A year ago today we arrived in a city we had never even visited before. With help from an awesome friend we brought the barest of essentials: our cats, a suitcase, a small tv (for watching the Oscars!), a portable crib and every toy we owned. I mean, one of the first things we had to do when we got here was go out and buy a litter box for goodness sake!

Now, a year later, we're finally starting to get settled. We've finished buying furniture, and we're going to order some rugs soon. There's only 1 more room that we need to repaint. And now that Andy isn't totally scared of strangers, we're starting to meet other families around our neighborhood. For a while I wondered if we had made the right decision in coming here, but then I took a walk yesterday afternoon, in the middle of February when it was a balmy 73 degrees outside. And I noticed that the trees around here are starting to bloom, just like they were when we first arrived. Then I realized that right now there isn't any place I'd rather be.

I went up into the attic yesterday in an attempt to see how easy it would be to install some ceiling fans. This was the first time I've been up there actually. There's not much to see. Part of our central air-conditioning is up there so there's not really much space for anything else. So, all was well, until I looked at a gable. There, in the soffit vent were about a dozen bats!

It was day time when I was up there so they weren't moving around very much. So I didn't immediately freak out. However, as I stood up there longer I wondered if there was actually anything between me and them. I had to run back down the ladder and grab a pair of binoculars in order to confirm that there was, in fact, a screen between me and them. So, phew. That would've been totally creepy.

So, we've got bats. I should probably check to make sure that screen stays intact. Plus, I'm not entirely sure that having bats is a bad thing — after all they're probably keeping the mosquito population down.

As for the ceiling fans — the insulation prevented me from seeing anything useful. So I guess I'll just have to unscrew some chandeliers and see what's going on.

Tomorrow is moving day. Again. I cannot wait for this to be over with. Moving twice in 2 months definitely takes a toll on your sanity. This time is going to be easier though, as we don't have to fit our entire lives into well-packed boxes. I've already been taking some things over: lightly packed boxes of dishes, the contents of our refrigerator, the contents of our closet. Speaking of closets, this house has a killer master walk-in closet. The previous owners put in a nice closet system. There's even a tie rack, where i can (finally) properly hang up my 5 ties. Actually there's two tie racks. I'll need to get some more ties. Good thing Father's Day is coming soon!

This will hopefully be our new house in less than two weeks! We're closing on April 13th, and at this point, I don't see any more obstacles in our way. I can't wait! Now I get to learn all about home maintenance! Laura and I really like the neighborhood its in. It's older (built in the late 1990s) so there are lots of big trees. None of the newer developments we looked at had any trees to speak of. Plus, there's lots of space between houses, and the nice berm behind the house provides a decent amount of privacy. In a couple of more weeks we'll be grilling veggie burgers out on the back patio, and sipping iced tea on the front porch!

So, Laura and I decided that we were going to put an offer on a house on Friday morning. We already made an appointment to fill out the paperwork. Then we heard about this "For Sale By Owner" house down in Waxhaw, and we figured "oh what the heck, lets just go and look at it." You can can probably guess the rest of the story. As soon as we walk into the place, we just know its for us. That's definitely the first time I've had that feeling about a piece of property. I mean, its so perfect, it's even in a neighborhood called "The Oaks." After looking at it, we went straight to the coffee shop in town to work up an offer. It was delivered immediately after that!

We've been here twice before, but this time everything is going much smoother (so far at least). We just found out that our offer on a 4 bedroom house south of Charlotte has been accepted, and we're officially under contract! We are really psyched, and only had to weather a little flakiness on the part of the seller. (Seriously, who asks to remove the financing contingency?) Our savings account is much more prepared for this house, and that gives us some better options when it comes to financing. We've already been pre-approved of course, and now all we have to do is hope the home inspection doesn't turn up anything too horrible.

We don't have pictures yet, since this is a "For Sale By Owner", but we're going to get some during the home inspection. We'll definitely be putting those up as soon as we can. The inspection should be some time next week! Yay!

