Small Victories

I've been wanting to write about last Saturday since, well Saturday, but just the thought of that day exhausts me.

We had too many physically & emotionally demanding tasks crammed into one day.
Sold 1/2 our property, 1/2 our sandbox, making us mortgage-free - for the time being.
Bought a car. Took the boys out for dinner to celebrate.

Not in that order and not, unfortunately, even in the same city.

A few weeks ago Kim was rear-ended when he stopped at a crosswalk for a pedestrian. He's fine, aside from a sore neck, but the moron (& he really was, but that's a whole other story) who hit him must have been going pretty fast because he managed to write-off Kim's car. Just what he needed to deal with right now: looking for another car in the middle of our property transaction & finishing up his floor-plans for the house.

That's why we found ourselves running a rally race all over the Lower Mainland & Fraser Valley last Saturday:
First to Mission (from NW Richmond) to pick up the new-to-us car and drive it to Abbotsford for a quick "it'll only take 1/2 an hour" repair under the previous warranty. Naturally, it was 2 hours before we could race back to the dealership in Mission to finish the purchase.

Running late for our next appointment and we now had 2 cars to take on the long drive back to Steveston. Me in my decrepit, underpowered little Toyota, Kim in his shiny (almost)-new Maxima which "goes like stink".
We stayed together for the first long stretch of highway, then realized we were running so late that it would be better if at least one of us were not embarrassingly late so Kim blew off, leaving me in his dust.

Kim loves to drive. It's one of his passions; something he does for the sheer enjoyment; the reason we don't fly anywhere for holidays, we drive.
Me, I'd rate driving somewhere between doing laundry & cooking on the enjoyment scale. Its something you do because you have to. I think I have a reputation for being a bit on the pokey side when I drive. (don't choke now)

But we were very late for a very important appointment - with the notary to close the sale. So I drove fast, but my version of fast is no-where near Kim's and I could relax a bit knowing that at least one of us would get there soon.

I was about a mile from our destination when Kim called. "Oh good, he's been there a while already & is wondering where the heck I am" I thought when he asked where I was.
"I'm almost there, at 2 & Steveston Highway"
"You mean 5 & Steveston"
"No, 2 Road"
"You mean you're ON 2 Rd, going TOWARDS Steveston Hwy"
"No, I'm ON Steveston, now between 2 & Railway"

"YOU CAN'T BE! THAT'S WHERE I AM"

"Oh, you're coming up to that red light?"
"I just stopped at the light"
"Oh yah, there you are. I'm two cars behind."

Must have got caught in some kind of time-warp, or maybe it was that 'Twilight Zone' short-cut I took.

Signing the sales agreement that will finance my fabulous new house was almost anti-climactic compared to seeing Kim's face when I caught up to him on the road.

Miracle confimed

While were were stunned, & thrilled, & stunningly thrilled, to get the call from Land Titles Offices a mere TWO business days after submitting our plan for registration, we had no idea just how unusually fast this was.

In all of his calls to LTO Kim had been told it would take a minimum of 6 business days to process our registration.
Yet, when we met with our notary on Saturday to close of the sale of 'the other' lot. (Yay! Yay! Yay!) she was even more thrillingly stunned than we were. "Sure 6 days is the minimum but in many cases it can take up to 6 or 8 WEEKS"

I know Kim made three calls to various people at LTO so what I'm curious about is.... just WHAT did he promise them?

Or maybe it's just that, with all of the snags & delays & additional costs we've endured, we were finally due for one great big break.

Gray is the new dark brown

I don't know where to start. The last few weeks have seen a fair bit of progress, red-tape-wise, with the house project and more than a few tense times thanks to looming deadlines.
I swear I see another gray hair every time I look in the mirror. (Kim's lucky, his hair's light enough that his few grays don't show but strangely enough, it's getting curly)

We thought we were on track with getting our subdivision plan registered with 'Land Titles' in time to have a fully-serviced and separate lot ready to sell by the date on our sales contact.

Ha! We were SO naive.

Just our luck to be truly "unique". Great description if you're an artist - not so good if you're trying to get a subdivision plan approved in a timely manner. Now didn't I mention weeks ago that the subdivision plan was signed & ready to go? Yup, all ready to go... oh except for this one little legal document: cross-easement-access-whatchamacallit. No big deal, have your notary make the necessary adjustments to an existing document and that's it.

Unless you're a "unique" situation. Then there's no precedent, no existing document to follow. And we're dealing with an understaffed, overworked department that is far to busy to tell us exactly what's needed, "Your notary can simply MAKE IT UP and when it's right we'll approve it." Maybe not the first draft, or the second ("Because we're too busy to tell you what part is wrong, but fix it anyway") or third or fourth, but eventually....

Just soon enough to squeak it into the Land Titles Office right before everyone leaves for the long weekend. While Kim & I anxiously keep our fingers crossed that the LTO can perform a minor miracle and do a "minimum-6-business-days" job in less than four ......


