House Cat

27 January 2010
Between yesterday and today, I’ve been checking out houses for sale. My wife finds houses that look decent, and then sends me the links, and I tell her what I think of them.
We’re gonna try to buy a house this spring. While I like the idea of living in a house, the whole process of getting approved for a mortgage, finding a realtor, driving around looking at houses and making offers on houses is very unappealing to me. I’ve done it too often; more than I thought I would have. One reason why it annoys me so much is because we always seem to be scraping the bottom of the barrel. To put it in simple terms, it’s as if all the good houses are at least $150, but we can only get approved for $100. So we look for houses, and see that there’s nothing nice for less than $120. So we make an offer, which gets rejected. I hate it.

28 January 2010
Tonight, I went into Owen’s room to say goodnight to him and he immediately stared crying, saying that he wished our cat Oliver hadn’t died. This was somewhat of a repeat of last night, when he said that he was worried that he was starting to forget what Oliver looked like.
Oliver and Owen were pretty much best friends; we have lots of video and photos of the two of them playing together. While our other cat initially viewed Owen as an outsider competing with her for the attention of the adult humans in the home, Oliver warmed right up to Owen and accepted him as just another person in the family that could pet him.
Oliver died last June, not quite making it to his seventh birthday. Owen’s sadness regarding this loss has recently been renewed, I think, because our other cat, Emmaline, has suddenly decided to start sleeping on Owen’s bed. Oliver used to do this all the time, and Owen felt very special because of it. I’m not sure what made Emmaline suddenly decide to pick up where her littermate left off (cold weather?), but when she hops up on Owen’s bed, it immediately reminds him of Oliver.
I told Owen he could pretend that Emmaline is Oliver when he feels her down by his feet in bed like that, but he pointed out that Emmaline doesn’t stay on the bed as long: “She only stays on my bed when other people are here,” he said, which is his way of noting that Emmaline sometimes jumps off his bed when my wife or I leave Owen’s room for the night.
Owen says he wants another cat, and I feel the same way. The problem is, cats are expensive at first, and there’s a good chance Emmaline won’t like the new cat, or that the new cat won’t sleep on Owen’s bed, either.

29 January 2010
Remember the other day when I whined about our bad timing regarding all major life events? Well, this morning, as I was leaving for work, I picked up my cell phone and saw that I had a voicemail. It was the woman who we’ve been working with to get our mortgage. She said that she took a closer look at our paperwork and realized that our short sale was only two years ago. “You need to wait three years after a short sale before buying another house,” she said.
This really took the wind out of my sails, to use a cliche’. As my wife pointed out later when I spoke to her on the phone, there is no way this mortgage lady didn’t know about this before; in several email and phone conversations, we had told her the date of our short sale, and she said nothing to correct us.
This pisses me off because, ironically, after complaining about our bad timing in a previous post, my wife said that at least our timing in buying a house is good this time around.
Well, if it seems to good to be true, it is (sorry, I just used another cliche’). Interest rates are low, housing prices are low, I have ample vacation time to use, and a new home would be the perfect place for Jennifer when she has the new baby.
Now it looks like we’ve gotta wait another year. I’m sure the interest rates will double in the next year, and housing prices will soar, meaning 12 months from now we won’t be qualified to buy anything nice. And is it possible to have a home birth in an apartment? I guess I shouldn’t care if we make a lot of noise on that day, none of our neighbors seem to care about their volume.
So what’s gonna happen next? I don’t know.