Mom to Bee

Where you at son?
The drawback with having a blog that strangers stalkers people read is that they actually notice when you don’t blog for a few days! Mama Bee has been crazy busy this week, but don’t worry my little honeys, I’ll be back and blogging before you can say “WTF, there is nothing on television tonight…”

Home Sweet Home
We have a possibility for a new home but I’m trying really hard not to jump the gun. But…I’ve pretty much already decided where all our furniture will go and which rooms to paint. *sigh* I’m kind of a retard that way – I simply do not have any patience.

We found this new home in a new-fangled tube of internets kind of way. While obsessively searching websites for any new homes on the market, I found Zillow. It’s a great website for searching for homes on the market but they have an even cooler feature: the Make Me Move price. How it works: a home owner who hasn’t put on their house on the market can list a price that they would move for.

So the house we found has a Make Me Move price listed. Now this “asking price” is totally over market price (but not far off from what we were expecting to pay). I emailed them through the site and we’ve been exchanging emails ever since. We toured the house this week and really like it. An added plus is that the homeowners are super cool too – we actually ended up chatting for more than a half hour after we toured the house! I don’t know if they are sold on our offer, but we’ll see how things go in the next few weeks…

Are You Really Sure You Think You Can Dance?
I have to start this segment by saying I really really am a fan of this show. I even took Nana to Everett last year to see the tour. Did you catch that? I went to Everett for this show!! I think that speaks for itself.

But really? Seriously?! Since when have we interpreted “dance for your life” as “turn in a bunch of circles snapping your fingers and try to incorporate about 8 trillion random leaps”? At least Comfort brings it every time she has to “dance for her life.” And speaking of, as far as I can tell, when the dancers fail their solo, not one has been put to death! I’m not necessarily complaining, but false advertising, anyone?

And, while I’m not a huge fan of Cat Deeley, I don’t really have anything against her. With that said, can she please learn how to say “girl” correctly? How many times must we hear about “One Guy and One GULL” being eliminated? Really, Cat? Are water foul really participating?

And dear God, STOP HAVING THE PRE-TEENS IN THE AUDIENCE YELL “JUDGES”!!! I’d rather hear you talk about “gulls” all night that hear you pronounce “jew-gez” and then giggle after the thoroughly rehearsed audience says it with you. I would buy each 13-year-old in the audience a new Walkman or Hypercolor shirt or whatever the hell kids like these days just to have them react with complete silence the next time Cat plays Simon Says with them.

Ding! Dong! Ding!
Yep, those are wedding bells you’re hearing! My work season has officially begun tonight with the first wedding rehearsal of the summer! Things went super well – I’m always shocked when everyone shows up relatively on time.

Tomorrow is a full day of wedding and I think this one will be really great. The bride and groom have always been so easy-going and organized so I can’t imagine anything will go astray (excuse me a second while I go find some wood to knock on in my laminate-covered apartment).

Oh yeah. Did I mention that tomorrow is supposed to be in the mid-80′s, maybe even mid-90′s inland? While some of you enjoy sitting in your air-conditioned house or even in the shade somewhere, please take a minute to think of yours truly dressed to the nines and running around like a headless chicken in the bright sun for 8 hours…

Song title: Where Did You Go? by Boyzone

Tonight I cried while rocking Baby Bee asleep in her room. Surrounded by the pink walls we painted after we found out that we were having a baby girl, I broke down knowing that this was going to be the last night that I rocked Baby Bee to sleep in this room.

As I cried, Baby Bee lifted her head off my shoulder and stared at me. She gently lifted up her hand and patted my tears on my cheek. I felt like she was saying, “It’s okay, Mom. We’ll make new memories in our new home!”

As I smiled at my sleepy baby and reacted to her pats, she then proceeded to start slapping my face as hard as she could (with a giant grin on her face). I’m pretty sure that she was now telling me, “Okay, woman. Enough is enough. Snap the hell out of it already.” Needless to say, I left the room with a smile on my face.

Song Title: Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina by Evita – the musical

Call me slow, but it just hit me today that tomorrow will be the last day that we will be living in our F-Dub home. We’re going to start our move on Saturday and hopefully be living in our Hills Shoe Box by Saturday evening. But now I don’t want to go!

