Got this from our agent a few hours ago:

The listing realtor will have the extension signed by the sellers. She has told me that the roof is scheduled for the end of the month. Hopefully, it will get done on time so the other repairs can also get done. There is nothing we can do at this time but wait and see. I will keep you informed as progress is made.

For those of you following along, after the sellers had told us they would not be able to make repairs in time for the closing that had been scheduled, we agreed to give them more time after we got our mortgage rate lock extended. But they still had no actual date scheduled for the repairs to start. Now they do!

So soon all of the wreckage resulting from two direct hits by hurricanes will be gone and the place will be back to the state we originally saw it in!

At one point in this process, I put the odds of this thing working out at like 25%. That was when they still had no date for the repairs, they told us they would not be able to meet the deadline, and we didn’t yet know if we could get the rate lock extended. Now, with a rate lock going through late January, and them startiung repairs in a couple weeks… I’d say it looks pretty good again.

There are still a few things that have to fall into place to make this happen. So it isn’t 100% yet. But much higher. I dunno. Maybe 80%? So here’s crossing fingers that they do the repairs quickly, but with quality and that all the money stuff on my side falls into place in time, and everything else goes smoothly!

And then, if all goes well, we can enjoy being house poor for awhile… cause with the additional monthly cost, plus moving expenses, plus new things we’ll need for the house… we’ll be scraping by for at least some transitional time. So a bunch of those “optional expenses” like new gadgets and such will have to wait at least six months, maybe more. And we’ll have to cut back a little bit on our usual spending too. Hopefully not for VERY long, but for at least awhile while we transition and adjust…

Very exciting. But stressful too!

OK, one feature that is provided by this blog software that for one reason or other I never had activated and functioning properly is comment notification. I had it visible on the blog when I first launched it, but it never worked, so I eventually removed it.

Well, tonight I got it all up and running and working.

So now, if you add a comment to a post, you will have an option to check a box to be notified if anybody else responds to that post. Woo!

(I also get an email when someone responds to any of my posts, so now I’ll catch comments being added to old posts, which I sometimes miss these days.)

For now I am continuing to leave commenting wide open to anybody, but at some point in the future I may start requiring registration for posting.

This thing has other mailing list features to let me send emails to registered members and such, but I haven’t explored them yet.

One thing I may look into next time I have is to provide automatic notification of new posts to people who register for the mailing list on here or something. Right now I email the monthly top ten list whenever I make a post, but that is manual. It would be nice to automate that for the top ten. And then I guess letting any non-top-ten people that want to sign up for such a list be notified as well would be fine too.

But that’s require some more research into the tool and probably a little bit of custom modification of the code. So that will wait awhile. Maybe days. Maybe months. Next time I get inspired.

For now, I should have gone to sleep about 3.5 hours ago, and have to be up in 5 hours, so even though I’d like to look into this more right now, I will not.

So for now, content yourself with the fun new feature of being told if other people respond to posts you respond to… if you want that. :-)

When I got home from voting (which only took about 20 minutes by the way) and then collected Amy to go to her lesson, we looked up and saw this on our roof. It was huge! Gigantic owl. It looked straight at us. Sat there on the peak of the house for several minutes. Then decided it had enough of us and flew away. It was a wonderful bird. Is it an omen? :-)

After the music lesson came home to watch the results trickle in. I’m switching channels every time a commercial comes on. No swing states have been called yet. Almost all of the precincts in Brevard have reported their results. 219 out of 223. Four are apperantly very slow. :-) Looks like lots of my candidates lost. Big surprise. :-) I’ll wait to tablulate my won/loss ratio until all the results on all the races are done though.

But it was a very cool owl!

Meanwhile, I am very tired and feel sick. Dunno if I’ll actually manage to stay up through all the results. We shall see.

So we’re sitting at the table eating dinner, and Brandy is finishing up cooking the part of the meal she can eat. (Being a vegetarian she couldn’t eat the chicken rice soup Amy and I were having.) I look over and ask Brandy “Is the oven supposed to have a flickering orange glow?”. Brandy’s response “It’s on Fire!!”.

