Homeless No More

We did it!!!! We actually closed on the house!!!!

Right up to the last minute, it was looking a little dicey. Our appointment was supposed to be at 10am, but of course we got there and there was no paperwork from our lender. None. The lender swore to our broker over the phone on Tuesday that they would be ready at 3pm on Thursday, on 'her personal word of honor'. Well, I guess she's a crack dealer, because she was surely smoking something potent if she honestly thought that THAT was going to happen, and even more so if she thought we were really going to believe her. So, while we weren't surprised that the papers weren't there, it was totally inconvenient and annoying, because I had had to reschedule our appointment with Moving Company #3 to noon because our closing had been supposed to be at 10am, which was when they were supposed to be coming. I did the call of shame and changed it back. Sigh.

Luckily, the mover not only came, but did his quote calculations on the spot, meaning that we had the third quote in time for the county to review it and make a decision in time to meet next week's check cutting deadline, meaning that we can still move next weekend. It actually turned out that we handed the quote to the county guy at the closing, he approved it on the spot, and we were able to call the movers back this afternoon and firm up plans with them. I am SO GLAD that's over.

Two hours later, all of the papers still weren't there, but we started anyway. Then we realized, surprise, the county guy, Joe, wasn't there to hand over the county's portion of the closing costs, and he hadn't left a check! We called and called and finally got ahold of him, only to hear that he hadn't gotten what HE was supposed to get, either.

Of course, the entire time, the seller and his rabid realtor were sitting there, staring at us. Even worse, our kids were both there, because today was a professional day for the teachers (something I think all financial employees could use, at this point - a class on professionalism!). Worse still, the seller's kids were there - the kids whose house was being sold in front of them because their parents couldn't keep it together. Luckily, they were older, maybe 11 and 13, and didn't seem upset about it at all. Still, I felt really bad seeing them, and having them see our kids, and know that our kids were going to be sleeping in their rooms. Ugh.

Finally, all the paperwork showed up, and we finished after TWO HOURS. I'm telling you, there's little that's more awkward than being trapped in a room with a seller for that amount of time, especially when it's your paperwork that's holding up the works. But, it's over. We have the keys. It's our house. We can go in it whenever we want! We will be packed on Friday, and moved on Monday and possibly also on Tuesday, depending on what they can finish in one day. They said they'll move our bedroom stuff first, so we can sleep and whatnot, and then extras afterwards.

After we finished, we celebrated by going to a local Amish market and buying an octagonal picnic table that seats up to eight, and a small kitchen island that seats a person at each end. I love getting stuff there. You always know it's well made, and if something goes wrong, the people who actually made it are right there to help. They're even delivering it for free, for heaven's sake. Oh, AND we lucked out in a HUGE way, because they were having an anniversary sale, where you pop a balloon and there's a sale percentage written on it - we got 20% off the island! Yahoo!!! When it comes in a couple of weeks I'll take a photo and post it.

I am both elated and exhausted. I almost dissolved into tears a few times this afternoon, I think because I've been trying so hard to hold it all together, and it's been getting harder and harder as the stress has mounted. It barely feels real that I never have to deal with that nutty realtor again, or those awful subcontractors, or get dissed by another moving company. I think it may set in tomorrow, when we go over to start working on cleaning and prepping to paint.

Anyway, here she is - our new house:


The back yard actually goes all the way to the next house that you see - it's split by the garage, which will allow us to segregate the dogs when we want to. In a few weeks, the non-fenced portion will have a picket fence around it, and there will be a large gate across the driveway that will connect the pickets to the stone wall. It's four finished stories, with two sleeping porches on the back and a wraparound on the front. We're thrilled. :)

How To Know When It's Time To Go

When I came home from getting Patrick from prek today, there were two suspicious-looking stakes in the driveway, right next to the house, where you wouldn't necessarily see them. From a distance, they look like this:

Upon closer inspection, however, they looked more like this:






That's right - proposed curb, and proposed sidewalk. To give you a little perspective on the change that this makes to our soon-to-be-previous neighborhood, this is the view of my neighbor's house from my front porch:



Since the road curves outwards, our house is set further out, too, so the stakes are back more on our place, but you get the idea.

