Sheep Guarding Llama

Today was crazy, completely crazy.  Nothing that we expected happened.

I got to the office.  I called our real estate agent.  She was thinking that it was time to follow up as well and set about contacting the selling bank to see what was going on.

Our agent called seconds after the decision was made to give us the house!  We can’t believe it.  We were so sure that after more than a week since we put in the initial offer that there would be no way that we would be getting the house now.  This doesn’t seem possible.  (At this point “too good to be true” should have occurred to us.)

We were very surprised as our bid was pretty lean.  We found out that there were four offers on the house but ours came out on top.  We actually were not the highest bid but we had the most stable funding and had a good offer and an early one so, in the end, we won.

So it is turning into a crazy day.  We were so sure that we were not getting the house.  Now we are.  Now there is a lot of planning and stuff to do.  I ran home for lunch which gave Dominica, Souder and I time to talk about what was going on with the other house.  Souder was up to start doing the work on the cabling that he didn’t manage to do last night because the electrical issues arose.

While we were there the electricians arrived and were working on things as well.  We are getting prepped for the fact that this work is going to cost a fortune compared to what was predicted due to the enormous amount of electrical work that is cropping up.  This is going to be rough.

I went over to the real estate office to sign the paperwork for the new house.  It only took a minute before we discovered what had happened: they put in the wrong bid.  They had been trying to convince us to put in a higher bid initially for this house because they were concerned that we were not going to get it because we were not high enough.  We had said “no”, that we had already made our best offer and we were going to stick with it.  This explains why we won the bid when we knew that we had been so long.  How could we have been high enough with so many people trying to buy that house.  Now we know.  Truly too good to be true.

So so much for the house that we were going to get.  Now we are disappointed.  And obviously upset.  We are not very happy that after we were so clear with our agent not to put in this price that it went in anyway.

It would be easily to be really pissed at our realtor for doing this but, after talking to her several times about it, it is very clear that she honestly is confused about the amount of money involved and does not, even now, understand that what she put in for us is as much money as it is.  She somehow thinks that we are getting some big reimbursement from the bank at the last minute or something crazy like that.  I’ve been over the numbers with her over and over again and she just can’t figure out why this isn’t the number that we had agreed to.  It is very frustrating but she certainly didn’t do it on purpose, she doesn’t even know what she did.

We decided that we at least wanted to discuss the offer.  The upside to the mistake is that, according to the selling bank, our “real” offer would not have gotten the house.  So we are now, because of the mistake, in a position to get the house that previously we would not have been able to get.  So, in reality, it is kind of a no harm, no foul situation.  Even as it is with this higher than expected bid we are still not the highest bidder, just the best bidder.

At least now we have the real numbers to work with.  This isn’t a bidding process now, it is just us accepting or not accepting the standing arrangement.

So Dominica and I talked about it for an hour or so.  I talked to our future tenant.  I talked to my banker.  We have everything approved should we want to go forward with the house.  We have until ten tomorrow morning  to make the decision.

Our final decision was… to get the house.  We ran the numbers again and decided that it still made sense.  A “house in the hand”, we decided.  We still got the house for a great deal – less that someone else was willing to pay right now, for example.  So the risk is very low.  It appears that we could easily sell the house if necessary at some point.

So we called the agent and she called the selling bank.  We have a house and we have all day tomorrow to wrap up the paperwork for it that we had started, and then stopped, today.  Our closing date is now set on February 18th.

So, while it was all crazy, we have decided that it is for the best.  We really do want the house and feel that it is a very good, long term property for us to have.  We are planning on staying in our current house for a long time and owning that house makes that that much easier.

We feel at peace about the decision.  People often think of the Lord closing doors to protect them from things that they should not do – like the car they wanted being sold before they get there or their offer not being accepted on their house.  “Oh well, the Lord is protecting us from something.”  Well, we feel that this is that, just the opposite.  Our offer wasn’t enough to get the house and so, to make sure that we got it, the offer was “wrong”.  Now we have it.

