Hey there, this site is pretty old now. I've decided to leave it up as I put a lot of work into it and would hate to see it disappear.

Blog

We Bought A Dog

Aug 28

Well if buying a house wasn't stressful enough we went out and bought a dog. We originally were going to get a dog from some people we found online in southern Wisconsin but they we taking long and were pricey. Then Emily found a breeder, ironically from New London for much less so we ended up going there and getting a Golden Retriever puppy from them. Check out my photo gallery for pictures of her.

She is 7 weeks old and we ended up naming her Blondie, mainly because she came to us when we called her by that name.

It hasn't been smooth sailing owning a dog so far. The first night I ended up waking up every 2 hours to take her outside. She has gone to the bathroom on our floor numerous times as well. She also feels the need to chew on things ranging from Emily's pants, the carpet, and wooden objects. We have taken measures to stop her from going to the bathroom on the floor and chewing on things but you can only do so much. It's sort of like being a full time baby sitter. Eventually she will get older and we won't have many problems anymore so it's not a big deal.

In house news we got the carpet in our basement replaced. That means that I can FINALLY set up the basement the way I want it, and it means I can FINALLY get my computer set up. It's been a couple of weeks of not using my computer at all so it feels good to get back on the "horse".

Mean while back at the carpet...I took our old carpet and laid it out flat in our extra rooms in the basement essentially converting them into 1/4 finished rooms. No more cold dirty cement floors for me when I'm doing laundry or storing junk in our basement anymore. It also means that our entire house has some sort of flooring on it! Go and vote on my new poll for our next house project.

Well it's getting late so I should be heading upstairs. Aidios!

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We've Finally Moved Into Our House

Aug 20

Well, after months of waiting I am finally blogging from my new house. We moved all our stuff into our garage last Saturday, and I've finally got my computer setup. Unfortunatly I'll have to undo the basement one more time for next week when we get carpet installed in our basement.

The move went well, although my body was quite sore at the end of the day of running all over the place. It's taking a bit longer to unpack because I have to bring everything in from the garage this time where before all our stuff would just be thrown into our apartment's living room.

It's great to finally be living in a house of my own. There is more responsibility with it but everything is all yours (or the banks until it's paid off).

To check out a video tour of our new house check out my open videos section of my website and also check out my photo gallery for some pictures I've posted.

I'd love to write more but I need to get ready for work.

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The Finish Line Is Near And I Want A Gold

Aug 12

We'll we're finally down to the wire. This is our last week before becoming home owners! It has been a long 6 months waiting for this. Other than maybe not having enough money after we make our down payment we are ready to move in.

Heck we even have our cable installation happening on Saturday! Unfortunately we're stuck in crappy Charter Cable/Internet territory now. After having Charter my whole life and then recently moving to Oshkosh (City Of) and having Time Warner, I can officially say that Charter sucks! Our monthly payment for Time Warner is $54. This is without any sort of special deal going on and includes the 99 channels of cable and regular ol' internet. With Charter they wanted to charge us $70 for the same thing! After I complained (although Emily would say "not enough") they lowered it to $60. The thing that makes me mad is why do I have to go through the hoops? With Time Warner the flat rate was always $54. There were no stupid deals I had with that and the price was less. With Charter I have the threaten to leave every 6 months, only to have to pay more.

The moral of the story here is don't move too far out of town that you end up in Charter-land. We're moving just on the border of Oshkosh, but we're technically not in Oshkosh (City Of). Perhaps Oshkosh will annex us in the future and we'll have the benefits of being with Time Warner again.

In other news we're pretty much packed up regarding our apartments. You can see by my photo gallery picture the chaos that ensues in our apartment right now. There is still quite a bit of "stuff" that we use from day to day that needs to be packed but we'll get to that Thursday night.

Speaking of thursday night, we're doing our walk-through of our house and also dropping off our new Speed Queen washer and dryer from my work.

Then Friday is the big day when we "officially" home owners (I'll post a video on my website giving everyone a guided tour).

Saturday is the big moving day and also the day we get our cable installed. It's so exciting to finally be doing this!

Anybody watching the Olympics? I feel like Emily and I are the only people on earth watching it. At work nobody is talking about it. This weekend we had the TV set on the Olympics the entire day. We probably watched 12 hours over the weekend. So far there have been some pretty exciting races going on so check those out!

Well that's all for now, wish me luck on the move.

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Six Decade Old Cake

Jul 31

I woke up this morning with my head spinning and my stomach turning. To quote Seinfeld I must have ate "A slice of cake from the wedding of King Edward VIII to Wallis Simpson, circa 1937, price--$29,000."

Well in all actuality, I don't know what I ate or if what I ate even matters. Nonetheless there was some throwing up going on this morning.So feel free to sing "get well, get well soon, we want you to get well" if you want...

I thought today was note worthy enough for a blog of it's own, even though I had recently wrote one this week. After waking up around 11 a.m. still feeling dizzy, I checked my email and noticed numerous emails from Emily. Apparently while I was recovering there was some madness occurring over our home loan. The evil private mortgage company decided we were not be trusted and decided to tack on another 2% to our down payment. How lovely of them to do, another $3,000 something we need to pull out of our butts in two weeks time.

The irony of the situation is the PMI company believed that we were risky to give the loan to, so they decided they "needed more money" from us. But what is funny, is now because they "need more money" they are actually making us MORE RISKIER(sic) because we will have virtually $0 dollars left in our savings account upon closing. THANKS! NOT! Apparently, people who have no money in their savings accounts are the right people to give loans to. No wonder our country is in a housing crisis. If they had just stuck with our regular percent down, we would be risk free loan applicants. So if you stop by our house and you noticed that the lights are off, candles are lit, and we're burning our front door to keep the place warm you will know why.

Well to be a bit more realistic, Emily and I will find some way to make it all work. We do have "enough money" for the down payment but that's about it. Over the next few weeks I have some potential places to get some more money i.e. side web jobs that I do, selling drugs, importing illegal's over the Canadian border (well not those last two) and Emily and I can probably budget ourselves a bit better as well. The worst part will be after we have the house.

Another annoying thing is, we were pretty much guaranteed that we would get the loan for our standard percent down, so knowing that we would have plenty of money left over, we started purchasing things for house. We already have purchased carpet and the installation which was a huge pain my butt to do no thanks to Lowe's. Had I known this was going to happen I would have happily postponed the carpet installation but what's done is done.

Well that's enough complaining for now, I am going back to my saltine crackers and stale 7-up.

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The Countdown Begins

Jul 29

Well it's only 17 more days to go and Emily and I are proud home owners. In the meantime there seems like a million things we need to do before we get there. We submitted our loan application last week and should be getting that back within the next few days. We had to order a washer & dryer from my company (since I can get a discount rate for them) and had to arrange a time to pick them up AND drop them off at our house BEFORE we will live there. We also had to arrange for our house to be inspected by Lowe's so that they could put carpet in our house when we finally own it. Also we had to get home owners insurance.

If all of that wasn't enough there's the packing and closing things up at our apartment like cleaning it etc. To make matters worse I have a few side jobs going on at home and my hands are slowly dying from carpal tunnel again. I woke up this weekend and my left wrist hurt a lot so I started using my right hand a bit more to give it a break, but of course now my right hand hurts as well. Perhaps I need a few more hands. Anyways I'm on a daily regiment of Tylenol and those stupid wrist/hand straps while I'm at home. Sooner or later I won't be able to do any real work anymore because I won't be able to type. (I realize that typing up a blog is contradictory to my whining, but yeah).

As far as other news, well there really isn't any, buying a house is pretty much the only headline right now. The countdown begins.

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