Wish us luck - we are
putting an offer in on a house. It's a ranch house built in 1971
and it will need some work to make it accessible too, but it has twice
the floor space we have so we could work within the existing space
without having to add on + figure out how to get to the basement family
room (those were where the big cost issues were with remodeling our
house). We suspect that our offer might go over like a lead balloon,
though - it's owned by an 81-year-old lady who has lived there since the
beginning and has no concept that her house needs a lot of updating and
a totally inflated idea of its worth (YES this reminds me of my mother,
who also would have been 81 this year). She had had it up for auction
with a $540,000 reserve, but bidding only reached $250,000. Current
assessment is $380,000 but the market has gone really flat around here
and comps are coming in at about $360,000 (comps on our house are about
$280,000). We signed a contract last night for $350,000 and got a friend
of mine at the credit union to fax a pre-approval over today; the
realtor was hoping to meet with the family (I believe her daughter is
involved as well) tomorrow and have an answer for us by the end of the
day Friday. I have a feeling that it's going to take a good long while
to convince that lady that she doesn't have a half-million dollar house,
so I'm not expecting much - but cross your fingers for us anyway? This
is so far the only thing we've come up with that seemed like it could
meet our needs in our elementary school district, which Laurel's
therapists agree is one of the best in the county for special needs (the
only other one with as good a rep is a) about to lose the teacher who
gave it that rep due to retirement and b) about to get socked with a
5,000-house development, so we're not feeling like it's as sure a
thing). The other option we've come up with is to build on a lot in an
adjacent school district (lots in our own school district are
astronomical) and hope we can get Laurel bused to her current school.
One of the therapists told us she thought we might have a decent shot at
that, but if it didn't work out, that school district has one of the
worst reps in the county. Also, the lot is a good ten minutes farther
out from pretty much everything than we are now. The house we're making
the offer on is in a subdivision across the main road from ours and it's
about as far off the main road as we are, but being on the south side of
the main road gives it the perks of public sewer (we have public water
but we're on septic, that road serves as the break point for sewer) and
being within walking distance of Laurel's school.
I have to admit, it's not my dream house and it would be fun to build a
home from scratch and get exactly what I wanted, but I feel like we just
absolutely can't beat the location, nor would we be able to afford to
build anything as big as this, so this really seems worth trying.
Welp, we just heard about the house. They wouldn't remotely consider
our offer, wouldn't even glance at the comps our agent showed them. They
are determined that they will not take less than $500,000. Well, they
are going to be sitting on that property for a long, long time, because
nothing around here is going for much more than assessed value, if that
much (which, remember, was $380,000 for this house). I'm bummed but not
shocked. We'll continue to look into the feasibility of building on the
lot I mentioned in the other school district and having Laurel bused,
and keep our eyes open for anything else that might pop up...
I forgot to post this, Laurel was briefly on the news Wednesday
night! They did a story about special-needs kids, i.e. her summer school
class, going to the county fair.
I'm told she had a great day at the fair, loved the horses and the
cheerleaders making over her. The teacher told me that they had
volunteers to take her on the Ferris wheel but he didn't want to
interrupt her tube feeding - I told him that I wished he had, she'd have
been fine...but oh well. We all have icky colds right now, but if we get
better over the weekend we'll take her ourselves and get her on that Ferris
wheel.
Very, very long update....
It’s been ages since I’ve had time to post! We left for our
vacation in the Berkshires in Massachusetts on Thursday the 9th, but it
was tough getting out – our babysitter was absent that day and the
five before (first her daughter had the stomach flu, then she had the
stomach flu, then her grandma had a heart attack) and we all had had a
cold, so juggling our own illnesses, the babysitter’s absence, and all
the stuff that needed to be done before we left (with both of our jobs,
it’s not like work disappears because you’re not there to do it, you
just have to get it done before or deal with it when you come back), it
was all we could do to leave on Thursday at all. Oh, and I forgot, we
also got a nail in our tire! Before we left, so that was a blessing at
least that we realized it before we hit the road, but that slowed us
down a couple more hours. Instead of getting about halfway like we’d
planned, we only made it a couple of hours before stopping for the
night.
So, we started out more tired and stressed than I’d hoped, but we made
it to Massachusetts OK. The whole vacation had sort of a “that was
nice except” quality to it – the scenic train ride was nice except
it was hot, Laurel liked the adapted bike except that when it went over
a bump, she’d shift and one of the straps would cut into her neck, she
loved the butterfly conservatory except that she got horrible gas pains
while we were there and we had to leave, the house was wonderful except
the last night we were there, some disturbance with a local cell tower
caused the alarm system (and apparently, all the alarm systems for that
company in the entire area) to go off and there was nothing we could do
to make it stop for good because we couldn’t get to the battery
backup. Fortunately it did stop between midnight and 6:30. I think
Laurel’s favorite activity was the Ecotarium, which was what she chose
for “Laurel picks” day (I decided we should each get one day to pick
the activities). I had the sense she was somewhat disappointed with the
accessible platform up in the tree at the end of the canopy walk, which
I think had been one of the selling points for her, but she loved the
planetarium show, and liked the little train ride around the grounds.
