dancerjodi

I lived in Wellesley until I was about 9 years old on the Natick line, with family that lived in Natick. I "grew up" as a young child in that area, shopping at the old Natick Mall, Shopper's World and Sherwood Plaza.

We moved mid year over Christmas break back to Waltham, where my parents were from and their parents, etc. Despite being in Wellesley we were always in Waltham to visit family, for Dad to go to work, to go to the dance studio. I don't know what it was about the city but I thought that we were so cool to be moving there that I remember bragging to my Wellesley friends. We never really fit in our little neighborhood (Overbrook Drive right off Rt. 9, near Chihn's Villiage).

For all intents and purposes then, I feel like Waltham is my hometown. My most formative years (imo) were spent there. I don't know what it is about the city but try as we might, most of us weren't able to get away. In high school I couldn't wait to get away from Waltham but in college (in particular, through my Sociology 101 course) I realized what a gem of a city we had. We're near Boston but not in it. We've got stuff in the downtown but we have the Riverwalk, Beaverbrook, Prospect Hill. It's easy for driving but there are trains and buses to the city. We have such a fascinating history both in terms of what our country has done industrially and also sociologically - a great 'microcosm' (ooh, college words)! I've waxed poetic here in the past about the Watch City so I'll refrain from getting into it too much.

Post college, Brian and I rented an apartment over near the 99 for a few years while we saved for a house. We couldn't touch Waltham at the time for anything that wasn't a POS, and Brian really did not want to live somewhere that I knew everyone. We looked north and west of the city at a bunch of places, and eventually settled in downtown Framingham on Alexander Street (off Irving, a couple of blocks from the junction of 135 and 126).

We loved our house! Huge and gorgeous! Stained glass and a fireplace! 10' ceilings! A huge yard! Gorgeous hardwood! A new kitchen we made! But we hated where it was, or rather, I hated it and Brian was indifferent and uncaring about the community at the time. We had some nice neighbors but for the most part folks kept to themselves or were getting into trouble that we didn't want a part of. It took one week until a drunk dude threatened to stab Brian at the Store 24, walking down to get some gatorade during our massive home gutting/rewiring project. He started carrying a knife again and was back to walking around on edge like in his old Everett thug days. It was just a depressing place to be. It reminded me a lot of Waltham in that late 80s/early 90s in its depressed and (to some) scary state on the Southside. Everything is relative of course. I would cut off my arm to help build up South Waltham, but I could have cared less about South Framingham.

We lasted two years on Alexander street, basically enough time for us to redo the house and gain some good equity, and for me to convince Brian that I really was not going to be happy there. We sold and bought where we are now just in time. I shudder to think of my poor mental state had the bubble burst earlier and if we were stuck there. I was not a pleasant person to be around.

Well recently I found a great blog about Framingham, and it warms my heart to read it. I'm glad to see some development in some areas and sad to see some of the same ole same ole in others. I'm glad that someone cares as much about downtown there as much as I do in Waltham. Since I started my life there, bought my first home there and since Brian and I end up doing many of our errands out there, I do feel a connection to that area. When we were first driving, my friends would go to the Natick Mall to walk around, hit movies at Shopper's World. I remember getting pictures with a Real Santa and Real Reindeer. I remember Child World and Windsor Button and House of Zodiac. So most of all, what I'm happy about in finding this blog is the old photos of Shopper's World and the Natick Mall:

http://www.thisisframingham.com/category/shoppers-world
http://thisisframingham.com/?p=179

(too bad there aren't photos of the old fountain outside Sears in the mall, but I digress)

A friend posted today about this being the anniversary of her first marriage (which did ultimately end in divorce), but how the pain was worth it to get her to where she is today. I remember the nasty fights Brian and I had and emotions I experienced around that Framingham house, the literal sweat and blood shed rehabbing it. Though, it truly did allow us to get to the place we are today, which is just such a perfect, perfect fit for us. Our hood isn't perfect but it is *our* hood. Our house has its issues but it is *our* house.

I think every town deserves its motivated townie. I hope that I am doing Waltham proud being one of its own. Now when do I get that toaster for converting my husband? ;)

Last night we signed an offer from someone to buy our house. We also looked at a house, loved it, made an offer, and they accepted and signed it. Freaky. Its a couple of blocks from Moody and we really, really liked it. Here's a URL: http://home.comcast.net/~waltham/

Freaky.

Today I need to fax over the pre-approval letter, I scheduled the inspection (will be next Monday), called my lawyer and generally will be nuts until we sign a P&S (at some point next week).

The thing that sucks, is we were preapproved for a certain amount but the letter we got says we were approved for less (he mentioned something about it saying a lower amount so that brokers didn't try and sell us more house than we wanted . . . I asked him to just set the letter to the full amount so he misunderstood me). It figures - the mortgage broker is on vacation until next week. I left a message for someone else in his office but haven't heard back yet . . . dammit! I was supposed to fax this thing 2 hours ago.