There were two articles on boston.com about the end of the housing bubble in the Boston area. First is an article about conditional offers, and second an article about the increasing supply of single family homes in the suburbs.

To my untrained eye, it seems like maybe the bubble is beginning to burst. It sounds like sellers are starting to have a harder time, and either have to wait for 6-7 months, or cut their prices to a more reasonable level (and probably both!). With an increase of conditional offers, one greedy seller can put a whole series of sales on hold as he tries to squeeze the most out of his overpriced property.

Not all is gloomy though. It sounds like condo sales are as strong as ever. Still, I'm glad we ended up passing on those condos last year. It would've been a tough situation had we gone with 100% financing like we planned, and we were forced to sell in order to move into a bigger place. Since then, we've moved into a cheaper apartment, and we're making good strides to saving a reasonable down payment. Still, there's no way we'll ever be able to afford a house in the northeast, so when the time comes we'll probably have to try our luck elsewhere.

So, we made the big move from Davis Sq. to Arlington over the weekend. This allowed us to completely skip out on helping Dave move, of course, but I think we paid the price; my back, hands and feet are all killing me. The mover's were awesome though, I was just amazed that 3 guys could move us so fast. They started at 8:30, and were completely done at 11. The house is a complete mess right now of course, we've got a lot of boxes left to unpack. We might be fairly close to done by the end of the week.

In other news, I see in the newspaper this morning that the US Election Assistance Commission is requesting the authority to delay federal elections from Congress. The Commission claims that the power is necessary in case there is an attack designed to "disrupt the election." Not that I'm any sort of Constitutional expert, but this might be legally possible, the only thing that seems to be required by the constitution is that the Electors all give their votes on the same day, as determined by Congress.

It seems to me that if the purpose of cancelling or delaying the election is to make sure that it is not 'disrupted', then you're not really doing the job, right? Wouldn't delaying or cancelling the election be extremely disruptive? Yes, that's a rhetorical question. I said a long time ago, that the only way that Bush would stay in office is if we didn't have an election this fall. Now that possibility seems frighteningly more possible.

Laura and I picked up the keys to our new place tonight. The back door key doesn't quite work yet. The deadbolt will only lock if the key is inserted. Its a new deadbolt, so hopefully the landlord will fix it soon! They seem like really nice people, they surprised us with a new built-in dishwasher in our apartment. I seriously did not expect that at all. However, they did throw away the washing machine we were planning on using (it was left there by the penultimate tenants), so we'll have to take a trip to buy a new one. I just hope the refrigerator doesn't go as well, as that would be a pain to replace. The new place seems really big. Sure it doesn't have anything in it yet, but I think the layout results in much more useful space. Right now we have a pretty big apartment, but there's so much wasted useless space in the kitchen and I guess would be the dining room.

Pictures of our new apartment

Boston Area Street Sweeper

BostonSweeper is a free service designed to save you money and prevent parking headaches by automatically e-mailing you reminders to move your car before the street sweeper comes.

I got my first email reminding me today to move my car. And thank goodness, because its on the wrong side! Now all I have to do is actually remember to move my car at some point.

Well, it seems like we've given up hope for buying a condo for now. We're anxious to move out of our current dwelling into something cheaper, so we started looking for 2 bedroom apartments around town. We've got an appointment to see one tonight. Its in Arlington, near Russ and Jeff. Looking at apartments is so much less stressful; yet the pace of the search makes things stressful all over again. Hopefully things will work out a little better this time.

Well, it all fell apart once again. This time, there wasn't anything really wrong with the condo. In fact, I really liked the place and was pretty excited over the prospect of living there. However, problems started cropping up in our relationship with the seller's agent and we started feeling as though something wasn't completely right.

In fact, things started off on the wrong foot. When we first met the Realtor, he didn't mention who he worked for. Naively, I assumed that he was working for us, and had to ask him directly before he admitted that he was not. After Laura and I decided to put an offer on the unit, the forms and documents he gave us were woefully incomplete, and sloppily prepared. For example, a lead paint disclosure document was never filled out by the seller, the offer form he provided was missing vital information like the appliances included.

