You know you're in trouble when...

You look up your company's stock profile on yahoo finance and the second "Headline" link says "Dreadful stocks to avoid".

back to work

Well, today is my first day back at work. ho hum.

I did jinx myself, by the way. Nikolai had a whopping 3 hours of sleep last night. It figures.

Holy cow, it's been forever

My goodness. It seems like I've been offline for about a year or so. In reality, it's only been about 2 weeks. Amazing how dependent we can become on technology.

So much has happened since I last posted, I just don't even know where to start. Perhaps I should pull a Kelly and back-post to fill everyone in. I haven't yet decided on my strategy. For now I'll just do a quick nutshell recap.
We spent our first night in my new home on Wednesday January 11th. It was FREEZING cold, in spite of having had a fire going for several hours that evening. I was in a bit of a panic, thinking it was going to be impossible to heat the house with the woodstove. That morning Nikolai woke up at about 5:00 am and came into the bedroom onto the thin mattress I was sleeping on. After an hour or so of squirming around he started crying to go back to grandma's and grandpa's. I was a bit worried about how this was gonna pan out, so I decided the next order of business was to bring my bed. After about a half an hour of grunting and pushing and tears and toil we got the mattress into my durango and brought it up to the house. The next morning was much better...it seems that it was very important for my bed to be there. Apparently my bed is "home base" for more than just me.
The first week was pretty cold, until we got down the art of getting the woodstove up to temperature, covering the windows for insulation, and turning on the ceiling fans upstairs and down. Now the house is nice and toasty and I'm happy.
The Saturday following our Wednesday move-in date I had the moving party. I was so very appreciative to those who decided to sacrifice a Saturday to help me out. We also had a special guest appearance of my sister Kelly, who flew all the way from washington DC to help me schlep my stuff. It is definitely true that I could *not* have done it if it weren't for my friends and family. Thank you all so very much. Oh...and Kelly, you forgot your shoes :( Shall I ship them to you?
I am so so so very happy here in my own home, with my own kitchen and my own bathrooms and my own porch and my own driveway. My own redwoods, my own dirt, my own mice, my own couch. There has been nothing anticlimactic about this...I'm still on a high. I keep waiting to come down but it's not happening. The worst thing is that I just don't want to leave the house.
Since the very first morning in this house, Nikolai has slept ALL NIGHT every night without getting out of bed once. All night with no wake-ups at all. I'm afraid to think about it too much, lest it jinx this wonderful new development. For those of you who understand and have been with us through Nikolai's less-than-optimal sleep schedules, you'll understand how fabulous this new turn of events is.
Well, I'll post more later. I'd hate to lose this because of a flaky dial-up connection.

Why yes...I *am* a homeowner.

Correction:

From the escrow officer this afternoon:
"Just to let everyone know that I just received the Lender's money. I've release the file to record w/Santa Cruz Title for tomorrow Jan. 11th at 8:00 a.m. Once we get confirmation that we are on record I will let everyone know."

WE'RE FUNDED!!!

The money is in the seller's hands. Now all that's left to do is for someone at the title company to walk the official recording paperwork over to the county office and officially record the change of ownership. This is supposed to happen tomorrow at 1:00 pm.

are we there yet?

I'm sitting amongst a pile of boxes that contain my belongings. I think I've pretty much packed everything I can pack without really getting into the last minute items (my last clothes, lamps, the bedding on my bed, advil). I'm as ready as I'll ever be. are we there yet?

Moving again

Well, I finally got over my denial this morning and admitted to myself that I actually have to pack something. Since most of my stuff is actually already packed and in storage, I had sort of subconsciously convinced myself that I didn't really need to pack anything here. I was wrong. So, yesterday I grabbed a pile of boxes from storage, and today I'll start packing stuff in them. Man...I hate moving. At least this is the last time I'm gonna have to do it!

I'm setting up the moving party for next weekend, so those of you who want to participate can plan for saturday the 14th and sunday the 15th.

...

Guess what I'm doing in THIS picture

6 days, counting minutes now

Brenda, my mortgage broker, ordered the loan documents today, but I think the lenders didn't actually get them in the mail by 5:00 pm today, so they will go out in tomorrow's mail. That means the documents will be at the title company on Monday, and we can make an appointment to go sign the documents on Monday at 1:00 pm. (this news *could possibly* change if by some miracle they did get them out today by 5:00 and we can sign our lives away tomorrow afternoon, but it's highly unlikely)

Here is what I think is going to happen:
Monday: We sign loan documents and they get sent overnight to the lenders
Tuesday: the lenders fund the loan, which takes roughly 24 hours
Wednesday: the change of title goes on record, and we officially own the home.

So, I will be a HOMOwner (as Connie insists) on Wednesday, January 11th. I'll be moving in on Wednesday, January 11th. :-D

8 days and counting

at the very latest we will be signing loan documents on Monday afternoon at 4:00 pm.

8 days and counting to close of escrow

W2's ...where art thou?

I think the biggest lesson I've learned throughout this whole buying process is "NEVER lose track of your W2's". That means, don't ever put them somewhere where you can't get them with less than 10 minute's notice.

I spent more than an hour today digging as strategically as possible through the front most layer of the 400+ boxes in storage looking for my archival documents. I was unsuccessful. There was one tiny triumph, however, when I actually ran across the line by line inventory of all the boxes...

Here's the story about the box inventory process:
3 weeks before we were supposed to move I devised a very clever strategy for knowing ahead of time what was in any given box without actually unsealing it. I would carefully inventory every last piece of stuff that went into each box, and then give each box an ID number. I thought this was a brilliant plan, and I was so proud. I enforced the inventory plan along the packing process once others joined along, requiring that they also painstakingly enter each mundane object into the notebooks.
There were two notebooks; one inventory of storage boxes, and one inventory of boxes which were to go to the house (for example: H37 is the 37th box going to the house and 370S is the 370th box going to storage). I might add there was plenty of grumbling on the part of the others at this tedium. All worth it, I thought, if it means that when I need to know where one thing is I don't have to dig through 399 boxes to get to it (it being in the very last box I check, of course). My brilliant plan included transferrance of these data into a database on the computer with a light application (perhaps web-based?) as a front end.
So, here I have two spiral notebooks filled with this very valuable information, and we've packed almost everything up. Just a few things left in the kitchen to toss into a box and then we were out of there for good. A plan executed flawlessly, if I might add. That is, until I discovered that in one of the very last boxes (which was obviously NOT INVENTORIED) someone had packed THE NOTEBOOKS.
"Where are the notebooks?!" I asked Matt frantically.
"I dunno." He responded, uninterested.
"HAVE YOU SEEN THEM? WERE THEY AT THE HOUSE LAST TIME YOU WERE THERE?!!" I asked, with the calm and control of the tasmanian devil.
"No, I haven't. and I dunno." He responded. Again, not even remotely concerned, comparatively speaking.
Today, as I was going through boxes (begrudgingly unsealing them just before we have to move them again), I saw that they were indeed in the very last boxes that had to be packed. The boxes containing the cleaning supplies and junk drawers in the kitchen. The boxes Matt packed.
Ha.

Getting ready for the big move

I was so excited about moving in that I couldn't contain myself. I had to go to the store and get a new bathroom ensemble, and I'm so excited about it I just had to share.



Now you can die happy.