*Breathes*

Now here's hoping there aren't any major issues with either inspection, and that both sides get mortgages, and that we can close. The estimated close date at this point is June 30.

I feel like my insides are all mixed up. It was also difficult to sleep last night. My throat is all scratchy too. Yeah, whine whine . . . but I'm so excited about the prospect that this may all work!

House looking, a nice dinner, a dead alternator and some cat piss for good measure!
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Its quiet here in the office since I'm one of the two early workers. I think if possible I may cut my lunch hour and skip out of here early today.

I didn't do such a great job over the weekend with my nutrition and workout goals but heck - its a new week :)

B and I had an interesting weekend. We spent most of the time together, just the two of us (heh, thinking of that Eminem song now). Last night we were going to have romantic "clean the basement" or "drywall the laundry room" night and then after making some progress, burn some of the wood from the laundry room up in the fireplace. Instead we had "redo the plumbing in the laundry room because the trap in the drain pipe is in the crawlspace and uninsulated thus causing water to freeze inside of it" night. I found this out when I heard water gushing up and out of the drain pipe from the kitchen - oops! It was funny, on our late trip to Home Depot the people in line in front of us were *also* buying pipe insulation and regular pink fiberglass stuff too.

I woke up to find pieces of fiberglass on my face this morning, odd (since I wasn't even putting the stuff in). B worked on the laundry area while I tackled cleaning part of the basement. God, I didn't know you could have so much dust and dirt in one area!

****

We checked out a really neat bookstore this weekend in Worcester which was CRAZY because they happened to be having a new age fair. http://www.tatnuck.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp was huge and had a great selection of all kinds of books. B picked up an autographed autobiography of Bruce Campbell ("Give me some Sugar, Baby") and a digital photography book. I refrained from buying anything since I'm still working on my "Soul of Sex" book, and, need to make sure I have enough money until payday for gas for the Saturn and other silly things. From there we headed to see Star Wars Episode II at the Imax Theater in Natick - vibrating seats!

Yesterday I went out to Groton to visit a friend - I haven't been in that town since I was in 6th grade and attending http://www.grotonwood.org/gwood/index.htm . I'm such a dummy, I never realized it was a religious camp (though I guess this would make sense, after all I was in Catholic School when I attended for a week in January). That place was so great - we had so many wonderful activities (like collecting mucky water and looking at the contained organisms under a microscope, and going out for late night nature walks lit only by the light of the moon and learning about the rods and cones in our eyes). It was sort of an "Outward Bound" type thing - like, with kids swinging on ropes between trees over big pits.

Their house is beautiful, and I also learned that horses are way bigger than I remember - its been a long time since I've been on one. And our bunnies REALLY like the timothy hay mix (though they were intimidated by the huge pile that we put on their "patio" area at first).

****

Its Martin Luther King Day today. It always makes me remember of one of my old professor and great mentors stories of his experiences in Chicago with Dr. King in the 60's - he finished grad school the year King was assassinated. Its just fascinating the kinds of experiences that he had, and the wonderful people that he was able to be around.

I wonder, do we have any charismatic heroes of that scale today? I don't think my generation has seen as much that was historically significant. This may make things safer for us - we've had a relatively easy experience in our world. I wonder though, how it will prepare us to take care of the future generations?

Okay dancer - stop rambling and off to work :)

Each morning I wake up with swollen, stiff hands and feet. I don't think its so much a result of the heat or humidity this summer as the constant pushing of my body to work around the house. A couple more weeks and we can relax. A couple more weeks . . .

We're about 99% done with the dining room and living room now (pictures will be up later today once B gets them off of his camera, tweaks them and uploads them). I did break down and buy one of those fireplace candleholders and we lit it last night while lounging on our comfy new couches in our comfy new living room. The dripped wax on the fireplace floor makes the place look lived in. I think I could have stayed on that couch laying back on the hubby-pooh forever.

What's left to complete aside from odds and ends scattered throughout the house? The two bathrooms, the upstairs and downstairs hallways and B's computer room. I'm so proud of him for being so strong with the whole thing; he wanted to save that one for last since he knew he wouldn't work on other things if he had a computer room with 11 ethernet jacks to hide in.

I'm looking forward to sitting on my butt in the living room doing homework - or laying around the house in my pajamas drinking french vanilla coffee and reading the paper - or going out for the day flea marketing, farmer's marketing or window shopping in Salem. Or getting to the beach. Or taking that day trip to the White Mountains that we keep saying we're going to do since we haven't been able to vacation there this year.

I want my life back. Soon young grasshopper, soon.

I've worked flex-time this week so I get to take off at noon; yippee!!!