I know that the house isn't ours anymore, but we still live here!!! Maybe they could wait to mark our houses for doom until we're all gone, for heaven's sake!

Well, anyway, I was pretty depressed until I got inside and saw my dog, Baci, doing what must be his new-and-improved backyard guard dog bit:


I might as well hang a sign on the door saying, 'C'mon in!!! TV's in the back, jewelry's upstairs!!!' What a doof!

Hokey Pokey, County Style

When last you left your hapless suburbanites, we were in the throes of realty uproar, caught between warring factions, if you will. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow being, as we know, the knowledge that we would be closing on our new home on the morrow.

And did that happen, you ask?

Yea and verily... no.

Of course, not. If you really thought there was a prayer in hell of that happening, you've been reading the Wrong fairy tale, my friend.

However, today has been much funnier than yesterday, in a weird way. For instance, Freak Realtor Flo has had a massive personality overhaul after being set straight by the actual county administrator regarding who is actually in charge of the situation (hint: it's not her). She was duly informed that we would get this house whether they foreclosed or not, and that there's no way the bank is letting the seller out of a loan that has almost been taken care of by allowing him to write it off, so she should stop with the screaming and get on with the acting like a realtor of someone who is desperate to sell their house. Oh, to have seen the look on her face!!!! With the amount of makeup that woman wears, I can only imagine the earthquake-like shift as her foundation cracked into shifting tectonic plates. Seriously, the only other person I've ever seen wear that much eyeliner was Liberace. I don't know why some women choose to try and hide their age by piling on ever-thickening globs of liquid foundation, but please, God, let me not be one of them!

Flo called me this morning to cancel our appointment for the final walk-through of the new house, which was supposed to be this morning before settlement. Ironically, guess who beeped in looking for a donation during her call? If you guessed 'State Department of Transportation', get yourself a brownie!!! Can you imagine?!?! Sure, tear down our neighborhood, and hell, take this donation to help you do it!!!! Holy shiite! I've never even heard of them doing fundraising, for heaven's sake. That HAD to be some kind of divine practical joke.

In a grand show of commitment, the underwriter that messed up the appraisal yesterday has finally decided to commit to the loan - or rather, to the cancellation of it. They are 100% behind... the idiot with the outdated software. No, no, they don't care that he valued it at below foreclosure prices, and also below the three other appraisals that have been done lately. They've picked their man, and they're sticking with him. Commitment is important, you know. (If this keeps up, I'M going to be the one committed, however.)(Currently, we have another loan venue, so we should still be able to close in a few days, unless the entire FHA collapses, which at this rate I'm not ruling out.)

Finally, the last and best example. I have been going back and forth with my least favorite relocation subcontractor, Pat, about moving companies. I gave her two quotes, one from Allied and one from Fleet, and legally that's all she needs. Today, she emailed me saying that she needs another quote because the one from Fleet is unacceptable because it's too low, and she knows it will cost a lot more than that. Huh? So, she suggested another company, who I called and scheduled an appointment with, and they'll be out to presumably screw me over on Friday to have a look at my stuff and write a quote. After a few minutes, I emailed Pat back, and said that isn't that the purpose of getting two quotes, to use one and reject the other? Also, if you read the fine print, the one that she thought was too cheap to be true was actually twice as expensive, because they hadn't added insurance costs into their bottom line; they made a note as to how much to add per thousand dollars of value. Far be it from me to suggest that she actually READ the contracts she's supposed to review. The woman emailed me back, no lie, and said that that's why they had rejected them - they're too expensive.

Taa Daa!!!! Your government at work, ladies and gentlemen! Now we know it is in fact possible to be both too expensive AND too cheap at the same time!!!!

