Monday, September 29, 2008

small update and a rant

Nothing like a grammar mistake to bring me out of my blog hiatus! In the last 6 months or so, it seems to have become trendy to overuse "myself". Like "you know a ton more than myself" or "Jack, Brad, and myself went to the store". What is wrong with me or I? It seems that people don't know if they should use me or I in a sentence and so they avoid it entirely by using "myself" and thinking that somehow sounds better.

My problem with grammar is that I hear these things and I know they're not right, but I don't necessarily know WHY. So then I have to google me/myself/I and find a plethora of information. Best I can tell, myself is a "special object" to be used only when you are the subject of the sentence. Like "I walked to the store by myself". "I" is the subject, so then you can use myself.

So there's your grammar lesson for the day. In other news, someone else made an offer on the house we're had the contingent offer in on, so it looks like they will end up with it instead of us. Not too much else going on!

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Airport Observations

I'm at the airport right now, I have a quick overnight business trip before my NINE GLORIOUS DAYS camping at the coast. I've been here since about 6 since Geoff dropped me off before work, and my flight's not until 9:55. That's okay, I've been online the whole time getting work done (okay, and blogging).

Anyway, I'm sitting outside of Starbucks (if you know the PDX airport, right when you pass through security on the ABC side there's that Starbucks with the lounge area? Yeah, I'm there) and at a table right near me there are 3 cops. All of the sudden a 4th cop comes whizzing in on his bicycle and screeching to a halt! I seriously thought he was going to hit their table - it was kinda funny. When he got there, one of the other cops got up and left immediately, and the other 2 stood up to talk to biker cop. I was watching this all go down when biker cop looked over at me, smiled, and said good morning. Friendly biker cop!!!

Oh, and the one other thing that happened: I went to the bathroom a little while ago and just as I locked the door to my stall someone said "Kelly? Do you have to go potty?" I was thinking "WHAT? Yes, of course I do!"... and then I realized there was a little girl named Kelly in the restroom as well. :)

More house stuff

So I can't remember where I left off yesterday, but we made a home inspection appointment for this week and it's only going to be $255!!! That is super exciting news. I guess that's the bonus of going to a house that's only a little over half the size of the one you currently live in. :) Sometimes they charge an "older home fee" but not in this case which is great.

Except then we found out that we probably need to do a septic inspection too, since we'd be on septic rather than sewer.
- There is a $150 fee for locating and unburying the septic system/tank.
- There is a $0.37 / gallon fee for pumping and cleaning the tank.
- There is a $300 fee for the inspection itself.

With a 1000 gallon tank that's full (just a guess, we have no idea how big it is or how full it is), this could be $820 on a house we may not even end up with! Which I realize is always the case when you're still in the inspection process, but in this case it's particularily a long shot because of the contingency. Ick. And we don't know if the seller will locate the tank for us and let us dig it up (apparently they are buried 18 - 20 inches under ground).

Then we had to read all of the disclosures (which we read before when we first made an offer on this home 4 months ago) and sign our lives away about lead paint, asbestos, and all of the other exciting things older homes have to offer. Makes me miss our more modern home already!

But then the day started looking up: our realtor decided that it really is dumb for us to have to do the septic inspection at this point with so much up in the air, so we're going to write an addendum to request that we do the septic inspection AFTER the contingency is up (if it ever is). Hopefully he accepts that. And if not, hopefully he at least tells us where the tank is and lets us dig it ourselves so we can save $150.

The good news continued when Geoff called to make an appointment with the sewer peeps. They asked how old the home is and when he told them, they said they don't need to do the $300 system inspection since it will fail anyway. I'm not sure if that's actually comforting or not, but it will save us $300 at least. Included in the pumping/cleaning fee is an inspection of the actual tank, so at least they can tell us if there's a giant crack or anything. So now we're down from $820 to a max (assuming a 1000 gallon tank that's full) of $370. Much more palitable. Although I'm still hoping he says we don't have to do this until if/after the contingency is dropped.

