Good Riddance

Meaning:
An expression of pleasure on being rid of some annoyance - usually an individual.

In our case, not an individual, but a rental property. Today we officially closed on the boat anchor, I mean house, we had in Ohio. The buyer, underqualified, and most likely to be default in a year or so, nickel and dimed us up to the very last minute. We're curious how he's going to afford putting new air conditioning units in the building, when he struggled to put 3.5% down on the house.

We are glad to be done with the nickel-dime buyer and a real estate agent who doesn't know her head from a head of lettuce. We're displeased, but will be writing letters to the real estate board in Ohio, as well as to the manager of her office. Not that we expect anything to happen, but at least we will be doing our part.

Now, about our new house, or what will hopefully be our new house. It's scheduled to go to auction next Thursday. Not good! The seller's agent is trying to postpone the "trustee sale" - which is where it would actually transfer back to the bank. If the agent's not successful, the bank will likely take posession of the house and put it back on the market in 60-90 days as a bank-owned property.

With that, we'll be leaving the Residence Inn this weekend and moving into a lovely country cottage. The owners are very nice, and we're looking forward to being their neighbors. We've signed a three-month lease, and hope that's long enough to find something permanent. If not, we'll probably negotiate more time at the cottage.

Our Girl is ONE!

We had a wonderful time at Cady's first birthday party. We had it at a beautiful park by a river, it was the perfect setting and we couldn't have asked for better weather! We had raspberry lemonade, cucumber-lemon water, wine, tomato-cucumber-feta salad, macaroni salad, a variety of sandwiches, cookies, dried papaya, chocolate dipped pretzels and cake. Here she is opening her presents!
And eating cake!

Here are the birthday girls with Jenny.

We're going to do Cady's hand print on canvas every year on her birthday. Here was the process on birthday #1. It didn't turn out as well as I had hoped. Next year, we'll do a practice print first :)

We're still waiting on our house. We are supposedly in the final stage of the short sale approval process, once we get approval in writing, we can get on with our inspections and get a closing date set. Keep your fingers crossed for us!