12 posts tagged “house”

So, the house next door sold, and out moved a family with kids about our kids ages.

In moved renters, with a dog, staked outside 24/7, who barks and growls every time we go outside.

His tie-out extends all the way to the property line, which he snaps taut every time I go outside with our dogs or kids.

We ask the landlord for a fence, to keep our kids from doing something a kid would do like chase a ball downhill, and wind up getting bitten.

We've wanted a fence for a while as the back of the yard ends in a cliff down to a ravine.

So far, the feedback we've got from the property manager is that the landlord's OK with it, as long as we pay for the fence he picks out, and our rent goes up because the property would now been improved with a fence and to cover maintenance for it.

On the other hand, we've got our own renters in the house we left behind in the relocation wanting improvements for their own lease extension/renewal.

I'm not only seeing both sides of the fence, I'm seeing it simultaneously and let me tell you; there isn't any green grass on either side.

Hedged Bets

Lift your covers up woman
Rise out of bed.

Sneak down the dark hall
Mind the floorboards that creak.

Slip to night out your back-door
Take a small light to see

Find our place in the bushes
Where we used to meet

It's been some time since there was a once in my while,
it's been a long line since there was happy in the smile.

Ain't nothing so cool as a hot summer rain
It soaks and it soothes and it puddles the pain

Your miles stretched out ahead of my years

Forget about your day now
The titles that you wear

You were none of those to me there
They all unzipped and fell

Remember what you became then
With leaves in your hair

Listen to what the night brings
The past in your head

It's been some time since there was a once in my while,
it's been a long line since there was happy in the smile.

Ain't nothing so cool as a hot summer rain
It soaks and it soothes and it puddles the pain

Your miles stretched out ahead of my years

Ain't nobody meeting you tonight
Not like I did

You can see into your house
through a closed window and to a warm bed

This is what you have now
And this shrub's just a hedge

No rendezvous for wary lovers this night
But for the yowl of a lonely tomcat

It's been some time since there was a once in my while,
it's been a long line since there was happy in the smile.

Ain't nothing so cool as a hot summer rain
It soaks and it soothes and it puddles the pain

Your miles stretched out ahead of my years

We've all still got some ass to kick.

Counting the Years

My mind's eye sees us young.

This group peeling layers off the great onion of life.

Jobs became careers and girlfriends turned into wives.

And I add it together and piece it apart.

I've had the same wife for nine years, today.

But I can't keep a bottle for more than a week.

Yes we've had two houses, two kids and two dogs before that.

We hold them, and fix them, and pay all their bills.

Wherever we'll go, that's where home will be at.

And in all, we've been together for eleven years, today.

But I can't keep a bottle for more than a week.

I'm an uncle and wife's an aunt for the very first time, today.

Careful maturing and aging, the form is an art.

See that's the distiller you know, me I'm just an old fart.

Friends married, bought houses and bred.

None of that kept me up nights in my bed.

But I can't keep a bottle for more than a week.

Selfish for sure, but this will be honestly selfish.

My mind says I can't be old enough to know a widow.

The bottle drains quick, looking for meaning or reason.

Some always died, sure, stretching back a long line

Those were the legends, the ghosts kept alive in their stories

And I didn't feel old knowing spouses, or parents, or uncles and aunts.

But the widow.  The survivor of death of a spouse.

Knowing a widow in the group, my memory keeps us so young.

That's the one that has me feeling the aches and the bruises.

Cold and unfeeling, it's the life that hands out these titles,

Now how we live with that life tag

That's what'll define us.

Me, I can't keep a bottle for more than a week.

My eldest 3 year old is a master of this art.

The 6 year old girl next door saw us checking the mailbox at the street on Friday.

She came over and said hi and asked if my daughter wanted to come play.

Girl:  "Hi, do you want to come play at our house?"

Eldest:  "Well, we're checking the mailbox for letters."

Girl:  "We have lots of toys that we can play with and I'll share with you."

Eldest:  (pointing to the sky) "That's an airplane.  Mommy rides airplanes to work in other cities."

Girl:  "I cleaned my room so that we have room to play.  It didn't take very long at all."

Eldest:  (pointing two-handed at our house) "This is our house.  It's not our Michigan house.  This is our Nashville house.  We have two houses."

Girl's Father:  (loading bags into car.)  "C'mon - - - -, we have to go now.  Come get in the car with your sister."

Girl:  (to Father) "In a second."  (to Eldest) "Maybe we can play sometime?"

Eldest:  (to me)  "I have to go potty."

