Not Feeling The Luck O' The Irish

Having two children while going to college and incurring the student loans sufficient to feed them really impedes any effort at buying one's first house. When barely scraping up enough for diapers and electricity there's not a lot left over for a down payment. Add a third child to the mix and you get where we are. Early 30's, three children, renting.

We absolutely love our house, warts and all. It's about 40 years old and needs a lllloootttt of work but the street is quiet, we have great neighbours, the school is good, and we have an ocean view. We love it here.

Aside from making major physical improvements on the house, we treat it like we own it. It's clean (for the most part), the yard is maintained, we respect it and make any small repairs necessary without running to the landlord for every little thing. Actually, the only time we speak to them is once a year when we give them a year's worth of post-dated cheques... and we pay our rent on time, every time. We are the perfect tenants.

Much to my utter disappointment and despair, the owners called on Monday night to tell us that they have decided to sell the house. The realtor is coming over tomorrow afternoon to evauate it and set a price. The sign should probably go up over the weekend.

This has brought us to somewhat of an unexpected crossroad. Do we continue to rent and pay someone else's mortgage or do we beg, borrow, and steal our way into buying our own home? While not really getting our hopes up too high and coninuing to look for another rental property, we have applied for a mortgage. I have felt like vomiting every five minutes since we started taking to the broker on Tuesday. The paperwork has been filed and we're just waiting to hear whether or not someone is feeling charitable enough to lend 300k to a couple without a downpayment or not.

Please send good mortgage vibes our way. I'll try not to throw up from the stress in the meantime.

1 comments! kim e posted at 10:50 AM
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Thursday, March 23, 2006

No Baby!

This is my sister. She is 38 weeks pregnant and very, very cranky. She's not actually due until the first week od April but for the past 25 weeks or so, her OB has been telling her that she'll be 3-6 weeks early. She was 3 weeks early with her first and she'll be even earlier for this baby. She's been holding on to this like a Willy Wonka's Golden Ticket to Quick Relief.

Anyone who has been pregnant even once knows how goforsakenaweful the last few weeks are. Now, I love my sister like we aren't even related but frankly she isn't really a nice person to begin with. Add 8 months of vomiting and back pressure to the mix and she's downright evil.

That photo was taken on March 13th, the day she went into labour for the first time. (Only beacuse her husband was a four hour drive away for work that day of course, mind you.) More than a week has passed since this pic was taken and the scene has only become larger, lower, and accompanied by a nasty disposition and many more contractions. But no damn baby.

Upon her last examination on Tuesday afternoon, it was discovered she was already 2 cm dilated. Two fucking centimetres!! It took me 6 hours of labour to achieve 2 cm!! The bitch. I swear to God this baby is just going to fall right out one day this week and bypass the whole labour process altogether. ("Excuse me ma'am...I think you dropped something!")

We also think it's a girl because

a) She can't decide when to show up.

b) She's certainly not going to let anyone tell her when to show up.

c) Everyone is sitting around waiting for her to get ready to go!

Oh, and my sister says this baby is totally grounded for life once it finally comes out. She's bitter.

1 comments! kim e posted at 1:30 AM
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Wednesday, March 22, 2006

WordPress or MovableType/TypePad?

I've been very quiet on here lately but it's been for a good reason. In addition to my three children, husband, house, home business, and part time job I've been working on developing a new project. I'm not ready to say what it is just yet but I'm looking for some of your experienced opinions.

I've used blogger before for this and one other business project and, while it is very user-friendly for the most part, it seems somewhat limiting and amateurish. Being that this will be a professional project, I am looking to use either movable type or wordpress and I'd like to hear your experiences and recommendations for either. I would like flexibility with themes/design, options to add a calendar, manage my archives, manage my comments, the option for multiple contributers, good comment spam prevention, and frankly a very low PITA factor (pain-in-the-ass factor). Price is also an issue...free is better than pay-for-service but I'm willing to pay a reasonable price if I get the options I'm looking for.

Any comments you can contribute would be very much appreciated!

1 comments! kim e posted at 9:07 AM
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Thursday, March 02, 2006

conventional vs holistic

Every child grows up believing, in the beginning, that their parents are the s.h.i.t. Completely trustworthy and on top of everything. Then we become The Teenagers, knowers-of-all, and start to question whether or not our parents have actually managed to pull their tiny heads out of their asses in their 40-something years of being. And this is very doubtful.

I don't know about you, but my mother was clearly Insane from the time I was 14 to at LEAST 17, if not later. I grew up with a one parent family and I know it must have been hard and frequently stressful for Mom but she was clearly off her nut. Organic food, vegetarian cooking classes, Macrobiotics, whole wheat everything - not to mention the Tai Chi, Chakras, and self-help books. She was a latent Hippy, long after hippydome was fad and fashionable.

When Mom was diagnosed with breast cancer almost three years ago, she was all about the naturopathic doctor. She had oxygen therapy, massages, injections, herbal pills, etc etc etc. She was taking all this stuff on top of her 'conventional' medicine prescribed by her Oncologist - the usual rounds of chemotherapy and radiation, on top of surgerical intervention. There came a time when Mom's hippydippy tendencies came into question and debate....was the Naturopath helping or hindering her chances for recovery and survival? Was the naturopathy helping or interfering and preventing the optimum benefit of the western medicinal interventions?

Guess which path she chose?

4 comments! kim e posted at 1:52 AM
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