i laughed. i cried. it was better than cats.

My phone rang at 7am. From a 5 hour sleep stupor, I turned off the alarm I had set and started getting vertical. This began my day.

Welcome to mr. toad's wild ride which we like to call "house hunting."

Twenty minutes later we were on the road to ken caryl, a *nice* neighborhood, to view a house at 8am. My cell is ringing again. It's our realtor. Apparently that call at a 7 was not my alarm but K, who I hung up on. Oops. I appologize and say we will be there soon. I give my folks a call about the last bit of financing to come in, but which i don't know the amount. I talk briefly with my mom ("you're up early!") and find out the amount. Mention we are off to look at a good deal. Will call back later.

We eventually meet at the house and start poking around and find out it is large, well maintained if a bit used, well landscaped, and at the top of our price range. We decide to put in an offer, since the price just dropped. If you remember the condo incident, you know why. We leave the house and drive to Paul's work to determine how long his commute is. It is about 8:45. I get a call from our lender, crossing our t's and dotting our i's with a good faith estimate. I say we will be home soon and will look at the estimates then. We decide to pick up groceries.

I get back to the car with the food and find paul on the phone with his dad, talking about this house we found. We get home. We put the groceries away. I get a call from paul's mom to get the actual description of the house. We get a call from P saying they are awake and we should pick up the bookcase any time. We put on shoes and start to head back out the door, and find this:

Leaks 7/28/07 12:50 PM

We call our friends to say we have a problem. We call the emergency maintiance guy .("bring a tarp") We start hauling out furniature from the front room. Said guy comes over and starts poking at our ceiling. it is mushie.

Meanwhile - my phone rings. It's the realtor. The offer fell through. Although the selling realtor assured our realtor that the price was correct last night, this morning when she brought our offer, he says it is actually $100k more. They had filled out the MLS wrong. There is much teeth gnashing.Ok, I say. Not your fault. The guy's a jerk. [can't talk now, our ceiling is falling in] , etc. Maintance guy finishes pulling down our ceiling and leaves. I break the news to Paul. Various family members are called ("false alarm. The island is not sinking.") and we generally get back to what ever the heck we were doing before hand. Oh yeah, bookcases. It's now about 11:30.

It has gone on from there, but hopefully that is the end of the unscheduled exictment for the day. The short story is we will be looking at some more houses this weekend. We rescheduled a gathering we were going to have tonight to someone else's house and after lunch we hope to get the bookcases. I can only hope the rest of the day is dull.

what time we waste with these shiny devices

I got a new phone. I got it 'for free' (replacement New Every 2 thing from Verizon) with as much combadibitily as I could get without having to shell out more money. I have now spent 4+ days figuring out how to make and transfer a ringtone and I'm still not satisfied with how it transfered. The sad thing about all this is one of the "whistles" on this phone is a microS/transFlash card. So if i was not cheap, I could have made this transfer in like 3 minutes. And probably in the end I will end up buying a card and adapter set for my g4. Highly complicated.

For the first time ever I have a camera on my phone. Oh? You'd like to *see* some photos I've taken with my phone? That will be like another 4 days of work for me to figure out how to get them off the stupid camera.

It's been a busy weekend. Ran down to da'Springs yesterday to do pysanky with a couple of friends. We're thinking about doing this once a month or so, since you should never do pysanky alone. It was a good day all things considering. I fortunately didn't have to drive. Originally I was going to, but as I pulled in to pick up a friend, my car started leaking green fluid. It was fortunate because I was 3 blocks from our car-fixing place and Guru was 9 blocks away at a bookstore. We were able to get it in to the Ford place and it was fixed by 3pm. I was already gone at that point, but we'll pick it up monday and no one will ever know. :)

House is still damage from leakage. We had a contractor sighting, but as of yet no work has been done on our place. Which probably means they will be here bright and early on Monday morning without a word from the apt mgt. But in 2 weeks we can start house shopping so they can go take a flying leap.

so remember when there was water pouring from my ceiling? No, the most recent time. This is just a note to say, their back. We were in a tornado warning Monday night and with it came hail and rain. Hail doesn't pour through my ceiling and since they didn't actually solve the problem, so does rain. I left a turse vm at the office and called the main. pager along the lines of "It's raining and nothing fixed. All the leaks are back. I'm calling maintenence now. I just wanted to keep you in the loop."
Apparently it was short enough to get a call back at 9am promptly. We're now having some contractors in today to work on the patio in hopes that they can work out the drainage problem.