It’s that time again… Everyone has gone out of their way to make resolutions for themselves, and those with actual will-power may make it past day #2. I made it a point to not even kid myself and have no resolutions this upcoming year. Why? It’s simple. If you truly wanted to make a change in your life you would have done it already, holding off until the first of the year seems more like a cop-out than anything. For the past 11 months you’ve wanted to either quit smoking, lose weight, learn a new language, pick up painting, whatever the case may be. If you haven’t done it in the last year, there’s nothing driving you to get it done this year.
So for me, I told myself my resolution is to completely write-off having a resolution. Not sure if that’s a double negative, but either way the only changes I’m making this year is to hopefully be moved into a new home within the next 90 days. Do I consider it a resolution? No… we’ve been trying to buy a house since October but nothings worked out.
We’ve been under contract on three houses. The first house? The financing fell through so we needed to be released from the contract. The community that we were looking to move to was black-listed by the lender and there was really nothing more that we could do. The second? After inspection we found out that the Well was contaminated with Lead and Nitrates, because of this the grounds were more than likely contaminated as well. There were also structural issues, half of the house didn’t work, and the water heater was so rusted by the lead in the water that it was about to rot through the floor.
Now? We’re under contract on a house that we both agree is absolutely perfect and with a few modifications over time it holds the “Dream Home” status. The bedrooms upstairs are all a decent size, the basement is already finished giving us two guest rooms and a man-cave for Sean’s liking. There’s a good sized kitchen, two car garage, gorgeous floor to ceiling brick work on the fire place, massive family room towards the back end of the house and a nice sized yard that will accommodate a pool and plenty of room for the dog to run around. The problem? The inspection was scary. While structurally it’s sound, there are numerous plumbing issues from the do-it-yourself finished basement that were listed as “Major Defects”. Now, I’m all for the do-it-yourself type of thing but if you’re selling a house, make sure it’s at least up to code. The random little things that they missed were so stupid it’s mind blowing. For me? It’s one weekend fixing random things for maybe $1200 worth of materials. The fact that I now need to figure out how to get a licensed contractor into a house that I don’t own so this stuff CAN be fixed is where things start to get annoying.
We knew going into this house that a roof was going to be needed, house was built in the late 70’s to early 80’s. More than likely it was never replaced, and it now requires four patches for a recent leak. In theory it would be better to just redo the entire roof so it doesn’t need to be worried about for 10 years, but that’s wishful thinking. The owners have absolutely no money and are in the process of selling just about everything they own so they can afford to move into assisted living. I feel terrible because they’re such nice people (we got to chat with them during the inspection), but we’re going to have to renegotiate the cost of the house because I know that at least $10,000 worth of work needs to go into it before it’s up to code… knowing that they don’t have that money means that they need to at least come down in price so we can work things out with the bank.
Our broker has already told us that the house doesn’t fit the profile of a FHA mortgage, but we could possibly do a 203k loan (which supposedly is a variation of FHA). With this, we can borrow the estimated amount of money at the same time of the mortgage. So if they come down the $10k, then we can borrow the extra $10k (putting us at our already agreed price on the house) and then fix everything that needs to be fixed. All of which needs to be done by a licensed/certified contractor. So that’s where things get tricky, it also extends our closing date. As of right now we’re supposed to close on Jan 25th 2013. This change would then send us into March. Which, I guess is OK because it starts to get warmer so working on the roof wouldn’t be that big of a deal but it’s still one of those “Will it ever end?” type of situations.
It’s upsetting, it’s frustrating, it’s completely bugging me but life still needs to go on so I need to draw my attention elsewhere. Thankfully I’ve got quite a of work to do, I stopped for a little while because my show is starting in a few minutes. I don’t sit down for much of anything, not a big TV fan but hopelessly addicted to “Mob Wives” on VH1. Not overly thrilled about this season because the original cast members are my favorite.. BUT the changes they made with this season, seems that there’s going to be more knock-down-drag-out type of fights and that makes me happy. Real or fake, I don’t care. It’s just nice to listen to a NY accent when you’re living in a very… rural… area LOL.
As far as life-changing events are concerned. Sean and I are officially engaged!! 🙂 It’s been 7 years of bouncing between two states and numerous ups and downs but he proposed on Christmas Eve at the tree in town. He was super excited to get me out of the house that night, I had a feeling but it wasn’t confirmed until he dropped down when we got towards the tree. He was super cute about it, of course I said yes. He lit up when I did, and it was very sweet. I can’t wait to start the next chapter, and really hope that everything can work out with the house so that we can get through all of the muck and start planning for a wedding and children. I don’t see myself having a huge wedding, not really the “Look at me!” kind of person, I’m perfectly content with a justice of the peace… but when you’ve got a huge traditional Italian family… things just get complicated heh.
So who knows what this year is going to bring… but I’m not setting any resolutions. I’ll just live one day at a time and take it from there.
