We are at our best when we’re in motion. I belive that and right now Jess and I have been running for the better part of two weeks. Since Jess said ‘Yes’ on April 4th, we’ve started up the process of where we should have our wedding, almost bought a home, started fixing up my home so it’s rentable once we move out, and then found out my other tenant is buying a home, so that work has doubled. That’s on top of our daily work and social schedule. The beauty is that we have NOTHING to complain about, these are all good things, so lets recap the weekend that was.
Friday – Jess went with our agents husband to look at three new homes in mid county. As she told me, they walked in, make a quick look around, and quickly left. This is typical of our home search, it’s amazing what people will put on the market. We’ve seen homes that had foundations that appeared to have a decorative waterfall and a Wet Willy’s slide plasterd onto it, to $20k in damage that the owner “had NO idea about”. People are just dumb. We saw a home in a neighborhood that has a median price of about $250,000 that was left vacant and not winterized by the bank. A pipe suddenly exploded and the whole home needs to be demolished. It’s that bad. Friday was good otherwise, I managed to get a good two hour run in playing basketball and Jess had a chance to relax for a few hours on the porch with some vino while Cooper stood guard in the upper window. Not to mention I had my third treatment for straining my trapezius. On the scale of pain, that’s at about an 8 since you are effectively unable to do anything that requires your arms or your back.
Saturday – Wedding Day. This is what the whole day was going to be about in one form or another. We had lunch scheduled with Jess’s parents and then we were having our first Date Night to celebrate our engagement. The lunch was great as always, Mom (Riggs) always has some good food going out at their home, and if I were able to without putting on 10 pounds, I’d go on Bill’s diet. He has a chocolate shake that is made up of two scoops of full fat vanilla ice cream and whole milk, powered milk and Ovaltean, WOW. We all sat around and discussed the Engagement Party and then Jess and her mom talked Weddings while Bill and I talked over the economy.
We then prepared for our date night. I told Jess we were going to a newer establishment in Maplewood called Maya. they were featured in the latest Alive Magazine along with their Cuban Pork, which… oh baby is it good. Go and try it, now. We had a nice dinner and even found a way to talk about things other than buying a home and weddings. We then strolled up to Monarch for an after dinner drink and just enjoyed one anothers company for the evening. It was a perfect date for the two of us, hey… I love her, go figure.
Sunday – I think we left our bed around 11am. That would lead you to belive it would be a lazy day, but once we started moving, I started working on priming and painting the bathroom closet door and Jess started cleaning the house. My workload included sanding down window sills, patching them, and then repainting doors. Why all the work? In anticipation that ONE DAY… we’ll find a new home. Speaking of homes, we went down to Maplewood to look at two homes. The frist one ended up being across the street from a huge metal storage facility, very nice home, but… there was no way I was going to live next to a big red metal building, and the second, we were un(lucky) enough to come by while the owners were still there. AWKWARD. The owner says, don’t worry about the dog, he’s nice. Then our agent says to the man, I hope that cast on your arm isn’t from the dog! (as a joke) The man says, oh it is, but we took that one to the Humane Society. OK… bad start. That home was a shot out of the 70’s. I’m not wasting any more time on that.
What a weekend.
