Halfy79's Xanga

More of Nothing

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 23:22:05 GMT

I'm finally starting to feel a bit more 'settled' in our house now. Despite the fact that our living room has large holes in the ceiling. Ya see, last week we got our electric service upgraded and now we're waiting to get recessed lighting installed. Hopefully by the end of next week, the living room will have new sheetrock and will be ready for us to paint it.

Speaking of paint... I swear I've looked at just about every paint sample available out there! It's kind of driving me insane. The dining room took us about 5 samples before we settled on 2. Now I'm loving it and am so thrilled with how it came together. The next room is the guest room/office and we decide to bite the bullet and buy an entire gallon of one paint without trying smaples. WRONG move. Man, the color came out to a neon green and it was a bit much for us. SO, we got 3 other samples and I think we have a winner. Hopefully it's as successful as the dining room.

I just can't wait to finish painting all of the rooms so that we can finally get our floors refinished.

..........

In other news - work is extremely busy and I'm working a ton of overtime. BUT, I'm still way underpaid because we haven't gotten raises again for the SECOND year in a row. This is getting SO old. As soon as things settle down... I just might have to beef up my resume and work on my interviewing skills. I didn't get an MBA for nothing!!

Corea and the House

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 18:51:07 GMT

Wow, I haven't posted since July! What's up with that?!

Welllll, I've been busy! I swear that every day for the last week I've told myself to MAKE some time to blog. But something just always came up. So here's a rundown of what has happened....

I went to Corea with Mike and my mom for 2 weeks at the end of August. The trip was both exciting and challenging. My family was very excited to have Mike visiting and they felt the need to show him every part of the country. While this is exactly what Mike wanted, the planning was shit. I depended on my family to make plans and they did for the most part, but some of the travelling was crazy and we went back and forth to areas way too many times. One great money-saver was that we got to sleep over someone's house almost every night (except for 3). Though in Corea, this comes with its price. My family apparently doesn't believe in buying beds. I suppose they were raised with sleeping on the floor... so they stuck to it. So by the time we hit up Seoul, I could barely walk due to extreme lower-back pain.

Despite these annoyances, we managed to still have a great time. Though it went by way too quickly and my mom didn't feel like she got enough quality time in with her mom (since she can't walk much nowadays).

Go here for pictures: Corea

This is most of my mother's family (minus 1 of her brothers who is now in the US)

...................................

We arrived back from that trip on August 22nd at about 10pm and were completely exhausted. THEN, we had the closing on both the condo and the new house on the 26th!

Plus we both had to continue to go to work because we pretty much used up all of our vacation time. I don't really know what we were smoking when we planned this out... but we just really wanted to be done with selling the condo.

And it all worked out somehow. We've been in the new house for a month now! Though you probably couldn't tell by the looks of it because there are boxes everywhere and it looks like crap. We basically only cleaned out and organized the kitchen... and then got to ripping out tons of crappy carpeting. So now we're thinking about painting and then having someone come in to refinish the wood floors.

We are SO house-poor right now!

NEW Home

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:57:37 GMT

Lenore_Happenstance reminded me that I haven't updated enough about the housing situation we're in. And Twitter just doesn't allow enough characters for a proper explanation

I'll skip a lot of the boring details and simply say that we're crossing our fingers again for a closing on the condo that's supposed to happen in 16 days. The buyer only left us a little over 30 days to find a new place to live and we didn't want to push it because we didn't want to scare him away. SO... we looked at quite a few houses in just a few days.

NONE of them were as good as the previous house with the orange shag carpet. Seriously. Mostly because it's almost impossible to find a house in the area with a TWO car garage and big closets (at least in our price point).

BUT, we found something that's very charming and cute. It does feel like we're settling a bit but it's not like we're unhappy with it at all. It's a colonial revival that was built in the 1930's and has been updated along the way. The bathrooms are tiny and only 1 is original to the house. The "half" bathroom on the main floor was once a coat closet so it's tiny. So tiny, in fact, that Mike wouldn't be able to sit on the toilet without knocking his knees on the wall. But it's okay because HIS throne will be the one in the basement... hahahaha. I might make him shower down there too

I have pictures of the interior from the listing... but I'll hold off on posting those since it has someone else's decor. Plus, I still have a bunch of pessimism going on in my heart. Once someone breaks your heart completely... it's tough to give yourself completely to a new one. We have the inspection scheduled for Friday and I think I'll feel better if that goes well. You just never know what you'll find in an 80 y.o. house, ya know?

