More pictures of Lulu

I think she is just the cutest thing so naturally I wanted to share the pictures that were sent to me. Look at that face. Look at those white puppy paws. Don't you just want to give her a little kiss? Yeah, I thought so.

Farkel

I love games. I am always up for playing a game unless it is some game that makes me use my brain too hard and I feel stupid. In early March a couple of us DiNatale kids were spending the weekend at the Homestead AKA my parents house. Lindsay and Collin introduced us to Farkel. Farkel is this extremely fun dice game that is reminiscent of bunko and Yahtzee. It is a game of chance and risk taking and is completely addictive.I am not going to go into the details of how you play because that would be boring. Just know that it is fun and everyone must try it.

Lindsay gave me Ultimate Farkel for my birthday. We have played it with friends and we love it. There are a ton of different varieties (Linds and Col have Froggy Farkel) but they are all equally fun.

Give it a try. You will thank me.

The house

So some people have been asking about the house. What does it look like? Where is it? So I thought I would answer some questions and maybe post a picture or two.

The house is a 3 bd 1 bath townhouse in the Tacony-Wissinoming section of Northeast Philadelphia. It is the second from the last unit on the right side of a one way street. It has a little yard in the front which mainly consists of a small hill sloping down to the sidewalk. There is grass there and a rose bush that has been trimmed way back. I hope it still will bloom. There is an open porch and a storm door as well as the regular door.

You walk into the living room and the stairs are to your left. It is an oddly shaped room so it will probably be used more for a sitting room than anything else. This room leads straight to a dining room and that leads straight to the kitchen. There is a back door which leads to a smallish fenced in rear yard. Right now the yard is gravel because they had been using as a parking spot. I want a garden back there.

When you walk upstairs there is a room in front of you, a room to your right, the bathroom and then a room behind you in the front of the house. We are going to use one of these rooms as the place to watch tv and listen to music. The bathroom has a claw-foot tub.

The outside of the house is all light colored brick. The end.

Tallulah Belle AKA Lulu

I told you that I would post a better picture of my puppy and here it is. As you can see she is quite the cutie. She is so young that she will look different when I get her. She will have curly hair because it is already starting to be wavy. I am posting this because today is my birthday and she is my birthday present. I had to look at her picture again because she is just so cute.

My birthday

Wow. I am going to be 31 tomorrow. That is nuts. If you know me you know my birthday is a big deal. I am not making a big deal over my birthday this year. Usually I have a party and invite my closest friends and make them tell me what they like about me. It is called the circle of love. I love making people tell me what they like about me but apparently it was slightly stressful for some people.

My mom has been making me a cake shaped like a bunny for 31 years. Actually there was one year that I wanted a princess party with a princess cake. I think I was 6 or 7. It wasn't as good as the bunny cake. Every year my family would wake me up by singing happy birthday and bringing me presents and breakfast in bed. Angel delight donuts from dunkin donuts. Angel creme with chocolate on top. After I recovered from the sugar shock I could do whatever I wanted for the whole day. I never had to go to school. I could order my family around. Anything goes on your birthday.

I picked out a puppy for my birthday present. She is this adorable little black maltipoo with white feet and white on her nose.In the pic above you obviously cannot see how cute her face is. I will get her when we have settled into a house and she is old enough to leave her momma. She isn't even walking yet. Anyway, I am not sure what to name her. Any suggestions?

That is all I feel like writing right now. I think I need to take a nap. I am feeling kid of ill.

LIBERATION!!!!!

Yea! We are out of the Horrocks Street deal. I breathe a huge sigh of relief but the stress is not out of my body yet. Obviously this now comes with the question of where we are now going to move. The tentative answer to that is Marsden Street. Ah, Marsden Street. Let me take you back to November 15th, I believe it was, when we did our one and only day of physical house hunting. We saw this house that we really liked and wanted to put an offer in. However, the seller said that they did not want to wait until March to close. So we moved onto the Horrocks house. Now it is March and the Marsden Street house is not only still for sale but it is 3000.00 cheaper. Hoo-ray! This house is slightly smaller but completely nicer. Already painted, new kitchen, new carpets and non of the huge blatant repairs. Obviously we are still having an inspector go out on Monday but there is no WAY it is in as crappy of a condition as the Horrocks place. This is slightly more expensive but in move in condition. We are seriously praying that this will work out. You can pray too if you want!

Oh well.