For years our F-Dub home was nothing special. It was built in the early 1970′s and boy did it look like it! But the crappy place grew on me. We fixed it all up (unfortunately, not in time to really enjoy it) and it slowly grew from crappy first home to our comfy home.

I’ll always remember the day we got the keys to Mr. Bee and I’s first home together. It was the weekend that Mr. Bee proposed…

I was awoken early (6:30am-ish and to a professional student at the time, that’s early) with a phone call from Mr. Bee. He was too excited and couldn’t wait any longer for me to wake up. He told me to wake up, pack a bag (he gave me a few situations to pack for), and head down to our new home. About a half hour later, I was on the road and got another phone call from the Mr. He told me to look underneath my driver’s seat. I pulled out a travel guide for San Francisco! Sweet!
I met Nana (back when she was just called “Mom”) at the new house with the keys and gave her the first tour of the house. That weekend the Mr. and I went to San Francisco where Mr. Bee popped the big question on a romantic bluff on the ocean after the sunset. *sigh*

We got back in town late Sunday night and just couldn’t wait to start our new *engaged* life, so we raided my parents house for sleeping bags, towels, toilet paper, the works. We created a little nest in our living room and started living in the house that night! (We also learned the hard way that apparently the utilities had been shut off prior to closing…Thank God for parents living two minutes away! Houses without running water suck.)

That was five years ago. This house has seen us through the end of law school, starting a business, job promotions, our first (and psychotic) dog, our first pregnancy and, of course, our first child. And now we have just sold her off to some douchebags like she’s our red-headed stepchild. How do we know that they will love her (and hate her) as we have?

But now we’re moving to greener pastures. And to celebrate, we’re feasting tonight on my favorite local Chinese food (and pretty much the *only* Chinese food that delivers to our crappy neck of the woods). It’s really the only restaurant in the area that I’ll miss – except for Panera and Great Harvest Bread Co. (but god knows I’ll be back to visit those places like every single day).

On a super, happier note, Sissy and Family moves home tomorrow! I’ll be loitering around Seatac at noon tomorrow to pick them up, but it still hasn’t hit me that they are back home (Western Washington) for good! They’ve been gone about four and a half years now and I’m pretty sure my mom is pooping herself with excitement tonight. Maybe I should bring some Depends with me to the airport…

Song Title: All Good Things (Come To An End) by Nelly Furtado

Oh yeah, and remember that house we were going to put an offer on? It’s in pre-foreclosure. Back to the drawing board…

Song Title: Try Again by Aaliyah

Today has been full of moving-related appointments here in the F-Dub house. The first appointment of the day was with Nielsen TV Ratings. Now that we are officially no longer a Nielsen Household, I can finally publicly discuss it.

For those of you that don’t know, Nielsen TV Ratings is the huge company in charge of telling the big boss guys at say NBC, ABC, CBS, etc. what shows people actually watch. They put something in your TiVo (I imagine some sort of tiny little man with a clipboard and a cell phone?) that keeps track of the programs you are watching. You also have a little box that gets mad at you every 40 minutes or so and makes you press a button so they know you are still watching a program and aren’t totally distracted writing a pointless blog post or something.

Needless to say, I loved participating. Being a hopeless (and somewhat disturbed) television addict, I love knowing that my television preferences actually mean something. I think just our house represented approximately 11,000 people in the area. I want to watch The Hills? Suck it, Federal Way! I represent YOU! Muuuaaaahahahahaha!!! But I digress…

We got approached by the Nielsen people a little more than a year ago, but because they only care what people with children watch, we had to wait until Baby Bee made her appearance before we could participate. And since they choose households randomly by address, now that we are moving to what I will call “The Hills Ghetto,” our little black boxes (or “Neil” as we call him at home) can’t come with us.