We watched a little BattleStar Galactica 2.5 tonight before Dominica went to bed, sort of, and I headed to the office to work.  Dominica failed to get any sleep, though, because Liesl had caffeine (not my fault, Dominica gave it to her before I got home from work) and was a terror.  She was visibly exhausted but could not go to sleep.  One moment she would be passing out and the next as wide awake as could be.  Very unlike her normal self.  She was almost acting drunk, banging her head against the wall, lots of screaming, not communicating well.  It was a rough evening.

I was up until two in the morning working.  I managed to get an article written just before Dominica fell asleep.  So I made her proofread it.  I submitted and then it was off to bed.

I have to be up at six in the morning so tonight is going to be a very short one for me.  Four hours at best.  And boy is there a lot to do tomorrow!

And yet another day and no word on the house.  This is getting to be a bit crazy.  We are moving forward with our usual spending rather than holding back funds for the house.  We can’t completely stop our lives while waiting for someone to bother to make a decision about this.  This is just silly.

I finally got paid today.  Haven’t been paid for a month which is a bit nerve-wracking.  We have a lot of bills coming up this week – it is the end of the month when everything is due.

There was frost on my car today, which was surprising, as it is pretty nice out.  My car was out front in the sun too.

I got into the office early today, around eight.  It is a little chilly here early in the mornings but by midday we are in the high fifties which is awfully nice.

Today was a very busy day.  FOMC Rates announcement is today so that takes an hour chunk out of the middle of my day.

This morning was Liesl’s doctor’s appointment.  She got three shots and some other stuff like a finger prick which I think was her blood lead test.  She was not very happy but she was a really good trooper and was great for everyone.  Once she got a lollipop, though, everything was okay.

I had to go to a really early, and short, lunch today.  That’s fine.  I generally take long lunches so I’m the last person who can get to complain about having to rush.  I ran over to Rockfish at eleven forty-five and ate very quickly.  As I was alone and clearly didn’t have a lot of time, they had my food out in about five minutes.

Brian and Tara joined me for the last few minutes of lunch before I had to jet back to the office.  I was back by a quarter after noon.  Very fast lunch.

I had hours of conference calls that, for some reason, were all during lunch today.

This afternoon the contractor was up at the house doing some additional work.  Brian went up to do some cabling as well.  Lots going on in that garage.

I was supposed to do some shopping at Home Depot today with the contractor but he ended up being sick so we postponed that until tomorrow.

On my way home I stopped by at Walmart to pick up baking soda for Dominica as she was baking a cake for dessert tonight.  What a madhouse it was there.

I got home and discovered that there was no power in the garage.  Brian had been doing some work out there on something else and touched a wire and an outlet exploded.  So this was destined to be a lot of fun.

Brian ended up working for like six hours just trying to get the electrical fixed in the garage and kitchen.  What a pain.  The wiring is a mess and we discovered one thing wrong after another.  There was very little for me to do since I don’t know much of anything about house wiring.

Finally, after midnight, the electrical started working.  Pheww.

We are pretty sure that tons and tons of electrical work needs to be done on the house for safety purposes.  The electric is a total disaster.  This is going to cost us a fortune and that isn’t going to be fun.

No, we did not hear anything further about the house today.  We were told either Monday or Tuesday and today is Tuesday and we have heard nothing.  It’s been six days now since we put in our bid and no information.  Rather rude.  You would think that they would at least want to keep their potential offers in the loop.  If we were the winning bid we could easily have been out looking at other homes too since this one doesn’t seem very interested in selling the place.

In reality, we are pretty confident that the house went to someone else and that the bank just isn’t bothering to inform us as much.  I’m very surprised that absolutely no one has called us to at least discuss us not hearing anything.  Our bank emailed me yesterday just to get a status.  Apparently they haven’t heard anything either.

I ended up working from home for a bit this morning.  It was just a really busy day.  It was around ten when I finally managed to get into the car and get off to the office.  I started work pretty early this morning, around eight, but there was just enough going on that I was never able to leave.  It happens once in a while.

Work was pretty busy today.  We have some server migrations going on this week so there is a lot of coordination required for that.

For lunch, Souder and I went to La Cima.  There was mahi mahi on the buffet again today so I didn’t want to miss that.  It was a short lunch, though, as there was so much going on.  Didn’t want to be away from the office for very long.

