before I entered Kindergarten, I became convinced that I would never learn to read.

I am not a fan of the word “adulting” for several reasons. First, “adult” is a noun and to add -ing to it to make a present participle is annoying. Second, it is a whiny present participle.