Most of the pictures I took were with my film camera and I haven't
gotten those developed yet, but here's one from the bike ride (before we
started out - that's our van in the background):
Just as we thought we were going to get through the vacation without
anything too bad happening, when we were checking out of our
hotel in New Jersey (where we stopped on the way back to visit Bob’s
brother and his family), it turned out I had forgotten to fasten
Laurel’s seat belt and she launched herself out of her wheelchair and
onto the floor. At first we thought she had just suffered a rug burn,
but when she got her tube feeding an hour later, she threw up, and then
she did this weird shaking thing where she seemed really out of it like
she might be having a seizure (oh, that’s one other crummy thing –
her morning partial seizures came back during the trip. This didn’t
look like those, though), and then she threw up again, and then she
seemed really lethargic. So we took her to a doctor-in-a-box, who sent
us to a hospital for a CT scan, which of course took hours till we got
it and then the docs got all excited because, big surprise (hello, we
told you she has a brain injury...), Laurel’s CT scan is not normal.
Actually, there’s so much empty space in there that it really rates as
some sort of miracle that Laurel does as well as she does. It certainly
points up how little we understand about brains! Anyway, they insisted
on calling her neurologist and her pediatrician and by the time we
finally escaped, it was 7:30 PM (Laurel fell right around 11 AM). The
good news, at least, was that there was no detectable damage from her
fall that morning, and by that time she was acting normally (and really
being extraordinarily patient about the whole thing). Meanwhile Bob’s
brother’s family had gone to the movies because they’d promised the
kids, so we didn’t even get to see them to say goodbye. 
The traffic and weather were both terrible on the way home, and we
didn’t make it home till 3 AM. Only to find a message from our
babysitter, “Hey guys, when you get home, give me a call about
tomorrow.” Also to find that although she’d been quite good about
giving the cat her thyroid medicine, apparently she’d forgotten to
feed or water her! The poor cat had been heaving up stomach bile all
over the place, I imagine those pills were not sitting well on an empty
stomach. Anyway, we decided not to call the sitter at 3 AM, which was in
retrospect a mistake because we have not been able to get hold of her
since.
BTW, I didn’t get to post this before we left, but good news about the
cat – she’s been judged an excellent candidate for iodine treatment
for her thyroid. She has to go for one last set of tests this Friday,
then we can schedule her for the treatment – which won’t be easy for
her, we have to drive her an hour and a half away and she has to stay
for five days – but the twice-a-day pilling has been hard on both of
us and I just can’t see doing it for the rest of her life.
Anyway, so especially with our sitter vanished (who by the way owes us
money! The contractor that Medicaid uses to manage payroll was taking so
long to come through that we forwarded her the money with the idea that
she’d pay us back when she finally started getting paychecks) we were
really right back in it when we got home. Monday night we had to empty
the kitchen because the cabinet refacing (something we really felt we
needed to do to make our house sellable) was going to start on Tuesday,
Tuesday night we had to get Laurel ready to start school on Wednesday,
Wednesday night we had to get cleaned as much of the house as we could
(the cabinet refacing was still going on, meaning that our kitchen
contents were still all over the living room, dining room and bathroom)
because the home study social worker (a different one than the one who
did the original home study, I think she left to be a SAHM) wanted to
come out to do the one-year update for our home study. (That went just
fine, and it turned out we really didn’t need to do all that cleaning
– she didn’t look around much. And she was really complimentary of
our knowledge about China, she said she learned a lot.) Thursday night
we got a much-needed break, and went to see Terri Clark. That was the
first country show for either of us, but it was a really fun show! Thank
heavens we had been worried enough about our sitter’s reliability
before we left on vacation that we had booked the gal who did our last
respite weekend instead, so everything went off without a hitch. We were
in the fourth row in a small (and not very full, which surprised me)
theater, so it was the most up-close-and-personal concert experience
we’ve had in quite a while.
Another thing in there was that Wednesday morning, I had to go get some
testing done on the nerves on my arms (real fun, they basically send
shocks through the nerves) – I’ve been having a lot of pain and been
told that I’ll probably have to have surgery (having run through
everything the occupational therapist could think of), and it’s just a
question of how many nerves they need to operate on. The testing
indicated that there may be some damage to my radial nerves (both arms
but slightly worse on my left, which BTW I’m left-handed), but it was
inconclusive. I have to follow up with the hand surgeon on September 14.
I think it’s just basically the result of years of Laurel-wrangling.
School seems to be going great for Laurel so far – her new morning
aide (a former nurse) seems awesome, her mid-day aide is the one who was
her morning aide last year (also pretty good), the only one I don’t
really know about yet is the afterschool aide (I met her for the first
time tonight and she seems very young and kind of passive, but we’ll
see…). Laurel’s been in a good mood every day (although when the
person in charge of afterschool asked her if she’d enjoyed her first
day, she promptly pushed her “no” button! Bob thinks she didn’t
like all the work. Tonight I had to do a questionnaire with her on what
she likes and doesn’t like, and she told me she usually likes school),
and it sound like she’s been able to stay with her class a fair
amount. She is attentive, mostly not in much pain (still the occasional
nasty bout of gas), laughing more often, eating orally with enthusiasm
if not always ease, and the biggest fly in the ointment is those
seizures. Unfortunately, the nurse practitioner that we’ve been seeing
for the last several years about her seizures decided to not come back
from maternity leave, so now we don’t have anyone to go to who has
really been following her. I never really liked her original neurologist
– he always seemed to act like she was an interesting object. Another
ointment bug is that her chest has been developing some more. Her blood
tests all came back normal when we had her hormones checked (I’m
forgetting when exactly, early spring?), but her ped said she’d send
Laurel to an endocrinologist if there were any further
“developments” so I guess it’s time.
