Sheep Guarding Llama

Another day and so far nothing has been said about the house.  Very frustrating.  We are so not used to how things are done in Texas.  It is amazing that anything gets done down here with a pace like this.

I managed to get up this morning, get showered, Oreo walked and out the door before Liesl woke up.  It still wasn’t that early as she had gone to bed pretty late but anytime that I can sneak out before she wakes up works out really well so that we don’t go through the drama of me leaving her or trying to get ready while she is awake.

It was a very busy day at the office.  Fortunately the coffee that I brought in yesterday was still there so I was able to just drink that.  Cold but perfectly good.

I managed to take a very late lunch and spend a little bit of time at home with Dominica and Liesl.  If we time it right I am able to get home, hang out, watch something while Liesl calms down heading towards a nap, walk Oreo and get out the door just before Liesl falls asleep for maximum family time.  Then Liesl will sleep pretty much until I get home after work so I really don’t miss much time with her.

The afternoon was a long, busy and stressful one today too.  I tried to leave work around five but didn’t manage to actually leave until almost six thirty.  I got home and ended up on a call until seven.  As soon as I was free we ran out to get to La Cima for pasta night which we missed last week.  It is just us this week, Watson took the night off.

Liesl was very good tonight.  She is always getting better and better at going out to eat.  Her food attention span slowly increases as she gets older and as we get better at managing the situation.  Tonight we thought to bring along the iPad so that she could watch movies on there over the WiFi via Netflix when she got bored.  The iPod Touch had worked out so well two weeks ago that we were hopeful that this would be an improvement on that – which it was.

When we got home we saw that we had missed a call from our real estate agent.  Of course, no message was left so nothing went to my email and when we called back we just got her voice mail.  Our call wasn’t returned.

We had spoken to our agent at one o’clock when I had just gotten home for lunch and at that time she had said that she was supposed to have heard something by three.  But we never heard anything and had not managed to reach her before leaving for dinner at seven.  It was probably nine thirty when we called her back.

So another day has passed without any news on the house.  Very frustrating.  We will both feel much better when we know the actual status of the situation.  We would really like to be able to do some planning.

Speaking of planning – next week is going to be crazy.  Brian and Dave are flying to Austin on Wednesday afternoon.  I drive down to Austin Wednesday evening.  Thursday and Friday are SpiceWorld.  I am speaking at the conference on Friday morning at ten thirty.  I found out the other day that I have been voted the number one attraction for this year’s event!  How weird is that?  I will be returning to Dallas on Saturday morning, laden with Round Rock Donuts.  Then, around Monday, Kevin and Pam are coming to visit us in Dallas.

I worked from home for a little while this morning.  There was a bit of work to do so I logged in to work early and just got caught up trying to keep up with all that needed to be done.

Before going into the office I needed to swing over to the real estate office to sign some paperwork.  So I did that and then went over to Panera Bread to pick up a thing of coffee to take back to the office.

Getting coffee turned out to be an hour long project.  Fortunately I had my iPod Touch with me which I had loaded up with Audible books yesterday and last night I had started listening to Alexis do Tocquville’s Democracy in America which I have wanted to read for many years but have never gotten around to doing.  So I listened to that for a while and ate an early lunch.  So it wasn’t the waste of time that it might have been.  But still, an hour for coffee.  That is a long time.  And when they finally brought it, they were out of their normal coffee totes so had made a makeshift coffee tote out of a box that they found.  I appreciated the effort but it was doomed for failure.

I got to the office and, of course, there were several coffee spills.  I guess that it couldn’t be avoided.  And no creamer today.  Argh.  At least Panera coffee is so good that drinking it black really isn’t a problem.

I took a very late and very short lunch.  After work I had a meeting up in Plano so drove up there as quickly as I could after work.  This was my first time in Plano.  One thing that I have learned about the DFW Metroplex is that all of these places that Americans know by name and feel much be major cities, like Plano, Carrollton, Richardson, Irving, Arlington, Grand Prairie, Denton, etc. are just random designations for random areas of population.  It is all endless suburbia and nothing differentiates one bit of it from another.  None of these places has any identity on its own at all.  They aren’t cities in the way that we think of cities in the rest of the country.

The meeting went well and afterward we all went to Waffle House for dinner.  That didn’t take long and then it was off to home.  I was home by a little after eight.

No word on the house today.  Nothing other than me signing that paperwork earlier in the day.  We made it all day without any feedback from the sellers.  This would never happen in New York.

We also had to deal with the furnace in our Peekskill house this weekend.  Apparently it is not turning on properly so we have to send an HVAC company out there to deal with it.  That is not fun.  Who knows how much that might end up costing.  These are the pains of being a landlord.  Although this issue would have hit us whether it was us living there or if it was renters.  This is our first major issue since getting someone into the house to rent it.  Before we had renters we had that shattered back door but that has been about it.

In theory today was supposed to be a holiday that I would get off.  We are treating it like a floating holiday at work as part of the market is open today and part of it is not.  I was on the list of people supposed to have today off.  That did not pan out.

I was up and online early this morning and found that there were a lot of people needing my assistance.  I ended up working all morning pretty frantically trying to keep up with the work until we had to leave at ten to run down to Coldwell to meet our Real Estate Agent so that we could go out to look at houses.

