Well, as you can see, I bought a motorcycle.  My bike looks exactly like the one in the picture except mine has a windshield.  I will get pictures of mine up soon, but until then you can stare at this picture.  I bought it on Friday and so far I am sticking to neighborhood streets.  I plan on braving some more major roads fairly soon (43^rd Ave, Bell Rd, Greenway Rd, etc.) as soon as I get more comfortable with my instinctual reactions while on the bike.

Escrow was supposed to close on our house yesterday, but some stuff fell through with the lender.  (They lost a document I faxed to them back on the 15^th of June.)  Also, the seller neglected to perform two of the repairs they agreed to.  In addition, they apparently shampooed the carpet and then proceeded to turn of the a/c prior to the carpet drying.  The result is a very pungent mildew odor that permeates the house.  We are having a carpet guy look at it this morning and hopefully we can take money from the seller in order to fix this problem.  Hopefully all will be resolved today and we will get the house today in a somewhat livable state.

I've been meaning to make this post since Sunday, but kept pushing it off.  Well, here it is:

We moved out of our condo last Saturday.  I have no home, now.  No Fortress of Solitude.  At least not for a week...  We are currently crashing at Ginny's house (Heather's mom), and the current occupants are Ginny, Holly, Heather and I.  Well, on Friday Ginny is going to New York for about a week, and on Saturday Holly is going to band camp up at NAU in Flagstaff.  Then, they are going to be back for about a day and then they will be traveling to Indiana until July 16^th.  This works out great for Heather and I.  We will have this house to ourselves, our new home closes escrow on June 29^th, and I get to walk around in my underwear again.  Our plan is to paint and make other repairs to the house we are buying before moving our stuff over and move in prior to Ginny and Holly getting back from Indiana.  We'll see how it goes.

I took pictures of our empty condo, I'll get those up soon.  Also, the people we are buying our house from backed out of the house they were buying because of some issues with the air conditioner.  They asked if we would push back the closing date by a week and I responded with, "If they're willing to work with us on the roof costs then we will be willing to work with them on the closing date."  Well, they are still refusing to help out with the roof repair costs so we are still closing on the 29^th.

My time-table is all screwed up, and it is still going to oscillate awhile longer.  This week Heather and I only have one vehicle.  This messes stuff up completely because Heather gets off work at 2pm and I get off at 3:30pm.  So, I am taking an hour of vacation time every day this week to get off at 2:30pm so that Heather can pick me up after she gets off work.  Next week we will have two vehicles (Ginny's car and our own), so that will make life a bit easier.  Of course, once Ginny comes back from Indiana we will only have our car again.  So my solution is that I am going to buy a motorcycle.  It just makes sense both economically and time-wise.  I will be able to use the carpool lane, motorcycles get about 50mpg, they cost less then cars, and the insurance is about a fourth of a car.  The motorcycle I am planning on buying is a 2003 Honda Magna.  I already have my motorcycle license (I took a Motorcycle Safety Foundation Beginner RiderCourse), a helmet (Shoei RF-900), jacket (Joe Rocket Phoenix 3.0), and pants ( Joe Rocket Phoenix Pants).  I am planning on starting to shop around for a bike next weekend.

As of today, Heather and I have been married for 3 years!  It's a bit of a bummer that it falls right in the middle of our last week before we move, but we plan on celebrating tonight anyway.  Also, eight years ago was the day I first asked Heather to be my girlfriend, so this day holds even more significance for us.

Last time I said I would discuss the inspection on the house we are buying.  The inspector found some problems, but most of them weren't too serious.  We felt that the important ones to fix were a cracked truss rafter in the attic, some potential problems with the roof approaching its end of life, and patching holes in the ceiling of the garage.  We also requested the sellers to fix a broken kitchen window and to have some other potential problems inspected.  They came back saying that they would do everything except for the roof repairs.  The exact response we received was: "The seller will take no action regarding the roof."  Well, our thought was that we would get a free estimate on how much it would cost to do the required roof work and request the sellers to at least provide half of that money to us at close of escrow.  As it turns out, they had someone examine the roof over the weekend, so we are going to see what the results of that inspection were and go from there...

We finally reached an agreement with the buyer of our condo (they had a problem with the condition of our air conditioning unit), and they also requested that we bump the close of escrow up to this Wednesday.  That's right, tomorrow.  As it turns out, the buyer is going to be out of town on the day he picked for close of escrow.  We have agreed to close on Wednesday, but we are going to be able to legally occupy the condo until Sunday.  I guess the good news is that we will get the money from the sale sooner...

Oh, by the way, buying and selling houses sucks...  I think I was more stressed out during some periods of college, but that was usually only for a week or two at a time.  The thing that sucks about house buying/selling stress is that it lasts for about a month or more.

Heather and I watched the new Harry Potter movie this weekend.  The short story is that we were both disappointed. (I'm not sure why the reviews are so high...)  Heather will give you the long story in her own review sometime later. Keep a lookout for it (or you could subscribe to updates off to the left and be sure you don't miss it!)

Hey, check this out: Kris Koellner and family were in the AZ Republic.  You can find a link to Kris's web site in the linkz section of my site.

My site is hosted through 1and1.  Well, on the 24^th of May they upgraded our PHP to version 4.3.6 and at the same time broke the pictures section of my web site.  I just now figured out what the problem was (with no help from them) and was able to come up with a work-around.  It's funny how they can set one variable to false and cause such a cataclysmic disaster.  If you're curious (and I'm sure you're not, but tough luck I'm talking about it anyway. Skip to the next paragraph if you start to fall asleep...) the problem was that they turned off the automatic passing of session IDs with links.  So, I had to manually add them where I required the functionality of sessions.  I could have gone with cookies, but I would prefer to handle it all on the server level.  Luckily I designed my web page in a way that this fix required minimum typing on my part.

I'm sure that at this time you are wondering what this means for you...  Well, you may have noticed that I had not posted the new pictures for the house we bought.  That is because the pictures section on my site was broken and I needed to fix that before you could see them.  So, now that I have fixed the problem I promise to get the pictures posted and captioned sometime tomorrow.  This should be easy to do because the pictures have been on the web server for about a week now, and all I need to do is label them and create the links.

By the way, I complain about the lack of support from my hosting service, but keep in mind that it is free.  However, if they expect me to pay $10 a month once my free 3 years are up, they aren't going about it the right way.

We had a house inspector over at the house we are buying today.  More on that later...