They accepted my offer and I start escrow tomorrow!
Within a month we should be living in the new condo :)
With speculation that McCain is going to make his pick this week... my vote still goes to Sarah Palin -- "could be a home run."
All of the others seem like the same old song and dance.
Buying a house SUCKS. We looked, and looked, and looked. We found one that is just about perfect. We put in a low ball offer, but we are putting a TON down.
We put down a deposit, we went with a short escrow, we provided documents showing where the money in coming from.
We were asked to up our offer. Done.
Then we were asked to up the deposit, shorten the escrow again, and get another letter about my inheritance. Fine.
Now they are asking for even MORE of a deposit...why??? The deposit is part of my huge down payment, so what difference does it really make in the long run?
I'm done with this place. They can take it or leave it. I'm not going to continue going back and forth with them over a measly $2000.
There is an article out there about some lawyer, representing the terrorists in Guantanamo, who dropped his pants at a press conference in Yemen to demonstrate how humiliated and tormented the poor dears must feel.
Color me unimpressed. While I certainly understand the point he was trying to make to a Yemeni audience ("for a Muslim man that is a thousand times more cutting than a Westerner can imagine."), I can't help feeling like he's missing the point.
His statement about "corn-fed" American soldiers doesn't help me feel any better about granting those terrorist sons-of-bitches access to our slow, ineffective courts. Prosecution didn't work in the 1990s, it won't work now.
A number of years ago, we had the case of Yaser Hamdi, born in the US and caught in Afghanistan aiding the Taliban. Denied counsel, he was one of the first cases that probed the status of "enemy combatants" in our legal system. The Norfolk District Court Judge, one Robert Doumar, decided that because Hamdi was still a US citizen de iure (and because of many other considerations that I am not qualified to speak on) the US government's detention of him without due process was incorrect. Illegal, even. I saw Judge Doumar speak on the subject while in school, and respect his position and reasoning. Hamdi, for your reference, is now living in Saudi Arabia having renounced his US citizenship.
But the men in Guantanamo are not entitled to representation in our civilian courts, and they are not worthy of their lawyer's sympathy. They do in fact deserve a lawyer stupid enough to "drop trou" in front of a live audience. The thing to keep in mind is that these men were taken in combat against the US, or supporting terrorist efforts against the US, serving no recognized state and wearing no military uniform.
One of the responses to the article was hilariously apt:
Comment by - July 16, 2008 at 10:40 am
I think my Vox is lonely. I haven not updated for a while and most of my contacts have not updated in a week or two. Plurk has stolen everyone (except Randi and Rachel) from Vox.
Oh well...
We are working with a new realtor now. The first one just wasn't for us...he was nice, but didn't do what I needed. In total, I think we have seen 12 properties now.
There has only been one that we REALLY liked, but due to a lack of research on the former realtor's part, we later found out that the house already has multiple offers that are way out of our price range. Had he called about the house first, we wouldn't have even gone to it, and we wouldn't be disappointed.
Not sure if we are going out this weekend with the new realtor, but I do know she has another couple places lined up for us to go look at.
This is...frustrating. And we just started, so I know this is going to last awhile. It is so hard finding a good place. There are so many factors that make us not like a place, whether it is too many upgrades need to be done, the bedrooms/bathrooms are too small, bad parking situations, crappy kitchens, small backyards. Ugh.
So much for Obama being that new hope and a different kind of politician, ehh?
Wiretapping orders approved by secret orders under the previous version of the surveillance law were set to begin expiring in August unless Congress acted. Heading into their political convention in Denver next month and on to the November Congressional elections, many Democrats were wary of handing the Republicans a potent political weapon.
The issue put Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, in a particularly precarious spot. He had long opposed giving legal immunity to the phone companies that took part in the N.S.A.’s wiretapping program, even threatening a filibuster during his run for the nomination. But on Wednesday, he ended up voting for what he called “an improved but imperfect bill” after backing a failed attempt earlier in the day to strip the immunity provision from the bill through an amendment.
I guess you can't vote with your convictions all of the time. So begins an even newer era for Obama -- that of being a true politician -- like the rest of them.
I guess we are reaching the herd immunity threshold.
The biggest U.S. outbreak of measles since 1997 has sickened 127 people in 15 states, most of whom were not vaccinated against the highly contagious viral illness, federal health officials said on Wednesday.
The outbreak was driven by travelers who became infected overseas -- 10 countries are implicated -- then returned to the United States ill and infected others, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It is simple... get your children vaccinated.
Like a mouse to a trap with cheese, a committed local climate follower sprung the hyperlink on Drudge today.
The article was out of Australia discussing a case study of a patient who was suffering from depression.
The utter irony of the situation is that the global warming deniers are really anti-science and for them to quote a scientific journal as further basis to prove that this other science is junk is too funny. Especially when the cited study is about psychology. If there is ever a question of modeling and trying to comprehend the unknown -- it is the study of how the mind works. How convenient...
It also tells another story -- extrapolating one event to prove a bigger phenomenon. That of taking a medical case study of a person who is obviously experiencing mental problems and concluding that all people who believe the science of climate change are somehow delusional. That is the antithesis of science.
But the good news in all of this is if we we are willing to accept one side of the spectrum -- those who abnormally interpret how to act with climate change (as described in the journal article) -- then there logically has to be the other side of the spectrum -- those who are stubbornly, unwilling to recognize the scientific advances made in the understanding of how the climate is warming, partially due to humans, and then try to use the guise of rationality to defend their position.
I laugh when I read those who claim that climate science is "anecdotal" or "unproven." Or that running models and tests are about getting the results you want to see. As if the peer-review system would let anyone get away with that!
The mind numbing arrogance about these sorts of thoughts is that this comes from the same people who see only what they want to see; the only difference is that they didn't run a model or a test. They only claim to have made an observation:
It was cold yesterday -- so much for that global warming thing.
Or how about this one:
There was this patient in Australia -- so much for that global warming thing.
You know what is really “a thousand times more cutting?”
Being beheaded.
Now that’s cutting.