the house

Perhaps I'm jinxing things but here are some photos of what we hope will be our new house. They are from the official listing so they are small. I deleted all that I had when negotiations fell through.


This is the dreaded front door that will soon be replaced by something that won't warp. It doesn't look 4'x8' in this shot but it is. The vines to the left are all jasmine so the entry courtyard smells great right now.


I'll limit the inside to one shot. The fireplace is double sided so you have a similar view of it when you enter the foyer. It's one of the more charming features of the place.

The Subway

I'm still playing catch up. During all of the house hunting insanity we had a chance to join some folks hiking The Subway in Zion. We had amazing weather and a great time. Because you have to swim through pools that never warm up, wet (or dry) suits are necessary and M and I ended up being the only two with dry suits. Unfortunately I haven't received copies of the photos taken of us prior to putting on the protective cover-alls but I will try my best to find them. We only needed red pyramid hats to be in a Devo video. They were truly crimes against fashion and just good taste in general.

The only real excitement (in a bad way) was when one person slipped and fell backwards several feet. It was not nice and I'm sure she had a more than impressive bruise the next day, but fortunately she wasn't seriously hurt. The rest of the day was just full of amazing scenery.

The hike in:



Our group before the truly macho took off and left the rest of us in the dust:



Here is our fearless leader, Kurt, hitting one of the last pools on the route:



Kurt's lovely wife, Janet prior to losing that very nice walking stick:



And finally the famous subway:



Along the way we regularly saw these cute little canyon tree frogs. I'm not sure if these white ones are the Hyla arenicolor species since we also saw brown ones (which H. arenicolor is supposed to be) but they appear to be close relatives given the many physical similarities. One even sat on my hand for a while. I suspect it was wondering why I hadn't eaten it yet as opposed to the Snow White moment most people imagine (yes there is a story here involving me, a hungry squirrel, some friends and my hip) but they really are pretty.



The hike through the "slot" canyon (it's a VERY wide slot for most of the hike) ends after a series of short falls:



At the very end, you get to climb back out of the canyon so that everyone who isn't in the best of shape comes out looking like they had their butts kicked in spite of the fact that it a very reasonable hike for most of the 9 miles.

Could it get any crazier?

We had an appointment to sign an offer on a new house today at 3pm. We show up and our agents sit us down and say they have something to discuss. Apparently someone went and talked some sense into the sellers of the first house and they are willing to give us everything we want.

Our agents were very smart and gave us lots of room to run away screaming which immediately required that we think about it all logically (even though emotionally I wanted to run away screaming). I have no idea how they know these things because my parents would have run away screaming whereas this was the perfect way to approach us.

We agreed, the sellers agreed and as of a few hours ago all of the paperwork was signed. We are still waiting on the lender's appraisal and we have promised to run away screaming if the appraisal is less than the purchase price. In the meantime though, we are somewhat hopeful that this could all be over soon and that we could have a new house in just two weeks.

Everyone warns you that buying a new house is an exercise in insanity but most of the horror stories we hear are about money grubbing agents and demanding lenders. Our agent couldn't have been nicer or a better advocate and the mortgage broker all but signed our names to make the process as easy (and as competitive price-wise) as possible. The sellers were our hurdle. They apparently have other issues beyond selling their home and had an agent who bought into all of their issues so that no one on that side was seeing quite right for a while. Supposedly that's all fixed now and we can all only hope that the lenders see it that way as well.

I do feel badly for the owners of the house we would have bought though. We met them both times we went to see the place and so they know that a couple was seriously interested in the house. Now, they will wonder what happened to us. I don't feel badly enough to turn down the deal we were looking for originally, but badly none the less.

The moral of this story is that, even in a buyers' market, buying a house is an exercise in insanity and you should always be prepared to run away screaming.

So...

So, I just realized that I appear to need to start my recent posts with "so." I just wanted to let you know that I've noticed and I should have it under control soon.

so much for extra time

So, like a fool, I went back to the online databases of homes for sale. We've now found another house that M has seen in person and likes enough that I need to drive back out there today so I can see it tomorrow and decide if it's worth the extra money it will cost us. By the time we finish this house buying nonsense, my car will be ready to fall apart I suspect.

So I won't be posting any more pics today and I won't make knitting tonight. However, this should be my last trip to Utah before the move so I should be more reliable in the next few weeks.

888 Seafood

So during the long break in blogging, my semester ended. To celebrate I took my TAs out to dinner at 888 Seafood in the San Gabriel Valley. If you're in the area, you should go.

When you arrive for dinner (not dim sum, you are just surrounded by carts then), they place a few small things to nibble on while you decide on your order. Who knew that the South had something in common with China? We all love boiled peanuts!!!!!



My wonderful TAs:





We somehow managed to show up on an evening when there was not one, but TWO weddings taking place at the restaurant (hence the lovely bows on the chairs in the background). We had cheesy elevator music on one side competing with electronica and hip hop on the other. We couldn't really talk over the noise but it definitely kept us entertained.

We ordered a few things none of us had ever tried before.

Sea cucumber with dried fish and mushrooms:


Frog hot pot (definitely the best of the night):


And shrimp with walnuts (as a back-up):


It was all great although sea cucumber has a very subtle taste and will give people with texture issues some problems.

Sadly I don't have any photos of their wonderful dim sum but if you google the place, that's what all of the reviews will rave about.

Where in the world is Erin?

I know I've been really bad and not posted in exactly one month today. So what the heck happened?

I got swamped with students who were worried about failing my class in the last few weeks (note to any college students reading this, your professor can do very little to help you improve your grade in the last two weeks of a semester!!!!!!) and then we went house hunting in Utah.

And we even found a house. In fact, we found it almost immediately.

Did we buy this house?

Of course not!

Instead I have spent the past two weeks more often in Utah than in California trying to negotiate this deal with "motivated" sellers who thought our initial offer was way too low (despite the fact that the asking prices of other homes in the same subdivision -8 out of 10 of them to be precise- were even lower than our offer) and then wouldn't pay for a new front door that wouldn't warp when the home inspection showed that it was warped to the point of not closing unless you threw the dead bolt.

Needless to say there wasn't any middle ground in spite of our agent's valiant efforts.

So this weekend she will be figuring out an appropriate initial offer on the next house on our list.

Ah, the joys of buying a home...


Fortunately I did get to do more than deal with contracts during those two weeks. We were invited to join a group on The Subway hike in Zion. You probably haven't heard of it as it is accessed from a side street in a neighborhood that borders the park and you have to apply for a permit several months in advance during the slow season just to get in. The bright side of losing our first choice house is that I will have time tomorrow to start posting all of the photos I've been collecting over the past several weeks.

For my local knitting group, it also probably means that I'll be around for a few more weeks and we can finish up that sock class after all.