Just the fax, ma'am

I've decided that trying to buy a house while not physically in the city where it's located is a bit of a pain. The technical snafus D and I ran into this week while attempting to get signatures on various documents (in all kinds of file types, from all manner of faulty printers) are too numerous to list. But in the end, it will be worth it: say hello to our new front door.

Yes, our offer that we put in was accepted! D and I are still in shock -- we expected a lot more resistance from the seller, but within four hours of submitting our bid, our realtor called us back with the good news. I don't think I quite believed it until I saw the fax with the agreement on it. And even then ...

!!!

So we've gotten the initial disclosure forms from the seller as well as the inspection report (from which the photo above is excerpted) and are waiting to hear back about certain items for which we've requested repairs (hence the need to get signatures back to our realtor as the next stage of negotiations begins). The bones of the house are in good shape, so there's nothing serious on the list. If all goes well with closing, we'll be able to move in before my final visit at the beginning of May. Here's to finally having a place where we can put down some roots!

Now, back to prepping for tomorrow's classes (today's at this point). Yes, I'm still thoroughly distracted from all the excitement, but I have to at least try ...

Still percolating

Well, the owners of the house we placed a bid on weren't keen on negotiating even after our second offer. They didn't bother to call back, not even after their realtor spent a good two hours trying to reason with them (goes to show that our offer was indeed a decent one). Oh well. We know there were at least two other families considering bidding on the house if our bid wasn't accepted, but as of today, the place is still on the market with no new offers. We'll just let the owners sit for a bit -- we figure in a few weeks, if they don't get anything better (if at all), they may come back to us.

So this weekend, we went back out to look at MORE houses. And we've found another one we like that may end up being an even better deal, depending on how much we can talk the price down. So here we go for another round. D is e-mailing our realtor to get the paperwork in order as I'm writing.

Everything else in the whole house-buying process has gone well so far. D met with our intended loan officer on Wednesday and gave her all the required documents for review. Sounds like we're in good shape there. Whether it's because of our credit scores or the influences described in this article, which coincidentally appeared in my newsfeed that same day, we won't know. But we're happy either way.

Negotiations

A lot has happened in the last week.

When I landed in Seattle on Friday, I didn't have much planned -- just a lunch date with D and then an afternoon of grading before officially starting spring break. Then I checked my e-mail and discovered that the house at the top of our list of places to watch had dropped its price by a tidy sum.

D and I were intending to put together an offer for the No. 2 house on our list (in terms of size, it didn't look like it would last us as long, but the price was better in comparison before the change on the other house). We weren't quite ready to make a decision on lenders at the end of my last visit, but D's done a lot of research since then and we had our choices narrowed down. So when the price drop came through, we decided to act on that house right away -- we figured we probably weren't the only ones watching and waiting.

We spent the weekend getting all our paperwork in order and put in a bid on Sunday. As we predicted, a competing offer was submitted Monday morning by someone else, so D and I did some thinking and decided we'd give the owners a price cap in the looming bidding war and then wait out the rest of the day (our deadline for a response was 9 p.m. our time). About ten minutes before our offer was to expire, we got a call from our realtor, who told us that the other offer had been withdrawn and that the owners had a counteroffer for us.

It turns out the owners were only willing to budge a tiny amount -- so we decided this morning to make an offer -- a final one -- at the value of our price cap in the bidding war that never happened. We've done our homework and know it's a reasonable price. So we shall see what happens next.

(Yes, I'm deliberately keeping this post as neutral as possible until we have more information. There's all kinds of back story that can't be posted until this is over.)

On a subject I can safely emote on, we took care of a Quaker parakeet named Sammy this weekend for a friend of D's who had to be out of town, and now I'm smitten. I know I said I wanted a kitty, but this bird leaves me seriously torn about what kind of pet to get.

I think what was so appealing about Sammy was his curiosity and his response to our attention. We really had to work to earn his trust, but that was what made the (brief) relationship we cultivated with him so rewarding. He was pretty nippy at first (chomping hard enough to break the skin), but we understood that he was in an unfamiliar environment and felt leery of us. So we worked on him with pieces of celery offered through the bars of his cage until he calmed down. Eventually, he was willing to climb onto D's arm without drawing blood. He still tried to bite anything that moved suddenly (sometimes our hands, trying to brush his beak away from our necks, which he liked to nip), but he got comfortable enough with us that he would perch on our shoulders and chirp back to us when we whistled and offered him treats.