I stopped arguing with her at that point because I realized that obviously she has a five year old, and he's writing her emails. I am, in fact, tempted to let Patrick start writing all MY emails to her, and everyone else too for that matter, since maybe like would work with like.

Thank you, and goodnight!

Bring on the French Hens!

I am SOOOOO done with this housing experience. Seriously.

First thing this morning, I got a call from one of the moving companies that is supposed to be putting in a quote for our move. This woman, Debby, started off by calling me Christine, which isn't my name at all, and when I corrected her, proceeded to be upset because she'd been trying to get ahold of me for a few days, but my daughter kept hanging up on her. Now, that didn't sound like Josie, since she finally pretty much has the phone thing down, so I made a non-committal noise and waited for her to continue. She then said, 'what can I do for you?', like she had no idea who I was! Turns out, she had called me by accident, and it took her all that time to figure it out! Then, she stammered and stuttered when I spelled it out for her who I was and asked why she hadn't submitted her quote yet. Then she started in again with wanting to know what other companies I had talked to, who I'd spoken with, and what they had quoted me! How unprofessional can you get?!

Oh, I was about to find out.

Then it was DH, saying he'd just gotten off of the phone with our lender, and - surprise - there's a problem. It's not a problem with us personally, thankfully, but still, we're probably not going to be settling on the new house tomorrow. It seems that the lender thought that the appraisal on the house, which merely came in at what our loan is for, was too high, so they decided to get their own appraisal done, and it came in $30k lower. This is so retarded, I can't even begin to tell you. Oh, wait - I can! First of all, this is the FORECLOSURE PRICE agreed to by the seller's bank. It's rock-bottom, people, as in, I feel a little guilty paying so nothing for this house. Second, the guy the financial backers got to do it was a pencil-pusher who didn't even look at the house, but rather went off of some computer simulation program to come up with a perceived value. That's about as stupid as they come, really. Fourth, when the value was so hugely different, no one told our mortgage broker until Today, the day before we close, because they were all too busy pushing their little pencils up the pencil-pusher chain. No one thought to question why the values were so different. Fifth, it turns out that the idiot not only didn't look at the house at all, but he used the WRONG PROGRAM that had old information!!!! So, to sum up, the bank used a guy who had no idea what he was valuing come up with a loan value using an obsolete program. And we wonder why the financial markets are screwed?!

The third call was, of course, from Flo, the Shrill Realtor Freak who represents the seller. She decided that it would be a good idea to track me down, as she put it, to freak out on me about the closing probably not happening tomorrow, and threaten me that if the closing didn't happen as planned, her seller was going to yank the house off the market and let it foreclose. Now, I'm not sure what she thought I was going to say to all this, but what she got definitely wasn't what she wanted to hear, because I told her that regardless of what happened, that we would get the house anyway, because if it goes into foreclosure, we'll buy it that way (which is true, because the county will seize it and sell it to us, we checked on that at the beginning of all this mess), but that we had been trying to save him from being foreclosed on. Oohh, she was PISSED! She tried giving me more crap, including saying that he had been trying to save the house for us by making extra payments past what he should have had to make (which is crap, since our contractual closure date was today) but I interrupted her and asked her if there was something she needed, since there was obviously nothing I could do about appraisals, and she wanted me to give her our lender's cell phone number! Um, no. She already has his regular number, fine, but last I knew she had used it to call him and try to talk him into giving us a bridge loan we didn't ask for to get us into the house before our settlement date!

Now, even though this was an entirely inappropriate phone call for her to have made, and I should have brushed it off, because this guy would be an idiot to walk away from a sale over a day-late settlement and there's no way his bank would allow it, it was still incredibly stressful and obnoxious. I consoled myself by looking online at other houses. I feel like I'm cheating on my probably-new-house, but it did make me feel better knowing that there are a few other houses out there I'd like.