I run past Brandy to grab the fire extinguisher from where we keep it. Then I stand in front of the overn for a few seconds trying to figure out how to use it. I’ve pulled the pin out, but then before squeezing the handle, I saw that the arrow was on the side instead of on top, so I was trying to twist the nozzle to put the arrow on top. (A completely unneeded and impossible step as it turns out.)

Meanwhile, Brandy has grabbed the baking soda, gets in front of me, and puts out the fire by sprikling the baking soda on it. I procees to get all flustered and upset because I didn’t get to use the fire extinguisher and start pouting and jumping up and down. Then I say, well, the pin is out, so I have to use it, and I aim one brief puff at the wall. Everybody jumps back.

Then there is one little glow from inside the oven. Well, maybe. I’m not sure if I really saw it or not. I say “Hey, it still has a spark!!!” and aim the extinguisher at the oven and blast the rest of it…. um… and that entire side of the kitchen. The fire extinguisher crap billows all over the oven, all over the kitchen, and all the surfaces are covered with it, including the rest of dinner.

Oops.

Brandy was not amused. And I was still all upset that she had jumped in front of me and put out the fire instead of letting me do it. (Even though she was quicker and had a better way.) And of course by the time I actually used the extinguisher, the fire was actually out. So heated words were exchanged.

Dinner was ruined. The whole kitchen and all of the stuff in it needed to be cleaned. It was really all my fault and I had no excuse. After a few minutes once Brandy was upset I realized of course that I was completely at fault and in the wrong. I apologized extensively, but she won’t let me help clean the kitchen (cause I will do it wrong). And she is all sad… and hungry since I ruined her dinner. Which she had worked on for hours and was really looking forward to.

Oops. Sorry Brandy. :-(

The last one scrolled off the front page, so time for another Darkflash! This one was originally sent to friends and family September 5, 2004 14:25:22 UTC.

After that last update, we did decide to go ahead and stay in Apalachicola for another night. We had plenty of time until the storm got this far, and it was good to just hang out for a day. We rested, we answered email, we watched the Weather channel. Amy watched some DVDs we got for her. Amy really really wanted to swim in the hotel pool, but we had not brought her swimsuit. But eventually late in the evening we let her go ahead and just swim in her clothes along with several other kids who were there. She had a blast and needed the release.

Anyway, overnight and this morning we are watching the Weather Channel. They don’t have any of the news networks on the TV here at the hotel. They have CNN headline news and a couple of local channels, but that is it. So Weather channel had the best coverage. One of their reporters is in Palm Bay, which is the location of the house we put an offer in on and is right near Melbourne. We got to watch him get pummeled and see pictures of the types of damage happening there. They say it is mostly trees down and “minor structural damage” (and of course power outages) rather than massive destruction. Hopefully it will stay that way. Right now as I write, the center of Frances is just a few miles away from Palm Bay. The area reportedly had at least one tornado too.

Meanwhile, the predicted track has it going directly over Apalachicola tomorrow sometime. (Well, somewhere within 50 miles on either side of here one you add the margin of error on the predictions.) They say by that time it will almost certainly just be a tropical storm, not a hurricane, although there is an outside chance it could be a minimal hurricane. The local news here is saying that we should expect flooding and power outages. The flooding could end up isolating some areas by cutting off the access roads. Hmm. Sounds fun. And we are RIGHT off the Gulf Coast.

Now, we have every confidence that we could indeed weather the storm quite safely here. But with the strong potential of flooding close by and of power outages, it doesn’t sound like the most pleasant of stays. If this was the prediction back at home, we’d just stay put. They are not evacuating this area at this time. But this isn’t home, this is a hotel. And we can easily move. So we are going to leave and head west again within the next hour.

Don’t know where exactly we will go of course. We’ll point the GPS at New Orleans again and just head in that general direction. We’ll probably still do some back roads, but we may consider switching to major highways since we are relatively far away from the main evacuation areas. As long as the highways aren’t still bumper to bumper, I’m OK using them. Although back roads are much more fun!

Don’t know how far we’ll actually go. Until we are tired of driving probably. Maybe see how far we can get before midnight? Dunno. Probably not all the way to New Orleans. We’ll see. :-) When we decide to stop, we’ll just take the next pet friendly motel along the route. Then we’ll stay there until we the storm passes and they say on TV that it is OK for people to return. Then we’ll start on the way back…