…beyond nice.

Wow, did I say something about sleeping better about the financing part of the condo loan?  I meant to say I’ve developed a new golf-ball sized ulcer in addition to the ulcers that have formed since I started the loan process.  This is really starting to hurt.  I’ve pretty much gone the route of straight bribery and still the bank needs to see more paperwork.  We’ve gone from looking at 20% down payment to 25%, then 30% and added please tell me if you need even more down payment, and still we’re not making any real progress.  We’re talking about large sourceable down payment, not bricks of cash from the opium ring my ancestors were running.

This morning I’ve printed out every piece of financial document needed and I’m going to get a second opinion from BECU.  I can’t tell if it is as I’ve heard, that Bank of America is just a real nightmare to work with or if my files are just that jacked up.  I’m a bit worried that if I sit around and wait for BofA to reply the new laws kicking in on April 1st will kill any chance of my getting a loan elsewhere.

All this talks about finances has actually gotten me off my ass when it comes to financial planning.  I bought stacks of books 10 years ago to plan for my financial future, which of course I’m only starting to read now.  I’m terrible this way with books.  I buy mountains of books that I know would be good for me if I read them at the time, but I age them until the paper turns brown and have a lingering musty odor when I turn the pages.  This is why I can’t own a Kindle, or e-reader, I need to be judged and shamed by inanimate objects to be motivated.  I bought books on relationships written by Love Lab expert Dr. Gottman, and wait until I’m staring down the faces of the Four Horsemen of Relationship Apocalypse and only after many a tea parties with my old pal Stonewall do I bother cracking a book open.

All is not lost though, I did learn enough early on to not carry any debt and actually put some money into my 401k. I made the boyfriend do the same too.  I’ve also recently set up our restaurant to pay the youngest brother a couple hundred bucks a month and I’m taking him to Charles Shwab to set up a Roth IRA for him, he’s only 16 right now, so maybe one of us might have it easy when it comes retirement planning.  Yes, I might be living vicariously through the little brother.  Next week we will get a nice boy to fall in love with him and break his heart.

I thought aiming to write twice a week would be easy because I enjoy writing.  It’s actually very difficult.  Not because I’m too lazy, or lacking in motivation, it’s that I live with the boyfriend, and right now, we pretty much live in the equivalent of a one bedroom apartment space.  It makes it very hard to get away from the other person to find some privacy to write.  Sure writing a blog entry isn’t a private thing, but I suppose in order to write, I do make some half-ass attempt at reaching into my soul and pouring it out in words.  It’s hard to do some soul baring when someone is in the room slaughtering other players loudly in the virtual realm, with screams of carnage and incessant bullet showering made possible by not having to lug it around in real life.  I really look forward to moving into our new 2 bedroom condo for that reason.

How is that condo buying going?  Well, I am sleeping better these days about the financing part, which means, I’m feeling pretty good about it.  Process is still slow because we have a ridiculous amount of paperwork for the loan officer to look at, I think if I hand her another doc, she just might say to hell with the commission and swat me with rolled up newspaper.  Keep in mind my family owns a few business, so there’s just a lot of paperwork to show for them, not to mention the additional tax returns per place to look at.

Here’s a picture of the living room window to help illustrate why I am looking forward to this place:

The boyfriend and I have been dorking out on playing house.  We plan on buying pretty much new everything, so that it’s “our” place and not “my” place because I am extremely territorial by nature.  I don’t mean that I pee in every corner, but I do lick everything and call it mine.  The boyfriend moved from Hawaii to be with me, he got rid of most of his stuff to make the move easier and really ended up moving with maybe three suitcase of stuff and still I griped about making room for what little he brought.  He was encroaching and I was defending my land from the dirty islander.  It’s a good thing he never engaged me in open territory battle, he just lived out of his suitcase and moved his stuff into the closet one sock at a time.  I was a slow boiled frog.

We are fortunate enough to have similar taste, although to be fair, I think my style tends to be masculine for a woman.  I like strong industrial looking furnishing made from natural wood, leather and brushed metal.  We’ve already decided we need a nice stainless steel set of All-Clad cookware.

