Well, it's official...

...we're in escrow. We don't have the house yet (it has to pass a couple of inspections first) but we're on our way to owning our own place for the first time ever.

And that's a nice feeling but scary (when you think of just how much money you're committing to pay for that house over the life of the loan; my dad suggesting looking at the amoritization with a bottle of wine. I think he was kidding. :-))

But if everything works well, we'll have a yard for the wee one to play in, for us to grow a garden, and for our family to grow too if that's in the cards.

Roots. It's nice to have them, finally. :)

That sucking sound you hear...

...is the hose attached to our bank account.

Because a) we just bought a house (I think...more on that later) and b) everything from here on out is tied up with the house---inspections, appraisals, weird fees I've never heard of (seriously, there's probably some funding for NASA buried in there.)

So, here's why I think (but don't "know" yet) we've bought a house. The seller (in this case, First Unethical Bank of California, as I mentioned in my earlier posts on the subject) sent us a purchase agreement. Our credits aren't as high as we would like, but since they're not pulling (yet) the dirty trick of forcing us to use them as the lender, I'm not all that inclined to fight it. Yet. So we talked it over with the realtor, agreed that the offer was fair, and signed it and sent it back. Depending on where we are in the seller's list of Things To Sign, we could find out in 3-5 days if they were really serious about accepting our offer. This is First Unethical Bank, so anything's up for question.

I hope we get this house. I hope we have the money to get this house. And I hope that if we are secretly funding NASA, that we get to Mars sooner rather than later.

With apologies to Jane Austen...

...it is a fact universally acknowledged that if you have a profile on Facebook, some asshat from your past will find a way to find you.

It happened to me this morning. I was contacted (at 2am, no less) by a guy I hadn't seen, heard, or thought of since we split almost fifteen years ago. It didn't end well---we were engaged, but by the time I was getting ready to graduate from college, I was also getting tired of his mind-games and his jealousy and control issues. Finally, we had a huge fight while I was driving and he hit me once, hard, in the throat.

And I left him. I should have left him bleeding on the side of the road, but I was younger then and I thought I still loved him. But I did leave him, and many times since, I've thanked [insert deity of your choice here] for that decision.

I'm not scared of him anymore. He's welcome to whatever life he has, provided he has it far from me and my family. I will confess that there was a part of me that stopped breathing when I saw his email in my in-box, along with the stupid-ass message of, "I think we used to know each other." Really? You think, you jackass?

And I still don't know how he found me on Facebook. I use my husband's last name on Facebook (my "real" name is hyphenated, but since both names are unusual, I figure it's better if I'm not too easy to find.) And I've got my settings set pretty high---people who want to contact me have to email me first to ask for permission. If I respond, they can see my profile...but I didn't respond to his email. I just blocked the son of a bitch. Let him wonder why he can't see me anymore, or why I didn't respond.

And please, let him stay gone.

#$&#%(*&!!! Friday the 13th

No, the day went fine, why do you ask? :)

Seriously. Someone needs to do a travel advisory, or a sig-alert or something. Don't work on a Friday the 13th when it's the full moon. It's really NOT a pleasant experience.

For starters, our network went down for almost four hours this morning at work...which meant, we couldn't do anything. At all. For any reason. I read a book for four hours and got paid for it. Normally, I wouldn't have minded this, but today I had a lot of work I wanted to get off my desk, and I only got through half of it. Yippee.

And then there was the house debacle. DH and I have put in an offer on a second house, and all seemed to be going well until today's blow-up. Basically, the house that had no offers, now has multiple offers...which is not good, but not unexpected in this market. What is bad, and what still has me torqued off, is that the bank that owns the house wants us to get pre-approved with them as a condition of even looking at our offer. While that's not necessarily illegal (a bad case of the law not having caught up with the market, I suspect) it is unethical. It's the technical equivalent of, say, buying a car and being told you can only go to Bank X for the loan. Which is ridiculous in any context.

Adding insult to injury, the bank that owns the home has had some major issues with unethical behavior that's gotten the attention of federal and state regulators in the past---so no, we're not exactly jumping for joy to have to deal with them over this house.

I think we struck a compromise---our broker will give them the info to do a pre-qual, which means they won't have enough to pull credit, but it should give them enough info to evaluate our ability to pay for the place. But with multiple offers and ours not being a high one (for budgetary reasons as well as our own assessment of what the place is actually worth and the amount of work we'd have to put into it) I'm not at all sure that all of this aggravation is going to result in us getting this house.

