Beijing Olympics 2008

A number of people have expressed an interest in combining their visit with our family together with a visit to the Olympic games in 2008. From our limited research, we've found that the time may be now for purchasing those tickets.

The official ticket sales provider for Americans (and other nationalities) is www.cosport.com . They are currently accepting requests for tickets, and their request deadline is June 30th. That is this Saturday.

If this is seriously your plan, we recommend that you do your due diligience immediately. And if you wouldn't mind, please report back any of your findings.

Second Shot complete

She came back, father in tow.

She told us she loves it.

He told us she loves it.

They commented on how the house really doesn't need any work, and how much they love the exposed brick and the backyard.

They were nervous about the neighborhood, and we talked about it for a while.

And then they left, to talk.

More information as it comes... but hopefully it'll be good news!

Second Shot

A woman who toured our house last night, has asked to come back this evening with her dad. She really seemed to love the house last night, and so we're very hopeful that she and her dad love it this evening and we see a contract soon. Please keep your fingers crossed!

Home Sales

This is the first time I've ever sold my home.

Sure, we moved when I was a kid. Each house was my home, and we sold each house. But the sale was all in my parents' hands. I was busy dealing with the trauma and excitement of MOVING. This time, along with MOVING, I'm also selling my home.

When we decided to buy a house, I wasn't fully on board. Everyone said "buying a house is a great investment" and "interest rates are so low, you'd be a fool not to buy now." So we searched. But I told Dave that I was only interested in buying a house if I fell in love with it.

I fell in love.

And 6 years later, I still love my house. It's expanded from the home of a young couple into a home with a dog and two children. It's grown a retaining wall in the front and a brick patio in the back. We've painted every room and placed the perfect curtains and artwork. This is my home and I love it.

And selling my home is so demoralizing. I think I will be like this as a parent, as well. When my daughter isn't invited to the cool kid's birthday party, I'll hurt for her. When people tour my house, and decide not to buy it, I'm sad. This is a beautiful house, I want to tell them. How could you not fall in love with it?

Overwhelmed

There are so many things flying through my head today, that I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed. I think that rather than going for interesting prose, I'll make use of the bullet point feature.

• We're still negotiating the contract on our house. Translation: we still have no contract on our house. We're on the neighborhood house tour this weekend, and sadly, we feel that we need to treat it as an open house. So, lots of cleaning and rearranging. And if we have no contracts by the middle of next week, we're probably dropping our price considerably and listing it with an agent.
• We've begun studying Chinese. We purchased Pimsleur's Conversational Chinese on CD. So we listen, and speak back to the man in the stereo, for half an hour every day. We've conversed twice so far. He asks us to repeat what he says, and to make sure we're getting the exact intonation. Then he asks us to answer his English questions in Chinese. He's really starting to piss me off.
• S-- has stopped napping again, and is quickly reverting back to the little pill she spent her first few months as. And this time, L-- is not so understanding. Awake time is spent comforting a fussy child, and Sleeping time is spent tiptoeing around to not disturb the lightly sleeping child. Needless to say, none of the To Do List for showing the house is getting accomplished during the day.
• I'm beginning to worry that we're going to have to pay if we want to store our furniture. We've got lots of it loaned out to family (thanks, everyone!), but a few select pieces remain unclaimed. And it seems ridiculous to pay $50 or more per month for the right to keep furniture that we paid only a few hundred dollars for to begin with. So we're faced with the option of paying a lot of money to store our goods, our parting with a lot of the goods we paid a lot of money for in the first place.

Whew.

Tardy Excuse

We've just learned an excuse for the tardiness in delivering our relocation package.

The Boss has left the company.

Referenced previously, The Boss runs the office in China and was in charge of putting together Dave's relocation package. The paperwork has been figuratively sitting on his desk for literally 2 months. The interim Boss is an expat, so will hopefully have not only more sympathy for our plight and act relatively quickly, but will also have firsthand knowledge of what is necessary. So my hopes are high that we will actually hear something from Uncle H-- within a reasonable amount of time.

On another note, we are in negotiations with someone over a lease purchase contract for our house. If all goes well, we should not have to worry about this within a week or so.

It seems too good to be true that within a few short weeks we may have both of these issues resolved!