Surprise!

/ Shane / 4 Comments

SOOoooo, for those of you who do or do not know, Sara is pregnant!  She will be 19 weeks tomorrow.  It’s a girl!  Sara has had pretty bad morning (all day) sickness so far, but maybe it is getting a little bit better.  She set a new record today by not throwing up for 11 days in a row!

Sorry about all the secrecy, but Sara wanted to wait until we knew everything was okay.  I’m normally not very good at keeping things a secret!  By the way, anybody that was previously under instructions not to tell anybody, the ban is now officially lifted.

Success!

/ Shane / 3 Comments

So I’ve been really busy lately, and I haven’t had a chance to post about it yet, but our offer was accepted for the house!!!  Perhaps we offered to little because they accepted all of our terms!  But really we’re very happy because we offered $7,000 less than the asking price in addition to the $5,000 closing cost credit they were offering.  Also, we got them to run a 220 volt line for our electric dryer and give us an $800 credit for using our washer and dryer rather than having them buy one.  Since ours are pretty much brand new, we are very happy with that.  Our realtor didn’t really want us to try to get both the credit and the lower price because he didn’t think they’d accept, but we sort of overrode him and look how it came out!

You can see some pictures of the place on your snapfish account.

One of the reasons we were so busy was that this weekend we went to a 1st birthday party followed immediately by a 50th birthday party! Opposite ends of the spectrum there.

On a completely unrelated note, as an addendum to my post about coyotes at our new place, here is an article about airplanes being unable to land at O’Hare due to coyotes on the runway! 

Stressin

/ Shane / 3 Comments

So we put the offer on the condo in on Saturday.  Here it is Tuesday night and we still don’t know!!  From everybody that I’ve talked to, they said it usually only takes a couple of hours until you hear back!  I’ll give the the benefit of the doubt over the weekend since they probably weren’t in the office, but they promised on Monday that we would know by today.  And to top it off, the seller’s lawyer/realtor is sort of rude.

In the meantime, you can occupy yourself with this submarine game.  You have to time your depth charges so they hit the subs and avoid their torpedo things.  My high score is 13,800 on level 12.

Endangered Ugly Things is another good time waster.  Basically it is a blog about all the endangered species that are too ugly to be the front-men for conservation efforts.  Take, for example, the long nosed Saiga Antelope:

Not exactly pulling in the big donations!

Life as a House

/ Shane / 7 Comments

So I think we found “the place” as far as our condo search is concerned.  Very exciting!!!  I think we’re going to put an offer down, so I guess we’ll see what happens.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for a condo/house in the greater Chicagoland area (and I know that neither of you who read this are), you should check out Chi-town Living.  It’s very good general information about realty and the housing situation in general, as well as useful links.  It may be of interested to anybody searching for a house.  Anyway, mad props Chi-town Living!

Coyote Crossing

/ Shane / Leave a comment

So we were looking at condos on Saturday and I looked over and saw a coyote walking on the el tracks!  I was like “Holy crap, there’s a coyote on the el tracks!”  Sara didn’t believe me that it was a coyote and not just a stray dog until I pointed out the roller skates and giant Acme rocket strapped to the little feller’s back.  No, in all seriousness, after a quick jaunt to Wikipedia to see a picture, she agreed that’s what we saw.  We also found an interesting article about the wild coyote population in Chicago.

I gotta say, you just don’t expect to see something like that in Chicago, but it’s still not as weird as the time I saw a wild boar in Philadelphia.