The Decemberists

     I rarely get into new music. My heart belongs to the 60s and 70s… and mostly all of the newer stuff I hear on the radio these days sounds like complete crap to me. Seriously, there are probably only 5-8 groups that are current that I really love; The Decemberists are high on that list.
     I’m the luckiest girl ever, because Sam bought me tickets to their concert in Portland for my birthday! The group is from Portland, so it’s always fun to see groups perform in their hometown. We had a blast and it was seriously one of the BEST concerts I’ve ever been to. They were freaking amazing.  

House update (again)

This update is mostly all good news this time, so yay!

Good Great things:

• The house was appraised for 43k more than we're buying it for, so that is FANTASTIC news for us! Instant equity is always a great thing.
• We're all set to close on Friday afternoon.
• We should take possession on Monday.
• The carpet will be installed (assuming the carpet we ordered arrives in time) on Tuesday and Wednesday.
• The movers are scheduled to move all of our stuff in for us on Thursday!

Bad Less-than-desirable things:

• Our time in corporate housing ended yesterday. A month ago, when the house contracts were signed, the latest closing could happen was July 10th, so we figured that we would be set having a move out time of July 14th. With the overall retardation we have experienced with the bank... we're closing much later than that now, so we're now going to be living in a mild state of homelessness for 9 days. Though Sam's work probably would have comped us an extra week in our corporate housing, we really didn't feel right about asking them to. Sam's still new there, and they have been SO gracious to us. We didn't want to out-step our bounds with them and have Sam's name continue to come up in their accounting meetings.
• So we moved out yesterday, and I'm staying with Sam's parents down in Vancouver (2.5-3 hours south), and Sam is staying in the Seattle area until closing. We are VERY lucky that a friend of mine from growing up offered to let Sam stay with him an hour north of Redmond for as long as he needs. Unfortunately though, we didn't get a solid confirmation on that until late last night... so Sam slept in his office at work instead. He knew he could have just stayed in a motel, but we have so many huge expenditures coming up that he thought it'd make just as much sense to sleep in his office. I didn't like the thought of it one bit, but I just had to accept that Sammies will do what Sammies will do. No worries though, Sam will have a non-office place to stay for the rest of our down-time, so that's happy news.
• Sam lost his phone yesterday (more than likely in a random building on MS Campus), so... I no longer have any way of contacting him unless he's online :(

So we can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. This week is going to suck and there will be lots of traveling back and forth from Vancouver to Redmond for me (I'll have to drive up and back for closing on Friday), but at least we are fortunate enough to have incredibly nice people who are willing to let us stay with them. For real, we are SO grateful and we WILL find a way to make it up, we promise. One week from now, we will be living in our new, perfect house, yippee!!!
Here are this post's random pics:

Jolly Ranchers

     I know that we just got started in a big career at Microsoft, but I’m already starting to think that perhaps we should just become ranchers instead. Then I realized that ranches can cost well over a million dollars… so maybe we will stick with our current game plan for a while; then after we make several buckets of money, we will buy a fantastic ranch. Until then, these pics will just have to tide us over.

These boots were made for toddling

     Once I found out that our family reunion was going to be at a ranch, I became determined to find some cowgirl boots for Addie. Seriously, cowgirl boots are actually extremely hard to find for toddlers; but I scored the jackpot on ebay. She totally loves her pink boots and her little strut in them is SO cute. I mean really, how stinkin’ adorable are these?!

     I was so inspired by Addie’s boots and the beautiful ranch that I spent a good hour or two a day taking pictures and getting to know our camera better. The combination of the scenery and Addie’s outfits made it rather hard to stop clicking that shutter button. Seriously, I took about 7 gig worth of pictures (all in RAW format, which makes for huge files)- but I learned how to do so many cool things! I’ll do my best to not post too many here on the blog, but if you’re bored, you should go check out this album.

 


I couldn’t help but take a pic of her cousin Daniel too.

Ball Family Reunion

     We spent this last week at my Aunt Lori’s fabulous cattle ranch up near Kamloops in Canada. My entire family was there including my parents, brothers and sisters, cousins, step-cousins, their kids, and all of my nieces and nephews on my side. At one point I think there were 38 people there total.
     It was seriously so much fun. Their ranch is freaking gorgeous, and we had a blast riding horses, chasing chickens, watching their cattle drive, playing guitar and singing, swimming, kayaking, and just having a great time being together as a family.
     Here are just a few of the pics Sam and I took of my family. The rest (that I’ve looked at so far anyway) can be seen at this album.

Update on the house

      We have been at my family reunion at my Aunt's ranch in Canada pretending to be cowboys and cowgirls for this last week, so there haven't been any blog updates lately. I have a slew of fantastic pictures from our amazing trip to the ranch that I'll work on getting put online tonight though- so expect that post in the next few days.

      Onto the house stuffs... Our offer was officially accepted on June 15th, with the potential closing date of July 2nd (or June 26th, best-case scenario). The bank had turned the water off while no one was living there, so it would need to be turned back on before we could do the inspection and the appraisal. We were originally told that that would happen in a manner of 3 days; but apparently the word "days" actually means "weeks" to banks... because the water FINALLY got turned on this last Tuesday. We have been waiting without contact of any kind from the foreclosure bank as to what was going on and what the hold-up was for nearly a month now. Seriously, this has been incredibly frustrating.
      So now for the update and good news! The water is on and we had our inspection today. The house passed with flying colors! Its only issues are the cosmetic ones we already know about (like the grotesque carpets). The only point of concern is the fact that there's a nest of birds living in the attic. Seriously, considering all of the other things that could be wrong with the place, I'll take a family of birds any day.
      Now that the inspection is out of the way, the only thing left is the appraisal. It's scheduled for tomorrow, then we should close by the end of next week (assuming there aren't any kinks).
      Hooray, hooray- the wait is over! I'm just SOOO thrilled. I'm hoping that there aren't any surprises with the appraisal, because I've spent all of my energy worrying about the inspection, I don't really have any brain power left to allocate to any other problems. Here's hoping that it's all smooth sailing from here on out (fingers crossed!). Then we will FINALLY not be nomads anymore!
      And, because no post should be allowed if it doesn't have a picture with it, here's a cute one of Sam and his brother (and BFF) Chris when they were kids: