Dolphin’s Dock

Ok, I’m a little late finding this, but I love it.

Note to art-illiterates: Nudity, on it’s own, is not obscene. Or is this another case of “naked woman = art; naked man = porn?”

That is how the home inspector described our house purchase this morning. There are a few bigger problems that will have to be taken care of by the seller before we close (for example, removing an old gas line that used to go to the hot water heater before it was switched to electric), and a several minor things that hopefully the seller will take care of but if it goes above what they are required by law to fix, and they refuse, we won’t mind doing ourselves (for example, the kitchen sink isn’t caulked). The inspector certainly didn’t give us the impression that we had anything to worry about.

The inspector (who, while not a real estate agent, clearly sees his share of houses being purchased) seems to think that with a little love, we could have a house that will bring us $40-50K more than what we’re paying for it when the time comes to sell it once the housing market has rebounded. That would be wonderful news indeed. I believe in buying a house because you want to live in it, not just because of the investment value (unless you don’t plan to use it as your residence and really are just buying it as an investment property), but it’s sure nice to know that the home you want to live in is a good investment as well!

I realize I’ve not been posting much lately (alot going on) so maybe the spambots have decided my blog is dead and therefore they have less change of being akismeted and summarily deleted, but I’ve been getting an INSANE amount of spam here recently. Fortunately, Akismet is catching them, but I swear since June has started I must have had to delete a couple hundred spam messages. What’s up with that?

Front of house

The front porch

The foyer

The kitchen

The backyard from the back porch

Of course there was one other concern that I had regarding getting out of our old place. Namely, what if we needed back in! I mean, there are things that can fall through in the best laid plans. For instance if something big showed up on the home inspection and our land lord had already found a new tenant for the house we’re in now, we would need to find something in an impossibly short period of time or find ourselves homeless. Turns out, like every other concern that has popped up in this process, the solution has popped up just as quickly and effortlessly. When we went to give 60 days notice to our landlord, we voiced the concern. Turns out, they want to put a new roof on the house after we’re out anyways (side note: that’s good, it needs it). There for, they won’t start advertising the place until after we move, giving them time to install a new roof before the next tenant moves in. Meaning, if something does fall through with our house purchase, our current place will still be available for us!

It’s really been amazing how everything is just falling into place for us on this. We’ve placed an offer, been countered, and accepted the counter (though we haven’t yet heard back from the seller). It appears the only other obstacle left to cross is the home inspection. Wish us continuing good luck!

Well, you may have noticed that things looks a little different here now. I’ve been so busy lately that I have only had time to occasionally pick at it here and there, so it’s taken me a LONG time to get this theme developed. I dove a little deeper into WordPress’s templating core in this one giving it full support for threaded comments (a feature added in WordPress 2.7, I believe), and the ability to easily switch out the header image (which I probably won’t really do, but I wanted to teach myself HOW to develop a theme with that capability). So I’m pretty proud of this one.

I made the conscious decision when I started this theme to NOT worry about Internet Explorer 6 compatibility. IE6 is a crap browser and now that it’s two versions old, it’s time for people to upgrade. I haven’t tested the template in IE6, but I know it will look pretty messy because, if nothing else I used a fair number of transparent PNGs which IE6 doesn’t natively support. If you have to use IE6 for some reason, there’s always the RSS feed. But outside of IE6, I’ve tested it in IE 7 & 8, and the latest versions of Firefox and Safari. If you run into any bugs that I’ve missed let me know.

Of course, also let me know what you think about the theme in general!

Longtime readers will know that TheBoyfriend™ and I got some property for a VERY good price awhile back and it’s been our intention to build our dream house on it. That is still our plan however we don’t want to build less than what we want on the property (because once it’s built, it’s there, and it’s not like you can just knock it down later and live in a tent until you get the new one built), and right now, we simply can’t afford to put the house we want there (not that we want some huge mansion, but I’m guessing building the house we want is maybe $40-50K above our current budget. In the meantime, we’ve been dumping our money into rent payments that don’t do any more than put a roof over our heads for another month and fund our landlord’s retirement. Neither of us are that financially minded, but we’ve come to the conclusion that THAT is probably not the best way we could be using what money we’ve got.

With all the squawking about what kind of marriage is acceptable to God these days, it’s nice to have Betty Bowers, America’s Best Christian , to spell out for us exactly what kind of marriages God likes.

*Snicker*

I barely saw any American Idol this season, but from what I saw, last night’s results were simply a case of good looks beating out talent. People are acting like that’s the first time that’s happened in the pop music world…