So that's the current update. Nothing has happened on our current house - no lookers yet. The sign is getting put up in front of our house today and we have an open house scheduled for 9/14 (this Sunday). If you know anyone who needs a nice house in suburban Portland, you know where to come... :)

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Movin' & Shakin'

Lots of stuff going on!! Our house went on the market on Friday, and we submitted the offer on the new house on Saturday. The owner came back yesterday with his counter which we accepted! We have 90 days now to sell our house and he asked us to get our inspection now rather than after our house sells - that way he isn't waiting 90 days for us to get an inspection and find some deal breaker after the fact. So we have that setup for Thursday morning. I'll be out of town but Geoff will handle it! He's also going to walk the property at the same time and hopefully set up a septic inspection for the same time. Craziness!

Our house is supposed to get the sign up in front of it today or tomorrow - not that that's a big deal but that will sorta be the "final" step in getting it on the market. Haven't had any calls yet, but there is an open house this Sunday so hopefully that will generate SOME interest... who knows. But imagine this: we sell and close on our house within 90 days, that's the beginning of December, so right around the 1st of the year we could be moving into our beautiful new house! (and I use the words "beautiful" and "new" both VERY loosely :)

Friday, September 05, 2008

House for sale!

So we met with the realtor last night and our house goes on the market today!!! (well, maybe tomorrow morning - depends on when the system updates or whatever) If you know someone who wants to buy a 4 bedroom / 2.5 bath house in the Beaverton, Oregon area - leave a comment in my blog and I will send you the details. Or if you're just interested in seeing all of the pictures and stuff, let me know that too and I'll send you the listing once I have it. :-) Stalkers. Just kidding. I'd want to see it too!

Tonight I'm going to Dinner's Ready to make a bunch of meals for my camping trip with Momlie that starts a week from today... YEAH!!!! So excited. :) Both about making the meals and the actual trip itself. And I have a business trip between now and then so it's going to be hectic time. Oh yeah, and we're selling our house and making an offer on another house.

That's about it... I had some character flaw (mine, not someone else's) that I was going to blog about but I don't remember what it was, so I guess it wasn't that important. I'll try to remember it later. Just wanted to give a quick update!

Monday, September 01, 2008

Embarassing Story

I was just in the copy room making some copies of receipts for a business expense that I incurred last week and for which I was submitting a reimbursement request. (that sentence originally ended I was submitting a reimbursement request for and then I remembered for is a preposition - so although it may sound odd, that sentence is grammatically correct)

Pause. Okay, after I "fixed" my sentence, I thought I remembered reading some time ago that you actually COULD end a sentence with a preposition in English. So I did some research, and in fact you can. It’s in LATIN that you can’t end a sentence with a preposition. However, when the preposition is unnecessary (at the end of the sentence or otherwise), that’s when you should leave it off. For example, when people say “where’s it at?” I grit my teeth every time! “Where is it” is sufficient. Of course, “Where’s it?” doesn’t sound quite as good, but “where is it at” is the same as “where’s it at” and it’s just adding that extra at that you don’t need! There’s your grammar lesson for the day – you can end a sentence in a preposition, just don’t add an unnecessary one. So I suppose my opening sentence above would have been correct as originally written.

Play. After I opened the copy machine after copying the receipts, the movement of opening the lid sent my receipts flying all around. The smallest one (which happened to be the biggest expense) flew right in the crack between the two pieces of the copy machine (the collating piece and the copying piece). AHHH!!! I looked around, underneath it and behind it – and then I called Geoff, who uses the copy machine WAY more than I do. Thank goodness it’s Labor Day and no one’s here. After sufficient mocking and trying to figure out a way to find the receipt, Geoff finally found the lever to pull the two pieces apart and rescue my valuable receipt. Yay!

Stuff to blog about...

