Last night I was going through my paper “in box” to make sure all the financial transactions I had receipts for were entered into Quicken and all outstanding bills were paid and such, just to make sure that everything was in order, and we knew exactly what the money situation is for closing, and more specifically for after closing, when we start having to spend money on immediate needs to get the place ready to move in. (For instance we need a washer and dryer and a mattress and such.) I was doing all that until around 08:00 UTC.

Then I decided that this might be a really good time to get the “Sam’s Net Worth” graph going again. I’d been slowly pulling the data from Quicken to do this over the last month or so, each time I did bills I had been printing a report with one quarter’s worth of net worth data at weekly intervals and putting that data into Excel where I was graphing it in my own peculiar way. (Not satisfied with the graphs Quicken produces out of the box.) At the rate I was going, I was adding a quarter’s worth of data every couple weeks. It would be a few months before the graph was up to the present and ready to post. So I decided to accellerate that and enter more data.

Well… Next thing I knew it was 12:00 UTC. I’d extended the graph so it now covers July 1994 to December 1998 though. I thought about continuing straight through until it was up to the present, but it would take a few more hours, and I was exausted, and frankly it was already the time I should be waking up. So the Sam’s New Worth Graph’s return will have to wait a bit longer. (It will be soon though, I’m going to be carefully monitoring things as we adapt to this move and the new conditions… as usual of course the web version will have the vertical axis labels removed, so folks can see trends, but not actual numbers.)

Anyway, finally headed to sleep. Then Amy woke up and started popping her head in every ten minutes. She wanted all kinds of things! She was up and ready to go. She’d set her alarm for some ungodly early time for some unknown reason, and had actually woken up. (She often sleeps through it.)

Anyway, I finally got to sleep. It is now 3 hours later. I am up again. Just woke Brandy up to go get Amy up (who of course fell back asleep). I am about to go hit the shower and get dressed and ready.

90 minutes from now we meet our agent for a final walk through of the property. There are a couple things they were still supposed to be working on which should be fixed by now, even at this late date. (The money for the screen is still going into escrow, some of which will be released to the contractor immediately after closing for them to schedule the work, the balance paid when the work is done… probably not for a couple months yet given the continued backlog for that kind of work.)

3 hours from now we go to the actual closing.

When that is done, we will have a house.

Then we have to start getting everything in order. We have planned out how we will do a lot of things. Others we decided to wait until we could actually be in there to even plan. There are a bunch of things we will need to buy right up front. We have worked out a preliminary budget we will have to live within for those sorts of things. (As well as a tentative budget for the amount we will need to live on PERIOD once we are in the new environs.)

Stress Stress Stress!

But this should be good.

If all goes well, which I presume it will, we’ll take some pictures of the new place and post here late tonight. And I suppose we’ll announce the new address then too.

Oh well. Gulp. I need to get ready. Already not really enough time to get breakfast or lunch or anything before we meet the agent. Maybe coffee.

Oh, have I mentioned I am sick as a dog right now too? Yucky cold, nasty cough, and lung reading thing under 400. Bleh! I probably should have tried to get more than 3 hours of sleep.

Oh well!

Fifty hours and forty minutes to closing as I write this.

At the moment, it looks like all issues have been resolved and all systems are go.

I’m heading to the bank this afternoon to get the cashier’s check.

I put a stripe on the tree. Do you like the stripe? I like the stripe!

Well, all the boxes and packages have been opened and the presents dispersed. I think we all got a lot of good loot that will keep us busy for a long time. Thanks to everybody who sent us stuff. We much appreciate it. (I’ll of course try to thank people individually too, but I didn’t keep an actual list this year, so it may take me awhile to figure out.)

We had a good Christmas. Everybody was up late the night before. I woke up at 9:30 AM and flipped on the TV. Remarkably though, Amy, who we expected to rise at the crack of dawn, did not get up until almost noon. So the whole presents thing took us all the afternoon. Outside it was pouring rain almost all day.

Once everything was open we watched a DVD Amy got. And now Brandy is making dinner. Then I think we’ll probably watch another DVD. Between Brandy, Amy and I we probably got about 30 hours of new DVDs to watch. :-)

And Brandy got me some new things to aid in my graphing! And there was a remote control car, and a bathrobe, and some clothes, and a few decorations for the house… and… and… well, like I said, I didn’t make a list. But lots of cool stuff!

Tomorrow the cleanup begins. :-)

Happy Trees and Boxes Day from the Minter/Donaghy/Roney’s!