randomness 1 Comment

The future Schnuth abode

4651 Ventura Drive. Three-bedroom, one-bath, tri-level single-family dwelling. Now with a clean bill of health, apart from a few ungrounded electrical sockets and a mishmash of other minor (and easily fixable) flaws. (Photo above taken by Aaron at the home inspection today, with our new-to-us digital camera.)

Now, we have to wait until the appraiser and surveyor do their job, and get all our silly busywork to the mortgage lender… and wait. Closing is on or before March 5th, and as I’ve said multiple times before, I hope it’s before rather than on. I still need to call the Smiths and let them know we won’t be renewing our lease, but I’d rather do that once we have at least a closing date, and preferably a solid date of possession.

Moving on to things-not-house-related… I’ve decided to track the things I should be doing on a daily basis, mainly just to remind me to do them. Thorough tooth-maintenance (brushing, flossing, Stimudent-ing, mouthwashing, gargling, and rinsing), exercise, mellophone practice, and… well… showering.

Yes, everyone, surprize of surprizes, I don’t bathe daily. I bathe every other day or every third day (a.k.a. “European standard”). I’m guessing you all knew that years ago. Especially Amy. 🙂 However, with my excuse of “my hair gets too dry to wash it every day” about to be thrown out the window by—gasp!—actually conditioning my hair, I’m going to make a concerted effort to shower more frequently. I know, you all had that figured out in Junior High. So I’m a late bloomer. Shoot me.

I feel empowered by having admitted my most embarrassing downfall in public. Aaron just found out my second-most embarrassing one a couple months ago, and I’m not sharing that one. It’s just too gross.

Aaron took a buncha pictures of the house during the home inspection today. If I feel saucy, maybe I’ll post them on my main page this weekend. I love our digital camera. 🙂

BTW, my PC is still down for the count. I haven’t really made any sort of effort to resurrect it yet, since I haven’t really wanted anything I have stored on it in the past couple of weeks. Aaron’s Dell and my Mac are doing a fine fill-in job for now… and I don’t have to put up with the damn thing being continually unstable. I think I mucked it up at some point. If I thought it would help, I’d consider installing XP on it… but I’m afraid it would muck it up even more.

Hmm… anything else? Oh, yeah, yay for dead presidents. I get the day off Monday.

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The house-buying saga continues…

How sweet. Aaron just called home to see how my trip to visit the Teamster Legal Fund went today.

See, the Teamsters Union has a lawyer on retainer at the Union Hall. Teamsters can consult with the lawyer for free with minor matters—it’s included in Union Dues—and pay only a small co-pay for cases like non-contest divorces and… home closings. And that is the capacity in which I was utilizing the Teamster lawyer this evening.

The meeting was fairly uneventful, and the Purchase Agreement looks perfectly fine. The trip to and from the Union Hall, however, involved me getting turned around and going down wrong streets multiple times. That part of town, up the Anthony Wayne Trail close to downtown Toledo, is a weird place. But I got there in time and got home in the end, and that’s all that matters.

So, we’ve signed the Purchase Agreement. We’ve had it looked over by our lawyer within the three-day period after signing. We’ve paid the appraisal fee for the home appraisal and land survey. The home inspection is on Friday at noon. Closing will be on or before March 5th (hopefully before), after which we are required to give the current owners 30 days to vacate.

Which puts us five days beyond our current lease.

That means that next on the agenda is giving our landlady, Mrs. Smith, a call to appraise her of the situation. We’re really hoping she’ll be nice and extend our lease by a couple weeks or a month. Actually, we haven’t made any provisions for what might happen if she refuses, so I really hope she’s OK with that. 🙂

Once all the boxes are unpacked and we’re in our new house, we’ll definitely be hosting a big party. It may not be until well into the spring, but you can count on it sometime. Oh, yeah, and we’ll have at least one extra bedroom, a big finished basement, and one air mattress, in case anyone gets too… jolly.