Alright, finally I have some stuff to blog about. The house we were looking at back in April is still on the market - I have kept my eye on it, so I was aware that it was. My realtor emailed me 2 or 3 weeks ago letting me know, and I asked her to see if the seller would consider a contingency at this point - nope. Apparently he had received another offer that was quite low, but those buyers were "back and more serious now". Okay. Well probably 4 days later the listing price was lowered by about $15K (this was the first time he'd lowered his price in the past 4 months - I'd been watching for that, because I figured it'd be a sign he was more desperate). Hmmm.... looks like those buyers didn't quite work out now. So I asked my realtor to go back again to see if he'd take a contingency now. Sure enough, she came back and said that yes, he would entertain a contingency now (as Momlie said - "what, like do a song and dance for it?"). Oh my! We weren't really expecting that. So we deliberated over it for a couple of days, and then decided we're going to go for it. :) We asked a different realtor to come over on Friday night to tell us what we needed to do to put our house on the market - he walked through and made several suggestions (obvious stuff - touch up paint, put away pictures, put bark dust out, etc.) and we spent the weekend doing that. Our house looks fantastic now - we just have to finish up the mopping/sweeping/dusting/vacuuming etc. part of stuff and it will be picture perfect. I'll try to take some pictures tonight to post on the blog. You know me though - so don't hold your breath! So this week I need to get a pre-approval letter (our other one was only dated for 30 days, but he said he could give me a new one easily, he wouldn't have to run our credit again for 6 months so that's nice) and then I suppose we'll get in touch with the realtor we're buying with to see about making an offer. :) So crazy and random... but we are like that. We did decide (I think... again don't hold me to this...) that we're going to go ahead and sell our house whether this one works out or not. We can then live in our trailer until we find another suitable house. We weren't planning on selling for another 6 months to a year, but our selling agent told us that he is telling everyone to expect it to take 6 months to a year to sell - so that will actually work out perfectly (unless we're very lucky people and our house sells in some ridiculous time like 2 days... yeah right!). So no real action yet, but the plan for this week is: get pre-approval letter first, then make offer and put our house on market (not sure about the order for those two things... I suppose they may be somewhat simultaneous). Yikes. I've done the buying thing before but never the selling part... this should be interesting.

Here's a small funny from this weekend's house-beautify-a-thon:
Geoff: "Do you have one of those little handheld broom and dustpan things?"
Kelly: "Yup."
Geoff: "Can I borrow it?"
Hahahahaha. As though it is MINE only and I'm very protective about MY handheld broom and dustpan. That cracked us up for a good long while.

Other highlights of the weekend:
- Watching a Wildcat football WIN against Syracuse on ESPN2. There are very few things in the world better than college football!!!!!!!
- A fantastic shopping trip to Walgreens - my original total when they ran me up was around $70. After my coupons and rebates, my total ended up being -$18. Yes NEGATIVE!!! The best part is... while I was doing all of my deal hunting and gathering (I had a $10 off $40 coupon, so I had to make sure that I spent $40... and that was after all of my other coupons, so I had to do a lot of calculating... my shopping trip was slow!) Geoff was looking through the movie bin. As I was in the cosmetics section, he came up to me and said "you'll never guess what I found". I couldn't guess so he finally showed me - Blast From the Past! I've been looking for that movie for a couple of months, and no stores carry it since it's a little older. VERY exciting. It was $7.99 - but even that was included in my negative eighteen dollar total. :) So fun! I took a picture of all of the items I acquired. If I post house pics, maybe I'll include that one along with it.
- Went for a run Friday night and Sunday night. We are tentatively planning on doing the 5K Run Like Hell in October and 10K Smelt Run in February. So sore... but in reality I think that's from awkward positions cleaning this weekend (leaning over the bathtub cleaning miniblinds, scrubbing vertical blinds, patching nail holes in the walls, filling up the entire yard waste bin with weeds and clippings (okay I filled only like 75% of it - Geoff filled the other 25% with mowing the lawn), etc.)