House Huntin'


Contrary to all of our well-agreed-upon future plans, which had this life phase scheduled to begin early next year, Shelly and I went looking at houses this past weekend. Recent dips in housing prices and plummeting interest rates on loans make this a good time to at least consider the idea, though I do worry that perhaps the "child-rearing" schedule might be advanced as well.
We looked at this townhouse, which is literally 5 minutes away from where we live now. It has three bedrooms (a must for us), a decent sized kitchen (important as well), and a nice backyard (extremely unusual for townhomes). Amazingly, it was priced pretty much right at its tax value, a situation we later found to be somewhat more common in the area than we’d believed.

While in the neighborhood, the realtor we met, Jim Pavlica of Remax, took us to see another, within walking distance. This townhouse was priced below tax value, with $3000 offered towards closing costs. Suspicious, we nonetheless checked it out, and aside from a few relatively minor things, found it to be perfectly livable. The seller must just want to get out in a hurry.

While it lacked the large, fenced backyard, and the kitchen is substantially smaller, it is a very good deal for the money. It also has a larger living area, new carpet, new paint, and new kitchen appliances. Yesterday I took the liberty of having the senior loan officer at the Credit Union write me up a pre-qualification letter, should Shelly and I decide to put in a bid on the place.

LATE BREAKING NEWS: Awesome! The SECU just today lowered the ARM rate down to 4.25%, and the 30 year fixed to 6.00%! I'd be stupid not to do this!

Finally, and of most importance, a nearby lake is positively overflowing with various species of waterfowl, providing fodder for years and years worth of blog entries. I know that Erika, for one, has told me time and again how she checks my blog every day to see if I've written anything about geese lately.

Since she’s on spring break this week, Shelly’s dove into this enterprise with both feet, and even today went and looked at other houses in the equivalent price range. Unfortunately, various factors (distance from Raleigh, higher prices, level of ghetto-ness) disqualified everything she saw today.

If nothing else, we did get an encouraging email from Martha on the subject, which brought other alarming possibilities to our attention, raising such specters as Shelly not passing the bar exam, rumors that no one with credit scores under 720 can get approved for loans, and me doing renovations unassisted due to Shelly’s busy lawyerly schedule. Shelly had to do some quick talking to get me to drop that cyanide capsule. (I kid, Martha! I kid because I love!)

In other news, you don’t have to be a UNC fan to be enthused about their victory over Duke on Saturday. We watched the game with Jason and Erika over at their house, while enjoying Jason’s homemade salsa, and he was even gracious enough to give us a large jar of it to take home afterwards.


So, in political news, Clinton won in Ohio and Texas last Tuesday, which basically means that neither she nor Obama will win the Democratic nomination outright, so they'll both need super delegates. Things will be especially interesting if she ends up winning more of the popular vote than he does, even if he leads in pledged delegates. Either way, we'll be treated to one of the two of them arguing after the fact that the rules they agreed to play by aren't fair after all (does Florida ring any bells here?) If Obama loses, he'll be railing against the power of the super delegates, despite competing in a system in which they were designed to be able to overrule popular will. If it's Clinton that goes down, she'll be arguing that the proportional allocation of delegates wasn't fair, because it had the affect of giving small states too much influence, and Obama won most of those. (Thank God I'm a Republican with no qualms about the winner-take-all system)


Meanwhile, for any other conservatives out there enjoying this whole spectacle as much as I am, this quick read, on Senator Obama's view of the Constitution, should sober you up in a big hurry.


Also in news, Jen Glass, newly recovered from the Turbulence Tragedy, is coming to stay with us for a few days this week, though she has yet to call us and tell us when she's coming in tomorrow. Ah, well, the airport's only ten miles from here, and Jen probably wouldn't mind a little hike to reconnect with her native North Carolina...


Hmm... I don't really have much else to tell you, but Shelly's currently watching America's Next Top Model in the other room, which is a natural repellant for all heterosexual human males. And there aren't any pictures to post relevant to this blog entry, so I'll go hunt down an irrelevant one... OK, here's Melissa, opening her Christmas present (in February):

Oh, and this might put a smile on your face...