Educating the Wheelers

Thanks to everyone who has peeked in on us lately or dropped us a line to make sure we’re still breathing. We are!

Life has been amazingly hectic lately, and I haven’t been able to keep up with email, let alone blog. As it is, I am typing this one-handed while I rock a fussy Owen…

We did end up buying a house, after a lot of hustle, fuss and grief. We found one we liked that dropped their asking price by 50k before we made an offer, which made life easier, since we didn’t have to try to come in and explain why their house was 50k overpriced. [Which is what killed our previous deals. I should note that neither of those houses have yet sold … ] We only had to get them to come down just a little bit farther.

But, we’re happy, we like the house. Moving in and settling has been very slow going. We closed mid-November, had to do some flooring work, didn’t move in until the day after Christmas. To this day, we still have boxes and furniture in the garage, only one bedroom set up.

I’ve only cooked a couple of meals in the kitchen, so you know we’ve been burning through money while we settle. Last night, I managed to make Whole Wheat pasta [on sale for a buck a box] with Cream Cheese Basil Sauce from Hillbilly Housewife and a 3-bean salad from my new favorite cookbook, Hopkins’ Healthy Home Cooking .

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 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?

There was a post recently on Blog Maverick about the current state of movie marketing, and how much it costs and what folks do to get a rear end in a seat on opening weekend of a movie. He then tosses the ball out and wants to know who’s got a better idea.

I am just an average Joe, and I always look at these types of questions as to what sorts of marketing sways me. I posted that they should take the “28 Days Later” approach further — that movie had posted the first X minutes online for anyone to see. But, in that case, you would have had to come to it, either by word of mouth or stumbling across it or seeing an ad telling you to go see it or whatnot. Instead, why not take the AOL approach and mail the first X minutes [to a suitable cliffhanger or whathave you] and send it out on dvd to everyone’s mailbox?

That way you could reach people like, say, my aunt, who goes to movies, but would never, ever go to Apple’s Trailers page.

It can’t be that expensive, or I wouldn’t have gotten so many AOL discs in my life.

Of course, to actually get me back into a movie, you’d have to have a cry room. Or a Tuesday matinee “baby day” like our local Alamo Drafthouse theaters. And a take-no-prisoners no cell phone policy. Hey, like our local Alamo Drafthouse theater!

It’s time for us to bump up my husband’s life insurance. I’ve never had to deal with anything more than just signing up for the employer offered coverage, but we want more than they have to offer.

I vaguely recall another pf blogger going through this process recently and blogging about it, but for the life of me, I can’t remember who, and using the search boxes on various sites that I usually read hasn’t yet found anything.

Does anyone remember who was writing about that, or have any experiences to share?

We could never have a garden at this house. We’re on the deer superhighway between two “wild” areas where they spend most of their time. Oh, I suppose we could build 12 foot fences, like the retired guy down the street … or we could not have a garden.

Well, it had to happen eventually. The weather has been unrelentingly hot and miserable here, and Saturday night, I went to let the dogs in and they smelled completely horrible. So terrible and I couldn’t quite place what it was. I walked onto the deck and looked around, and there I saw a dead deer in our yard. Too bad the dogs had found it first. [And too bad it had been sitting in the hot sun all day.]

We called the animal control guys, but the Austin ones wouldn’t come get this guy because we’re just outside the city limits, and the Travis County guys apparently don’t do pickups on weekends. So we kennelled the dogs downstairs and decided to take care of business in the morning.

I showered and soaped and scrubbed the heck out of the dogs to get the stink of death off them, and Andrew went to Lowe’s to get heavy duty gloves and thick trash bags. While he was gone, I was upstairs nursing Owen and saw very large, ominous shadows through the window.

I went downstairs and discovered about two dozen vultures fighting over the meal. It was like Animal Planet back there. If we didn’t have a fence, I’d bet I’d have seen coyotes as well. The pictures don’t do it justice, but I had to take the photos from inside, I didn’t want to scare them off. Or not scare them off. Heh.

A few hours later, even after the B team and C team and D team vultures had their turns, they were all gone and all I could find was a small strip of fur and a few bones.

