15 Dec 2008
In March we found an absolutely fantastic home in provo near my family. The house had everything we wanted. The location, size, layout, and sheer awesomeness of the place was really really cool. Only one problem. There was already a buyer on the line and they were pretty close to closing. Well, we wanted that house something fierce, so we went after it and went into a crazy bidding war on it (mind you, it was a short sale). In the end, we lost out on the house, which was semi-devastating at the time. A look back on it now,what a blessing we didn’t get it. It was WAY out of our current budget, for one thing. I had at the time a fairly high paying job (highest I’ve ever been paid by a long shot) and we felt very secure there. As I’m writing this, that company has been out of business for nearly 4 months, and I’m still owed two final paychecks that I’m not really banking on anymore. Long story short, it is a good thing we didn’t get it!
After we lost that house we kinda lost faith in house hunting. The budget thing came to a head and we realized that we would’ve died had we gotten that mortgage (just like all the other in-over-their-head mortgage owners causing this fabulous financial crisis). Also, Anders was due to arrive mid July and we didn’t have much heart to get set on a house in the midst of the business end of the 9 month haul. Once we felt settled with Anders near the end of July, we felt like it was time to get started again.
This post is part 1 in a 5 part series. To see the other posts go to the main post entitled My Really Great Family (and our search for a home).
15 Dec 2008
Angelee and I were married in June of 2004. After a brief stint staying at her parents house, we moved to her sister’s newly purchased home that had a basement apartment. This is where we lived when we had Bella, and were there about 6 more months before we decided to move into my parent’s basement apartment, which was a sizable space and kitchen upgrade. We’ve been there ever since, over 3 and a half years! While my parents have been so kind to let us stay, and we love that our kids are so close to Grandma and Grandpa, for close to a year now we’ve been really hungry to get a place of our own. With Angelee’s brother Dustin as a real estate agent, we’ve been searching for a home since January-ish.
We’ve tried to keep an open mind throughout the process, but definitely have our criteria that we try to match up to our supposed dream home (at least for this stage of life). My major concern was that I didn’t want us to buy a home that we would be forced out of due to space issues when our 3rd and 4th kids come along. That being said, if within 5 years we’re ready to skedaddle… as long as it’s financially feasible, why not? In other words, we wanted the length of tenure at our first home to be on our terms, not forced on us by unwieldy family size. So, space being the main issue, I made sure that nearly every house we saw was at a minimum of 2500 square feet. In the end I was pretty sure that even 2500 was pretty small for what we will likely need to grow into, so my secret number was really at 2700 :).
We found some houses early on that were semi-promising except for the single cockroach in the ice cream: The Lehi house was far from family and at a super wacky angle on the lot, so bizarre; The Cedar Hills house was gorgeous but also far away from family (though close to AF canyon climbing… but we all know that didn’t hold a whole lot of clout in the discussions).
What follows is a series of posts about our house hunt and other family-related stats. It seemed easier for readability to break this into multiple posts. I actually had it all in one, but it seemed kinda bogus, so here are a list of the posts in this “House Hunters” series:
- Too good to be true
- Too stingy to be sane
- Too dishonest to be worth it
- How about just perfect
- Interesting stats about our family
15 Dec 2008
I thought I’d give a rundown on some various statistics about our family since we’ve been one.
- 4.5 - the number of years we’ve been married.
- 2 - the number of kids we have.
- 6 - the number of jobs I’ve had: The Quarry, Primerica, Wildcat Software, Heritage Web Solutions, MarketPartner, BidSync.
- 480% - the amount of annual pay increase I’ve received since we’ve been married (which is more staggering because of the low end than the high).
- 41,674 - the number of plausible business ideas I’ve had (and not implemented).
- Infinity - the number of years more we have to be together (and that’s a good thing :)).
This post is part 5 in a 5 part series. To see the other posts go to the main post entitled My Really Great Family.
12 Dec 2008
Okay, I am seriously crying over here this is so good. This morning I came across a post from Dvorak Uncensored that I am still laughing hysterically over: 10 things I hate about Star Trek. Dvorak actually just posted a link to a forum post, which is where the original list is at.
I must confess, I am (or used to be) a hard core Trekkie. Admittedly I haven’t watched the show in years… but I cannot rescind my past Trek obsession and the awkward sense of pride I have in it. Not that it matters much, but I was definitely of the TNG generation, don’t get much enjoyment over TOS.
Here are a few of the questions that had me rolling:
- Seatbelts. Yeah, I know this one is overdone, but you’d think that the first time an explosion caused the guy at the nav station to fly over the captain’s head with a good 8 feet of clearance, someone would say, “You know, we might think of inventing some futuristic restraining device to prevent that from happening.” So of course, they did make something like that for the second Enterprise (the first one blew up due to poor lubrication), but what was it? A hard plastic thing that’s locked over your thighs. Oh, I’ll bet THAT feels good in the corners. “Hey look! The leg-bars worked as advertised! There goes Kirk’s torso!”
- A Star Trek quiz: Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and ‘Ensign Gomez’ beam down to a planet. Which one isn’t coming back?
Okay, so a lot of people may not find those funny, but there is no question in my mind that any respectable Trekkie’s (current or otherwise) are just dying at those reasons. In case you missed the link, here is the original forum post.
11 Dec 2008
I cannot even describe how scary the federal bailouts are to me.
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