In the end, it was a dispute over a referral fee that sunk the deal. When we first met with the Realtor we mentioned that we had a referral from another Realtor. He said that was fine and asked the other agent to fax his office. However, citing dubious reasons, he refused to honor the referral. It got to the point where the selling agents were demanding that we indemnify them in the purchase and sale against any claims from other Realtors!

This combined with all the previous shady behavior made us realize that no matter how much we liked the condo, these were not people we wanted to do business with.Virtually everything that came out of his mouth turned out to be misleading our outright false. At this point I'm just glad I don't have to deal with the whole issue anymore. Next time we're making sure we have our own representation, and hopefully we can deal with people who are more knowledgable and a lot less slimey.

We had the first round of the home inspection on Monday. We used the same inspectors that found the Mold of Doom, Jackson Home Inspection. The inspector found a few problems in the basement, and raised a bunch of questions that I forwarded to our lawyer. Hopefully those can get taken care of so we can sign off on the purchase and sale this week!

Always read those documents before signing. The draft purchase and sale agreement was pretty horrendous. It dropped a few of the contingencies that we added to the offer agreement, and reversed a few clauses to be in the sellers favor. We've got our Lawyer on the case though. We postponed the structural inspection that was supposed to happen on Monday until everything gets cleared up. But I think in the next few days things will be running smoothly again. Maybe this was just a misunderstanding, but more likely it was the sellers trying to get as much of an advantage as possible.

The lawyer suggested that we go through each room and identify any extras we might like, such as outlets, telephone and cable jacks, lighting fixtures, &c. So I think we're going to try to do that in the next week or so. After that its picking out colors and window shades. Hopefully there's not too much more excitement this week; Laura and I are going to a Red Sox game tonight, and we've got tickets to the theater for tomorrow.

Looking at a 1 bedroom in Medford today. I'll post some pictures when I get back. Its relatively inexpensive, and a new conversion, so I'm sure its full of pitfalls. Here's hoping!

Updated: So that went well. Its still really under construction, but we liked it, and we sure liked the price. We're going to put an offer in on this one and see how things work out. Closing is expected at the beginning of July, so there's plenty of time to get everything in order. I'm not so sure what this will do to our planned vacation though. I'll post some pictures a little later.

Updated: It looks like our offer was accepted! Yay! Here are some pictures:

• Kitchen - oven/dishwasher
• Kitchen - sink
• Kitchen - refrigerator/backdoor
• Office/Dining room - kitchen to left
• Sitting room - that's the hallway to the front door on the left, and stairs to the basement on the right. The bathroom is right behind us.
• Sitting room - a shot of the bathroom
• Living room - the dining room is behind us, the bedroom is through the french doors
• Living room - the bedroom is behind us
• Bedroom - the living room is behind us, a door to the front hall is to the right.
• Front hall - looking down the hall to the bathroom/sitting room
• Front of house - we're the lower right unit.

Updated: Below are a few blue prints taken from the condo docs. They're really big images, so it might take a while.

• 1st floor - Really big, covers entire 1st floor
• Unit #4 - Just our unit, a little smaller

Oh well. It was exciting while it lasted. The home inspection that that we had a week ago turned up some really scary looking black mold in the attic. Of course, he couldn't actually say if it was mold or not; and it would cost $500 more to find out for sure. Regardless, we're not about to pay all that extra money just to find out that we don't want to buy the place. So we've rescinded the offer. Such a cute place too! I guess its back to the house-hunting grind.

Well, I certainly can't let Laura write more than me in the weblog that I made for her!

Recently, we've been on the long windy road that is purchasing a new home. A condo actually. And to make matters more confusing and stressful, its for sale by owner. They are really nice people though, and seem to know what they're doing.

The place is really nice; The only thing it really needs is a little touchup paint around the trim. I'm going to the home inspection tonight, so perhaps I'll post some pictures of it later.

After this, the next stressful step is signing the purchase & sale agreement, and applying for the mortgage. I can't believe how long I'll be paying this thing off, but I think that its got some real value to it so I'm not too worried.