I knew I wasn’t going to like it, but there was no getting around it.

After six years in our home, it was time to list it.

I dislike any big-ticket transaction, which I’d define as anything between a major car repair and the national debt. Rest assured, as much as I love cars, buying one is like a trip to the dentist. Purchasing a home? Fugetaboutit.

Which is why I was a little surprised I wound up owning a home in the first place. Signing the papers struck me as playing with silly money. Why would a bank ever be willing to make that kind of deal? With a journalist, of all people?

But it was the right thing to do at the time, providing us with a stable base of operations, particularly for the kid. With her now just a year away from college, and knowing this wasn’t where we wanted to spend the rest of our lives, the time had come for me to suck it up.

It has been eye-opening, to say the least.

For most, monthly open houses and surprise showings on a couple hours notice are simply opportunities to get out of the house, eat out or run errands.

In that respect, I have two major obstacles.

For one thing, I work from home. The nature of my work requires me to be near a computer, often on deadline. You haven’t lived until you have cruised around the area desperately looking for a WiFi connection to send pages or post a story. 

There’s only one thing I can think of to make it more of a challenge.

Dogs.

Two of them, to be exact.

Each showing becomes an afternoon of madcap racing around trying to de-dogify the house. Then, we all pile into my surprisingly subcompact car to wait it out in the air conditioning. After all, it is the “dog days of summer.” 

Nowadays, it seems everyone wants to see a house as a blank slate. Bland walls, minimal furniture. No personal items. All that “noise” makes it harder for people to see how their stuff fits in a house.

We live and work in our home. It’s going to look lived in. No offense to the experts and agents, they know their profession, but there are times I feel I could move all of a potential buyers’ stuff into the house and they still couldn’t see it because of the color of the walls. That, to me, speaks more to a lack of vision. 

We didn’t much care what color the walls were. We didn’t need a home to be empty to picture how our stuff would work in it. And we certainly didn’t criticize peoples’ personal choices or style. We acted as if we were guests. Sure, the sellers were motivated by a hope of selling us their home, but they had put aside what they were doing to open their doors to us. We were respectful of that.

I blame HGTV. I’ve watched my fair share of flip-it and house hunter shows — the kind where half the couple sold the business and the other half is a professional blogger — and words like shiplap, staging and open-concept are tossed around without mercy. 

Frankly, I think that kind of stuff has distracted house hunters and tainted their expectations. It just isn’t reasonable to presume the average seller will drop thousands of dollars into a home to make it sellable. Were we to sink that kind of investment into the place, we’d be sticking around to enjoy it.

Rather than focus on critiquing homeowners’ decorating choices, it might make more sense to look at what we used to call “the bones.” Is it sound? How was the equipment? Any chance of a pricey issue popping up? 

In the end, it’s just a structure. It’s what you do with it that makes it a home.

Chris Six is a freelance writer and consultant. Learn more at cdsix.co

I never expected to find myself at a high school football game I wasn’t being paid to be at.

Working as a sportswriter, as I did in the first few years of my journalism career, I expected to attend my fair share of high school football contests. But I always assumed I’d enjoy the relative comfort of the press box, not out in the elements.

That all began to change about 10 years ago, when I met my girlfriend and her daughter. First it was cheerleading, in high school, it’s been band.

I’m sure, like anyone with kids on the field during football season, the weather doesn’t bother me like it would if I were simply working the game. Well, much. The cold can be penetrating, the wind brutal. I have a few miserable memories of rain, but we’ve been lucky the last few years, and the kid on the field tends to make you forget all of that.

Funny thing. Just when you get accustomed to it, it’s over. And I’ll miss it.

I’ll miss watching the field show and rooting for a team of rural underdogs who don't have the depth to outlast the city schools. I’ll miss the concession stand food on a Friday night. But most of all, I’ll miss high school. For, in a couple of weeks, not only does the season begin, so will a year of “last times.”

By now, I know from experience the weeks race by from the end of August to November. Packed in there will be senior nights and homecoming, and before you know it, you’re making Thanksgiving plans and chopping down a Christmas tree.

Things don’t slow down in the new year, either. Musicals and prom and suddenly, graduation. Each school event will be the last one we attend. This is the last year to hold on to those moments, because they’ll never come again.

