The sellers accepted our offer!  There was some drama with the relocation company, but I will detail that later.  We have a house in Colorado!!  wooot!!

Tasha and I have decided on the 9715 Iris Street address!  We’re writing the contract tomorrow afternoon and then we enter into the oh-so-enjoyable negotiation process!  wooot!!

Today was a fairly eventful day at work… I got to meet new members of the team, our project was officially announced, and Tasha spent most of the day house hunting for us.  We have narrowed down our choices to two houses: 9715 Iris Street and 3171 S Princess Circle.

I get to see both of these houses tomorrow… Tasha is leaning towards the Princess Circle home, however the Iris Street home has some features that are slightly better for resale.  I think in the end its going to be the emotional response that wins the day, but I’m not going to rule anything out yet.  Hopefully we will have a tentative decision tomorrow and be able to put an offer in, but who knows what will happen in this crazy, mixed up process?

Stay tuned, theres more to come!

Tasha has survived her first experience with airport security, and we are both sitting here waiting to board our flight.  I’ve looked at so many house listings on the Internet, I’m actually pretty excited to get out to see some places in real life.  I’m far more informeed this time around and I know what I want to have out of a house so it should be a fun process.

The Eee PC is far more convenient to blog on from the airport, but because I’m working I had to lug my huge Dell M90 along for the ride too.  That’s all for now, I’ll post the details of our drive-arounds this evening and Tasha will begin in earnest tomorrow screening down our list of houses!

With pre-approval letter in hand, Tasha and I are winging away to Denver tomorrow to begin the house-hunting process.  I’m a little unclear about what the steps are in this process, but we’re going to have to start looking at houses all the same.

I’m sure, as they say, all will become clear in time.  I’m going to call my relocation representative and my mortgage lady on Monday to see what exactly I need to know if I find the house of my dreams.  Expect blogs from the hotel!  Woot!

Well, the electrical inspector just left.  He seems to think that three wires in my circuit box need to be rewired.  Crap.  I hope there’s some way they can do that without ripping out the ceiling that I just got done fixing.

To make matters even more fun, I get to figure out how to vent the attic bathroom fans to the soffit.  Oh, and repair the soffit around the chimney.  And fix the clearance for the furnace vent to the roof.  And do a bunch of stupid little things like changing outlets, adding downspout extensions, and several other little annoyances.

Woo-freakin-hoo.

Tonight’s workout  was excellent.  It all began with a relatively small class consisting of a handful of white and yellow belts, a few brown belts, Sensei Quinn and me.  We had a good solid basic class focused on technique and repetition.  Things felt relatively good considering my spotty attendance lately.

The second class was just depressing.  It was Sensei Quinn, a newer brown belt, and myself.  To make the most out of a disappointing turnout, we did a whole class focused on Sochin kata.  For those of you new to the mix, Sochin is one of my favorite katas and having Sensei Quinn break it down was extremely beneficial.  It ended up being somewhat of a light workout, with a lot of questions and explanations exchanged.

All the talk about Sochin made me reminesce about the year that Matt and I did 2000+ Sochin.  I took the opportunity to look up my Sochin notes tag, along with my karate reference tag which contains some kata videos related to my Sochin studies, so check them out if you want either my ramblings about Sochin at the time and some awesome videos of other people that do things better than I.

More soon!

Last night, I took a small step into a larger world.  Matt, Tasha and I all installed World of Warcraft in an effort to still spend some “together time” online.  We still plan to chat, Skype, and the like but we wanted to have a roleplaying experience online as well and this was the most logical path.

We elected to purchase the Battle Chest, which contained WoW, the Burning Sands expansion, and several strategy guides.  I started in quickly on the strategy guide and found acquisition quite difficult because of the jargon but it is getting better.  Luckily, since we are playing as a three person group we should be insulated from a lot of the retarded jargon and we can only use that what does not offend us.  I hear there are portions of the game that must be accomplished with larger groups so we might have to branch out of our shells a bit later on, but when that time comes we will weather that storm too.

I’m playing a rogue for my first go-around, we only got to level 2 last night so I will provide more input as we get further along in the game.  I have to say, I’ve resisted this game for a long time because it is horribly addictive. 

The three of us are working hard to prevent ourselves from spending all of our free time into playing the game, and we’re working hard to ensure that our characters remain very close in level so we can continue to play the same characters together.  For that reason, we may end up creating solo characters that we can play alone so we can learn about the game on our own time, but I doubt I will have much time to do that until we get out to Denver.  We’ve restricted ourselves to playing together once or twice a week.  Luckily, because we all referred one another we’ve got a 3x experience bonus until December so things should progress quickly!

Fun stuff!

As I write this, I am seriously considering messing with the date setting… I just missed the September blog posting month by three minutes.  Crap.

I’m still dealing with some back issues, so I elected to stay in and get World of Warcraft installed along with a new distribution of Linux for my Eee PC.  I have to say, I’m 100% satisfied with this new Ubuntu Eee distribution.  My internal microphone works, and I actually like the Netbook User Interface that they have gone towards.  It has all of the features I need, and it’s quick.

We’re gearing up for our first house hunting trip, and I think this is going to be fun.  We’ve geared up with a new Garmin GPS and we’re ready to go see some sights and neighborhoods on Sunday night and she’ll get a guided tour early in the week.

My good buddy Debra over at Reflecting had a positively intriguing post today about self-analysis and whether or not a person can change their own destiny.  She compares life to a day at school, and she feels like she is in the remedial class… this couldn’t be further from the case.  She wonders about how people that “have it together” learn to get it together and how she can do that from where she perceives herself to be.

I feel that I can offer a wee little bit of insight here, since I am often wrongly accused of “having it all together” and “being in control.”  Here’s the big revealation: not one person, anywhere, actually has it together.  It’s natural as people to strive to be more collected, more organized, more engaged… but this can often lead to disappointment.  Do not misunderstand… I believe strongly in striving for perfection, setting goals, and trying to reach them.  What I take exception to is people that judge themselves by this perfect image that they create to fight against.  News flash: it’s impossible to win!

Instead, I take the incremental victories towards being more organized, working a plan, and making my life better.  There will be plenty of time to take stock down the line… if you are a planner like me, make your plan, do everything you can to make incremental steps toward your goals each day, and to nuts with perfection.  If you stop worrying about it for so long, you might be surprised at how far along the path you get without noticing.

Debra asks a very important question whether or not we organically grow into the people that we will become or if we can wrest control and make changes to affect our life.  I believe that both are true: you can make changes to your plan and working that plan will help you grow into the person you want to become.

I will elaborate a bit more just so I’m not brainlessly answering Debra’s questions: I don’t believe in luck, nor do I believe in worrying about where I am relative to other people.  Everyone looks at how far my career has gone, how quickly I have progressed, etc and says something to the effect of “wow, you must be lucky.”  It’s not luck.  It’s being communicative, knowing how to work in a way that not only satisfies the job tasks but also makes your managers/customers/coworkers look good at the same time, and being open to embracing new (and sometimes scary) opportunities as they come along.

I also don’t tend to worry too much about what the guy down at the other end of the hall is doing.  Keeping up with the Joneses usually tends to either get you into an “arms race” which causes you to abandon your plan for the sake of appearances, or it gets you into an endless shame spiral that can also cause you to abandon your plan AND feel bad about yourself at the same time.

So yeah, I am not an expert or anything but this is what I think on the matter.  If you have any additional thoughts, share them in the comments.  Also, go over to Debra’s blog and tell her she rules!