There. I did.

if you like it, share it with others?

So... it's been a while. I guess now that my computer is once again operational (vid card died in the move) I should make some sort of an update, particularly since my last notice was not so good.

Moved into the house. That went ok. Adopted a baby of the furry four-legged kind. She makes my life interesting.

Today is the first day it has felt like fall (well, second I guess since it was cold and rainy yesterday) which has sparked my soul searching once again. I have that feeling that I need to start figuring stuff out again.

Health has been so-so. Seeing a specialist who is sending me to another specialist, who will hopefully be able to solve the problem. Hopefully it will all be worth it.

Going to try to restart working on my hobbies, since it's been months to a year since I have done anything with them.

I guess that's good for now.

It seems to me that the more I get involved in political discussions, both real-world and online, the more I notice that the only thing most people hate more than the "other side" is the extremists in their own party.

If life had an undo button, I'd be control-z'ing the shit out of it right now.

Something new needs to go into here... Ahh, That will do. :)

In the latest episode of "buying a house will be the death of me.... literally."

Sellers want to move the closing date from July 15th to June 30th, obviously to their benefit. No obvious benefit to us, considering we are already paid to August 4th, which is the end of our lease. Thus far, they haven't accepted all of our repairs, and won't even if we make it a stipulation of closing early.

Husband already has verbal agreement with their realtor (who went through our mortgage officer to contact us about this, since our realtor is in Mexico, instead of contacting our realtor's partner). Husband went directly to their realtor to make the deal, instead of going through our realtor's partner.

This leaves the queen grumpy, because she wasn't really taken into consideration. Secondly I talked to my mom today, who gave us more bargaining ideas, but... yeah, bargaining has been done. Going to have to try to figure out some way to do damage control on this.

So what now? I don't know. Still too raw.

We ended up making an offer on the house. Our offer was about 10k lower than the list price. Their realtor said that they had received many offers on it in the past and were not very negotiable so they all were rejected. Some how the accepted our first offer anyways. I guess our realtor played up the "couple of young kids trying to get off to a good start". That and we had a prequalification letter from the bank.

Anyhoo... Just got the contract back from the realtor so taking it to the bank tomorrow I guess in order to start getting the appraisal and whatever else the bank wants. Trying to find good home inspectors. Need to run a radon test.

Does anyone know if the little home radon tests you can buy at Lowes/HomeDepot are accurate enough? Not sure much how else we could have one done. Not sure if that is covered by the home inspection or not.

Other suggestions? Bear in mind the initial contract is already signed...

Just so I can boast about it here as well... I'm going to Svalbard next week! :-D

For business. But still...

Let's see...

- The new job (started 3rd of March) is going OK though there are still quite a lot of adjustment pains. At the very least I have close to a carte blanche when it comes to going to external courses and conferences, which is quite cool.

- It's finally warm enough to start running outside. Yay!

- Still doing Krav Maga. Some of you know I missed out last semester due to an injury, but now everything seems to be OK. I'm not sure if I'll go up to P5 this semester though.

- I met an ex-slashdotter/Multiply refugee in real life, making the total to three.

- I've been taking lots of bird photos lately, but I really need to learn how to use my camera properly. It's good to know I'm not short on subjects :-)

- I have mod points :-D

How are you all doing?

I know it's been a while. And I know I owe everyone on planet earth at least one email. Lately I have just felt like hiding. I still feel like hiding, but I have questions.

So after months and months of refusing to look at/discuss houses, the mortgage rates dropped and husband was ready to start looking again. So we do a little driving around where there are signs out, do a little browsing of the internet, and husband picks out 2 to go look at and we go see them on Saturday. One was old and not at all what we were looking for. The other one is kind of (gut instinct was to use the word "enigma" here, but I don't know if it is the correct choice).

2250 sqft, .5 acres, and somehow in our budget. Well, I already know the "somehow" is this. For those of you who cannot view the link, it is a giant powerline that goes across the backyard with the two superhuge wooden poles being inside of the fence.

I don't like them. He couldn't care less that they were there. How much would having those giant powerlines in your backyard bother you?

Other questions are: what percentage of your savings did you throw down into a downpayment? What type of mortgage do you have?

One that renters can answer too: how many places did you look at before you decided on your current place of residence (if you consider this to be a place you will be living for at least a few years)?

Aside from the powerline issue, it just seems wasteful to buy such a huge house, for just the 2 of us, with no children on the (at the very least immediate) horizon. Really, what will we do with 4 bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms? We have enough furniture for a 800 sqft apartment, and pretty much maxed out donations from relatives to have this much. So probably at least half of the house will go empty for a few years while we figure out what to do with it, and build our funds back up again before we can really buy anything.

I *was* going to post often here...but never get around to it...sorry!

ttyl
          Farrell

You know you're in for a training from hell when the instructor says that he's going to whack you with the stick of pain if your tempo (when doing drills) is too slow...

It was a good training though :-)