Call #4 was from our lender a little while ago. Turns out Freaky Realtor gave our lender's phone number to HER CLIENT and told him to call himself!!!!!! Now, I would swear that that was probably against some professional realtor code, wouldn't you? I can see how Seller might not have been able to resist calling once he had the information, since I'm pretty sure Freaky Realtor Flo probably has him spun up six ways to Tuesday about all this, but for her to give it to him is. just. obnoxious.

To wrap it all up in a nice little bow for you, that's three canceled movers, two screwy county contractors, one nutty realtor, and a freakin' partridge in a pear tree!

Book Review: Belong To Me, by Marisa de los Santos

Last night I did something I haven't done in a long, long time - I stayed up until 1am reading because I couldn't put the book down!!!! OK, so maybe it also had something to do with the small amount of Mountain Dew I drank, but still. I promise, tomorrow I will get back to the usual moaning about my daily life, but in the meantime, I have one more review.

The novel I was glued to is called 'Belong To Me', by Marisa de los Santos. If any of you have read Tom Perotta's 'Little Children', this has somewhat of a similar feel in that there are a few different plot lines going on with a group of neighbors that intermingle into a single glob by the end, but (thankfully) minus the pedophile. The main-est main character is named Cornelia, who is a married woman who has left NYC with her husband looking for suburban bliss. She ends up in a stepford-esque neighborhood, which is ruled by catty queen bee Piper, whose life is of course not at all as perfect as she broadcasts, befriends an oddly secretive waitress named Lake and her genius son, Dev, who have also just moved to the area after Dev is tormented at his old school, and tries to integrate into the vapidly complex neighborhood social scene. The story is told using the alternating-chapter method, rotating between the three women and Dev (this method seems to be becoming more and more popular recently). The women's chapters were the best; Dev's story for the larger part I could have lived without, since while his existence is important to the story, his actual daily experiences are not quite so much. The novel stumbled a bit towards the end, which seemed both rushed and a little too convenient, but the rest of the novel made it so worth the read. The characters themselves were honest creations, without the typical contrived personality disorders/quirks, and as their lives intertwined, the relationships they forged seemed completely natural and like those anyone else could have. I think that was the most endearing part of the book, the fact that the bulk of this tale could be taking place next door. All of the characters, despite their flaws, were also likable, and each grew and was changed by events that transpired.

Various Stuffs

We sold our house yesterday to the county. Currently, we have no home (which my husband reminded me also means no mortgage!), although we are still allowed to live here until we move on May 3rd. We will be buying the new house on Tuesday, which is when the real fun can begin, since the place is filthy after the guy living in it alone for awhile and then being empty for a long time, and also it seriously needs some paint. The kitchen is painted GREY, for chrissakes. That, my friends, is the color of rotted meat. Ugh.

Josie's trauma is over. Yesterday her teacher pulled her, Guy, and Kwami into a room and asked them for The Truth. Shockingly, Kwami 'fessed up that he had a)lied about Josie spitting in the first place and b)lied to his dad about her spitting on purpose a second time, on him. Josie and Guy were then free to go, and she doesn't know what happened to Kwami from then on, but whatever it was, she said he spent the rest of the day with his head on his desk - not because he'd been told to, but because of whatever his punishment was going to be. Phew! I had really wanted to believe my little Pea, but with everything else that had been happening that we hadn't known about, I did have my doubts that *something* had happened. We decided not to punish her for hiding her previous school punishment, since the emotional trauma was enough.

I have been reading a lot lately, and not saying anything about any of the books!!! So, here's a rundown:

Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortensen:
Eeh. I couldn't get into it, and stopped somewhere around page 60. It wasn't that well written, and while what the guy was doing was great, the presentation was terrible. A lot of people have liked this book, though, so make your own call.