Mr. Bee is probably relieved. He constantly is freaking out when he sees me watching The Hills or something like Celebrity Circus (I missed it last night! Will someone tell me what it was about?!). He starts arguing that because we represent so many people and we are influencing what stays on the air, we can’t encourage crappy tv shows. I, on the other hand, proudly take full credit for keeping that crap on the air! There just aren’t any other choices!! Sure, I’d rather by watching Pushing Daisies or How I Met Your Mother, but thank you Writer’s Strike for screwing up my television/life schedule. Mama needs some new tv!!

I Could Write A Book
No, I really couldn’t write a book, but am I like one of the only bloggers in the blogosphere that isn’t a professional writer? “What?! You aren’t a professional writer?!” you ask? Shocked? Surprised? Yeah, I didn’t think so…

Song Title: I’m Gonna Miss You Forever by Aaron Carter; I Could Write A Book by Ella Fitzgerald

Douche or not a Douche, That Is The Question…
Just when we thought all the house drama was over, it keeps on coming! Late last night we get an email and phone call from our agent who has been contacted by the buyers’ agent…and they are asking (randomly, I might add) for an additional $500.

Seriously?!

No explanation. Just an addendum that says, “Um, yeah, give us more money because we’re greedy bastards.” And all this after they switched their financing on us, too (which doesn’t make a huge difference, but would have made a big difference in the original negotiations). Arg.
(Extra points if you recognized Greedy Smurf above)

Tiny Love Space
On a more positive (?) note, we found an apartment yesterday. One apartment. Apparently this is the only apartment in the entire South End that will do a month-to-month lease (and that’s with an extra $100 tacked on to the rent each month!) We were searching for a high end apartment in the area to stay while we find our new house, but all of them practically laughed at me when I asked if they would accept a month-to-month lease. *sigh*

The new place will be close to our future home since it is in the Hills. It will be nice to get to know the area and get used to the neighborhood. The bad news, you ask? Well, the apartment is approximately the size of Baby Bee’s pinkie toe. And…it’s on the 3rd floor. So much for an easy move. We already weren’t going to bring all our furniture in to the new apartment, but holy crap monkeys, we’re only going to be able to bring like 7 pieces of furniture! And that’s not going to include our super fantastic California King bed (which, if my calculations are correct, is the same square footage as the entire apartment).

Offer
Speaking of not wanting to live in a shoe box for a very long time, we got the ball rolling on an offer last night on a house! It’s the right house on the right side of the street on the right street in the Hills, but we had to low ball an offer since the owners of the house are frickin’ delusional with their asking price.

They put their house on the market 100 or so days ago and their beginning asking price was $100,000 MORE than what they paid for it back in 2006 (i.e. the peak of the market). Welcome to the recession, assholes. You will not be getting that much for your house. And it’s not like they made any improvements or anything.

They have since lowered the price but are still asking what we think is way too much. So our offer is like $50,000 below asking! LOL! Part of me (a teeny, tiny part of me) hopes that they will realize they are crack smokers and come to terms with the realistic price of the house. The other part (99.9% of me) has a feeling they are going to tell us to suck it. More updates to come later today, I’m sure…

Song Title: Money For Nothing by Dire Straits; Tiny Loves Spaces by Jewel; Offer by Alanis Morisette

Now that we’re officially going to be homeless in (eek!) less than 2 weeks, Mr. Bee and I have been trying to figure out where the heck we’re going to live! Originally, we were thinking we’d save some cash and stay at Nana & Poppa’s Lake House in Shelton.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Seattle/Puget Sound area, to get to Shelton, drive a billion miles, when you get to the middle of no where turn left. You are now in Shelton.

This was originally enticing because we’d have almost no bills to pay and we’d be living on a lake when the weather gets nicer (that, of course, is if the weather ever gets nice…). But we finally came to the conclusion that with my wedding season quickly approaching and Mr. Bee’s commute going from 40 minutes per day to roughly 2 or 2 1/2 hours per day, it just wasn’t going to be worth the money saved.

So, we decided to live…

…wait for it…

…in an apartment. That’s right, faithful readers/stalkers. We’re going from the ghetto of the F-Dub to the super ghetto of living in an apartment! We’ll be living up at the Hills and we’re hoping that will make the second move in to our eventual new home even easier, but I reeeeeeally hope that the apartments are nice and not full of annoying apartment people. Since my last apartment was about the size of a postage stamp, I figure this new place can only be an improvement.

We’re going to tour the Hills apartments this afternoon, so I’ll report back soon.

Song Title: In The Ghetto by Elvis

Well, after all the crap and negotiating for weeks, our house is officially selling!! They accepted our “This or Suck It” offer (they chose “This,” not “Suck it”) and now we’re just waiting for closing. Except I discovered that, being the retard I am, I accidentally scheduled our closing to be Wednesday.

THIS Wednesday.

Yeah, that’s not going to really work for me. So first thing tomorrow I will be kissing someone’s butt trying to get it rescheduled for a few weeks out. But the good news is: We will officially be homeless in 17 days! Oh wait…did I say good news?…

No Sleep Tonight
Last night, my lovely lady friends hosted a bridal shower for Brain Twin, and afterwards we had a good, old-fashioned (but with copious amounts of alcohol) slumber party. It was so much fun that I literally came close to peeing myself about five times due to laughing ridiculously hard (the alcohol probably didn’t help much either).

The highlights of the evening were (in no particular order):
**Each of us saying the word “vag” approximately 8 billion times
**Brain Twin’s slow clap
**T-Money being attacked by an ironing board
**Playing Presidents and Assholes for the first time and getting to hear everyone say “Jealous?!?” and “meow meow” about a billion times

We also played Loaded Questions, which is a game where you answer questions and one person has to figure out who said what answer. Some of the funniest question/answer combos have got to be (and these are only the ones I remember; I’m sure there are better ones that got lost in my Bellini-induced coma):

If you were mayor, what would your city be called?
Transyldouchia, Vagatopia

If you were going to be on a game show, which show would it be?
Wheel of Vag, Price is Right (vag edition), Jeopardy (vag edition), Vag or no Vag, Douche or No Douche

Are you starting to sense a theme yet?

And I think the question/answer that could possibly be the best/most memorable for the night (and has since become our group’s tag line) is…

Wait for it…

What three words best describe you?
My. Vag. Awesome.

Have I mentioned how much I love my friends recently?

{slow clap}

Writer’s Note
Oh, and I don’t recommend Googling “Slumber Party” unless you are specifically looking for porn…

Song Titles: I Am A Lonesome Hobo by Bob Dylan; No Sleep Tonight by The Faders

Can you believe that’s an actual song title? LOVE it!

So here’s a house update…I swear to God will this ever be over…

Last Sunday we had our home inspection which came back with five items the prospective buyers would like us to do:

#1: Replace the furnace. Cost: $3000+
Now the furnace is original to the house but works fine.

#2: Clean all the heating ducts. Cost: don’t know. don’t care.

#3: Plumb the master bath sink.
We tried to have this done before the inspection. We obviously knew it had to be done; we just lack any sort of plumbing skills…

#4: Replace handle on valve under garage sink. Cost: Like $0.99.
Seriously? It’s like a buck to buy the plastic valve handle. Whatever, we just had the plumber do it.

#5: Replace the entire electrical panel in the garage (i.e. like the whole circuit breaker thing). Cost: $2500+
We didn’t initially realize this would cost so much! WTF!

Before we knew the cost for #5, we responded to their requests with:
#1: We’ll service the furnace.
#2: No.
#3: Yes.
#4: Yes.
#5: yes.

THEY come back and say:
Yes on the above PLUS $3500!!!!!!

WHAT. THE. FRICK?!

So our new offer to them is:
#1: We’ll service the furnace. Suck it.
#2: Suck it.
#3: Done.
#4: Done.
#5: We’ll either replace it or give you $2500 cash.

Oh…and SUCK IT!

This is pretty much our final offer because I’m tired of all this bullshit. They are getting such a great remodeled home for way less than it’s worth and since we don’t need to move anymore (thanks douche bags that gave our Hills Home to someone else!), if they tell us to suck it, then we’ll just take the house off the market.

It’s such a shame after all we’ve (read: I’ve) done to get the house on the market, but oh well. I just want to know one way or the other so that I can either sigh a huge breathe of relief and chills out OR get off my ass to cancel all our utilities, get more moving boxes and basically work 24/7 for the next 20 days.