Free Money Finance likes to post about the true financial costs of owning a pet. I guess I’ve got more fuel for his fire today.

We have two dogs and a cat. The cat is the easy part. I’ve had her for about 6 years, and she’s lived in three different states with me and doesn’t mind the cross-country moves.

But she’s also less than a quarter the weight of the dogs. And they’re, well, dogs. The issue we’re currently running into is that the kids and I are heading up North this week, before the house goes on the market, so once we have it all cleaned up and ready, we don’t have to worry about cleaning up after Hurricane Audrey every time someone wants to tour.

Since we can’t just leave the dogs in the house or the backyard if people want to tour, and I won’t be there to take them out for a ride in the car, we either need to kennel them in the house, out of the house, or send them up north. Well, I don’t want two big dogs barking at strangers from kennels inside the house, that wouldn’t be the greatest sales tool. And kenneling two large dogs is expensive, between 40-60 dollars a day. That leaves flying them up north with us, there are a few companies that do that, but some of them won’t ship when the temperature is over 85 degrees. Okay, this is Texas late summer. That isn’t going to work.

So that leaves us an option like Pet Air Carrier, who ship them in the air conditioned part of the plane.

Hmm. Should I just tell you how much this is going to cost? Or would anyone like to guess in the comments, and I’ll post it later …

Thinking about selling the house puts my stomach in knots. It’s not a great selling climate out there, but at least Austin’s housing market is doing better than most other cities. Lots of CA investors apparently turned their eyes towards Austin recently and it’s near impossible to get a handyman/contractor. Running the most recent numbers in the market analysis for our little pocket of town shows that we could probably get about 10-15% more than we could have if we’d put it on the market a couple of months ago. We’ll see how that shakes out when we list next Friday.

I’m starting to emotionally transition away from this house, which is a little weird since Andrew and I love so, so love our home and had no reason to think we wouldn’t be here forever.

I’m going to miss the veritable cornucopia of weird Texas wildlife that my history in the Northeast, Midwest, Pacific Northwest, and Pacific Coast never prepared me for. Armadillos! Road Runners! Tarantulas on your front porch!

… but then there are the scorpions. We’ve been in this house for over three years, and though I’ve seen many [many] scorpions, and had quite a few close calls [not the least of which was nearly stepping on one in the shower when I was 8 months pregnant with Audrey], I managed to always dodge the bullet.

Until a few days ago. It was basically my nightmare scenerio come to life. I was sleeping and felt something crawling on my neck. My hand goes to knock it off, and he gets my hand. Then he gets the front of my leg about a half dozen times, then gets my foot, too, for good measure. The silver lining is that Andrew was able to find it and kill the heck out of it before it got to Audrey or Owen, who were lying right next to me.

My tongue swelled up and went numb, and my lips were tingling — not to mention the fact that my leg felt like it was on fire. There was so much venom in my system that I paged my doctor’s office to check to see if it would get into my breastmilk or if I needed to pump and dump and feed older milk through bottles until it passed through my system. Funny enough, we couldn’t find anything via google addressing this issue. Heh.

For the record, my doc said not to worry about it, and both of my kids seemed fine. Well, as fine as a 2 and a half month old who’s teething and a 2 and a half year old who’s stressed about her toys getting packed into boxes can be.

Speaking of crazy Texas wildlife, now we’ve got a dead deer in our backyard. I only wish we hadn’t found it several hours after our dogs did, and after it had been sitting in 105 degree temp all day.

Our introvert-would-not-be-strong-enough neighbor appears to be getting all of his trees cut back today and yesterday. That’s good! We’re thrilled to see him actually taking care of his property. But then I’m watching out the back window as I see tree branches falling into our backyard and possibly even taking out a part of our fence.

Hmm.

So I go over to talk to the nice young Hispanic men who are doing the work. Oh oh. They don’t speak a word of English. Not even the foreman. I don’t know a lick of Spanish. We somehow manage via hand signals and perplexed expressions to communicate what the issue is, and he starts walking to my fence gate to help me get the tree branches out of my yard.

And then I remember to yell, “Perros!”

And I think, “Thank you, Amores Perros!”

UPDATE: Oh my God, they cut a bunch of our trees. Really badly. Oh my God.