August 12, 2003 - 9:49 a.m.
Well, it was not my intention to leave everyone hanging over the weekend. I honestly thought I'd be able to sit down and finish my previous entry, Friday night at the latest. But the weekend in The Bookgirl's house wasn't as sedate as we imagined it might be.
First of all, the pre-season of football has begun. Since we no longer have DirecTV, this means the television isn't airing sports 24/7, but Mike has already begun scoping out the best sports bars in the area to watch these games (that don't count), spend $7.95 for a beer, and hang out with a bunch of smokers whom I pray don't have a pack of cloves on them. He spent part of Saturday morning watching tapes of last year's Panther games with Zachary and Marcus on his lap, wearing the only jersey he has that isn't cursed... You'll have to get the full details of the jersey curse from him...
Anyway, we spent Saturday doing family stuff - buying groceries, going out for ice cream, watching last year's Panthers victory over the Vikings again, and driving around a few neighborhoods to see what kind of houses might be on the market.
Sunday morning I went ought and bought a paper, gave the Sports section to Mike and began hunting through the Real Estate classifieds for any promising "open house" ads. August is a comparatively slow season for real estate, presumably because everyone is vacationing - including our agent. So we've spent the past two weekends touring open houses on our own and rather hoping that we won't find anything we like because of the hassle involved in using another agent.
On Sunday, we found something we liked. Aside from the pink paint in the bedrooms, it's exactly what we had hoped to find. Since our agent was scheduled to be back in the office the following day, I tried her cell phone. I'm on vacation, please call our office at.... I tried the cell phone number she had given me of another member of her team. Voice mail. I tried the main office line. Voice mail. Bah! We went to another open house to cool off and kill time. It was nothing like previous one and only convinced me that I really wanted that one. The alternagent called while we were driving to another property. Mike suddenly and inexplicably turned shy and handed me both the cell phone and the brochure of the property so I could relay the details to her while driving. (Lesson to passengers - don't give a pile of stuff to the driver and then flinch when the car veers a bit.) While she went to check it out and page our broker office for the commitment letter (he's on vacation), we took the boys to Fair Oaks to run around a bit and then rounded out the afternoon in the real estate office working on the offer paperwork. (We rewarded the boys with milkshakes afterward for putting up with such a long afternoon with no major meltdowns.)
Yesterday I juggled tracking my parents' flight back from Amsterdam, waiting impatiently for news if the sellers had accepted or rejected our offer, and the laundry/housework I had neglected over the weekend. To sum it all up - my parents arrived late but without incident, I discovered that an ice cream soaked shirt can grow mold in an astoundingly short time, and we got the house.
Did I mention it has a library with built-in bookshelves?