Me:  (to Eldest) "Say bye-bye."

Eldest:  (walks inside.)

Me: (to Girl) "Oh, maybe she can play later.  Bye-bye."

Girl:  (to me/Eldest) "Bye-bye."  (to Father)  "I'm coming Daddy!"

The drumbeat of the move is picking up pace.

The house is beginning to fill on a daily basis with various contractors for fixing up, real estate agenty-types, and stuff-moving types.

This all happens around the daily routines for the kids, the dogs, and I.

April is shaping up to be the first month where the wife is home more than she is away on business travel.

I feel like a psych ward patient, in my wheelchair, in the corner.

All metaphorically.

Except for the psych ward patient part.

I was at the gym, about to step off the elliptical machine, and looked out the windows toward the parking lot.

And was at that point seized by a panic attack.

Where was my daughter?

She had wanted to come to the gym with me, I remember putting her shoes on, and then I was at the gym on the machine.

I had no recollection of dropping her off at the child care center.

SHIT

Was she still in the car?  Or had I left her wandering the halls?

I set off at a quick pace trying to put a plan together.

Focus, man, focus.

Then clarity washed over my sweat-sheened face.

Oh yeah, she'd changed her mind as we were getting in the car, and had stayed home with my wife to watch Dora instead.

Ah, relief.

Then back at home later that night, watching a movie, I came upon a particularly boring stretch, and thought to myself, "Self, now would be a good time for a nip from those two fingers you poured yourself earlier."

Wild Turkey has gone upscale by the by.

They have a line called "Russell's Reserve" that is aged 10 years.

Fantastic.

Here's a link to a reivew:

Russell's Reserve Review

So I went about trying to find where I'd put the tumbler, in the dark.

I wasn't on the table next to the loveseat, it wasn't on the floor beside it.

Nuts, maybe I'd put in my lap under the blanket I had, or worse, in a fold on top of the blanket.

I've lost more wineglasses that way while watching movies in a darkened room.

I forget they're there and stand up, to hear a crystaline crash moments later.

I gently tug aside the blanket to look for the orphaned tumbler peeking around my legs.

No luck, so I put the blanket back down...

and notice that the tumbler, is in my left hand, now with only one finger or so left.

So, yeah, I feel as though I'm skipping grooves, several at a time, and am disoriented, more than usual.

But here are the things I did notice this week:

The wife bailed while running on a treadmill at the gym. 
Her knees now look like mine when I was 12 and first learning to skateboard.
The housing market locally has depreciated another 12%.
We'll be looking for slightly less expensive homes in Nashville than we were previously.

I'm a lame duck resident in my own house.

Theoretically, I know that we're moving, and sometime soon.

It just doesn't feel like it though, as the news isn't new anymore and here we are still.

Life for the kids and the dogs is unchanged.

My daily routine is much as it ever was as well, and yet I know the days of this place are numbered.

I'd rather just get going and be done with it.

Cranky hath I grown and mighty is my irritability.

Doesn't help that the place we're moving is in the 70's already, meanwhile, it's freezing and with fresh snow here.

And I can't commit to anything here, and I can't set up / plan for a place to live there that we don't have yet.

Restless.

And in need of something to break.

Literally and metaphorically.

...with joy.

There's a SOLD sign on the real estate arm post in front of the house next door.

Sweet.

Now we get to go next without competition immediately next door.

So happy after noticing that I actually put on a kids CD, which normally I don't tolerate until AFTER I've had my first coffee.

Skip to my Lou comes on and I start bellowing along for benefit of a giggle from the 10 month old.

To which, the three year old tells me around a mouthful of peanut butter panda puffs, "It's not your lou, Daddy, it's only my Lou!"

Ahh, the possessive stage.

Concurrent with the naked stage, mind you.

Every time she visits the little girls room now, she comes back out as Lady Godiva, galloping down the hall.

Uhm, well... shit.  That's just so cool.

I don't know what to do with myself.

Apparently, I will be obsolete on this move.

Just found out from new company's Human Resource director that the relocation will be all-inclusive.

They contract out to a firm that manages all their relocations to make things as smooth as possible for employees.

So, we will have a "relocation coach" assigned to us, available 24-7 throughout the process.

They will pay airfare and hotel for two separate scouting and house-hunting trips before we move.

They have their own in-house people to box up our house and place it in storage until we find a new house.

Meantime, we will live in a furnished house in the new city, paid for by them, picked out by them using a list of criteria we provide.

They will transport our two dogs from here to the temp furnished house there.

