As you can see, I'm not very good at this

Well, since it's been just about a year since my last, first, and ONLY post, I'll try to catch everyone up on what is going on, and hopefully this blog won't go the way of my Middle School diaries and disappear again after a few days or weeks of writing.

This last year has been a busy one. We celebrated our first anniversary on April 21, 2008 and went to Molokai for a honeymoon anniversary trip. It was beautiful, working on Tyler's family's property in the Papahaku Ranchlands. Just relaxing together, well, that's not entirely true. In the mean time, back at the ranch in Seattle, all hell was breaking loose.

On March 3rd, we made a split second decision to purchase a house (that I'd never even been in). Tyler went and saw it, on a suggestion from his mother and we put in an offer, which was accepted. Only later did we find out that this was a "short sale." Basically, the seller owed more on the house than she was selling it for. Her lender was Countrywide. We didn't know it at the time, but this would be anything but short. So, fast forward one month and about 20 days and we're in Molokai putting our old house on the market (which we remodeled the bathroom of - entirely - in about a month) and trying to figure out what was going on with the new house. It was stressful.

After waiting a month after our house was on the market, we had to pull it off, since the new house still had not closed and we were told that Countrywide was dumping many of it's short sales and letting them go to foreclosure. Our house got to the day of the foreclosure auction TWICE while we were waiting for the sale to go through. Let me tell ya, not fun. Then, we almost lost our loan a couple of times because we kept going past our "lock" period. Headaches galore.

Well, we finally closed on the new house on August 8th (5 months and 5 days after our initial offer was accepted) and now we're the proud owner of two homes. YAY! So, the old house is back on the market (for less, of course, since the housing market went down during its hiatus off the market)

and away we go.....

Currently, we're painting the new house and living in the old house. We have a one year old miniature pinscher, named Gracie (Allen) who is fun, mischevious and at times exasperating. She has terrible outdoor listening skills, but is warm and affectionate. She's our starter child. So far, things are going well.