Dominica said that the contractor showed up around three and started work on the garage.  He was quite impressed that I had managed to clear out so much stuff.  He didn’t think that I was going to pull it off so late at night.  So the demolition has begun.  We should, in theory, have a new garage in no time.

I didn’t stay late this evening, there was much to be done.  Demolition had been completed by around four thirty and supplies are needed for the garage.  So I left at normal time, met Souder and he followed me up to the house on the surface streets so that he could bypass the parking lot that is the President George Bush Tollway northbound in the evenings.  It can easily take over forty-five minutes to get home while taking only eleven minutes to go south to the office, both during rush hour.

Brian and I got there and the contractor and electrician were there minutes behind us.  We put in an hour or two working on and looking at the garage.  What a mess we discovered once those walls were down.  Live electric wires just shoved into the walls, tangles of power lines, electric outlets that were not attached to studs, just hanging in the middle of insulation, no insulation on the outside walls (but insulation on the inside ones!), the inside wall was freestanding and not attached to the house, etc.  What a mess.

The biggest thing that we discovered, though, was our fuse box.  We had been thinking that we probably only had a one hundred amp service.  Thankfully that was not the case and the house was actually fitted with two hundred amps which was good forethought for 1978 when the house was built.  We definitely need that much power.  What is bad is that there is no main breaker, so no way to fully cut power to the entire house.  But the really bad part is that the two hundred amp box contains six hundred and forty amps worth of breakers.  That seems rather excessive.  There is no way that we would ever flip a breaker.  The box would explode and the house burn down before the breakers will flip!

Tomorrow is the shopping for the garage supplies.  I think that they are planning on having the garage done by the weekend.  The electrician is hoping to be in on Thursday to do all of the wiring.  He and Souder also went around the house and looked at the electrical situation there as well as up in the attic.  They are formulating a plan on how to deal with the electrical disaster going on up there, which is pretty significant.

After the contractor and electrician left, Souder and I hooked the Internet back up so that there is at least some minimal communications with the outside world while this work is going on.  Our house phone is off until the weekend, though.

Dominica made a late dinner and we ate veggie riblet sandwiches and watched some Disney channel shows while Liesl was still up.  We can’t watch anything from our own collection since the server had to be taken down, as did my garage movie conversion system, to make way for the demolition.  So we are down to Netflix only.

While we were watching, Liesl showed up by the bed holding a shrink wrapped movie that I had not seen before.  It was one of her kids shows.  I was like “where did she get this?” and Dominica had no idea either.  So we opened it for her and she watched that while I went and worked for a while.  Always something to do.

We were off to bed at a good time.  Dominica has to take Liesl to a morning doctor’s appointment.  I can’t make it with them as I have a “numbers” call during lunch tomorrow and I have to be in the office.  I also have to be ready for when I need to run to Home Depot to pay for a large number of supplies being purchased for the garage.

I managed to wake up without an alarm before seven this morning.  That was pretty amazing considering that I went to bed late and have been getting up around eight or later for over a week.  My BlackBerry, which had been set as my alarm, died during the night.  It is a year and a half old and the battery is just about shot.  I am very lucky to get one real day of use out of it.  So almost every weekday I take it to work and plug it in at my desk to charge it and then run it down in between.  Not as useful as it used to be.  Now that Verizon has the iPhone I am seriously considering getting one of those when I reup as Dominica’s Droid X is not very impressive in comparison to my iPod.  The BlackBerry devices have not kept pace and all and I need something a lot more advanced and reliable.  The rollerball on my BlackBerry is completely useless – you can’t reliably select anything.

I got in to work at eight which is pretty early.  I was quite productive this morning.  I grabbed coffee and a danish at the cafeteria and ate at my desk.

At a quarter till eleven I ran back up to Carrollton so that I could be at the house to meet with our landscaper who was coming by to give us a quote on our disaster of a lawn.  I was a little late but there in plenty of time to be able to talk to him and find out what he was thinking.

We need to put in new drainage.  That much is clear.  The yard fills up with water and it just sits there.  That isn’t good.  Even in a very light rain we could take little sailboats out beside the house and sail them around over half of the space there.