They will contract with a realtor here to sell our current house and pay all fees, titles, and closing costs, commissions, etc (except for any applicable taxes, which won't be much because we've been in the house long enough for the sale to be tax-exempt.)

They will contract with a realtor in the new city to assist our purchase of a new home there and again, pay all fees, loan-origination, and closing costs, commissions, etc

When we select and purchase a new home, they will contact the local utilities, trash hauler, phone, cable, internet and establish service.

They will then deliver our boxed up household possessions that had been stored (they don't unpack, but they do label by room and deliver to appropriate room.)

I think that we may have to stand in line at the DMV ourselves to get our pictures taken for the new state drivers licenses and to register our vehicle titles in the new state, but that seems to be about all the effort required on our part.

Uhm, again... well shit; that's just so cool.

I'm going to sip down some mojito with the wife and watch Clerks 2 now.

Snootchie-bootchies.

YeeeeeHaaawwwww!

... oh shit.

I try not to get caught up in euphoria.

I try to understand the information / data I receive in the proper context.

For this reason, when presented with good news, my mind often begins to work out the
implications and ramifications that the good news will have on other aspects of a given situation.

Particularly when the given situation has to do directly with me, the wife, the kids, the dogs, our house, our car, and where we live.

So the good news is, my wife was extended an offer for the job she interviewed for.

Upon hearing this, before I can smile, my mind is already racing.

Okay, says my mind, but are we going to accept?

How much are they offering versus current salary?

What does the benefit package include?

Is it worth disrupting our current life for?

Are they picking up the relocation tab for us?

What will we pack and take?

How should we price our current house and how long will it take to sell?

Where do we live in the meantime?

How soon do we have to relocate?

Do we rent or buy when we move?

What kind of house and where in the city or 'burbs will we look for?

For me, getting the job offer isn't the end of the process, merely the end of the first phase.

Now the implementation of theorhetical policy begins and every decision we make will just add more ripples to the pond of consequences.

Which as we've all seen from the Iraq war, is harder to accomplish smoothly than it looks like on paper ahead of time.

So, when we moved out here (for a raise), it was supposed to be a five year gig.

Then, soon as a position opened up for my wife back at her HQ in Seattle, we could move back there.

Nine months into our adventure, knowing we were pregnant with our first child, we bought a house.

Since we were certain that we'd be moving back in about 4 years and three months from that time,
we financed the home purchase with a 5-1 ARM (adjustable rate mortgage)

The "5" designating that the loan rate was fixed for the initial five year period, at 4.125%.

The "1" designating that the loan rate would adjust (up or down) to market rates each year thereafter for the remaining 25 years of the loan.

The contract has caps on the interest rate movements.

It can't go up or down more than 200 basis points (2%) in any given year.

The floor is 3% and the ceiling is 9.125% for the life of the loan.

A pretty nifty loan product.  Especially under consideration that we were going to be moving away before the initial lock period expired.

Then, a year ago, my wife left her company that moved us out here to be closer to her client, and went to work for the company that she had previously been a vendor for.

A fantastic career move, and the compensation / benefit package was a move up.

However, the new company HQ is here, which is where we will likely remain for the next bit.

So, now it is likely that we will be in the house when the fixed period of the loan expires and the adjustments begin in two years.

Which has me shopping refinancing rates and products, to see what our options are.

The original loan is not a bad deal.  We've paid down the principal considerably and will continue to put a dent in it before the first adjustment happens.

At the same time, having put a dent in the principal, if we were to refinance, it would be for a much smaller amount than the original loan was amortized for.

The upshot of that is that a new loan, even with a higher fixed rate than the ARM we currently have, would cost us less money each month, even though the higher interest rate meant we were paying more interest with a new payment than with our current payment.

Which isn't as off-logic as it might sound, because mortgage interest is tax-deductable.

So, with a refi, we could lower our payment each month and receive a larger tax-deduction at year end.

Still, I detest paperwork, and there's no shortage of that with a refi.

Add to the mix the used car dealer tactics of loan origination officers trying to sell you there loan, without ever confessing exactly how much in fees you will be paying at closing until you show up with your lawyer and your checkbook.

Which has me skittish.

To boot, I can't get a straight answer from the wife concerning how long, really, we will be staying here before her career moves us away, inside the company or outside with a new company.

She gets a number of inquiries from headhunters each week.

Which further clouds the decision.  If we're moving in a year or two, refi still doesn't make sense, because you need time for the cheaper loan to balance out the closing costs associated with completing the transaction.

Bother...