Sammy's owner lets him loose at home most of the time, so as he grew to trust us, we started taking him out of his cage more and more, which he liked. We figured out that TV excited him -- he started shrieking at the people talking on the screen and darted back and forth on D's arms and shoulders (pausing only briefly to groom D, which included yanking out some of D's chin stubble!). The real breakthrough, though, was when we turned on some music. D had noticed before that Sammy got talkative listening to the dishwasher at his owner's apartment, which has a rhythmic thump to it when the arm spins. So we found an internet radio station that plays techno/dance and turned up the speakers. Immediately, Sammy started chattering away, spouting random phrases including "Good boy," "Pretty birdie," and "Here, kitty kitty kitty"(!).

It was great fun watching D interact with Sammy -- D had an African grey parrot and a Nanday conure when he was a kid, so I imagine this weekend brought back good memories for him. We spent part of Saturday evening giving Sammy some playtime, and I managed to get some pictures. Here are the ones that actually remained in focus.

Every kidney has a silver lining?*

So after dinner Thursday, just as I was posting my previous entry, I noticed that my back was hurting -- odd because I've never had back problems, and I've never known blogging to be a strenuous activity involving large muscle groups, etc. "Hmm," I said to myself. "Perhaps this is some weird kind of indigestion?" I curled up on the couch to see if it would help, but no dice. Ditto my attempts to massage whatever sinews seemed to be knotting up somewhere to the right of my spine.

Almost Dr. Sis (the one in med school) happened to call at that moment. At this point, I was fairly uncomfortable but not sure if I was overreacting to some silly back spasms. "What do you think this is?" I asked her.

"Well, it could be your pancreas, at which point, that's a surgical emergency," she said. "If it gets worse, go to the ER."

Oh. Okay.

Ten minutes later, I was in enough pain to make it difficult to move in any fashion, so I called up a friend, who drove me directly to the hospital. Good thing we went when we did, as there was a sudden influx of walk-ins after I was admitted. As it was, I waited an hour to be treated, and by the time the doctor got to me, I was in tears.

Fortunately, the diagnosis was pretty straightforward: "You have a kidney stone," the doctor said, after a quick trip to the CT scanner (aided by some truly wonderful IV drugs that took all the pain away). No surgery needed either, thank goodness. I was sent home with a prescription for more painkillers, advice to drink tons of fluids, and orders to follow up with my regular doctor in a few days.

So the weekend was less productive than I'd hoped it would be -- even though I was only technically in pain for not quite three hours Thursday night, I was completely exhausted on Friday and didn't really feel back to normal until Monday. My stack of student papers, to be graded by Thursday, is still much larger than it should be. And my birthday, which fell within those recovery days, slipped by rather quietly. (I did get lovely phone calls from my family, but because I didn't want to worry my parents, who were traveling, and my other sister, who was dealing with a nasty paper herself, I didn't mention the ER visit.)

There is a VERY positive side to this: on Friday of this week, I leave for Seattle again. Imagine if that kidney stone had chosen to wreak havoc while I was 30,000 feet over Montana. There would have been no option but to divert the plane to get me to a hospital (you can't confirm the presence of kidney stones without a scan, and there are too many other scary things that could be wrong if you leave the diagnosis at a guess, even if you can administer painkillers to treat the symptoms). So I'm okay with the way things turned out. Relieved, in fact (no pun intended).

I'll leave you with a picture, courtesy of Almost Dr. Sis, who created this diagram of how a nephron works when she was studying for her board exams last year (click on it for a close-up). Truly amazing what these tiny things do and how a small imbalance in their regulation can cause so much distress.


*Credit goes to Almost Dr. Sis for the title too. That was her response after I told her how the Thursday night (mis)adventure turned out.

To whom it may concern

It has been discovered that a small brown kitten with cream-colored mitts hopped into my luggage in Seattle and is now making himself at home at Little U. on the Prairie. He says to his owner:

"She promised me a dish of cream and more fish than I could shake a stick at. I couldn't say no."

In truth, I did no such thing, but this little guy just wants to help me wish D a very happy birthday. Which is why I borrowed him -- he normally naps in D's home office near the paper shredder. I found him just under ten years ago and gave him to D when we first started doing the long-distance thing (for dating, not marriage). Why? Because he goes by the name of Pounce (each Beanie Baby comes with a handle, printed inside the tag), which is also the name of a card game D taught me -- it became a favorite between us before we'd even considered a long-term relationship.

So, D, I promise you'll get him back when I come home for spring break. One week to go! Oh, and Pounce says he wants to hit a sushi bar for his pains but I think we can convince him that a home-cooked bouillabaisse would be just as tasty ...