*crossing my fingers that the home inspection doesn’t turn up anything bad*

drumcorps

New house and old chops

My weekend:

Saturday was house shopping day. We met Rebecca the Realtor at her office at 3:00 and headed off to look at the seven houses on our list. The first one, which we’d initially thought was one of the more promising ones, turned out to be just too damned small. Nice and bright and clean and open, but just too damn small. The other two that we’d thought would be just perfect from the exterior photos and their descriptions were actually the most skanky inside. Nappy carpets, smelly, and generally run-down. There was one tri-level that had some serious potential, though—of course, that house was owned by a cat-lover, and I made friends with the longhair in the cat window-seat. 🙂

The house after the cat-lady’s, though, was almost identical. The owners left music playing for ambience—sounded like something mellowish you’d hear on 94.5. At any rate, I think it helped our opinion of the house. As did the glass-pane door (French door?) down to the finished basement. We liked it so much that Rebecca inadvertently referred to it as “our new house” several times before we were even finished looking at the rest of the houses.

So, after we were done, we ended up going back to Rebecca’s office and making an offer on the house on Ventura. (!!!) After that, we went out to dinner with Kris and Jamie at Ruby Tuesday’s (yummy low-carb cheesecake…), then went home and began agonizing over whether the sellers would accept our offer… Well, not really agonizing, per se… well, not really at all. More contemplating how much more furniture we’re going to need to buy to fill up our new house.

Sunday was my day to drive up to Clawson, Michigan for the LakeShoremen brass rehearsal. Saturday night, I’d crammed for half an hour, getting the notes “under my fingers,” as they say. I hadn’t played in seven years, so I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to read the music as well as I should.

It should have occurred to me that my weakness wouldn’t be my noodley-finger-speed; it would be my unused chops. Like, the actual real chops. As in, my lips. OMFG. After one third of the rehearsal was over, my chops were already gone. I have no range left, very little pitch memory, and I feel like I’m having to start all over again. Like my year in the Bluecoats was someone else.

My lip muscles are so underused (hey, be nice!) that, since I had no endurance, I started shoving the horn into my face. For non-brassers, this is how you are not supposed to combat fatigue, but it’s an automatic habit. After a while, I just started blowing air. I tried to play, but got nothing but air. And I was so pissed off, because I had everything under my fingers… I just couldn’t make it speak.

My lips are still swollen.

So, back to the saga of the house: After rehearsal, I called Aaron on the cell, and he said that Rebecca had given word that the sellers had rejected our offer and made a counteroffer. He told me what the offer was, and I agreed that it was fine with me, so he called Rebecca and she wrote up a new Purchase Agreement. Aaron and I drove up to her office today, separately, to sign the PA and send it on its way.

So, barring a piss-poor home inspection, we (almost) have a house! Next on our agenda is paying the appraisal fee, getting a home inspector, and talking to the Teamster lawyer about coming to the closing with us. The closing will be no later than March 5th (hopefully sooner), and we get possession 30 days after closing. If all the cards play out like they should, we may not even need to ask the Smiths to extend our lease at all.

How about that.

randomness

This Weekend: Curry and Silver

Over the weekend, I bought one of those videos of beginners Pilates (read: pill-AH-teez, not like who drives a plane). Did the workout this evening before dinner; my arms are sore like I worked out with weights, and my lungs and windpipe feel like I’ve been really breathing again for the first time in a long time. I wonder what this is going to feel like in the morning…

I’m also very proud of myself for making “real” food this weekend, too. Aaron cooked some chicken on the Foreman, and I made a curry cream sauce (with Atkins ThickenThin not-starch thickener instead of flour, of course). Mmm… curry… reminds me of my Memaw’s yellow curry rice. But, yeah, I made something that wasn’t alfredo sauce, tuna salad, or any number of pasta dishes I can no longer indulge in… and it was so, SO good.

Another weekend accomplishment: I scored what I believe to be a platter made of real silver. From Goodwill. For a dollar. Spent four bucks on silver cream, and probably an hour buffing and cleaning the sucker. Looks like silver to me, and nowhere on the bottom does it say it’s only silver-plated, like the other platter I found at the thrift (and didn’t purchase). Its only mark says “Oneida Silversmiths,” and, unfortunately, there’s no mark indicating it’s Sterling. 🙂 Anyway, even if it’s not pure silver of some sort, it still looks nice, and isn’t too gaudy.

Oh, and one last thing. I, like Beth, am not upset that I didn’t watch the StupidBowl, even though it means I missed Janet’s insanely nipple-pierced boobie. Yeah.