Looking back through the last 10 years, I’ve had the privilege of watching an amazing kid grow into equally amazing young woman. Talented, whip smart, able to keep up with my offbeat sense of humor and hold her own. 

I know the future holds joys and surprises I can’t yet comprehend. But, while college is a new world, full of things we’ve yet to explore, it also will be different. It’ll be her world. She’ll be establishing her own life.

I suppose I’ve looked forward to these moments for so long, I’m not ready for them to be over. That’s selfish, I know. But when you never planned to have children, and life gives you an unexpected gift, I can only hope a little selfishness is excusable.

Odds are, this won’t be the last year I attend a high school football game, but when I do, it’ll just be a game. I’ll be back in the press box, or roaming the sidelines with a camera.

So, this time around, it won’t be business as usual. I can already feel the warm, late summer night. I can smell the French fries. I can feel the hard metal bleacher through the two padded seat cushions. And, even though it is currently humid and in the 80s, I can even feel the bite the first chilly fall breeze and those November nights. 

Don’t get me wrong. I’m going to complain about the miles. I’m certainly going to complain about the weather. I’m going to regret that walking taco.

But, I can’t wait for the season to start. 

I just don’t want it to end.

 When it comes to food, I’m an experimenter. 
 
That made me kind of unique among some of my friends, particularly those from families that may have been hard-pressed to travel to the neighboring county, let alone another city, state or country. 
 
I grew up in the kind of place where if it wasn’t meat and two veg, it wasn’t a meal. Chinese was looked at with skepticism. Sushi? That’s bait.
 
But at home, that wasn’t my experience. 
 
Sure, growing up outside Philadelphia, we had our share of hoagies, cheesesteaks and pizza, but going out was different. My dad did his share of traveling for work, and got the chance to try a lot of food around the country. He would seek out places to take us. Today’s kids are used to having any number of regional and international chains at their fingertips, but back then, you had to find restaurants, and they weren’t always nearby.
 
That suited my mom. If she was going out, she wanted something special. “Chicken?” Mom would say, “I can make that at home.”
 
And it suited me, too. From the time I was old enough to go out to dinner with my parents — and by old enough, I mean able to behave myself in public, there were no high chairs, bibs or children’s menus for me — there were only a couple of rules.
 

1. Take all you want, eat all you take — that was a rule of thumb dating back to Dad’s Navy days.
2. Try it. Dad let me experiment. I always knew if I wasn’t a fan, Dad would swap with me. That only happened once, when I wasn’t quite ready the first time I ordered gumbo. 

 
The net result? I jump at the opportunity to try new things, new cuisines and new flavors. Food, for me, is a way to travel and experience the world on a limited budget. I’ve spent many hours watching Anthony Bourdain, or the original Iron Chef, where the secret ingredient was something I never heard of and somebody would create squid ink ice cream.
 
Which is the long way round to bring me to the point of this column.
 
Even I have my limits.
 
You might have seen last week that French’s — yep, the mustard people — teamed up with Los Angeles’s Coolhause Ice Cream Company to create, you guessed it, bright yellow mustard ice cream. The flavor made its debut for National Mustard Day, which, in case you didn’t know, is the first Saturday in August.
 
Now, I’ve had my fair share of ice cream in my time. I’m fond of a Japanese creation of green tea ice cream wrapped in soft rice dough called mochi. The ladies in the house think I’m on something, particularly the teenager who sniffs everything before she eats it. 
 
Back when I was slacking off in elementary school, they had me shadow the kids who needed extra attention for a day. They were doing an ice cream flavor survey and I suggested adding peppermint stick to the choices. No votes. I didn’t get invited back. I think they figured out I was just lazy.
 
That said, I’m drawing the line at mustard ice cream. I’d say “who knows where this will lead,” but, I already do.
 
Just days later, Oscar Mayer taunted French’s and introduced hot dog-flavored ice cream. It’s all part of the Ice Dog Sandwich, made with candied hot dog bits, hot dog sweet cream, spicy dijon gelato, and a cookie bun. 
 
Dijon. I suppose plain old yellow just didn’t cut the mustard.