Exciting tasks for this afternoon:
-Taking Max to the vet a few times for his outpatient diabetic curve tests (B took him this morning, I'll take him around 1:00 and 5:00).
-Going to the bank to open a savings account for my school bills; its just getting too confusing to deposit the money for that into our house account and not have things get messed up.
-Cleaning our bedroom floor with a mop (I did "round 1" of cleaning the other day on my hands and knees with a scrub brush and got the hard goo off; now I need to get the remaining dirt).
-Getting things to hold back our bedroom curtains (like big hooks).
-And I need a hedge clipper - something large and pointy. I weed-whacked the little teeny patch of grass on the right side of our driveway but there are SUPER WEEDS that were too hardcore for the weedwacker. I need some of those huge scary scissor-things to cut them down.
-Unpacking the bedroom and possibly making it look more homey :)

and the clincher

-Finding the Commonwealth of MA's Sheriff's Office for our county (office is in our town) so that I can let them know that "Crazy Bobby" doesn't live at our address anymore. I came home the other day to find a letter stuffed in our doorway for him that I can only imagine is some kind of warrant or summons. Nnnnnniiiiiiiiice . . .

And tonight; nekkid women (or, mostly nekkid women):
http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/arts/theater/documents/02366691.htm

We have a WHOLE BUTTLOAD of bats near our house! They must live somewhere nearby because at dusk there were tons of them swooping around in the sky above our yard. I've never heard the little bat squeak before :)

As time went on their numbers dwindled as they moved out to feed. I really want to get our bat house up soon so that we can see if we can procure some of our own.

WHEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

It was nice to throw out "Crazy Bobby's" refrigerator and washing machine last night. There was SO much trash to drag around to the front of the house.

I also took off the pantry closet door and took out all of the shelves and swept it out - we've decided to just cut a hole in the back of the closet for a dryer vent and move the dryer upstairs next to the washing machine (when we do the kitchen in the fall we'll re-arrange things to be more ergonomic and roomy back there). I pulled off a piece of plywood from the back of the closet to see what was behind it (that closet used to be the back door of the house before the den addition was added) and there were the HUGE remains of an old smelly bee-hive. It appears to be dead but for the time being we promptly screwed back the plywood over it so as not to disturb any possibly remaining bees. When the time comes for the kitchen remodel we'll need to pull it and all the other crap in the wall out to nicely finish it with drywall.

Such excitement, the guys were plastering the living room last night and it may be ready for paint by at the end of the weekend (whee)! I need to get cracking on stripping the paint on the mantle and calling someone to check out our fireplace and chimney to see if they would be safe to use :)

We're in the house, there's lots of work going on. We still have no internet access or phone and since B's off work this week anyway and webmail isn't working (though his server is up because I can get to our photo album) we won't have any e-mail access. I can get online from work and get access LJ, though.

Once there is time I'll post more details about our whole experience - the high level description:

It took forever for the sellers to get out of the house.
They were big slobs.
We've already ripped up rugs and wallpaper. Our living room is already wired, the dumpster showed up this morning, lots of paneling has been taken down (to find plaster in good condition behind it) and the guys have already wired the living room and should make a lot of progress on the 2nd floor today (they found an easy way to run wire from the basement to the 2nd floor so they may even finish it today).
We've already found some old military medals (a friend thought they were from Vietnam) and some baseball cards from the 1960's.

We have a cruddy refrigerator and an old rusty and dented washing machine to throw out in the trash on Thursday. Needless to say, we won't be selling our fridge until the fall when we buy the new one to go with the kitchen remodel.
Our new electrical service goes into the basement either today or tomorrow (so we'll have a washer and dryer hooked up finally, woo hoo)!
We'll be getting our new stove hooked up (hopefully) this Friday or next Monday so we cut out the crappy non-working range top in the kitchen this weekend.
Our cat is doing OK though he's freaked out with the noise and dust so he's been hanging out in the walk-in closet in our bedroom.
We've met some neighbors and they were really cool - the guy across the street (next to the cop) is a contractor named Vinnie. He offered us use of tools if we needed them :)

Crazy crazy crazy on Sunday with the huge Brazilian population and world cup. I have never seen anything so wild before!

I'm a bit tired :) If people need to get in touch with us for the next couple of weeks just call B's cell phone. Or, comment in here and I can check it from work.

We came, we saw, we liked - we make offer tonight.

It was really nice, REALLY big, the yard was very pretty. The owner (and landscaper - hence the yard being really pretty) walked through the whole house with us and showed us all of the updates. Its the home he was raised in (his Dad owned it as well as the 2-family next-door) and you could tell that he and his Dad cared for the property a lot.

As with all of the houses we've looked at, because its old it would need updated electrical but what it has is working property. It has pretty woodwork and maple floors, some stained glass, replacement windows (all but the stained glass ones) and lots and lots of space. And its a safe neighborhood - there is a cop that lives across the street that we saw leaving his house when we were waiting for our broker to show up. He rolled down the window and asked accusingly "can I help you" as we were parked - good to see he's looking to make sure his neighborhood is safe.

We didn't take any pictures because the wife was home sick from work and the kids were running around (is it April vacation now?) - perhaps if the offer is accepted we'll take some when we go to watch the home inspection.

Weird, again!