Meanwhile, we have tons to do on the house front – the cabinet
refacing is done so we’re reconstructing the kitchen, we need to order
flooring for the kitchen and main bathroom, Bob is working on painting
the cabinet in that bathroom, we need to spread mulch, get the huge hole
in the lawn fixed, get someone to fix the rotten window frame on the end
of the house, do lots of touch-up painting, and get the clutter out of
the house (no doubt the biggest project of all!). Oh yeah, and find
somewhere to move to…that house we looked at went on the market at
$539,000. Good luck with that – I’m sure people are just going to be
lining up to pay almost half again the assessed value. But we can’t
sit around for months waiting to see if they’ll wise up. Friday night
I found five lots that were mislisted as being in the next school
district over, but are actually in ours! We’re worried that the cost
of clearing and putting in well and septic will push them out of our
price range, but we’re going to look into it further. It would sure be
nice to not have to worry about whether we can get Laurel bussed into
this district, and the location is about as good as I think we can
reasonably expect for a new lot in this area.
Also meanwhile, we’re dealing with the aftermath of a nasty storm this
past weekend – it knocked our phone service out (still out – good
thing we have a cable modem!), partially broke our TiVO (I don’t quite
understand what happened, but I know that we can’t view or record any
digital cable channels now), and put these nasty arcs of
green/blue/purple along either side of our TV screen. Bob thinks there
was some sort of magnetic pulse – it also set off one of Laurel’s
battery-operated toys. I do know that lightning struck CLOSE to the
house.
Oh, and my 25-year high school reunion is this weekend! I’m not sure
how I feel about that! But we’re going up to Pittsburgh so I can go.
This is actually our first class reunion – there was an attempt to
organize a 5-year reunion, but it died because nobody felt ready (me
included! I hadn’t even graduated college yet) and then nobody has
tried to organized one since.
I think that concludes this long update! I feel like my life is some
sort of big good news/bad news joke...
Random news bits -
OK, headline news is that our babysitter called yesterday morning!
She said that her grandmother died, she had to go to the funeral in
Florida, and she didn't have free long-distance and didn't want to spend
the money to call us. ENNHHH! (That's supposed to be the buzzer for a
bad answer.) Fine that she couldn't come to work because she needed to
go to her grandma's funeral, NOT cool that she was too cheap to call us
and let us know what was going on. I know how well that excuse would go
over with MY boss! She does claim, however, that she is still going to
pay us back. I hope so.
We took our cat in for the chest x-ray and other tests that she needed
preparatory to doing the thyroid treatment, and they think they found a
mass in one lung. The doctor said that it's impossible to say anything
about it without cracking the cat's chest open for a biopsy, but there
wouldn't be anything they could do about it if it were cancer anyway.
She said she's seen cats die in a matter of months or live for years and
die of something else after finding a mass like that. We don't know yet
whether it will prevent her from getting the treatment. The doctor
raised the question of whether we still wanted to spend the money not
knowing how long the cat will live, but well, you know, we never did
know how long the cat was going to live.
Laurel wound up staying home sick from school yesterday, but she was
better this morning. I've been trying to fight the stupid cold off with
Cold-Eeze and felt like I was losing the battle this morning, but I
don't feel too bad right now. Laurel's special ed teacher called
yesterday to find out how Laurel was doing and also, to say that she
feels that Laurel is doing so well with her communication book that she
wants us to come in and observe one day next week. So that was great
news.
We've been out to see those lots in our school district, and honestly,
they're hard to see! Only one is cleared (well, another is partially
cleared, but it has a big ol' power line going over it so forget that
one) - the other three have an old pine plantation on them that's thick
with succession growth (thousands of hardwood saplings, blackberries and
other shrubs). Not maybe my ideal habitat, but it's nice and private and
we're not likely to beat the location. They're all partially down a
hill, so after looking at contour lines overlaid on the parcel map,
we've picked a favorite (actually not the cleared one, it's one of the
steepest). Everybody who could tell us anything more seems to have been
on vacation this week, but on Tuesday the builder that our real estate
agent has been talking to is supposed to go out and make an estimate,
and the listing agent is supposed to be back, so hopefully we'll learn
something. We are really favoring going that route if the price works
out.
Oh, and we've managed to get our phone fixed, degauss our TV, and Bob's
hunch that replacing the infrared cable for the TiVo would fix that was
correct, so we have now recovered from the lightning storm. We're only
out $12 for the cable, so that went better than I'd hoped.
All right, now I think you know as much as I do... 