paulandemily.com

Apparently our house is a Sears and Roebuck kit house which were very popular from 1906 to 1940. These houses are a great part of history and luckily Sears has archived their history for us:
http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/
We are going through the floor plans and have a few that we think are the plans for this house. Our kitchen was remodled by the previous owners and I’m sure some of the previous owners have had their share of work into it.
It is pretty cool to lear a bit of the history of your house though. When Brian and Ash bought their house down the street, they went to the courthouse and library to do research on it. I may have to do that myself! These PDFs are priceless though. Depending on what model house we have, Sears priced them from $1600-$2500. Wow.

Our real estate agent, Holly Nally, came over last night…we have an offer on our house!!!! We countered just a bit on it, and she will hear back from them today. We are so excited to only own ONE house soon! We are losing a heck of a lot of money on it, but that’s the market right now. At least it will be off our backs.

Please cross your fingers / pray / do a rain dance or anything else that you do to bring us luck! We should find out today!

*UPDATE*
They accepted our counter offer! So, now we just have to wait for inspections and loan paperwork, etc to be done and then waiting for the closing!

We started out on Saturday by attending a musical that Emily’s cousin Wes was in. It was a small theatre group introducing a new Christian musical. We enjoyed it. Sean enjoyed his afternoon with his Auntie Gamma (Emily’s Aunt Laurie).
Emily made us a reservation at John Philip’s in Crestview Hills. Its one of my new favorite restaraunts. The menu is small (wine list huge), but the selection of appetizers and entree’s is not missing anything. I went with the Filet (with a side of mushroom bourdalaise sauce) and Emily got the prime rib. Having a restaraunt of this nature makes me feel we don’t need to drive down to the waterfront anymore! The service is great as well. Our waiter was never overbearing and even remembered the last time we came in (and he wasn’t even our waiter that time!).
Ashley kept an ear out for Sean while we were out to eat - Thanks again Ash! Another advantage of the colony! Emily and I finished up the night watching the movie Jumper - although she didn’t make it through and had to finish it on Sunday. I don’t know why that movie got such a bad review when it was in theatre’s, as we both enjoyed it. Def. a renter and not a buyer though.
On Sunday, Emily, Sean, and I went to the Newport Aquarium. We got the idea a few weeks back when we visited a Petsmart store. He just stared with great awe into the little aquariums there.

We had a great time. Sean stayed up for it as long as he could. We actually got almost to the end before he couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore. He only missed the penguins (We’ll just have to catch them when we go to the St. Louis Zoo next time).
On Monday, I came home to a Father’s Day surprise! Emily and I have been looking for a small table and chair set to have on our front porch, but never got around to picking one up. I had a model that I liked, but Emily was unsure about it. Turns out, she liked it enough to make it my father’s day gift - I was quite pleased!

Real Estate Valuations

Now I realize that this website is probably not 100% accurate, but it gives you an idea of how your house stacks up against others near by.  Zillow.com gives you a “goggle maps/earth view of the surrounding neighborhood and then many details on the house you are looking at.  Give it a whirl!

GigaOM SunRocket is Toast, MEMO «

Crap.  Yes, Sun Rocket, the nice alternative to VOIP (Voice over IP or Internet Phone) service Vonage, is going out of business - and without ANY notice to its customers.  I’ve got two SunRocket accounts and we pay for the service annually, at $200 each.  One account just renewed a month ago yesterday for another year!  I already transfererd our 859-XXX-1286 number to Vonage and it apparently is already working on their service.  We won’t have their “gizmo” device to make the phone ring for another couple of days though.  If you need to get a hold of us, just call our cell phones.

Put up a couple sets of pictures from the last few days…

First, the bunny hole. As described in the post below, here are some pictures of it after mowing and fur removal. There are a couple of cute pictures of Megabyte in there too The lat picture is one of her tonight (5/7/07) sitting in the dark in the yard about 5 feet from the empty nest/hole, staring at it…just waiting for the bunnies to come back. Cute stuff.

Next, are pictures of Chip, just doing his thing. There are two pictures of him in his new favorite sleeping spot; in the recycling basket in the kitchen, and a few of him in a very dainty relaxation posture. Wierd cat.

And last but not least, some pictures of the day lilies that we transplanted from New York (at Emily’s dad’s) last summer and planted along the side of our house. We were worried that they wouldn’t take, with the differences in climate and soil, but they are up and growing strong. They haven’t bloomed yet, but it’s still early in the season. We can’t wait until then!

Well, our family is shamed…we mowed our lawn for the first time yesterday and mowed right over a family of bunnies (they are all ok).  They had a nest smack dab in the middle of our fenced in yard!  All that time, and Megabyte never sniffed them out! 

For years, Megabyte has been known as the devourer of stuffed animals, and a threat to the life of any little animal that dares to come in our yard. When we found a family of bunnies that has been living in the yard for weeks, we were shocked and amazed that Meg didn’t sniff them out.

We remember about a month ago, Megabyte spent hours running around the yard with her nose to the ground, apparently sniffing out something, but never found anything.  I guess she was smelling the bunnies.

So, now she’s embarrassed and ashamed that she let 5 babies and a mommy bunny grow up in her yard without seeking them out and devouring them.  Try not to make too much fun of her if you see her.

We finally broke down and got curtains for most rooms of our house.  We’ve actually been looking for ones that we liked since we moved in, but never found ones that screamed “buy me!”  We finished installing the valances in the kitchen a few weekends ago (still need to get pictures of those), and this weekend put curtains in the front room, living room, and office.  We also hung our wedding picture on the wall.  The curtains look great and make our house really homey.  It’s amazing how much warmth and coziness curtains can add.  We love them.  Only took a year!

We visited my family in St. Louis back for my sister’s birthday in February. When we showed up late on Friday, dad presented us with some great gifts. For those that don’t know, one of my dad’s hobbies is woodworking, specifically Shaker reproductions. His current focus are on these:

We also got a beautiful little chest. Details and photos when you click on the photo above!

-pc

Sorry to all our avid readers *smirk* that we haven’t posted in awhile.  We’ve both been really busy with work, Dliberation work, friends and family.  I was thinking back to this time last year, when we were buying our house, living at my mom’s, I was preparing for my black belt test, Emmaus was going on, we were having all sorts of car trouble, etc.  Whew, what a stressful few months!

Now, a year later, it’s happening again…not so many big things going on, but this time of year seems to be a tough one for us to get through.  We’re both swamped at work, there’s another black belt test coming up (thankfully this time I just get to watch everyone else), we have 3 mock trials coming up in the next month with Dliberation Resources, plus we are squeezing in a visit to St. Louis, and a couple of on-call weekends for me, and of course, Brian and Ashley’s upcoming wedding.

Luckily though, we’ve got Lost, Survivor, and The Amazing Race starting back up again (which we love), a great cruise to the Caribbean (YAY!), and April, which in general is our “ahhhhh, it’s all over” month.  Hopefully we’ll get back to posting soon, just wanted to keep everyone updated.

-ec