Aurora Borealis

While we were having dinner tonight (Italian beef sandwiches from one of the St. Monica’s Circle women — moms group at church), one of our neighbors came by — the mom and her 13-ish-year-old daughter.  They live behind our across-the-street neighbors, and we met them when the across-the-street folks hosted an Easter egg hunt.  They said they’d heard I was on bedrest, so they came by with a rotisserie chicken and fruit — apples, oranges, strawberries, and cherries.  I thought they would have heard our situation from the across the street neighbors, but they said they were at the pool today and heard about it from a neighbor who lives a couple blocks from us who goes to our church and who brought us dinner last week.  (She also happens to be the wife of our at-large city councilman.)  Isn’t that nice?  Nothing that neighborly would have happened in our old neighborhood.  In part it may be because when I moved in there and for a number of years I was single and out of the house most of the time — working, MBA program, volunteering.  But I just don’t think that neighborhood ever felt quite that neighborly.  This is nice.

So the other day I hung up bulletin boards in my office area and hung up pictures in Agent Murphy’s room.  He seems very happy to have his stuff back.  He keeps pointing at all of it excitedly.  Now I just need to get to putting up some pictures/artwork elsewhere around the house…

Other than out of necessity bringing the fall clothes up from the basement a couple of weeks ago, I’ve kind of stalled out on the unpacking.  Still have a few boxes in the garage to finish dealing with, and all the stuff in the basement to organize. And I’m starting to get a little restless about hanging up some pictures and stuff.  I’ll have to figure out what items I’ve more or less identified placement for.  I guess after having lived in a rather barren house since listing in April, I’m ready to have things look a little more cozy again.

Had a few more things done on the house by the contractor who lives up the street.   They finished up this morning installing the cell phone signal booster gizmo we got.  So far it seems like it’s helping.  But the biggest thing we had done was putting a railing around our front porch with a gate.  It looks cute, and will even more so when the wood has “aged” long enough to be painted.  Now the Agent and The Dog and I can go out and sit on our church pew and I don’t have to worry about anybody dashing off!

Mr. Tldz has been working to get his team at work on track to go back to their shift coverage.  The whole crew has been on first shift with on-call coverage since the beginning of October with the goal of getting all the policies and procedures in place that this new group needs.  (That was only supposed to be a one-month arrangement.) It’s been tough for him because he’s not officially the team lead, but he’s had to try to function as a shadow team lead so stuff will actually get done.  The boss seems to be recognizing him as something of a co-team lead now.  Anyway, the date is set to go back to shift schedule on November 23, which will leave just Mr. Tldz and the team lead on first shift; and Mr. Tldz should be able to start to work from home pretty regularly then.  We’re looking forward to that.  He has a nice, private office setup in the new house, so it’ll be good to get to use it!

Had lunch out there yesterday, dinner tonight.  And Agent Murphy just randomly asks to go out there.

Books are now out of boxes, on the shelves.

Mr. Tldz has the new commute down pretty well.  We’re picking him up from the bus stop in the evenings because we haven’t walked through the street crossing yet, but it’s a pretty easy run for us to make.  The commute isn’t hugely shorter than the old one, but Mr. Tldz reports it is much easier — fewer connections to make.  And hopefully by sometime next month he can start working from home pretty regularly.

Still working on getting the wireless network signal into his office downstairs, but we think we’re on the right track.  It looks like we’re going to have to do something to boost our cell phone signals, too.  His work phone does fine, but our personal cells aren’t very happy in this house.  We are though!

And did I mention our new mattress came on Saturday morning?  So we were able to spend our first night in our new bedroom on Saturday.  Queen bed is a nice change.

We are now in our new house, and little by little we are getting settled in.  I think we’re really going to like it.  It’ll be nice to see it in the sun, though.  It’s been raining seemingly non-stop since we moved in.  I can’t complain, though.  The house is dry, unlike a lot of the areas around here that have seen really bad flooding.

Mr. Tldz was supposed to go back to work yesterday, but ended up taking another day off given the nasty weather — nasty to the point of dangerous and officials were saying people should stay home if they could.  We thought he could work from home, but when we set up the equipment we thought would work to extend the wireless signal into his office, it didn’t work.  So in the afternoon, when the rain had let up, we went out to get something else to try. Stupid move. The downpours came back, and getting home was pretty harrowing.  Thankfully, we made it safely.  But the new piece of equipment was still the wrong thing.  Mr. Tldz has now figured out what he really needs.  In the meantime, today he’s working in the foyer/ante-room to what will be his office.  (Figures — the wireless signal dies at the threshhold of the office.)  This weekend we should be able to get his office set up more officially.

Other than several boxes of stuff in his office, we’re down to a handful of boxes of kitchen stuff to unpack, 2 boxes of my office stuff, boxes of  books and CDs/DVDs that I’ll get to when I get to, and some master bedroom stuff.  Hopefully I can get to unpacking the last of our clothes today.  (Mind you, there are a bunch of boxes that are just going to sit in the rec room downstairs for a while — pictures and decorative items, etc.  I have to live here a while before I decide what of that goes where.)  Thanks to Aunty N. for coming over for a few hours on Friday morning to keep an eye on Agent Murphy so we could really knock out some stuff; she even helped him set up his room while she was here!

Our new bedroom set is here, minus the nightstands which are backordered but should (hopefully) come this week.  And if all goes well, our new mattress will be delivered on Saturday.  In the meantime, we’re sleeping on our old bed in the guest bedroom.

