I know it's been forever since I've blogged. It wasn't intentional, I've just been really busy moving and having babies. Well, just one baby. In fact, here she is:
It turns out that babies keep you really, really busy. In fact, I had to wait until my maternity leave was over in order to have time for blogging at work.
But before I start telling you about my beautiful daughter Lily, I would like to catch you up on the events that transpired before her birth. You see, until last April we lived in a small condo in Campbell. I loved it there but it was too small for three humans and two cats and trudging up the stairs with a stroller would have been seriously un-fun.
So we put our fabulous pad on the market at the beginning of the year and started looking for a new place. As you know, the housing market is not great right now so we struggled to find a buyer. Eventually we got an offer. It wasn't a great offer but it was good enough to accept.
Now, my understanding is that selling and buying homes can be messy and confusing but our buyers turned out to be especially evil. The contingency period came and went (and I got bigger and bigger) and still they had not finalized the sale. They demanded a new air conditioner and some electrical work. Well, our A/C worked perfectly but we cut a few dollars out of the sale price for the electrical work. Then the bank wouldn't lend them all the money they offered so we accepted even less than they originally offered. Then they wouldn't sign because they alleged the neighborhood management association was having financial problems and would be hiking the residents rates.
At this point I was 7 1/2 months pregnant and our offers on homes weren't being considered because of the position our buyers were putting us in. We told them to shit or get off the pot. They did both.
They finalized the sale, however: We had originally arranged to rent back from them at a reasonable rate until we had new living arrangements. They decided it wasn't enough money and tried to gouge us for a lot more. We'd had enough. We had a sale pending on a new house but it was taking forever to go through. Within a week we packed up all our stuff and put it in storage while we and our cats moved into a residential hotel.
We lived in the hotel for the last month of my pregnancy. The staff were terrified I was going to give birth in our room. The other residents were annoyed that I blocked the breakfast buffet with my big belly. I was stressed and couldn't sleep and was generally miserable.
We were able to move into our new home two weeks before Lily was born. It was just enough time to settle in.
Later we learned that the buyers of our condo (the Evils as we call them) continued to bully and gouge everyone for money. Apparently they threw a fit because a piece of board was missing from the bottom of the dishwasher (we removed it because it scraped our feet whenever we opened it). They refused to sign some paperwork and eventually their real estate agent paid to have it replaced out of her own pocket. When we recently visited our old neighbors they told us that they rented the place out to a couple and were planning to raise the rent on them in the next few months. Nice.
