Personal Posts

International Helmet Awareness Day

Today is International Helmet Awareness Day. Check your expiration date and if you need a new helmet you can find a place participating and get a more affordable helmet due to the sales by visiting http://www.riders4helmets.com for more information.

A New Start

Also Called: Buying a Home By The Seat of Your Pants

KeysToday was the final day of a process that has taken my Husband and I a full month. It’s going to set into motion years of work, expense, and joy.

We officially own a home!

And we bought it by the seat of our pants. Unlike most people, the entire process for us took a month.

It began when Husband-man acquired a second job to see if he wanted to start working on a construction crew. It turns out he really enjoyed the work, and in accordance we decided that it would have to be a move to the home of the company he was working for. Which was really a win, as the city has some serious amenities that are much nicer than our current City.

My cousin was instrumental in the next bit of the story. I was dragging my feet about getting into the (overwhelming) process of looking. He found a link, and sent it to me. It was a cute little blue house that was foreclosed on a few months ago. The price was right, I agreed with him that it was worth a look.

And so I called a realtor, set up the appointment, and then called Paul at work to let me know what was going to happen before we went to the baseball game with his construction crew. The conversation from my end when something like this. “Hi hun. What do you think of looking at a house before the game today? . . . Good. I already made the appointment and we’re seeing it at 5.”

Looking at the house is another point in which we had help from Family and Friends. My Uncle and another of the guys from the Construction crew Paul works on took a look and gave opinions on the property. They approved and it was deemed a suitable replacement to the trailer home we’re currently living in.

Then came the trickier parts: I arranged the financing through the help of my father, and quickly put in a bid. It was a good thing we had hurried, as other bids had come in.

And we waited some.

And then we got the happy news. We got the house!

From there it was more waiting. We’d set the closing date for today, and the bank who owned the house (Fanny Mae) really came through. They turned it around, got the title taken care of and had the house to us in no time flat.

Today we signed our names a million times and were handed a beautiful set of keys. Sure, there is a lot of work to be done (and that’s part of my 3 Projects 6 Months train of thought, since organization is really key to this whole affair. Over the next months you’ll see a lot of this little blue house, as it’s going to stand at the center of most of the projects I take on and dominate a lot of my thoughts. This blog is probobly going to dip into renovation and redecorating pretty heavily…

3 Projects, 6 Months

I’ve decided that now is a great time to use my blog to make myself accountable and document some serious life changes and things going on in my life. The first thing I’m going to do is commit to the following three projects being complete in the next 6 months. They are as follows:

 

Project #1: The Command Centers

I have decided that my how needs a command center, but in the end I realized that it needs to be comprised of three distinct pieces. Within this 6 months this three part command center system will happen. The three sections of the command centers are thus; The family command center, which will contain a meal calendar for the week, mail sorting, places for my purse and the things Husband-man dumps immediately after work and the like. The second section is K-9 Command, with treats for the dogs, leash storage, a note board for anything that needs to be jotted down and the like. The final element of the command center system will be my office, with marker boards for daily and weekly overview to-do lists, drawing space, a cork board for pinning various inspiring things, and that sort of thing.

 

Project #2: The Family Binder

I want to put together a complete binder that will compliment my family command center, provide record keeping so that my need to physically write things down doesn’t continue to be the disorderly mess it currently is. It will make organizing finances easier, figuring out who to call when a utility company needs calling involve less googling, and should just generally make organizing things like mail and bills that much simpler. I’ve got a start  on this in that I’ve begun using a binder to organize my personal schedule and new actually having a blogging schedule thing, so this project should just involve expanding what I’ve got going on here.

 

Project #3: The Library Project

The final of the three projects I want to make happen is a complete inventory of the “library” items in the house. This means books, video games, and DVDs/Blurays. It will use the website Libib, since this is the easiest and fastest way I have to make this happen and think it will result in the best possible and most usable system in the long run.

I shouldn’t be encouraged…

Modern-Last-Supper

Seriously. I shouldn’t. Things like this happen. (In my defense, however, the joke started in church, following a service in which it was conclusively identified that cell phones are effecting the wireless microphone system. The guys who’re in our Maundy Thursday Drama were kidding around about how much more entertaining the time between there speeches would be if they if they brought their phones on stage, and were talking about how easy it would be to pose while holding them…

The rest is history… Photoshopped History.