SIDE NOTE: Seriously, will whoever please stop emailing me offers to “upgrade my penis”? Really? I’m kind of okay not upgrading at this time. Geesh.

Song Title: I Want To Stab You With Something Rusty by Against All Authority

**Warning: What follows is a selfish diatribe on the suckiest birthday ever except for maybe Asian Brain Twin’s gay boyfriend dumping her. She definitely wins that contest!**

{{sigh}}

Here begins the long ass story of how we lost our Hills house…

Once upon a time, in the Dirty Dirty South, we found a house unlike any other. Well, okay, there may be approximately 8 trillion other homes on the same street that look exactly like it, but we liked this one, okay? Geesh, get off my back already.

Any who, we found this house and after attempting to put an offer down, we found out that they wouldn’t accept contingent offers. So we immediately put our house on the market (after two weeks of excruciatingly exhausting work packing up all our really cluttered crap and staging all the remaining crap in a fashionable way) and low-and-behold! We actually get an offer on our house after it’s only been on the market 10 days! TEN DAYS! In *this* market?! Crazy talk, I tell ya.

We are just thrilled. We plan on making an offer on our Hills house as soon as the inspection on our house is completed. But wait! Someone is already putting in an offer on “our” home in the Hills?! How dare they?! (In fact, I believe my actual reaction was, “Oh, fuck.”) So we scramble with our buying agent and get an offer on the table…

Saturday: Find out someone is trying to buy the Hills house

Sunday: Tour the Hills house and neighboring houses for sale. We determine that we do love the house and want to buy it tout de suite (thank you for the French lesson, Sex in the City).

Monday: Sign paperwork for offer on Hills House

Tuesday: Submit offer. We’re told if we make it non-contingent on the sale of our house, then the house is ours. We do make the changes! We have a house!

Tuesday Evening: Oh, wait. They want to allow the other people to up their offer if they want the house. How about you come back with your highest and best offer Wednesday morning?

Wednesday Morning: We say, “Pound sand, assholes. That *was* our best offer.” We think we’ve lost the house.

Wednesday Midday: Guess what?! The other people said “Pound Sand!” too! We’re still in this!!

Wednesday Afternoon: Oh wait. Ha ha! Remember when we said you were still in this? Yeah… not so much. They gave it to the other people. Even though we offered $$ over any offer of theirs. They just gave it to the other folks anyhow.

So in approximately four weeks, we’ll officially be homeless.

Suckiest. Birthday. Ever.

OMG, did I mention that my email was down all day too? Jesus Christ, Kharma’s not fucking around today. I must have been Ghengis Khan or Hitler last time around or something…

A Little Help From My Friends
Besides my family, the redeeming part of today was ending it with my closest friends drinking Cosmos and watching the final season of Sex and The City. It was a nice send off for our F-Dub house and it was really weird thinking that tonight will be the last night that all the Lovely Lady Friends hang out here.

And OMG, how much do I love the Lovely Lady Friends? Anywhere I can comfortably say “Fuck,” “Jesus Christ,” and “vag” without anyone blinking a beautiful eyelash is heaven to me! It’s so amazing finally (finally) having a set of wonderful female friends that are soooo honest, and so FUN, and so dependable! Fingers crossed that I’ll never need it, but I know these ladies would be at my side in a heartbeat if I needed them for anything!

And don’t even get me started on how much they love Baby Bee! It was just about the cutest thing in the world to see Bee snuggle up with her Auntie Mrs. J! And Mr. J’s ovaries would have just about popped if he would’ve seen it (um, PS: Mr. J, can you knock up your wife already?! I don’t want to pull out the “shooting blanks” jokes, but I’ll do it. You know me. I’ll do it.)

Anyway, that’s a little (novel) on how I spent my 29th birthday. Only one more year in my 20′s…But 30 is the new 20, right? RIGHT?! Oh dear God, I need another Cosmo…

Song Titles: Happy Birthday Blues by B.B. King; A Little Help From My Friends by Joe Cocker