The landscaper liked the idea of putting in a patio running alongside the house between our house and the one that we are hoping (but not hopeful) to buy shortly.  That entire side of the house does not get enough sun to support grass and so the plan, we think, is to put in flagstones and make it a complete outdoor seating and entertaining area.  It would be awesome to have places to go and hang out outside.  Oreo loves being able to just lay outside for long periods of time and if he had some actually comfortable outside furniture he could just stay out there baking in the sun without getting over exposed to the grass to which he is allergic.  We need a comfortable place for us to sit while Liesl plays in the yard too.  We hope to be able to be outside quite a bit with this new house.

The backyard needs sod.  A lot of it.  No question there.  We currently really have no grass.  It is awful.  We need to dig out and remove a good chunk of soil that appears to have become “salted” from the runoff from the water softener too.  A load of soil needs to be brought in as well to fill in the gaps and bring the yard up a little bit as it is too low at the moment.

We want the bushed that are blocking the windows of the den to be removed.  They aren’t the best bushes and they are just in the way making it darker than necessary in the house.  We might leave some of the other bushes.  We will see.  Dominica really does not like them.  The trees are absolutely staying, though.  We might add a tree to the front of the house.  It wouldn’t block our view or sunlight from the windows but it would, eventually, shade the living quarters of the house a little bit from the southern exposure and would, eventually, lower the cooling cost of the house and add some interest to the front of the house.

The existing flower bed he had some ideas about switching from the old, crappy wooden box into something curved and made of rocks that would be a lot more attractive.  An actual garden piece rather than the box of clay dirt that it is now.  We will need something done with the flower box on the front of the house too.  We actually have a fair amount of “garden” space around the house that all needs to be addressed.

The last big thing is that we need a new irrigation system as the old one is broken or possibly just missing altogether.  We’ve never really seen any trace of it so we aren’t completely convinced that it actually exists.

He is getting us a quote together and we should know more tomorrow evening.  We are very excited to get some of these big projects moving.  The garage, yard and atrium are the big three that are driving us crazy until they are done.  The atrium being clearly the third place project there.  Until we manage to get it done, we can just ignore it.  But the house is full of boxes that need the garage to be completed in order to be put away and it is really cutting into our space.

I spoke to our contractor at lunch and he is planning to come over this evening so that we can look into getting the garage project started right away.  I hope to be able to work on the indoor gardening this evening as well.  I’m very anxious to get our new plants into place.  We have two nice, large pots to place in the living room and by the front door.  Until we get all of the plants done they are just sitting in the entrance way.

The afternoon at the office was kind of busy.  On my commute today I am continuing to listen to “Pirate Hunter”, the biography of Captain Kidd which continues to be pretty interesting.  It is a very long book.

I got home at six and our contractor was over around seven.  We went around the garage and figured out mostly what needs to be done and the plan that he is going to go over to the house tomorrow afternoon to get started a little after lunch.  Hopefully we can get this all completed very soon.  We are quite excited to have this start tomorrow.

My project for tonight is to empty the garage.  No small task.  So after dinner and watching a few episodes of Big Bang Theory: Season 1 with the family I set to clearing out the garage.  Dominica came out and helped for a while too, especially with the lighter stuff and getting all of the foodstuffs out of the extra fridge so that we are prepared to unplug and relocate it to some place where it will not be so much in the way.  Although I have no idea where it might fit after this.

It took a few hours to get the garage cleaned out.  What a job that was.  I listened to my book for most of the time that I was working.

It was around midnight when I was all done.  Liesl was busying herself watching her new video Leap Frog Letters or something like that.  It is a video for learning the letters and the sounds that they make.  She loves it thus far.  She watched it four times just tonight and already knows the songs and sounds!  She already knew her letters but this is really great.

We put Liesl to bed and Dominica and I watched a little bit of Big Bang Theory again to give me a chance to relax after the exertion.  It was pretty late, after one, when we finally went to bed.

In theory we are supposed to hear back about the house next door tomorrow.  But we aren’t holding our breathe.

Today is housework day.  Originally I was going to be running a UNIX class today but that ended up getting canceled as it was tough on everyone’s schedules.

Before I knew that we were canceling the class today, I got up and worked on Solaris for two hours.  I had meant to sleep in a little more than I did but was paged out by the office at eight in the morning and once I was up I just decided to stay up and to be productive.