Backyard Giants: The Passionate, Heartbreaking, and Glorious Quest to Grow the Biggest Pumpkin Ever, by Susan Warren:
This I liked. It follows the Southern New England Pumpkin Grower's Association, and mainly the Wallace family, through the 2006 season. Since I like to garden, it appealed to me, but also it was just fun to read about people taking part in such a niche competition. As a child, I went to many fairs in the New England area, and saw the 1000lb pumpkins that I have tried to describe to my kids. It wasn't a page-turner, by any imagination, except at the very end, when you find out who the world record holder was going to be, and who would win all the awards. The Wallace family was an interesting bunch, and it was kind of like following the progress of a neighbor that you liked a lot. This one is definitely for the NPR crowd.

Before Green Gables, by Budge Wilson:
I actually enjoyed this novel more than the rest of the Anne of Green Gables series, which I have been reading to Josie over the past several months. Wilson isn't the original author of the series, of course (L.M. Montgomery is), but her style was very true to the Gables books, and she did a wonderful job of tying this prequel into the rest of the series using little mentions of this person or that cat that were just asides in the original books. She begins writing with the pregnancy of Anne's mother, and while basically everything that follows is despair (the death of her parents, the bouncing from home to wretched home and finally the orphanage), there is an undeniable strand of hope that continues through the whole thing. The only problem, really, is that Anne has relationships with several adults throughout the years, who in real life would have adopted her at any point rather than have her go to another awful home, but since Wilson is bound by the existence of the original series, she can't allow that to happen; to be more realistic, these relationships should have been less familial. Also important to note: this is not a young children's book. It deals with alcoholism, parental death, abuse and poverty. I was able to read it aloud to Josie because I edited some as I read, but I would not have wanted her to read it on her own.

Alexander and the Wonderful, Marvelous, Excellent, Terrific Ninety Days, by Judith Viorst:
Remember Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day? Well, he's an adult now, with three kids. Judith Viorst, who wrote the original series using her son as a model, has written another book about her son's family coming to live with them for ninety days while their home is remodeled. Viorst is in her seventies now, and believe me, it shows. While her book is entertaining and interesting in a reality-show kind of way, man, does that woman have irrational expectations of what will occur while having three young kids in the house!!! While I did enjoy the book, I have to say that Viorst is a giant stick in the mud whose house I would not want to have to visit with my kids!!!

Josie Grossie

My daughter, seed of my loins, progeny of my DNA, did something so nasty yesterday that it requires a new word, like Grosstastic, or Stinkowatt, or...

Supernasty-getthelysol-expi-ali-grossious.

She is, potentially, a spitter.

EEEUUUWUWUWUW!

Well, maybe she is and maybe she isn't. According to her, she isn't, but it's hard to be sure. When she arrived home from school crying, she told me that her friend, Guy, had stuck his tongue out at her, so she stuck hers back out at him, and then one of the other kids in the class, Kwami, started yelling that she'd spit at Guy, and then other kids took it up as well, and Kwami ran back into the classroom (they were in the hallway getting their backpacks for the end of the day) to tattle on whatever she did or didn't do. The teacher, Ms. Burns, told the class that they would sort it out tomorrow, but that she wanted the truth or no one would have recess for the rest of the year. There were about ten kids saying Josie did spit at Guy, but both Guy and Josie swear that she didn't. Kwami was in Josie's class last year, as well, and we had a problem with his laying on her desk, cheating off of her, and hitting, so he's not exactly a reputable kid, but still.

This probably would have all blown over, and I never would have known, had the following not happened. Apparently, on the way out of the door, Josie was trying to explain to Kwami that she did 'ptthhh', not 'pa-tuey', and (accidentally, she claims) got some spit on his face. She says that she apologized, but that he told her he was going to tell his dad, who was waiting to pick her up, and sure enough, he did, and his dad called the school all upset about it.