Sigh.

The offer is in...

...but I'm not sure whether to cross my fingers yet. :)

On Wednesday, my hubby and I went househunting. Again. And we found a house that we both liked, in an area we weren't sure of. After much dithering/discussion (and much pulling up of the local crime databases,) we went to go see the house again.

So we put an offer in on the casita (I think that's the technical term; it's a Spanish-style bungalow)---it's been the only house (so far) that my hubby and I both liked. It's in decent shape for a house built in 1925 (and hell, it's still standing so they must have done something right. :)) And aside from some interior painting glitches, it's pretty darned cute.

So we bit the bullet and put an offer in today. Now, we wait, because the house is a short sale and it seems like everyone and their mother has to be involved before we even get close to getting the keys. Which means that nothing is really resolved; like an Ebay auction, we've put our "bid" in but there's just no guarantee we'll win. And if we find something better in the meantime...well, that'll be as it should be too.

Us. Homeowners. Wow. :)

Um, it's 6:30am here. What time is it in YOUR universe?

Ugh.

We just got a phonecall from one of DH's aunts (he's got I don't know how many, but due to his, er, complex family situation, we don't really hear from most of them. It's not a problem for him, so I don't sweat it either.) She lives on the east coast and was calling to tell him to meet her for breakfast tomorrow since she'll be in town.

Nice. So not only are you completely ignorant of the time zone issue, but you don't even have the common courtesy to ask him if he wants to go to breakfast. He's 41; I think he passed the "ordering around" stage around 35 years ago. And besides, we might have plans tomorrow. (Granted, those plans could include various activities along the lines of underwater basketweaving, but they are plans. :-P)

I no longer have any doubts about why DH has as little contact with this woman as possible. (Though my first clue was when she came out the last time---she seemed to think that DH's sole reason for existence was to drive her and her son around town and play tour guide. Just what a man with an infant and busy life wants to do without even being asked.)

Grrr.....

Well, at least today went better :)

Today was a much better day at work than yesterday, thankfully. I got lots of work done (which always makes me feel better---there isn't anything worse than having spent eight hours doing something only to realize that you really don't know what you did all day. ) So things are pretty much back to what passes for an even keel there. Whew.

And after work, DH and I went house hunting. And we found two houses we would be perfectly happy in. I'm pretty sure we're going to put an offer in on both of them (no, we're not rich, but most of the houses here are short sales, so putting two offers in really means we might get one of them. Maybe.)

It's a nice feeling being able to put roots down somewhere. In a (more) perfect world, we would have brought the wee one home from the hospital to a home, not an apartment, but as the Vulcans of "Star Trek" say, Kaadith. What is, is. (Yes, I'm at one with my geekness. Why do you ask? :)) So, what we hope for now is to find a house we can afford, with a yard for my husband's garden and the tree we're going to plant for our daughter (and whoever comes after her.)

In short, the normal things people want for their families. I just hope our house of cards that's gotten us this far in the process stays up and sturdy. :)

Krista and the Awful, Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day....

Okay, it wasn't quite that bad. But it was plenty bad enough.

I love my job. The people are great, the work is challenging (for the most part) and I get a lot of job satisfaction out of what I do. But we, like everyone else, are being affected by the economy, the state budget crisis and (for all I know) whether Mercury is in retrograde or not. ;-) The end result is a lot of nervous people who are stretched too thin, being asked to do even more with even less. Layoffs aren't imminent or even likely, but like one of my co-workers said this morning, she's not sure whether it's worse to be laid off or to be the last one left. I see her point some days.

So, yeah, things are tense. And when things get tense, goofy stuff tends to happen. In the last week, I've been honked at four times for things which wouldn't have been considered wrong, raised an eyebrow or rated a comment even six months ago. It's not that I'm a bad employee (I'm not---I've got the personnel ratings and the division awards to prove it, and I work damned hard at my job) but I think, as another co-worker said, management is under pressure to show they can Do Something Important---because they, like the rest of us, are nervous for what could happen if they come under the microscope.

So, for right now, I've got a target on my back. And I don't particularly enjoy it. But I'm an older and wiser employee now, and well, the only thing I can do is go to work tomorrow and hope things are better. And that Mercury stays out of retrograde. :-P