We did it! We got our new home! The call came in about a half hour ago! It’s ours!

Our final offer increased to $100 over asking price, but we left in the closing costs (and warranty). The ball was then in their court. We were told to expect a call between 5 and 7 tonight, but by 8:30, we were starting to get doubts. Until the phone rang, that is!

So, barring any meteor strikes between now and then, we’ll be moving into 8321 Hobhouse Circle after June 16th. Woohoo!
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By way of Metafilter comes some amazing footage of tornadoes that touched down May 12th near Attica, Kansas (Note: 27MB MPEG download). Scott McPartland is the photographer.

I’d like to chase storms around here, using all the necessary tools and training from the National Weather Service. We don’t have any storm chasers in the area, though the NWS’s SkyWarn program does train amateur radio operators in storm spotting.

Storm chasers around here will spend most of their time being bored, since this isn’t the tornado hotbed that Kansas-Texas-Oklahoma area is. Still, it’d be thrilling to get my own footage like this.

And, come on! It’s only wind, right? 🙂

Update: I put a local link for the tornado video, via FreeCache.

We spent two hours this morning going over paperwork for our offer. After crafting it, the sellers’ agent called and told us he’d “be right over” to pick it up. “Be right over” turned out to be three hours later, at which point the negotiating fun began. The cellphone was ringing off the hook!

Mary, our agent, soon called us and gave us the details of their counteroffer. After talking it over, we sent in a new offer, meeting all of the sellers’ terms. Mary was then going to bring the paperwork by our home tonight for us to initial. It looked like we had done it.

She got as far as our house before her cell phone rang again. Ten minutes later, she comes in to tell us the bad news: two other offers were put in and were being considered. Our hearts sank at the news.

Mary went over with us the various considerations at this point. We talked it over and came up with what we consider our best offer. The terms were relayed to the sellers’ agent and we expect an answer by tomorrow night.

What seemed so ours just hours ago is now up for grabs. The sellers’ agent couldn’t believe it, even. He remarked that the house was on the market for ten whole months and in one weekend alone, three offers come in.

We were smart to fill out the paperwork as quickly as we did. Now let’s hope we’ve got what it takes to make it ours.

We are making an offer on a home we looked at today. Spent a few hours kicking the tires. It’s in Windsor Forest, off of Durant Road.

Tomorrow we go to sign the paperwork. If the deal goes through, we could have sold our current house and closed on our new one within a span of seven weeks. Not too bad, considering.

I can’t wait until all of this is behind us because I feel like we’ve been short-changing Hallie. All these hours devoted to houses is time taken away from our daughter. I’m so glad that the end appears near for all this hassle.

I’m finally back in town after a week away. Had a fun time reacquainting myself with my wife and daughter. Check out Hallie‘s page for the play-by-play on that.

The flight home was interesting. There was a crowd of people at my gate trying to get to Manchester, NH. Their plane was delayed well past its original departure, so the gate area was overflowing with people. The Raleigh plane was only a little bit late in arriving. It was overbooked, however.

I waited too late to get an earlier flight. The 5 and 7 PM planes were all full. Which means some of the folks on my plane may also have been stuck with the late flight. The gate agent pleaded for volunteers to be bumped to the next morning’s flights, but few if any people accepted.

I seriously considered accepting that offer. I didn’t have much scheduled for Friday and would get home around 11 AM. Kelly was okay with my staying, since we both like free airfare. Only real problem was my need to pick up new contact lenses by noon Friday or else suffer through the weekend without them. I decided to keep my seat.

Once the plane was full (and I mean every last seat), the flight attendents pleaded once again for volunteers. A man was waiting who desperately needed to fly that night. Even when we learned he was on his way to a funeral, no one jumped. An attendent mumbled “wow, a bunch of toughies” as she went down the aisle.

As the plane’s door was closed, I couldn’t help but think of that poor guy who just lost his chance of attending that funeral. It could have been totally bogus, but it did get me thinking. What if the funeral was for someone really close to him? It’s bad enough losing someone you love, but to also miss your chance to pay your respects must feel as low as you can get.

The whole flight back, I kept thinking how I’d feel in his shoes. There were no heroes around when he needed one. I could have made his day but chose not to. And I regretted it. Because someday, that guy could be me.

While I’m waiting at my gate for my 10 PM flight, I’d thought I’d look up this interesting story. Federal air marshals, flying under cover on random flights, have been giving themselves away by the procedures they use to bypass airport security checkpoints. Seems that they waltz straight through the “exit only” section — past all the metal detectors and screening machines — sign a logbook and then pretend to be anonymous again. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out these guys are the supposedly undercover agents. What’s worse is that these asinine procedures remained in place after an agent pointed out the flaws.

I mean, just how stupid are these guys? Aren’t we lucky to have such a crack security team protecting our skies? Gheesh…

The cicadas are back. Those creepy, crunchy bugs who make an appearance every 17 years, are sprouting from the ground and littering the place with their shells. The last time they were here in Northern Virginia, I was too, finishing up high school and figuring out what to do next. They, like myself, are finding much more pavement around here than before.

Kinda neat that the bugs remind me of my time here.

Its off to Wilmington, DE and then Philly today on a long, long last day. Can’t wait to be home with my girls.

I wandered into an area CompUSA today with my coworker and discovered a very cool device. It’s the Hauppauge MediaMVP. The MediaMVP is a Linux multimedia platform which can play MPEG1/2 movies and MP3 music stored on a server elsewhere on a LAN. It is Linux-based, comes with a remote control, and costs a mere $100. If I didn’t have to figure out how to stuff it into my suitcase for the flight home, I would have bought one on the spot!

There are a few pages devoted to hacking the MediaMVP, possibly to get DivX or OGG support added. The MPEG decoder is a common IBM chip (also used in Tivos, I believe) which unfortunately doesn’t have open-source drivers. The chip might not be much help with OGG or DivX media, either, unfortunately. Still, a hackable media platform for $100 is hard to ignore!