Before heading out to see the houses we ran over to McDonald’s to get breakfast.  Dominica was very ill from a lack of food this morning.

The houses today were generally much better than the houses that we had looked at in North Irving.  We are in Carrollton today for the first time seeing more than a single house up there.

All of the houses today were decently acceptable.  We pretty much ran through the list in reverse order of interest – just because that is how it worked out.  The first house was not a winner but wasn’t all that bad.  It had a horrible kitchen but some interesting living spaces that would have been pretty workable.  But it wasn’t going to make the cut so we moved on pretty quickly.

The second house was pretty good.  It was very inexpensive and pretty nice.  Up for consideration.  It didn’t grab us but it was a rather nice home.

The third house was somewhat more expensive and in rather poor shape but it was larger and very interesting.  It has some high ceilings, neat architecture and a very good use of space.  We were quite wary of it because of the amount of work that we would have to put in to really make it a house in which we would want to live which is not what we are going for at this point.  We do not tend to be in houses for very long so it is pretty important that whatever house we choose is one into which we are able to move right away without any additional hassles because those items that are a problem for us could easily never get addressed before we move out.

The four house is the one that we were most interested in.  Middle of the road in price and from the pictures it seemed like something that we would really like but you can never tell from pictures. We learned that lesson a few days ago.

We were both in love with this house from the moment that we walked into it.  We liked it pretty well from the outside as well.  The house and the grounds are in really good shape.  The house was built in the late 1970s and when you enter it you’d swear that you were stepping right into the 70s – the house feels new, but new like it is still the 70s which is very cool.  Everything is in perfect condition.

The living room is very large and just filled with light as there are windows all the way around.  There is a nice fireplace right in the middle of the living room.  The back yard is just what we want for Oreo and Liesl.  Big enough for them to use but well protected and safe and in good condition.  The kitchen is very dated, no getting around that.  Two car garage, outdoor atrium that is perfect as a formal dining room.  Three bedrooms, two baths which is not ideal but it will have to do.  A room just off of the living room that will likely service as the kids’ play room and den area.  There is room for our small dining room table in the kitchen’s eat in area which works out well.

One of the coolest selling features of the house is the complete bar that is at the back of the living room.  And I mean full. It is a bar meant to be staffed by a bar tender with a sink and plenty of space against the back wall and the normal serving bar in the front.  It has a fake roof for it on the inside of the living room and three small windows looking into the atrium.  It is a perfect place for all of our wine and coffee items.  We have always wanted a bar.

The house is a ranch which is what we want.  We do not walk small children or the blind Boston Terrier dealing with stairs unnecessarily. Just dangerous and we don’t like how they make the house feel.  Everything on one floor is the best.  I don’t like running up and down stairs every time that I need something.

We were decided in no time and put in an offer while still in the house.  It was around twelve thirty or many one by the time that we were all done house shopping for the day.  Now the long, drawn out Texas house bidding process begins.  Heaven only knows when we might actually hear something about the house.  We are very hopeful, this is the first house that we have seen that we really, really like.  The price is good, at the top of our desired range but less than five thousand over what we had said that we would spend so close enough that we are not fretting it at all.

On the drive back I timed the trip and in the middle of the day it took eighteen minutes to get from the house to the office in Las Colinas.  A lot farther than I had wanted to be but not a far commute like I was used to in New York, DC or New Jersey over the years.

After we got back I worked for the rest of the afternoon for the office.  No additional work on the house today.  I will have to go back into the real estate office tomorrow to sign some additional paperwork.

We ordered in some Domino’s pizza this afternoon and watched 30 Rock.  Overall we did very little today after the house hunting was done.

This weekend Dominica has been doing some additional research on houses that we are interested in and today there were two that came up in our searches that were very interesting indeed.  We decided that we were interested enough that we really want to get out and look at these.  We spoke to our agent today but she was not available because she was running an open house.  But since tomorrow is a sort-of holiday (which no one celebrates, thank goodness) we are going to go out tomorrow and see these houses instead.

Today was another day of playing Oblivion and just hanging out at home with the family.  I made great progress on Oblivion and I bet that I am nearing one hundred and ninety hours of game time at this point.

It is the beginning of the holiday weekend!  Whoo hoo.  This weekend is all about relaxing.

Today I spent much of the day playing Oblivion.  I am really making some significant progress now.  I am working hard on the Thieves’ Guild and on the Dark Brotherhood storylines.  I want to get those two wrapped up at a minimum before Fable III releases.  At the rate that I am going, however, it will be so long before I am ready to play Fable III that I might need to just hold off on getting it until I have some additional time in which to play it.  That will make me sad but I did get Fable II and play it with little baby Liesl sleeping beside me so maybe playing Fable III with the yet to be names Miller baby in a few months will work out well and be a sort of family tradition.  That would, in theory, give me time to complete both Oblivion and Fable I which I am only about halfway through at this time.  We haven’t even hooked up the XBOX 360 since moving to Texas.

Very little to report today.  We literally did effectively nothing.  I did a few hours of work, nothing significant.  Mostly just Oblivion, 30 Rock and playing with Liesl.