I went on to do some serious house cleaning once Dominica and Liesl were awake.  There is a lot of cleaning that always needs to be done.  We did vacuuming – which alone probably took an hour as there was vacuum maintenance to do as well.  And there was at least thirty or forty minutes of down on my hands and knees floor scrubbing with the Little Green.  That never seems to end.  I wind up doing a full cleaning of at least one portion of the carpet on any given day.

I did a little of the dishes then Dominica jumped in and cleaned the kitchen.  The house is looking really good after about two or three hours of solid cleaning.  Feels good to get all of that done.

Jen came over at one because we had failed to convey quickly enough that the class was canceled for today so she was just in time to head on over to IHOP with Dominica, Liesl and I.  So we got lunch and then Jen went back down to the apartment while the Millers headed out to do some serious shopping.  This was our chance to get out and do some shopping that we always need to do and never manage to do.

Our first destination of Academy to try to get some shoes for me.  We ended up getting lost because Dominica was navigating and the GPS took us to the right address in the wrong city.  So we wound up in a really bad part of Dallas while trying to get out to the suburbs.  Oops.

We eventually found Academy and ended up getting quite a haul.  I got two pairs of shoes, two pairs of jeans, a new belt, new wallet and both Dominica and I got new UT slippers to wear around the house.  I have been pretty desperate for new shoes, jeans and belt for about a year or more now.  My old shoes have been in shambles for years now; they are completely falling apart.  I’ve been down to a single pair of jeans for months.  I have been without a belt since the Daddy Dance Off competition in Grapevine.  So this was some important shopping.

We found so much stuff at Academy that we were able to skip going to Casual XL Male on this particular trip which was nice as it was taking us a very long time to get back home.  On the way home we also went to Lowe’s as we had a $10 coupon that needed to be used.

At Lowe’s we bought several more plants, planters, potting soil and other associated indoor gardening paraphernalia.  We are working hard on getting some serious plant life in the new house.

Once we got home we got to work planting plants into the brick planters that separate the living room from the den area where Liesl plays.   We pulled out the ancient, dead whatever plants didn’t make it in there and discovered that the planters are actually incredibly deep, over a foot deep, and full of coil but had had potted plants just sat on top of the soil and some crap and newspapers shoved down in as filler.  It was awesome.

We dug out all of the pots, dead plants, moss, newspaper and more and got it cleaned out to just loose soil.  Then we added in most of a huge bag of Miracle Grow potting soil and transplanted two houseplants into the planter.  That was a bit of work but boy does it look better.  Having those planters full of dead grass and moss looked awful.  Having two, luscious and vibrant plants in there really shows why someone designed that planter in that way.  It looks great.

After doing the first planter we realized that we did not have enough soil to go on to do the second one.  So we decided to go back out to Walmart to get more soil since it was seven thirty at that point and Lowe’s was already closed as it is Sunday night.

It took about an hour to get back out of the house.  Liesl really didn’t want me to leave so we all decided to go out shopping again.  We got what we needed at Walmart and found another plant that we really liked and picked up a movie to watch later.  Then, on the way home, we stopped at Jack in the Box and picked up dinner.

Once we got home we ate dinner and watched Hot Tub Time Machine which Francesca had been raving about.  I had barely heard of it but it had John Cusack who is normally pretty good so we figured that we couldn’t go too wrong.  It was decent.  Not amazing but it was an entertaining movie.  Unfortunately it was not child friendly so we had to put Liesl to bed earlier than she might have wanted but she was pretty tired and did fall right asleep.

It was pretty late by the time that we were done with the movie and so instead of going back and working on the plants again we just decided to head off to bed.

I need to go to work early tomorrow morning as I am coming home early at lunch to meet with the landscaper who is coming to look at our yard and to work up a quote for us on getting our yard into shape.  We are really anxious to make it so that Liesl can actually go outside and play.  One of the big reasons that we bought a house was for Liesl to be able to go outside and, as of this point, the back yard has never been accessible to her.  It’s been cold, so it has been okay.  But pretty soon we are going to be very disappointed if she can’t go outside and play in her enclosed yard.