We''ll be bringing our notary's office flowers and chocolates tomorrow - when we go to sign the final sales agreement to sell one newly registered lot. ON TIME!

P.S. Need a great notary? Click here.

Bunny Day

Woke up this morning to a fabulous brunch already made & just had time to put some Easter goodies on the table before the wonderful smell (and a few threatening yells into one bedroom) enticed the boys out of bed.
I mentioned last night that the Easter Bunny wouldn't be able to leave his usual jelly-bean trail unless the house was vacuumed (hint, hint) and was told that they didn't need a trail anymore, as long as the chocolate at the end of the trail was still left. So the vacuuming's been put off until later and one more family tradition is out-grown. (I don't care, next year we'll have bunny trails in our new house)
The "which to eat first, ears or tail" debate has never been an issue in our house because my soft-hearted boys, from a very early age, could never bring themselves to eat anything as cute as a chocolate bunny or chick, or lamb. The Easter Bunny had to leave only eggs or face-less chocolate cars & trucks at our house. I even once found a snowman cookie saved in a bedroom drawer because "how can you eat anything that looks at you with a face like that?"
I guess it's a sign of maturity (??) that they now have no problem savagely biting the face off an adorable Belgian chocolate chick.
Even the marshmallow chicks are no longer safe: "Oh cool, Peeps. Can I put them in the microwave and make mutant Peeps?"

I know you are but what am I?

Teenagers....how do they annoy us? Let me count the ways.

Sorry, can't do that. Because I can't count that high!

Trust my youngest son to add a new twist to a classic torment, one used by generations of children to drive their parents and siblings insane: Mimicking. Every. Word. You. Say.

But now its....

"Feed the cat please"
"YOU'RE a cat please"

"This marinade makes a big difference"
"YOU'RE A makes a big difference"

"Where's the phone?"
"YOU'RE a phone"

"Don't forget the bathroom & laundry room floors when you vacuum"
"YOU'RE a bathroom and laundry room floor"

"We're having pizza for dinner."
"YOU'RE a pizza for dinner"

"Bring me your dirty laundry"
"YOU'RE a dirty laundry"

Is it considered child abuse to duct-tape your teen's mouth? Because I need to ask someone to take out this stinky bag of garbage.

Sneek Peek

Here's a look at what our house will look like - sort of. Well, at least it's an accurate picture of what the ROOF will look like.... if you're a bird. This is one of the images from the roof truss guys. They're only concerned with the configuration of the walls where they meet the roof, so on the main floor it looks like there's a wall in front of the entrance and the (maybe stone, still deciding) columns bracketing the living room are missing. It's still pretty cool.

This one is, sort of, kind of, what the back will be like. Lots of ventilation..... oh wait, the actual house won't have those big open spaces looking into the master bedroom, we'll have the walls going all the way up. More privacy that way.

We're going to have some pretty dramatic roof overhangs, befitting our 'wet-coast' climate and rather Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie House-ish. He's one of Kim's favorite architects - we're the proud owners of quite a large library of books on his architecture and it'll show in some of the interior details too. Just no creeks or waterfalls and we'll forgo his usual closet-sized after-thought-of-a-kitchen. FLW was obviously not the one who did the cooking in his household!

Now tear it up

After Kim spent so much time lovingly tamping & smoothing the lot, the next step is to, you guessed it, pay someone to rip it up.
Hopefully they won't need to mess up too much of it but we're getting the stuff put in for Terasen, Telus and Hydro next week.

I know it looks like there hasn't been anything happening but things are moving along. We did a whirlwind run through the Home show last Thursday night and found a couple of interesting things.
Saw a rather new type of heating & hot water system that is mid-way between the standard hot-water tank type and on-demand hot water with (so they say) the best of both systems. Sounds like just what we've been looking for because, while I'd decided ages ago that we're going with on-demand hot water, I've been reading recently about some drawbacks with that system (like being hit with a "bubble" of ice cold water in the shower) & that the best solution is an on-demand system combined with a small tank. We'll have to look into this new thing further. Because we're going with radiant-floor heating we'd have just one system supplying both the heat for us and hot water for our baths. I like that idea.
A couple of tips I've heard from others with radiant-floor heating:
1. If you throw your bedding on the floor in the morning you'll have toasty warm blankets at bedtime. (I like that one - never been much into making my bed anyway - I go with the theory that it's more hygienic to 'air out' your bedding each day than have all the bedbugs cosily tucked in)
2. Watch what you leave on the floor: chocolates will melt (not that they ever last long enough in this family to reach melting point, and come to think of it, chocolate tastes better slightly warm - OK, you can leave any chocolate you bring me on the floor, just don't forget to tell me about it right away) and polymer clay may partially cure so I'll have to put my Michael's shopping away as soon as I get home.