blur

These days have been a blur....

Been working alot
Going to California for work next week to verify a software install
Going on vacation the week after that to Charleston
Have to get a mortage picked out before we go on vacation (so in my downtime during my 60+ hour work week I'll work on that :) )
I actually hung up on a mortgage broker today because he wasn't cutting to the chase....shame on me. It's lent for crying out loud.
I missed the heartbeat/dr's appointment today

With all this crap on my mind, no wonder I look at the clock and say, "wow, it's noon already?" "wow, it's 5pm already?" "dude, you aren't leaving work are you?? It's only 6:30pm!"

Update from last post: Oh, yea, we are in contract for the house!

Despite all this, and trying not to go crazy with it all (don't minsconstrue the above comments as complaints, because they aren't) life is really great. Let me tell you why, (besides the obvious crap like a kick ass marriage and a wonderful wife) 1. I am employed and 2. We are getting the house we want at a great price. Can't beat that!

C

officially unofficially in contract

We are officially unofficially in contract for the house. According to our realtor, since we signed the counter offer and sent it to her and she sent it to the sellers realtor, that constitutes a binding agreement. However, from our realtor's point of view it's not official until the seller's sign it too. So we've been waiting all day to hear back from them.

What's killing me is that the sellers said that they had to have our counter offer back to them by saturday night, and now it's sunday, 4:45pm and still no word back. Why can't they move their butts if they expect us to hustle ours?

Oye vey!

And I'll see your 250!

Yea, so the wife pretty much covered the basics of our house offer adventure that we went through this afternoon. The short of it is this:
1. We were going to put in an offer on a house and the seller's realtor knew we had seen the house twice and wanted to see it again
2. Somebody else (suspiciously) made an offer on the house today
3. We had to hustle and get our offer in.
4. Of course, not knowing what their offer was, we were too scared to (politely) low-ball them with our offer so we upped it to just a smidgen under the sale price.
5. They liked our offer better so they counter-offered our offer and added 250 bucks. They also put a bunch of other items in their counter-offer that said we have to hustle and not drag our feet with this i.e. getting our mortgage together, the home inspection, and so on.
6. I just got an email from our realtor (at 10:45 on a saturday night, man she rocks!) that says that she'll call me tomorrow as soon as they sign. Once they sign that means we are in contract for a house!

Wooo-hooo! I'm hoping they'll sign and we go into contract tommorrow because Amanda and I have done what every potential home owner shouldn't do, and that's become emotionally attached to the house before purchase. Oh well, what can we say, we're human. It had cat doors, what were we supposed to do?!!?

On the downside, we forgot to put in there that the screen door was broken and we want that fixed. D'oh! But we did get the barstools!

So that's that. On top of that we went through all of this while I was at work today...darn end of the quarter milestones. Next week is going to be exciting as well with all that we have to get moving on with the house and meeting deadlines at work. But I wouldn't want it any other way, I'm employed and we got the house we wanted under the price it was listed on the market!

C

Our future home?

Whoomp here it is!



We are going to put an offer on this house shown above. We visited it twice, once with the in-laws, and have driven by it on at least 1 other occasion....and looked at it alot on the internet. We feel pretty comfortable with it....the layout, the looks, the amenities and most importantly, the price. So this weekend we are going to look at it one more time and submit all the paperwork for the offer.

It has 3 bedrooms so when you visit us no more couch, no more floor and no more air mattress!! Aren't we nice? Yes, we are!

Hope all is well with everyone!

C

blonde moment

I had a blonde attack today. At work today my boss was telling me that next week he and his family are going skiing in Idaho. I asked him where at and he said that they are going to fly into Boise and either go to some-city-I-can't-remember or drive to Salt Lake City. As we have this conversation I'm staring at a map of the US and looking directly at Idaho with my nose 6" from the surface. At this point, I make the dumbest comment of the day..."Where's Salt Lake City?". I for some reason, expected it to be in Idaho. Look down, dummy, it's in Utah! We all had a good laugh at my expense and that's okay.

Are you smarter than a 5th grader? Your next contestant is right here.


C

house hunting

Well, 5 more houses down. I think we are going to put an offer in on the house with the cat doors and Thomas Kincade paintings. However, for the time being we are going to pray on it, sleep on it, badger our parents on what to do and look for something else to come on the market. No rush.

Not only that, but the addition of me working this past year has thrown us into a different tax bracket. Not really, it's more like catapaulting a watermelon into a brick wall type of thing. We owe a disgusting amount this year. Have no fear, we already have a recommendation for an accountant. Hopefully she wears wonderwoman underoos and a cape so she can save the day.

Bye,

C

end of round 1

Here's how the family is doing with our March Madness brackets at the end of round 1:

Chicks: 27/32 correct
Hugs: 27/32 correct
Peanut: 27/32 correct

So we are hanging in there.

Off to look at some more houses today. Ideally, we'll look at the others and pick out the one with the Thomas Kinkade pictures and the cat doors. Or, we could end up finding one we like just as much, if not more and then have to decide. Arrgh, this is difficult.

And of course, this (blogging) is just another way I allow myself to procrastinate because I don't feel like doing our taxes.