We each have our splurge of choice.  He wants a set of Wusthof kitchen knives and a Dyson vacuum.  I want this ridiculously expensive rug:

It’s actually more fun playing house as adults than what I remembered as a kid.  Except playing house as an adult tends to result in forced Top Ramen eating for months whereas playing house as a kid result in accidental drinking of Folders coffee because I thought it was hot chocolate mix.  God, first taste of coffee was terrible.  Ugh!   Might have been worse than first taste of beer.  And yet I am now addicted to both.  Hmmm.

Oooh, look, it’s TWO posts in one day.  I’m pushing off the sprinter block hard and fast.  Of course, like an exciting new diet fad, this too will fizzle out after a couple days of realizing eating less sucks.

On dieting.  I’ve never truly dieted a day in my life.  Not because I think I’m skinnier than you or anything like that.  It’s because I’m the kid that can’t resist touching you if you tell me to stop touching you.  If I’m on a diet, it means I’m going to devour every unhealthy food crossing my path. It will happen, I work against myself in an open warfare.

I’ve noticed whenever I date someone after being single for a while, I gain weight.  It’s a simple byproduct of eating more regularly and having someone remind you that you haven’t eaten in a while and much date activity revolves around eating at some nice restaurant or movie popcorn.  The boyfriend definitely pudged-out after a year of dating me and I would be lying if I say my face didn’t look “fuller”. I did what any good girlfriend could do, I bought him hiking boots told him we were going to start hiking regularly but only after calling him a fatty.

I’m still on a mostly liquid diet because of my graft surgery.  It’s amazing how quickly a lifelong favorite pastime like “eating” becomes a dislike when it causes pain.  My ribs are poking out a bit already, not enough to star next to Sally Struthers in South Park, but almost camera ready enough for the 10lbs adding.

My brother who is almost twice my size said he’s going on a diet.  I told him he should just get a string of dental work done. He’ll be skinny AND have nice teeth.  His good friend is a dentist and works in the same building, so he’s got no excuse really.  Hey, it’s not like I’m telling him to stuff his face then throw up in a self-loathing sobbing fit, I’m the good sister that encourages good dental hygiene, that’s all.

We got a nice facelift.  Not me.  The blog.  I’m not above a lift and tuck when the time comes, but I am in denial that time might be now.  The WordPress that powered my blog up until 3a.m. last night was so old it was acting up on me.   It was over 3 years out-dated and if I wanted to start a new paragraph, I would have to manually add in html code breaks. It was a bit of a chore after a while to even write, then edit and then edit code.

This new WordPress can self update, so after this, it should be a lot less painful.  I’ve lost all comments and page categories in the migrate and permalinks to pages are all over the place, but hopefully from here, it’s somewhat smooth sailing.

As part of my commitment to readying myself for law school, I’ve decided to train myself to write more often.  Granted blogging is really the laziest form of writing and half the time it’s really a mind dump, but it’s still me sitting at the keyboard pecking away.  Baby steps.

The thing I really like about the new format is the calendar that shows when my last entry was.  It’s a visual reminder of my failing to sit down and write something, anything at least twice a week.

We have decided we are okay with paying a bit too much for the condo unit that we really wanted.  It was a tough decision and we hemmed and hawed over it for a couple weeks, but decided to bite the bullet.
I want to say I wish someone had warned me about how horrific the current loan process is, but I’m really not sure anyone can verbalize it.  When they ask for every little bit of financial info about my co-signer and me, I assumed “EVERY LITTLE BIT” was a slight exaggeration.  It is not.  Even now I am still on information gathering mode, and this is all just to get pre-approved.  I do all my banking and tax filing online so I was able to gather all my data in less than a day.  My mother is my co-signer and she banks with low-tech Chinese banks where asking for a simple bank statement invokes fear in their tellers’ eyes.  It’s like I’m asking them to hike down 18 floors and dig through vaults of microfiche for this, which is actually quite probable. Don’t get me started on her Chinese tax accountant that is waiting for the last minute to file her 2010 taxes.
My right cheek is currently swollen like a chipmunk suffering from a facial stroke and didn’t trust to store nuts on the numb side of face.  I just had gum grafting done, and you should stop here if you are squeamish about people talking about surgical process.  The inside of my mouth looks like a patch-work quilt, except instead of patches of meaningful keepsakes I got patched with hunks of flesh from the roof of my mouth.  It’s all mismatched looking.  If I wasn’t awake for the entire process I would have thought that I got patched with skin off a rotting cadavre butt.  The little sewn on square patches looks ghastly.
I was informed that post grafting surgery would feel like I’ve burned the roof of my mouth.  My boyfriend and I fight about soup drinking temperature all the time.  He likes it a tad warmer than room temperature and I can’t drink it unless it was just poured from a bubbling cauldron.  What I’m saying is, burned roof of my mouth and I are old familiar friends.  Grafting surgery is nothing like that.  It feels like what it is, like someone hacked off hunks of your flesh and now you have gaping wounds.  Joy.
To cheer me up through the procedure, my doctor explained to me that God is fair.  There are two types of distribution of dental problem.  People like myself with delicate features have thinner gums which leads to potential gum thinning and needs for gum grafting.  Then there are the burly stocky types, where just by facial profile, you can tell they have thick strong gum and will never have gum thinning issues, but they tend to have bone loss issues so their teeth is more likely to fall out earlier.  In his opinion, he would take thinning gum over thinning roots, because one can be repaired easily.
I had a mouth full of dental tools or I would have asked him to explain Catherine Zeta Jones in God’s fairness plan.  I understand we are all his children and he loves us all, and I’m not exactly being sent to bed every night without dinner, but I don’t think I’m his secret favorite either.

