Are we at all sure that it's not secretly Friday the 13th?

Yeah. It's been one of those weeks. I'm thinking that instead of having the bottle of wine when we look at the amoritization chart (as my dad jokingly said) I should just cut to the chase and start drinking now.

Because, for a 24 hour period, there was a situation in which we had committed to buy a house but had no funding lined up. None. Because the bank our broker went with did an about-face and decided that no, they weren't going to adhere to the guidelines of our first time home buyer's program after all (and how nice of them to tell us a month before closing. /sarcasm off.)

It does look like things are looking up, but slowly. Our broker is hot on the trail of another bank who actually will write the loan the way it needs to be written. Now if he can just do that before our first-time homebuyer's program runs out of funds....yeah, who, me worry? :-P

The one upside of this is that I'm finally starting to hear the family horror stories behind when my parents bought their first home. (I was four or five, so yeah, I missed a lot of this.) It's been pretty funny by turns, and strangely reassuring to know that no, this isn't really that unusual. Odd. Annoying. And damned inconvenient...but not unusual.

So now, we wait. As of now, our COE is May 18th. That date may change, but that's where we are now. And in the meantime, we hope. :)

Well, now about a month from closing...

..yeah, our close of escrow (COE) got extended due to the requirements of our first time homebuyer's program. Which is fine, but frustrating...still, we plan to be in that house for many years to come so a few more weeks won't matter. On the upside, First Unethical Bank of California decided to go ahead and fix the few things that needed to be fixed (like the water heater, the leaking pipe under the kitchen, and the toilet. YAYYY) All in all, not too bad for a house that's almost 70 years old.

Today we had such plans---we were going to take the wee one to the zoo. Except that a) the wee one and some killer indigestion kept my hubby up last night and b) hubby on three hours sleep does not a pleasant day make. So he slept in, I kept the wee one off her daddy, and we went to a garage sale instead this afternoon.

We really hadn't planned on the garage sale--it was one of those "Hey, they're having a garage sale, let's stop" things, so we did. I scored with a $2 CD of an Irish artist named Sinead Lohan and a scarab paperweight. (Who, me, eclectic? :-)) And we had a good time, which is more important.

We also had company today...of the sort that makes you go, "Huh?" My friend Alwyn's (not her real name) ex-husband (or husband, I'm never sure what's going on with those two) was on some sort of long distance bike ride today and called us to see if he could come down and visit. Mind you, a) the house wasn't clean and we weren't really prepared for company and b) when Alywn and her husband hit the skids, things got pretty nasty pretty quickly between her husband and us and c) are they together or not? Who knows? And why did he want to see us, really?

So...yeah. It was a little awkward, but I called Alwyn before he came down just to make sure things were fine on her end, and they were...and the visit wasn't bad. So while this was all totally unexpected (to say the least) it hasn't been a bad day at all. Whew. :)

16 Days to Closing and Counting....

...yup, that's right. We are thisclose to closing escrow on our first house. And I'm sitting her shaking my head, because I literally cannot believe it's really going to happen for us.

But still, I'm nervous, because things just don't happen this smoothly for us. Ever. (In fact, about the only thing that's ever gone smoothly was the wedding and the honeymoon--after that, it was a rollercoaster. Which is fine---I like rollercoasters, but I could have done with some warning first. :)) So, we're working on crossing our t's and dotting our i's and maybe, just maybe, things really will work out.

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.