1. Old house goes on sale in April
2. 3 weeks later, house gets buy-contract from nice family
3. House gets backup contract from couple wanting to make it a rental
4. Nice family has bad credit. Backup contract becomes primary contract.
5. Backup couple wants us to give them $2400 so they can make $350 in roof repairs. We refuse. They dump contract.
6. Our agent quits national realtor to sell houses on his own. Number of showings drops to zero.
7. We get roof repaired and get several rooms painted.
8. Contract with agent expires. We fire agent and hire another.
9. New agent demands carpet be replaced despite having carpet allowance.
10. Before carpet can be replaced, another young couple puts contract on house.
11. We make a hundred minor "repairs" under demand from buyer's agent, ranging from replacing the A/C filter to replacing a cracked $8 dryer vent. At one point I make a 34-mile round trip to replace two burned out light bulbs.
12. Two days before closing, buyer's loan falls through when buyer quits her job. She was apparently told by her friends that quitting your job is okay to do immediately before closing on a house as long as your new job is similar. Friend is wrong. Buyer must now wait another 4-6 weeks to get two paycheck stubs so that new employment can be verified.
13. Turns out that "paycheck stubs" were drawn on buyer's mother's personal checking account. FHA understandibly refuses to consider mom's personal checks to be real employment. Loan must now be completely re-done using only husband's name.
14. 9/8/04 4:00 PM, we officially close on house and turn over keys, hopefully to never have to worry about the sorry mess again. Mortgage company promises to wire profit from home equity to account tomorrow. We shall see.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Having two houses is one house too many, but trying to get back to one house is an ordeal in itself. Since we traded up to a house worth approximately 3x what the old house costs, we likely won't have to deal with FHA or HUD or first-time buyers, but it'll still be a pain. I'm gonna stay here awhile.
Going to Austin tomorrow for that Austin game conference. I'll likely have coverage posted to gamedev.net over the weekend. Keep an eye out!
Oh, and finally a couple of pieces of Flash goodness that I recently found. . .
http://www.powersdk.com/prim/ has a library of primative types for Flash that are quite a bit nicer than the ones built-in. For one thing, they can log gets and sets. Nicest of all, though, is that they can be created as constants, which will likely fill TANSTAAFL with glee, as he was always a bit bummed by the lack of a reasonable way to make constants in Action/Java/J/ECMAScript.
http://www.bit-101.com/blog/archives/000069.html is a piece of JSFL (an extension of the Flash IDE) that automatically makes Aqua-style buttons. Not a "use every day" kinda feature, but certainly nicer than the buttons I usually make.
http://www.actionscript.org/tutorials/advanced/Tween-Easing_Classes_Documented/index.shtml has documentation for the new-but-undocumented tweening classes built into Flash MX 2004. Even if you aren't writing Flash code you might wanna go here just to play with the little demos. Not bad considering they're about 10-20 lines of code each.