The neighborhood is amazing, though. Well... amazing for families, that is. To the right of the garage, there's a walking path that leads out to a park and then it all connects to playgrounds and a pool. We have to pay association fees to belong to this area of the town and I hope it's worth it. Supposedly there are summer camps for the kids that are all included in those fees, too. So whenever I do decide to have kids... and when they're old enough... I wouldn't have to worry about them ever crossing a street to go out and play. That's kinda cool.

Big downer is that there's only a narrow patio in the back. And it's just big enough to fit a table and grill. From the picture above, you can sort of see the neighbor's roof.... that's how close we are to neighbors. There's also another one to the right of the garage. It's a corner lot though, so we get the other side completely open to a yard.

Like I said, it's charming. AND it's more money than the previous house that we loved.

We're hoping to close on this house 1 week after the condo. Luckily for us, my sister is going on vacation for that week and we volunteered to watch her dog and house So we'll be squatters for a bit!

3rd Cake Results

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:49:41 GMT

Now that I have another second of down-time... here are pictures of my 3rd kid's cake:

I tried a new buttercream recipe and I'll never use it again. It was ridiculously sweet (12 cups of sugar) and way too thin so the cake started melting a bit. But I do love how the elephant turned out!

I got lazy and didn't make a tall cake. So to compensate for that and still make sure there was enough for everyone... I made some cupcakes. I'm in love with my new decorator tip that makes the icing look like grass.

I might attempt a real, grown-up cake one of these days. Especially since my sister has now requested one for HER birthday. LOL. At least I can stick with a small one and not have to worry about layering a sheet cake (hell).

Another Cake Idea

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:44:17 GMT

So I am now known as the cake-maker in my family. I've produced 2 kids' cakes so now I'm an expert or something. LOL. I love it though.

This year, my oldest nephew is turning 5 (O-M-G) and he's having his party at a zoo. So my thought was to have a zoo theme with maybe monkeys and/or giraffes. Since my nephew is now old enough to understand most things (he's a genius), I approached him with the idea. Well, he turned it down and told me that he wanted an elephant instead. Hmph. FINE!

So I looked up cartoonish looking elephants that I could design on a cake. I toyed with the idea of having Dumbo (since nephew likes him)... but then thought that was more circus-themed instead of a zoo. I found a nice, simple outline graphic that I might go with. And it'll be fairly easy to cut it out of fondant and then pipe a black outline. Then I slapped on a banner with the number 5 to make it a little more dressed up.

Add some grass border (have to buy a new decorating tip!) and you've got a pretty plain cake.

What are your thoughts????

I might pipe more grass on the bottom edge of the cake, too. And I'm toying with the idea of making the sides look like a cage or something with brown lines. Too much?

Nutshell

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 12:16:27 GMT

While a lot may have happened in the weeks since my last update... not much has changed. Right now we're in attorney review with someone who's purchasing our condo. I'm crossing my fingers and praying that this one works out. If it does, the guy wants the closing to happen on July 24th.

The house we were going to purchase previously is now under contract with someone else. SO, we've been pretty busy with looking at some other houses lately. There's one out there that we really like, but Mike wants to look at other options before sending in an offer. So, hopefully today our realtor can line up some others to look at and then we'll have it all settled.

I really need for this all to be sorted out before we head off to Corea (Aug 9th)!

So yeah, that's my life lately in a nutshell. Just trucking along and hoping for the best (while expecting the worst). Heh.

Now I shall spend the week catching up on my subscriptions!!

PS - Can someone make this rain stop? Please??

Seriously?!

Mon, 11 May 2009 14:41:34 GMT

Well the poop just hit the fan, people!