It has been so stressful the past couple of days. Most of you know by now that we indeed did NOT go to settlement on the house. The first issue was that the seller decided that she was going to send over the (already signed a month ago) agreement to our agent with the appliances scratched out, meaning she decided to take them. What made her think she could just scratch out something on an official signed document and send it over like it was no big deal is beyond me or anyone else sane for that matter. So we had to tell her to compensate us monetarily and our agent(who we are now painfully aware is not particular working in our best interest) told us to ask for 500.00(WHAT??!!) to replace the stove(which is by law in the state of PA mandatory), the refrigerator, the washer and dryer. Her idea was to get stuff on Craig's list. (Again I say WHAT??!!) Uh huh, nice. How do we transport it though? Of course we would have to rent a truck, plus gas and mileage, not to mention the time and effort it would take. We decided to ask for more money. Instead of giving us the money the seller decided to take the appliances back. Who knows if they have been damaged or if they still work. That is beyond angering to me.

The second and bigger issue is that the appraiser for the loan insurance came out and said that certain things need to be fixed before they will insure the loan. Therefore we were asked by our agent (again, where are her priorities?) to fix the stuff for the seller and then be reimbursed. Ha ha ha ha ha ha...right. Put our money into a house that we don't own. Why on EARTH would we trust this seller who just tried to pull stealing the appliances? Mike told the agent that we don't trust the seller and that was the end of that. So, now we are waiting to hear if she is going to get off of her ass and fix the stuff that, if she would have just taken care of in the first place, we wouldn't be having this problem. Stupid stupid things that started off as just maintenance and now are full blown repairs because she didn't do these very small things.

Why did we just find out the night before settlement? Oh don't even get me started on the mortgage guy who has been so disorganized and nonchalant about everything that he literally just started working on our case last week. He only started working on it because I called him every 20 minutes to bug him.

You also may have heard by now that our contractor who gave us the bid for the major work that needed to be done is officially AWAL. His phone is off and he is not responding to email. Of course he probably bid low and of course he isn't around to do the work so we are probably screwed in that area too.

How did we get hooked up with these crooks and losers? Well, our agent I found through the Remax website. She then recommended both the contractor and the insurance guy. hmm. Kind of fishy.

If we had more time we would dump the lot of them and start over. However, we do have to be out of our apartment by the end of April and the mortgage guy has all of our information.

There is another house that we have been interested in am actually hoping that this house from hell falls through. Doesn't that say something? That I am praying for this deal to fall through? I personally feel like it means we should just move on. The only thing keeping us on this house is the fact that it is a great deal. (besides all the other crap that is going on).

UGH! For the love of Benji, can this just be over. I know that buying a house is stressful and everyone runs into snafus. But is this not excessive? C'mon, seriously.

Please just pray for us.

update

I know there were some things I was updating about regularly and I haven't been very good about doing that. Here is a brief update.

Weight Watchers- not much to report. Still counting points though I haven't had a very good week. I only went swimming once. This is all due to some drama we have been having with the house.

The House- Some of you knew that Jason and Collin were helping us out by investing in the house so that we could pay the upfront costs as well as get good rates on the mortgage. It turns out that I have good credit and Mike has fair credit and therefore it was a better deal financially for us to get the mortgage on our own. We are getting a really good rate and paying monthly not much more than we are now for rent. We are getting a good chunk of money for the repairs and a lot of seller assistance.One truly God ordained thing is that Mike got a big bonus on Friday that will pay for the majority of our closing cost. We go to settlement on Tuesday. One thing that is a big issue is that the contractor who gave us the estimate for the repairs is now MIA. Seriously, his phone number is out of order. We need another one in order to get the work done so we can move in.

That is all for now.

Oh Man!

Darby just sent me this. How can anyone be grumpy when there is a pensive tiger on the loose.(who's fur looks a tad too small)

Back to black

Do you know how horrible it feels to be depressed when you know that you should be happy? Everything is going well and I am getting all that I wanted,all that I thought would make me happy and because I am fucking mentally ill nothing seems good. I just want to claw at my insides. I want to take a knife to the part that is hurting right now and pop it out of my chest. Don't try to point out the good in my life because I know it is there. That is the problem. I know I should be happy.

Well, as you can tell. I am not well. I am back on the fucking lexapro.

Jealous...yet again

I am having one of those days where I feel so inadequate and mediocre. Wait let me start over.
I am a lover of the arts. I am a lover of creativity. I am a lover of money. I am a lover of compliments. Therefore I am extremely jealous of those people who are creative and make cute fun creative things and then sell them for money and have people rave about how cool they are. I am just so not extremely talented and I really just want to be. I wish someone would just teach me how to do something cool so I can amaze people and have people snatch up all the stuff I make. I want to write songs that people think are great. I want to be super good at SOMETHING.