The reason I know THAT is because I called the school to try and get the straight poop from her teacher, who had just gotten off the phone with the dad. Unfortunately, I also got to hear about how Josie and Guy have been in trouble frequently lately in the lunchroom for being too loud, and have been supposed to sit apart from one another, but haven't, so they both had homework from the lunchladies to write 'I will follow rules' 25 times. According to Ms. Burns, this came home with an explanatory note. I never saw anything, meaning that Josie did it in her room at some point and hid the whole thing from me. Nothing was written in her homework assignment book about it, and no one called or emailed me that there was an ongoing problem. In fact, I spoke to one of the lunchladies on the phone yesterday about her lunch account being in need of money, and she didn't say anything to me then, either. I also got to hear about Josie's too-familiar behavior (aka, sassiness) with her teacher. Needless to say, I was NOT impressed.

I spoke to her teacher again later in the evening, and she said that it had blown up into a full-fledged Incident, with both Kwami's fathers calling (Kwami has an odd situation where he has been adopted, but his birth father is still around somehow) and freaking out, saying that she can't handle the classroom, and there have been issues all year, and they wanted the office involved, etc. She said that she got them all calmed down, and that one father hadn't been aware at all that Kwami is actually a significant discipline problem himself. She also said that she had spoken with Guy, who insisted that Josie hadn't spit at him at all, as well as to another student who backed up Josie and said that it was actually Kwami who had spit at Josie on the way out the door, and had been calling her names like 'loser' and 'stupid', so she spat back at him. Ms. Burns said that she believes the children, and the she no longer thinks at all that Josie meant to spit on anyone's body, regardless of whether she really did end up getting spit on someone or not. However, she had had to bring the vice principal into the situation, so all the children may have to go to the principal's office today.

I had a couple of long talks with Josie about choosing friends wisely, and how when she has to lie and cover things up, and gets in trouble all the time when she's with a certain person, that means that that person isn't a good friend for her to have. The little feeling she gets in her tummy of uneasiness and guilt is a good thing, and that's her conscience protecting her from doing things she knows are wrong. Also, I said that she should tell Guy that she can't hang out with him anymore, because of these reasons, but that she still is his friend, and when things change maybe they can play together again, because that will protect her and also show him that HE needs to change, as well. I explained that she needs to be patient with Kwami, who obviously has had a lot of family issues, and probably has a lot of anger, and his tattling is his need for attention and positive reinforcement (thank you for telling me, Kwami, you're such a help) showing itself. So, she doesn't have to play with him, or even like him, but she shouldn't hate him, because he's young and is having a hard time controlling his feelings. She understood that, and said that she didn't want to spend a lot of time with Guy after this mess, either.

This whole thing has shown me that we are quickly reaching the stage where Josie will be having her own problems that I will have to basically stand aside and watch her deal with. Gone are the days of her biggest problem being a tiff with her little friend, which I can solve with cookies and lemonade. So, I talked to her about how the decisions regarding who she hangs out with will always be with her, and it's important for her to become astute in those choices now before she's older and is faced with having to sever ties with friends who get involved with drugs and alcohol. If she's a follower and content to be dragged along into other people's problems now, it will be all the harder when she's older to cope with important decisions. I also told her that her lying, aside from being morally irresponsible and hurtful to me, made it impossible for me to help her at the school, because if I don't know what her actual behavior is, and what events have already transpired, there's no way I'll have enough credibility to walk in there and defend her by saying, my kid would never do that, you must be mistaken.

I know in the grand scheme of things, this is small trouble potatoes, but I'm not used to having her be in trouble at school, and am unsettled at all the things that have been going on there without my knowledge. Sigh. I guess they're really going to be teenagers someday, with real problems, then, huh? Gross.

Now DH and I are trying to decide what, if any, punishment we should mete out to her. She did hide things from us, which is wrong. Since I wasn't at the school, aside from telling her to keep her tongue in her face from now on, I'm not entirely comfortable with punishing her harshly for whatever happened there, especially if she is punished by the school. Also, I think sometimes emotional upset is its own punishment. But I don't think she should get away scott-free, either. Any suggestions?