I got a call this morning from my realtor telling me that the buyers couldn't secure PMI insurance and so they couldn't secure a mortgage. AND, this entitles them to a refund of their down payment.

We're SEVEN days away from the closing date!!

AND... if that weren't enough... they knew since Friday but decided not to notify us until this morning.

Seriously, I want to drop kick that bitch right now. I don't even know how to drop kick someone, but I bet I could figure it out based on the pure fury that is running through my veins right now.

...........

Mike's trying to get a hold of our attorney to see if we can back out of the house we're purchasing.... even though I don't WANT to back out!!! WE put a nice down payment on that one so I am NOT losing that right now.

Our other course of action if that doesn't work out is to rent out the unit and also put it back on the market. That just sucks donkey balls because we didn't want to become landlords in the first place! I can't handle 2 mortgages if we can't find renters!!

UPDATE: We're backing out of the house that we wanted to purchase. Mike doesn't feel comfortable carrying two mortgages so that's what we have decided to do. So basically now another family is getting screwed. I'm on the verge of crying... AT WORK. WTF.

Grumble, grumble, grumble...

Fri, 08 May 2009 13:37:42 GMT

I haven't blogged in so long that I don't even know where to begin. From time to time I still get that, I-should-blog-this moment. But then I get busy again and forget. Blogging about something when it's already in the past just isn't fun for me. The raw emotions and thoughts are gone.

Blah.

It's not like I have many people who still read this anyway. Most people follow my tweets* or facebook updates.

But... I have to start somewhere if I ever plan to get back into my regular journaling ways. So, for now, you get an entry that's a jumbled-up mind-dump! Hah! As if this is different from any of my other posts! Oh well.

..........

For the last 2 weeks, I've been trapped in a nightmare revolving around selling our condo. I don't want to get into the details now because I've moved on somewhat and just don't feel like revisiting it all. Let's just say that I now hate the FHA, Weichert (Realtors AND Financial Services) and young chicks who want to buy property with no money to put down. PLEASE, people.... save money before you buy a house!!!!!!

After a million phone calls and forking over $5000 to our buyers (to put toward HER down payment!!)... we may be getting somewhere. It's not the route we wanted to take, but it is what it is. And I'm just going to leave everything up to karma now.

The closing is currently scheduled for May 18th. Cross your fingers and toes for us!

..........

I'm done with classes, exams and papers! Thank the Lord, Jesus Christ! The graduation ceremony is scheduled for May 21st and I can't wait to make it official! Granted, the school is going to mail my diploma and I'll get something fake when I walk... but still, it'll FEEL official. I still can't believe that I'm getting my MBA! Crazy.

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Things at work aren't too bad right now. A few weeks ago there was a rough patch. It started to seem like everything I did or said was WRONG. At least in the eyes of my director. She was a complete BITCH to me and I couldn't do anything right. It's like she would ask me for a rock and when I'd bring one back to her, she's say, "NO, not THAT rock!!!" Jeez, SORRY for not reading your fucking mind! Well, now she's praising me and thanking me for all of my great work. WTF? I'm thinking maybe it's menopause. Hahahaha.

I'm hoping that my MBA will take me to a serious job one day... when the economy makes its turn. For now, I'll thank the Lord that I have a paycheck and get to book overtime.

*If you want to follow me, just let me know and I'll send you my username. I don't feel like announcing it here for people to connect the two networks.

Reno Coworker

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:30:05 GMT

So this goes out to anyone who watches Reno 911.

I'm currently on a conference call and some asian chick is talking. She sounds EXACTLY like Cindy - the asian intern on that show.

VERY distracting stuff.

That's all for now.

Wedding Follow-Up

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:58:28 GMT

I know I'm almost 7 months late on this... but I finally got a chance to sit down with Mike and pick out some wedding pictures. We started with 1400 of them and narrowed it down to 185. After I get physical prints of this set, we need to get down to 50 for our album. So feel free to tell me which ones are your favorites!!

Professional Wedding Pictures

Also... I uploaded my first video to YouTube! Haha! Now I just hope no one makes fun of us! It's of our first dance at the wedding:

Enjoy!!