Sean was super sweet this year and bought me a 17″ MacBook Pro. As much as I absolutely love it, being as it’s everything I’ve ever wanted – I’m also upset. See, work has blown up and I’m back to working on five different sites at once – trying to pace myself through them instead of rushing through them this way I don’t royally mess something up. With that, I’ve yet to be able to really be able to enjoy this new lil super gadget. I’m also having one of hell of a time patching some programs, no serial numbers I come across are actually working the way they’re supposed to and it’s driving me nuts to go have to repeat the steps numerous times every time I boot a program. I even pulled the numbers off of the iMac (which work fine) but can’t have the same result here. I just wish there was a physical ‘patch’ file the way there is on Windows but I’m sure I’ll figure out a way to get around it in the future. For now I’ll just deal with it, and usually it only happens when I need to open the programs so just getting past them once and leaving the program open should pretty much do the trick for the time being.
While that can get a little annoying, it also worked to our benefit this year. All family members were well taken care of for Christmas, Sean and I did spend quite a bit of money on ourselves but it was on things that we both wanted (for a while) and desperately needed. We know the difference between Wants and Needs – unlike anyone under the age of 16 these days. We both were in desperate need of new desks. I had my Mac sitting on a Rubbermaid folding table and being as the 27-inch iMac (2011) weighs about 40 pounds, it was starting to sink down in the middle. To avoid it completely caving in, we went out and got me a new desk. It’s a super nice one, with plenty of storage and it’s even a little bigger than the previous folding table so I actually got the chance to organize things where I can still completely function without any issues at all. Obviously after Sean spent 7 hours putting this thing together (one warped piece was throwing EVERYTHING off) he gladly took a little nap. I decorated the drawers with dollar store shelf liner so that they can list a super long time without getting destroyed. There’s more than enough room for the work phone so my boss can stay on my butt too heh. I had it across the room next to the TV because we didn’t have a long enough Ethernet chord, but that was taken care of with the addition of a ZyXEL wireless switch that now sits behind my monitor. It supposedly boosts the Wifi in the house, but turns the Wifi into an actual plugged in connection as well, so I’ve got the phone plugged into it and if I needed to I could plug a printer in to it. It was actually strong enough of a feed to handle Sean’s XBOX 360 for a few weeks as well, so obviously it works how it’s supposed to.
Sean, after my desk was put together, began increasingly becoming annoyed with his desk. After drilling into him that he spends way too much time at his desk and needs a new one…. we headed back to Staples a little over a week later (this past weekend actually) to pick up a new desk for him. The one he’s been using for years was a typical students desk with the metal legs, the pull-out keyboard and the thin table top. One you’d see in college students dorm, basically. So it was creaking like all holy hell and we wound up replacing that one as well. He found a nice wide desk that he was in love with, but it unfortunately was not going to fit in the room so he went with one that was closer to size (in comparison to mine). He’s in love with it as well. It’s very nice dark wood with a nice sturdy base, some drawers – finito.
Either way, we both were playing with the Tablet for a little while and found out when browsing through the Settings to get all of the stats that it was now possible (with Android – Ice Cream) to have multiple users. This sparked our interest almost instantly, and we both looked at eachother and I was like “I want”, he said “Go get it” (cause he’s fricken awesome) and while I was pulling the car around (cause he was picking up his desk the same day) he paid for both. Turned into an expensive shopping trip on our parts, but we walked out of there with a want, and a need. 
While he was in the Bedroom for a few hours setting up his new desk, I was prepping the house for Christmas. I did more baking in the past few days than I ever thought possible. Everything from cookies, to breads, to brownies – you name it, I probably baked it. I went all out for Christmas this year, because I actually had more room to do it. I know that sounds a little weird but it’s true. A huge living room and a big footprint in reference to the front end of the house, things just kind of happened. The baking was really just phase two, we’d spent quite some time decorating prior to my even pulling the flour out of the cabinet. So the tree was decorated, the bulk of the outdoors was draped in white lights and the rest of the house had random little touches here and there. Thankfully, minus today, there was really no wet weather going on outside so my garland didn’t get all mucky and was nice and clean for Christmas. I was also really happy with the tree in the living room. With the combination of Karen’s ornaments and mine everything kind of came together that worked out really nicely.
I also got him some new Happy Feet, this is a brand that we were in love with long before Snooki put it on MTV. I’ve always had a pair, and so has he and his were worn to the point that his toes were going to start popping through the bottom. Knowing how comfy they are I changed it up a little bit and got him the “All Around” ones, they look like real sneakers and there’s about an inch-thick rubber sole on the bottom of them. They’re better than my usual outdoor slippers so of course I’ll have to pick up a pair for myself in the future but for now this was all about him and that’s what he got. So that was one pair, and instead of getting him the standard color variations I decided to take a look under the “Animals” section and got him the most ridiculous ones I could find – and his favorite animal – the Penguins. Watching him walk around in these is more amusing than the slippers themselves, but they bring a smile to just about everyone’s face so it was more than worth it.
The thing I was surprised about, however, was the ViewSonic 24-inch Monitor that was under the tree. I’ve been using a 17-inch monitor as my “Email Screen” for the past couple of months and it was working out pretty well for me. I kept my email completely on that window and when I was actually in Photoshop or Dreamweaver I would just load project free TV and watch television right on the desk, no complaints at all. So you can imagine my surprise when Sean upgraded me to a much larger screen. This was one of those items that wasn’t on my wants, or my needs – which then turns into a complete and total surprise. And that wraps up Christmas Eve.
