Educating the Wheelers

I was beginning to wonder why I’ve never gotten anything from Amazon Associates. I mean, I’m not exactly their highest traffic associate, but I did actually fairly recently get enough referrals for them to send me a gift certificate.

[Note: they won’t send out a GC until you have at least 10 dollars of referral fees, so you know we’re not talking big bucks here. But, hey! 10 dollars is 10 dollars I didn’t have before! Two books for the kids! Or maybe apply it towards House Season 1 dvd set for me … ]

So I go wade through the site to find out that they sent me one a few weeks ago … aha. Gmail spam filter, you lil’ devil! Sure enough, there it was sitting in my spam bucket. Thankfully I found it before 30 days was up and it shuffled off this mortal coil into the ether.

Anywhoo, moral of the story: Gmail marks the Amazon associates gift certificates as spam! Keep your eyes peeled.

I just wiped out a months and months of “save a dollar here, save a dollar there”s.

We didn’t have a whole lot of notice between deciding to look for a job in MN, and Andrew actually accepting a job up there. Once we knew we were going to start looking up North, we started eating primarily out of the freezer and doing our best to clear it out.

But eventually we had to start packing up the kitchen, and now it’s time to unplug the garage freezer. In addition to the bazillion ounces of frozen stockpiled breastmilk that I ended up having to donate, there was what turned out to be 8 full bags of roasts, steaks, chicken breasts, bullets of ground turkey, turkey sausage, hamburger, frozen fruits and veggies, pounds of butter … yeah. Everything that I had bought on big time sale and now wasn’t going to be able to use up.

I ended up giving it to my neighbor, who has extra freezer space and who held and rocked our baby — and entertained Audrey — for almost 5 hours tonight so Andrew and I could be free to work on packing. She’s going to share it with our other, retired neighbor who we’re quite fond of.

At least it’s going to a good home!

[If you’re squeamish, avert your eyes right now! And, of course, since we homebirthed both of our kids, there were two wrapped up placentas in there, too. Yeah, yeah, I know there are things you are supposed to do with them — bury it, plant a tree over it, etc — I suspect that a large number of people end up doing precisely what we did: stick it in the freezer and then completely forget about it.]

I was looking forward to blogging about the process of selling our house, but very quickly realized that the chances were pretty good that our buyers might do the very same thing I did when I found out their names: Google them and try to find out their story.

So, uh, yeah. That wouldn’t exactly be the best bargaining position.

Suffice to say, the option period is over, the negotiating is over, so I can share that we put our house on the market on a late Friday night, and selected an offer over asking price made the next day. If everything goes according to plan, we should close at the end of this month.

I would also like to add that it’s really, really awesome to be moving from an area with a relatively hot real estate market [Austin] to a market that’s currently in the tank [Twin Cities]. Searchlight Crusade has a nice recent article about buyer’s markets that I found very timely for us. Mainly, how do you deal with the notion that you should wait to buy, because aren’t prices just going to drop lower?