Had an exciting time hanging out with Sergey last night playing Clue. I laughed my head off! Mr. Green, with the knife in the study. Duh! I was this close to winning! D'oh! I probably would have won, but I think I was distracted by my engorged gullet filled with a pre-game meal of a double steakburger platter with cottage cheese and chili and shake from Steak and Shake. Ooooh, Steak and Shake. Distracted by the blinding need to beat my wife, along with the full belly I lost all concentration and was hasty in my accusation.

Next time I'll know who dun it.

C

Brackets

We just completed our first gambling activity as a family! I feel so much more of a closeness between my wife and child....

Our picks are:
Me: Georgetown over Florida
Wife: UNC over Wisconson
Peanut: Kansas over OSU

May the best bracket win!

C

Yea yea, I'll get to it

Had a great productive weekend.

We went and looked at the house that we are interested in with the in-laws. I think they more or less gave us their approval on it. Meanwhile, I think we are going to look at a few more just to make sure we like that one and then put in an offer pending a few things. There was some mold damage a few years ago, so we need to investigate into that and a few other minor things. As the house sits now though, it is totally move-in-able. We'd just have to repaint a couple of the bedrooms, currently they have a John Deere color scheme that we don't like too well.

Other than that, we hung out at GameWorks with Nikki to celebrate her 29th birthday, sent out baby announcements, went to mass, washed the cars, changed the oil in them both (boy, they were filthy).

WAIT A SEC!! What was that second one up there you said??!! Baby announcement!! What the dilly-o!!

Yep, that's right, the wife is 10 weeks pregnant! The announcements should be reaching your mailbox here in the next day or two. And don't worry, we've already got a blog going to chronicle this event. So go ahead, check it out and post some comments.

C

Home Depot

A month ago my brother and father in law brought over the weightlifting rack that B.I.L. (Mark) made for me. We got it assembled and everything was great. I needed to go to Home Depot to get some new supports for my pull up bar and while I was there I was going to look for some cheap carpet to throw down to keep my feet warm.

Oh, yeah, my new thing is now to lift weights either barefoot or with some flimsy sandals on. Hugs is mildly paranoid I'm going to lose a toe down there. I figure, hey, it's just a toe. No, I'm kidding. I'm really careful.

So Serg is over and we head over to HD to get the gym assessories. I get the stuff for the pull up bar and go to look for some cheap carpet. I found some scrap that I like and it looked cheap. Well, the carpet employees must have all started last week, because they sure weren't too helpful. It was like pulling teeth to get them to get off their rear and tell me how much it was and trying to get them to measure it. Talk about frustrating.

At HD, when you buy items by the pound, or square yard, the employee has to write you up a ticket to give to the cashier to charge you the proper amount. So I get up the the cashier and the guy is having trouble ringing it up. He must have been really, really new because it took him what seemed like forever to ring up the people ahead of us in line. So I just say to him, "Aaah, that's alright, I don't have to pay for it." And he threw the ticket out! I couldn't believe it. I walked out of HD with a 12'x3' piece of carpet that cost 25 bucks without paying for it! Unbelievable. My Jedi mind tricks must have been attuned to the Force that day since they finally worked.

Anyhow, I got some free carpet and it made me forget about the newbs in the flooring department.

C

Arnold Classic continued...

While at the Arnold Classic this weekend we were walking past one of the booths that had a 10 foot chain link fence around it with guys in there lifting weights. It was impressive on one hand because of the amount of weight they could lift, but disappointing on the other because they took about 10 minutes between sets. So it was a pain in the neck to try and watch.

Last year there was a guy in there trying to bench press something like 700 pounds. He took around 5 minutes to get ready, got his special shirt on so that he couldn't put his arms down (just like the move "A Christmas Story"), had some DJ put on some really aggressive music, sniffed some smelling salts, gets under the weight and moves it 4" down and 4" back up. Pathetic. I don't care how much weight it is, if your form stinks you are weak.

(The special shirt that he put on is designed to keep you from blowing out your rotator cuffs, but in reality it adds around 100 pounds to your lift. In other words, if I can lift 100 pounds on bench press without a shirt, if I went out and bought one of those shirts and benched I could press around 200 pounds. )

So this year we are walking by (more like shuffling because people were packed in there like sardines) and they put on some Rammstein and play Du Hast. Sergey actually has the album and used to play the song alot through college. So we had the weirdest exchange of conversation while shuffling by and it went like this:

Serg: Du Hast!
C: Du hast mich!
Some random guy that was within earshot: Du hast mich gefragt!

Serg and I thought it was pretty fricking cool.

C

ahhhhnuuuuld classic 2007

Me, Sergey and Mark went to the Arnold Classic this weekend. It was pretty cool. I got some pretty cool pictures, but I'm a ding a ling and forgot to pack extra batteries, so I didn't get cool pictures of the World's Strongest Man competition or guys doing push-ups with girls on their back or our trio doing pull-ups at the USMC booth. And for the record, I got 13, Mark got 14 and Sergey got 12. And even before you think about posting some comment about how you think you can do more, don't even try it because it's a whole different story when a US Marine is counting how many you can do. All the way down, all the way up.

So here are some pictures.

And here is one of the videos I took. It's of the Governator walking in using his cane.

Have a nice weekend!

C

youtube

This is like a train wreck. I can't figure out which one I like better. I think I like the one in the purple shirt that looks like Poncherelli (spelling) from the tv show Chips.



I'm trying to find motivation to work on our taxes. Or you could say I'm wasting time and not working on our taxes. Both apply.

C