Studying for the LSAT is surprisingly fun for the time being.  I ordered a couple hundred bucks worth of study material and did piss poor at my first practice exam.  I’m not going to throw out actual numbers, but let’s just say if this was an actual exam, most of my points came from writing my name on the sheet.  I’m most of the way through my first study guide “LSAT Logic Games Bible” and I feel much better prepared already.  It’s a bit like having someone teach you how to solve the rubik’s cube, sure it’s about thirty years too late, but still fun.
The bidding on the condo is not going well as we feared.  The seller won’t meet us at our price of 400k, he’s holding at 404k AND he took back the 5k toward closing cost.  So it’s going to cost us 9k more than what we set our budget for.  Now 9k isn’t a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it’s that much more of a drop in value when we move in.  Like I said, I feel that soon as we move in, we can only hope to sell the place for 350k.  Oh…but but…I do love the place so. Decisions, decisions.
After doing fairly well with 25lbs in mountaineer training I thought to up it to 30lbs, and wow, I’m not sure I want to see another backpack again.  It’s been too long my friend.
I still need to learn how to swim properly.  My sister and I have been working on finding a good pool in Seattle, but then the pool at her friend’s condo opened up, so we’re going there.  In preparation for the swim to come, I bought myself some fancy Italian goggles and nothing says hardcore swimmer like a pink swim cap.  I mean if I’m going to drown, I might as well as do it with dignity while wearing a condom on my head.

Getting decked out to watch the Oscars at a fancy hotel is every bit as pretentious as you might imagine it but it had a surprisingly huge turnout.  The people that showed are mostly local business owners and aspiring filemakers.  I aimed to get drunk and not break an ankle in my fancy Italian heels.  To be fair, the event was not nearly as awful as I pictured in my head.  The Oscars was playing in 5-6 rooms with many flat screen TVs throughout but most of the people were munching on food, getting sloshed and chatting with each other.
I am once again shopping for a new home.  I did shop for a home a few years back and actually wrote a check to put in a bid for a one bedroom condo.  The bid was for $345k but someone else came in at $350k.  I was upset to have lost the bid back in 2007, but I’m doing the thank-fucking-gawd dance right now.  The condo wouldn’t even sell for 250k now.
Right now I’m looking at a 2 bedroom condo so that I have a room to study in, so that I don’t kill the boyfriend while stressed out from law studies.  We are about to put in a bid for a new condo, and we were feeling pretty good about it up until our buyer talked to their seller.  We were told by multiple source that the seller is desperate to sell, because he has 15 out 100 units sitting on the market for over 2 years now.  However when we try to come in at a lower price point, their rep said the seller will not even look at the bid, so we had to start a lot higher.  At this point, we’re not sure they’re going to try to meet us halfway.
As hopeful as we were initially, we have now prepped ourselves for a possible letdown.  We don’t want to come in at the sellers asking price of $425k because I know the moment we move in, it will drop in value by $50k.  It’s what I’m seeing those units resell for.
So why do we like this unit so much?  I want to say it’s because of the large floor to ceiling glass wall.  Or that it’s extremely well laid out.  I think my sister said it best when she first saw the place, “Oh my god, it has TWO bathrooms.”