Short and Sweet

Real Estate: Purchase and Sale is signed, next is the moment we have all been waiting for......the Appraisal.

Moving: Our landlords are going in to the apartment today to take pictures for the Craigslist ad. We are confiscating any boxes we see, M has totally dismantled the music room already. I have listed lots of books on half and have a bunch more, including undergrad textbooks, to give away.

Family: My cousin and her friend left, we were sent a lovely Edible Arrangement as a Thank You from my aunt and uncle. My mother was planning on coming in September, she managed to persuade the same aunt and uncle to come out with her! Should be so much fun. It's been forever since they came out for a non-huge life event (college graduation, marriage).

School: Got a 24/25 on the final for my last class, waiting for my final course grade to be posted so I can get the partial reimbursement for the class. My online class, Health care Policy, Ethics, and Finance has started after an ever so brief respite (4 days) from my Spring class. One 8-10 page paper and a group project/presentation. Shouldn't be too bad...and it's my last summer class so I just need to power through..

Short and Sweet

Sorry for the sporadic postings but we have a ton of stuff going on, including but not limited to:

real estate wheelings and dealings
offer accepted, purchase and sale pending. crossing my fingers that the house is appraised decently or we have to rework our funding or renegotiate with the sellers....Radon test was sent in today, results pending

school
took the final last thursday, got 24/25. New class starts today (health care policy, economy, and finance)

guests
cousin and friend arrived last wednesday, leaving this wednesday.

....And It's Good!

After many calls from our agent to the seller's agent, our offer was accepted late Friday afternoon!

We're so thrilled, we think we got a great deal and the house has everything we wanted that we were afraid was too much for our price range. The home inspection is on Wednesday, we're doing our own radon kit. The purchase and sale will be contingent on the radon results. Our closing date is 6/26/09. We gave notice to our landlords, but they wanted 60 days to find someone so we're in there until the end of July. That works out fine because we can clean the new place before moving anything in, do some paint touch ups etc.

My tasks for this week include getting quotes from movers, finding an attorney to review our purchase and sale, and find out to lock our interest rate in.

We took a drive past the house yesterday and checked out the main street that's kind of near our house. We have plenty of things very close to us, but we're removed enough that we won't here traffic noise etc. We were delighted to see that the grocery store was substantially cheaper, gas was cheaper, and there was no line!

Tick Tick

We put an offer in on a house.....we've been waiting for 24 hours at this point to find out if it's accepted. We thought we'd be a shoe in by asking more than offering but I think there's a lot of interest in this house.

Communication from the seller's agent to ours has been spotty at best. It seemed like we would get a definite answer at two previous deadlines so hopefully this time he means it.

I'll keep you posted....

Seamless...Maybe for Others

I am nearly done with my Seamless Hybrid and per usual, I have difficulties reading EZ patterns. She is so vague about things that I inevitably do something wrong that requires me to undo about 6 hours of work. My foible this time? The pattern tells you to create a saddly on each shoulder, knitting 44 rows for each. I thought it interesting at the time that this wasn't a percent or ratio as most of the other parts of the pattern are. It seemed like too many rows but I went with it. Unfortunately this meant that the two saddles met without room for the neck. So I undid all of my work back to the halfway point of the first saddle. I'm basically eyeballing it and making it up at this point. No one seems to have made a note about this on ravelry so I'm pretty sure I'm interpreting something wrong if everyone else has gotten it right. I'm putting it on thread tonight before I attempt a neck because I can not bear another frogging session (that's knitting lingo for unraveling all your hard work with tears in your eyes). I'll post a pic of the finished product.

I think I am going to attempt a fair isle sweater soon. It would be a great project to use up lots of scrap yarn that I have. I think a completely fair isled sweater is a little dizzying but I might just go for it and wear it around the house. I guess I could also do one with a fair isle yoke...I got an ancient book from the library about fair isle knitting. It has some sweater patterns and some fair isle patterns, I can use it in conjunction with Color Knitting Techniques to comes up with some good color choices. It would be so gratifying to use up all those random yarn dregs!

Pages

I have this habit of putting several large, long books on my library list at the same time and then they all come in at once...



My library, as I'm sure yours does, offers an online catalog of every library in our library sysem. You can request books online, select a pick up library location, and they do all the work. I've even gotten so lazy to request books that are housed within my own library. I have never been further than the check out desk at my library!



Anyway, the current books are:

Way the Crow Flies

Deluxe: How Luxury Lost It's Luster

Get it Together

Classic example of the sloppiness of the MSN program I am enrolled in...



Last night in class they came in to hand out surveys of the seminar portion of our class. As I'm doing the survey, I notice that the questions are geared toward a class with a lab. At first, I think maybe they are just using the term 'lab' instead of 'seminar', but then the questions become more specific. Have you used any simulator models in lab? Would it help if the model showed you normal and abnormal bowel sounds? Um okay...that was last semester's class when we were learning how to do a physcial exam. Almost half of the questions were asking about the lab environment, supplies, funtionality etc so the whole questionnaire was pointless. I wrote for each question that this class does not have a lab and that I think they meant to give this out to students in a Health Assessment class and not a Health Promotion class. Typical.

School/Home Search

Well, we now have a real estate agent working with us. It's someone we met at an open house and planned to call and then she got in touch with us to get feedback on what we didn't like about the house. Worked out well.

Also, we finally got our preapproval letter! We gave them the paperwork on April 24 and received the letter yesterday. They weren't kidding when they said their turn around time was decreased because everyone and their brother is refinancing.

School related news....last night was my last night of class. Now to study for the final...we were given a study guide (the exam is the first closed book exam of my graduate career) which was three pages long. Good thing the test is 2 weeks away....Two more clinic days left and I'm done. I survived!

Weekend recap



Knitting--finished 1.75 sleeves now. Should be able to finish the second sleeve tonight and then I think the easy part is over for this pattern. The sweater will be an Elizabeth Zimmerman special. I am hoping this goes better than my first attempt. While the concept seems easy, the instructions prove difficult since she wrote her patterns more in the form of a chapter of a book than a step by step. I found several steps very confusing making M's saddle sweater and had to call out to my ravelry.com peeps to get me through it. Maybe now that I've done one of her patterns this one will make more sense....



House hunting--it was the kind of weekend that makes us think we are either too picky or we want things that are outside of our budget. We didn't see anything overly promising at any of the open houses this weekend. We are supposed to get our preapproval letter today, when we have it in hand we are going to call one of the agents we met at one of the houses to get some help weeding things out. There was one near some friends of ours that looked very promising in the pics and then of course we get there and it was an instant no. It was actually cuter from the outside than I thought it would be and the inside was not as cute as I thought it would be. Go figure. It had a much older/out of date feel than I thought it would. Several other houses were no's from the second we walked in, one seemed like it had to be a foreclosure even though it wasn't marked as such. There was a distinct smell of cigarettes as soon as you walked in, ashtrays everywhere. They hadn't even taken the time to make their beds! There was one that was cute but built around the same time as our apt now, the windows needed to be replaced. There wasn't much space in the basement for us to be able to have a treadmill and M's music area. The upstairs was very cramped. It was 2 full baths but I didn't like that there was no bathroom on the first floor, one was upstairs and one was in the basement. Nothing has been a perfect fit so far.