I need to get in to the habit of drinking more water.

Welp, 9 months to go! We pretty much have a lot of the wedding already planned and stuff.

Rang in the New Years playing Settlers and Life with Jenna and my sister Leah.

Lots of exciting stuff happening this year.

I went over to Jenna’s house. I took Jenna in my arms and embraced her.

Me: I really like you a lot.
Jenna: I like you too.
Me: I’m really sure about us.
Jenna: Me too.
Me: Do you want to be with me?
Jenna: Yes.

We hung out for a little bit. I thought it was great that she was now my girlfriend (so I thought).

I was getting ready to go to Porterville for a week, and Jenna gave me some cupcakes to give to my family. She walked me to my car.

Me: I was really nervous back there.
Jenna: Why?
Me: Because, it had been a while since I had asked someone to be my girlfriend.
Jenna: YOU WERE ASKING ME OUT?!
Me: wait. umm. no?
Jenna: No really, were you?
Me: Yeah.
Jenna: OKAY!!

I drove her back to her house, and I saw her go inside and saw a big smile on her cousins face like Jenna had just told her that we were now together.

A year ago tonight.

I’m so lucky and blessed :)

I sure have slacked off on updating my blog. Here are some of the things that have gone down the past couple months.

Well, right off the bat – Jenna and I are engaged! I purposed to her on Tom’s Bench, from 500 Days of Summer. She didn’t see it coming, so my plan worked! We got engaged on July 12th, but I’m still overly joyous about it and can’t believe I’m going to spend the rest of my life with such an amazing lady.

This summer I worked a lot. My brother Sam got married. I got an Air Conditioner for my room, but the electricity bill didn’t go up (weird). House stuff is on hold. Whatever.

Really, besides work, I’ve just been relaxing. Saturdays I go to the gym. I try to go more often, if I can get away from the work I have and go downstairs to the gym at work. It doesn’t always happen that way though.

Most of my time is spent working, or planning a wedding with Jenna. We are looking at 10/01/11 as the wedding date, but that might change depending on venue scheduling.

Things are just really amazing right now.

Now that I have the awkward “sorry I haven’t posted in a while” post done, hopefully I’ll get around to posting more often. Right now, I have dishes to clean. :)

Congrats! You win! You left your kid in a stroller and went inside to order food. Maybe you left your kid with the stroller so no one would steal it? Regardless, the kid was less than 2 years old. Someone could have very easily kidnapped him. My heart sank as soon as we noticed him there alone. He was alone for at least 10 minutes.

You deserve this award, and I hope that you someday feel some heartache from your irresponsibility (although I wish no harm on your children).

Today I received my escrow deposit check in the mail. It was $424.00 less than what I deposited. That brings the total amount of my loss down to about $1300.00.

Not buying a house is expensive. I wish that it was something I could have prevented, but it is all due to the buyer not selling for what the house is worth.

I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be buying a house soon. For me it’s way too much of a gamble to be just throwing the money away.

At least I’m putting money in to the economy without getting any goods out of it. Maybe that’ll get me some points somewhere with someone. Haha it would have been cool to blow $1300 on some cool gadgets though.

I’m still working a lot and taking “some” time off of house hunting (still reviewing listings that I get sent). I’ve been giving myself Sunday’s off so that I can focus on other things outside of work, such as Church, my beautiful girlfriend Jenna, and just living it up.

I’ve really liked the past couple Sundays. They’ve been eventful and full of activities. Last week we went to church and then went to IKEA and got some stuff to hang on my walls in the apartment (looks like I’ll be here for a while). After that, we came back and went for a bike ride on the beach.

It was pretty windy, so we didn’t get to go for that long of a bike ride before having to head back. It was still fun thought. Jenna was having a hard time pedaling her beach cruiser, while I was having no problems with my road bike (thank God for gears).

We went on later on that night and got some more frames and took some photos I took of NYC and got them developed and hung them up. I’m doing a “big city” theme in my place. I have a huge picture of Downtown LA, and a couple pictures I got of the skyline from NYC, and then those ones I took.

Today we went to Church, and then hit up Crystal Cove and checked out the Tide Pools. It was pretty fun.

Sea Urchin

Jenna wrote out first initials in the sand, and then quickly cleared it with her feet:

… and then she looked at my like this:

After checking out the Tide Pools, we went for a walk on the beach. It was a nice, quiet, natural beach.

I have the most beautiful girlfriend ever:

We drove back to Long Beach taking PCH the whole way. It was a nice drive.

We ended the night with Chipotle, Episodes of The Office (I’m getting Jenna caught up).

It was a pretty rough week, but things are pretty darn amazing right now :)

<3:

It’s not going to end the way that I wanted it to, but I think it’s for the best.

They sent me another offer for $233,000 ($8,000 over the appraised value – yeah, they want the $8,000 tax credit I would be getting). They also slipped in the offer that they wouldn’t be paying the $5,500 previously agreed to for closing costs, which would mean that if I had just accepted the offer thinking that I had the $8,000 coming at the end of the year, that I would have to pay the $5,500 extra, or lose my $7,000 deposit.

It all just seems really sneaky to me and seems like they’re really trying to get me to pay more than what the house is worth. Sure, I would have paid $250,000 for the house. I was assuming that the house was worth what they listed it for. But, the house is only worth $225,000, and they’re just trying to make more money than that. I would understand if they put some labor or investment into the house, but they didn’t. They bought it and turned around and sold it without making any improvements (which is in the paperwork they sent me). I’m just not going to let them sucker me into paying more than the house is worth because they think I’ll do whatever it takes to get the house – even spend money that I don’t have (yet).

I’m going to spend the rest of tonight praying about it and thinking about it. I had more clarity on the way home from work that I should just pass this up and let them have their bad investment and try to find someone else to sell the house to.

I love Jenna a whole lot, and she helped me edit every “in to” into “into”.

The updated appraisal has been sent to the selling agent. Now I wait to see what happens from here.

I don’t sleep enough these days.

Got the revised appraisal just now. It went up 2% to $227,000.

The comparables that that seller wanted the Appraiser to use are COMPLETELY different than the house that I’m trying to buy. The original Appraisal compared houses in the same track as mine. The new one they wanted to compare with houses in a completely different neighborhood about a mile away. They’re nicer houses and are roughly 10-15k more than the appraisal of the house I bid on. It seems legit. The sellers just need to accept that this is truly what the house is worth.