Ugh

Our second offer officially backed out today. Is this normal? Do people routinely make an offer on a house, go to all the trouble of signing the entire contract, then back out? It has basically happened to us twice in one week. It seems a little strange, and it is more than a little frustrating. I'm beginning to wonder if our house will get sold. It seems luck is not on our side so far. I guess at least we are getting offers, which is more than I can say for the first month on the market. Nonetheless, start gathering your recipes. The House Fund Bake Sale is tentatively scheduled for June 15th, in front of Kroger. More details to come!

Flaky is out, offer #2 is on the clock

Just as we predicted, our flaky potential buyer #1 backed out. He and his paranoid realtor thought we were trying to hide some major foundation issue with our house. Which I find funny, since he is the one who declined an inspection. I think it is for the best, as we would have been stressing for a month wondering when/if Flaky McFlakerson was gonna back out of his contract. Better now than later.

Luckily, we have another offer. We countered, and they accepted, so we are now just waiting on them to get an inspection and we are good to go. One stipulation of our counter-offer was that we would close on May 6, but then rent from them until June 15th. This is so we do not have to rent an apartment or live in a hotel for 3-4 weeks while The Fitz is finished. That would not have been fun.

Meanwhile, they have started installing cabinets and painting walls and ceilings. I should have some pictures for you tomorrow. I am in Lorena right now for Brynna's BDay, so I can't post any tonight.

Come on, May 15th

Our closing date for the sale of our house is May 15th. The prospective buyer accepted our generous counter-offer, the contracts are signed, and the fun begins. We only have about 20 more hurdles to get over before the house is actually sold, so we aren't getting overly excited just yet. Especially since this particular buyer appears to be a bit on the, um, flaky side. I won't get into too many details, but it would not surprise us at all if we were moving on to offer #2 by this time next week.

They have finished the brick, and are now working on the inside. They have now textured the walls, "stomped" the ceiling, and started installing our doors and baseboards. It's actually starting to look less like a construction site, and more like a house. We were planning on going out and picking up extra bricks after they finished laying them and saving some for ourselves to use in various little projects I have planned (which Nancy, probably correctly, predicts I will never do). Mike assured us that we would have alot of bricks left over if we wanted to save them. As you can see in this picture, "alot" might have been overstating it a bit...evidently our house is the first house in the history of Meritage Homes to have almost the exact number of bricks needed delivered to the site.

Today we came across another snake...this time in our house. And this time, Nancy was careful not to react the same way she did before, lest she be featured in a new blog entry. This snake is an exact twin of the snake we saw in the other house, that I described in this blog entry. As you can see by its massive size in relation to the dime, Nancy had every reason to run screaming out of the room.

I was expecting something more like this:

Here are some more pictures:

Makinley

Makinley is already three weeks old! Seems like just last week I was thinking Laura was never gonna pop that kid out.

Here are a few of my favorite pictures so far:
This last one is funny, because that's what her Grandma looks like when she is "watching" tv. Drool and all.

Happy Three week and one day birthday, Mak-B

Not One, but Two Offers!

While Nancy was out shopping today, the realtor called me to tell us we had gotten two offers on our house today. They are both pretty similar offers, and both acceptable to us. The only thing we want to change is the closing date. If we can bump that back a few weeks, we can move straight into our new house, without having to find somewhere to live for 3 weeks.

I called Nancy to tell her the good news. I went through the main points of each offer, and she was really excited. I then told her that I was only joking. We hadn't really gotten any offers. She was very mad at me that I would play such a cruel joke on her. But she knows me well, and knows I am certainly capable of such things. Plus, the realtor usually calls her, not me...so that made it possible that I made the whole thing up. I finally told her that I was just messing with her, and that we really had gotten two offers. Then she was really mad that I would do that to her, and she still didn't really believe me until I showed the offers to her.

Our house showed three times yesterday (twice to the same person) and once today, so we were hoping something would come of the showings. Little did we expect two offers! Now we'll keep our fingers crossed that everything goes smoothly from here, because we are still a long way from signing on the dotted line.

We are expecting them to finish the brick work tomorrow, so expect some more pictures.

Better to be pissed off than pissed on

I am at work. We just laid a dog on his back to do an ultrasound of his abdomen. He got nervous and decided to pee. Only, since he was on his back, his 'water gun' was aimed right at me. Perfect shot, right in my mouth. I can't wait to give Nancy a big kiss when I get home. Good thing I love my job, huh?

Radiology 101

Ever since I have known Nancy, she has randomly had a nagging pain in her right ankle. It would appear at random times and cause her a lot of discomfort. In fact, she has had this random recurring pain since college. Well recently it began hurting worse, so I checked it out to see if I could figure out what was wrong with it. We determined that the pain was confined to the medial malleolus of her right tibia (the knobby bone on the inner part of the ankle). It didn't seem to hurt to flex or extend the ankle, but it hurts when pressure is applied to that bone.

So, since I own an x-ray machine, we set out to x-ray her ankle to see if anything would show up. The first picture is the x-rays (2 views) of her right ankle. The next picture is of her non-painful left ankle on the left, and her painful right ankle on the right. For comparison purposes, the right picture is flipped so that the inner part of the ankle faces to the right in both pictures.

See anything?

After looking at the x-rays, I could definitely see a radiolucent (dark area) circular area, surrounded by sclerotic bone (whiter, denser bone) in the medial malleolus, which is where she is painful. This resembles a cystic bone lesion that some animals get, but since I went to veterinary medical school, and not Homo sapien medical school, we did some research. It turns out that this is a common place to develop bone cysts in teenagers and young adults. So that is what we think this is. Here are some pictures where I have labeled the cyst, since it is kind of hard to see.

She went to see an orthopedic surgeon on Thursday, and he is seeing the same cystic lesion. She didn't take her x-rays that I took with her, or even tell him about them, since it is technically illegal for me to "practice medicine" on a person. She now has to go have a contrast MRI done next week, to see if they will need to biopsy the cyst. Sometimes, they have to drill a hole into the cyst and put in a bone graft. So we'll see how it turns out. She is supposed to be on crutches to keep pressure off of it, but of course she isn't using them at all.

I know this has nothing to do with the house, but Nancy wanted me to post the pictures a) so her parents could see them, since she was telling them about it last night, and b) so that if any of you saw her limping or on crutches, she wouldn't have to try to explain why.

And I know I am a nerd, but this is alot more interesting than bricks and drywall.