Holly’s Happenings

And before you ask, no, the house hasn’t sold! We have a good friend that lives just around the corner from here and his girlfriend has been pestering him to get the remodeling done on his house so that he can sell it. But the fact is, he doesn’t want to sell it! The current real estate market is in bad shape and with the amount of work that needs to be done on the house, he’d have to invest about $25,000 in it right now to even get a decent amount out of the house. On top of that, he bought this house more than 10 years ago as his “retirement” house.

It’s a cute little house that sits on a little more than 5 acres of land. The house itself has a little more than 1,500 square foot of living area, basically the same amount of room we have here. But right now, it’s in complete disarray! Our friend has been working on it, little by little, for about 5 years now. The walls are currently nothing more than drywall and the floors are nothing more than sub floor. He’s gone over all of the wiring and plumbing in the house and is currently finishing up the wiring and insulation in the attic. Once he gets that done it will be a matter of getting all of his clutter out of the house, then he’ll start working on all of the finishing work.

Right now he has a brand new kitchen and bathroom, complete with some really sweet looking Hansgrohe faucets, sitting in boxes in the dining room. So we told him that we’d come down and help him get both rooms installed and get the painting done, in lieu of a deposit. The house will still need more work done after we move in, so part of the rent will be “taken out in trade”, in other words he’ll provide the materials and we’ll do the work.

The best part about this house is that it gets us out of the horrific school district we’re currently living in! We’ve lived in this school district for the past 5 school years and it’s literally been a nightmare! Rather than putting the focus on important things like making sure the kids get a good education, they’d rather put the focus on a ridiculous uniform dress code and whether or not the kids are wearing a shirt to school that has a logo on it or whether or not they have a frigging belt on. But it gets even better! Depending on who you are in the eyes of the school administration staff, you can actually get away with wearing what you want to because the uniform dress code is NEVER administered across the board. One child can get into trouble for wearing something and another child who is wearing the same thing or something worse will get away with it. And the school is so poorly underscoring that it’s currently rated in Academic Emergency. But hey, at least the students all look the same, that’s what’s important, isn’t it?

OMG, I can’t even remotely explain how excited I am right now! I got the tracking numbers last week and have almost stalked the UPS website checking for updates. The delivery date said May 13, which is tomorrow, so that’s what I expected. But when I got home from taking my son into school a little while ago I almost died when I seen a package on the front porch!

As you may recall, back in February I wrote this post with a video that I made telling why I felt Buy.com ROCKS! I had so much fun making that video and it started me on a video making spree…LOL!

But that video won me one of THESE!!! I am SOOOOOO totally excited, this is something that my family has wanted for a VERY long time, but it just was one of those things that, as much as we wanted it, we just couldn’t justify the cost! Well, thanks to Buy.com and the company that sponsored this, I now don’t have to choose between paying a bill or putting food on the table and buying something that is going to bring my family even closer!

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!

I just thought I’d give you a heads up and let you know that I’m going to be taking a trip in a few weeks! It’s not one that I had planned or expected, it actually came up very unexpectedly in a conversation yesterday!

I’ll be leaving around Memorial Day and will be gone for a week or so. I’m going on a road trip with two wonderful ladies to the West Coast, our final stop being San Jose, California. Along the way we hope to be able to make a few stops and seeing some of the many wonderful sites our country has to offer and after arriving in San Jose I think we might try to sneak up to San Francisco before flying home.

It will be the first time in the 15+ years that I’ve been a parent that I’ve gone away from my kids for more than a couple of days, but I have no doubt that they and their father will be fine while I’m gone. OK, I lied, I do have my doubts….LOL! But you know what, I NEED this more than I’ve needed anything for a VERY long time! I give everything I have to give to my family and rarely do anything for myself, so for once I’m going to be selfish! I think I have the right to be…LOL! I do plan on taking my husbands laptop along, but not for anything more than keeping in touch! I need a break from everything, but that’s not saying that I won’t pop in and say hello and let you know how my trip is going!

I managed to drive up to Michigan Saturday morning in the midst of a snow storm to meet my mom for some shopping and spend time with her. My mom is just a couple of months away from becoming a great grandmother for the 2nd time and I swear if you didn’t know other wise you’d thinkit was her very first grandchild that was about to come into the world…LOL!

Since Christmas has been over my mom has been out buying everything a baby will need from clothes, diapers and bibs to bottles, burp wrags and toys. It’s nice to see mom get this excited over stuff, it gives her something to do other than work for a change! And as surprising as it is, my niece wasn’t too upset over finding out that her second child is another boy. I know that she reallly had her hopes up that it would be a girl this time, but she’s just as excited that her son that just turned two is going to have a little brother!

And as always, when I go to the hospital to see the baby after it’s born, I’ll have to say the line that I stole from Monica on Friends, “I’m your great Aunt Holly and I’ll always have gum”, LOL!!

I’m sure you’ve heard me talk here about the problems that we’ve had with our phone company. Since we live out in the country having cable TV and/or internet is not an option. I tried to convince the cable company to bring service to our old house, even going to the extent of drawing up a petiton and taking it to the neighbors and asking them to sign it if they would be willing to switch to cable if it were offered. Amazingly better than 75% of the neighbors were more than happy to sign, they all agreed with me in the fact that they were tired of the monopoly that the phone company held over the area and wanted other options! Unfortunately, the cable company didn’t “bite” and said it just would not be financially feesible for them to bring service any further.

Since moving to the new house, we’ve been faced with problem after problem when it comes to the phone and internet service. Once again our only option is the same phone company we had at the old house. But we also found out that lightning had gone through the lines at this house sometime after the last people lived here, and we also found out that the current lines would only support a lower speed DSL connection than what we had at the old house. But a recent letter from the phone company talked about changes and upgrades that they plan to start implementing to their customers starting this spring. One of the upgrades is supposed to include replacing the current phone lines with better fiber optic cables that are supposedly going to give us better phone service as well as the option to upgrade to a faster DSL speed. They’ve replaced the lines once since last October with very little improvment, so lets hope the upgrades they plan on doing this Spring are an improvement because I’m really NOT liking their services and I don’t like not having options!