It’s really all coming together amazingly well.  We’re all here and okay, and all our stuff is here with very little breakage that I’ve seen so far.  Agent Murphy likes the new house.  He enjoyed sitting out on the deck for a few minutes today while I was washing dishes. (The sun actually came out for a bit!)  The Dog is figuring out how to get down to the yard — she has to go up and down stairs for the first time.  We brought her here on Thursday evneing and she almost immediately christened the carpet in Agent Murphy’s room.  I was ready to kill her.  But it’s getting better.  And I think they’re enjoying having her crate in his room.

Okay, I’m off to catch up on paperwork, finish laundry, and work on the master bedroom closet.

We’ve sold our house!  Closing completed and hour or so ago.  We’re still waiting to close on our purchase, but are hopeful that will still happen later today.  Lender’s processor has to do some data entry to satisfy underwriting department before our loan can be released to the closing department.

Life has been a flurry of packing and scheduling stuff and packing and…  We’re going to try to get some more packing done while we wait on the next closing.  Will probably be out of touch here for a few days until we get transitioned.

So over the course of the weekend and yesterday, I was feeling pretty pessimistic about our closing.  Since our Buyer still hadn’t deigned to give us her repair amendment, we were certain she was planning to ask for the moon.  She finally got all her information from her appraisal yesterday, and around 6:00 p.m. our agent informed us they’re not asking for anything.  We’re scheduled to close at 11:00 on 9/14.

We’re still waiting for official word that the bridge loan contingency on the house we want to buy has been removed.  Hopefully we’ll get that word today.  Then we can give our loan office the “go” to order the appraisal and hopefully we’ll be able to close that transaction 9/14, too.

So Agent Murphy spent the day with a babysitter yesterday and had a grand time.  (She has a boy about a year older than he.) I actually did get a lot of work done, mostly in the basement. That’s good, but what’s bad is that it’s depressing to look around and see how much still needs to be done even after that.  And I’m exhausted.

It was good to be away from the Agent for a day.  I actually started to miss him a bit.

So Princess Buyer still won’t deign to give us her list of repairs.  Our agent has told her agent that they need to get us their amendment as soon as possible when they have all the information they’re waiting on — no 8:00 p.m. on Monday, the day her extended due diligence period ends.  And we’ve told our agent that if they request another extension or anything else, we won’t agree to it until we have their repair amendment in hand. It seems pretty obvious to us at this point that Princess Buyer can’t actually afford to buy the house and is trying to see how deep our pockets are for making repairs for her.  We’re trying to make it clear that they’re not very deep, and if that will kill the deal we’d rather know that now rather than later so we can go back to showing the house and maybe find a real buyer.  (I guess we’d go back to showing the house, though I really dread the thought.  Of course, I dread the thought of staying here, too.)

I’m waiting until tomorrow to call our agent for an update on the bridge loan contingency on the house we’re trying to buy.  If it looks like it’s going to take anywhere near the full 15-day period to get that resolved, we need to go ahead and push the closing date out now.

I hate all this and it’s making me miserable.

It sure feels like it.

Princess Buyer (and her aunty, the other agent) needs to extend her due diligence period because she’s not sure the underwriting on her loan (where they officially say sewer doesn’t have to be connected) will be done in time, and without knowing that for sure, she’s still not sure “what to ask for” as far as repairs.  She wanted to extend it through next Wednesday (it’s supposed to end this Thursday).  Our agent called this morning and seemed to think that was reasonable and we should just agree.  I pitched a fit and pointed out we’d already given them a longer due diligence period (14 days) than the 10 we’d wanted.  I told her we’d give them through Monday (to which they agreed).  And then I told her to get some numbers from them.  They’ve been sitting with the inspection report and the plumber’s estimate on connecting to the sewer for over a week.  Certainly they should be able to give us at this point: IF sewer connection, THEN we want xxxxx.  IF NOT sewer connection, then we want yyyyy.  It sure is coming across to us that they plan to ask for a lot, and if that’s the case, we can’t do this deal and we’d rather know that sooner than later.

Still no word from the sellers of the house we’re trying to buy that they’ve made any progress on their bridge loan contingency.  Which may well mean we’ll have to push the closing date because we can’t even order an appraisal until after that is removed.  It feels like we’re the ones having to be flexible on both ends of this deal, and it feels like we’re going to get screwed.  And I want to know who the hell is representing our interests in all of this.  Because right now it feels like our realtors are doing a piss poor job.  We were really impressed with the activity they got on our house and were looking forward to recommending them to some folks; but now I’m not so sure about that.

And I’ve been in a truly foul mood about all of this all day.  It doesn’t help that Agent Murphy is being his usual annoying self and he had a fruitless speech therapy session (he went in short on napping because of the time of the appointment that was available; fortunately we now have a schedule set for September that doesn’t interfere with his normal nap schedule) which once again has me wondering if there’s any point to all the money we’re spending on this therapy.

Meanwhile I’m exhausted and sore from working in the basement all weekend trying to get us ready to move.  And I have another day of it planned tomorrow since our moving company delivered packing materials today.  At least that gives me a reason to ship the Agent off to a babysitter for the day.  But it will really suck if it turns out this deal falls through and we end up just taking the house off the market and living here, cramped and unhappy, until we die or pay off the mortgage, whichever comes first.