Merry Christmas everyone. Your present this year is Video's Anual Year in Review 2008 Edition
It's 3:31 am as I begin writing this. And it's hard to sum up the year, as it always is. My entire year can be broken down into two parts, one good and one bad. Normally I would try to sepeate the good from the bad, but they're intertwined in the year and co-exist, so I'll just go with how the year was.
The year began, as it always does, on January 1st, with a fondue dinner with my friends that we throw every year. The first few months of the year began with us preparing to buy our first hosue. We were getting pre-pre approval, meeting with our bank, who turned us on to a realtor that we ended up sticking with named Lauren, and the hunt for the house began. I'm not sure how many houses we looked at, many of them being a blur, but there's a few that stood out. We'd come up with little nicknames for each house to keep them seperate in our heads. Dirty House. Blue House. Ziggaraut House (seriously). They all had things we liked about them, but plenty that we didn't.
While we were searching for our house, the bad happened. In late April, my dad suffered a massive stroke. Nobody was home at the time. We believe he was found within the critical period, but he was in a neuro ICU ward for for a good long while while they worked on keeping him going. He lost movement in the right side of his body and the ability to speak, but back then that didn't really matter, he would be heavily sedated most of the time. So that's a life altering experience for the family.
So, with this hanging over me and being on my mind pretty constantly, we continued on with the home search, and eventually found one that we liked, and that counter offered us. The day that we were counter offered was the day that I went to visit my dad still in the hospital, but out of the ICU. I remember it because on the trip down Kim and I discussed if we would counter their counter, or go through with it. We decided to go through with it and begin the steps to buy the house.
We went and met with the owner, who was moving because she was getting married and moving her family in with him. We bought some furniture off of her, some of it which proved to be pretty worthless (a mower that died shortly after we bought it and a grill in such bad condition I couldn't do anything to get past its rusted and worn down bolts). The inspection went fine, few problems here and there, but nothing game changing. So in August we signed the papers and moved in to our first house.
It's a two story with attached garage, eat-in kitchen that's not used for eating in, dining room, living room, 2.5 bathrooms, 3 bedrooms, 2 of which we are using for our offices for the time being, and a partial / partial finished basement. I have a fenced in backyard that we spent late summer taming, and a lawn out front that needs some weeding and reseeding, but the fundamentals are in place. We're really happy with it, and we have just kinda begun working on parts of it. We have a lot of things that we want to do in the spring and summer next year. I hope our motivation keeps up.
While we're doing all of this, my dad's been discharged from the hospital. From a medical standpoint, there's not a whole lot more they can do for him. He was placed in a kind of waiting facility with a friendly staff, but I was not at all fond of his doctor, nor the conditions that the rooms were in. Mom was waiting for a nursing home near their home to have a bed open up for him where he could start going through rehab. And while all that's happening, the effects of a recession in the economy become more apparent, and my poor mom feels the squeeze. It's really hard to be happy about a new home when your parents' are on the verge of losing theirs, so we helped where we could afford to, namely our Bush refunds that we just didn't need and felt would go better to them, plus some extra that could spare.
From here, there's not a whole lot more on the home front. We're all moved in and unpacked. We picked up some new toys for ourselves, and a bunch of things that you just need when you own a hosue, like ladders, and gardening stuff, and new furniture, and wall decor and stuff like that. We're living comfortably and are happy with how things are for us right now. Some things will change, but that's ok and will hopefully only make things better.
On the family side of things, dad eventually got put in the nursing home for rehab, and has been in and out of the hospital again with cases of pnemonia, I guess it's very common in stroke patients. Right now he's in the hospital again, but the last I heard he's doing ok. My mom and sister have even reported seeing him wiggle the fingers on his right side recently, so hope is always still there.
So that's been pretty much my year. I'm not in a real Christmas spirit kind of mood this year, some of it being that I'm perfectly content with what I have right now, and I would rather those that are having a hard time making ends meet spend on themselves instead of me, and part because of how my dad's doing. There is a very precious commodity that I'm discovering with age called "time". I just don't have enough time to keep everything running anymore. I try to stretch myself over a bunch of things at once, and I just can't keep it going. Tiny cracks form in each thing, and while most everything that matters is strong enough to handle a few small cracks, there's a lot of things that I like to do that have just been shelved because there's not enough days in the week to get to everything.
So, thinking of all of you and wishing everyone a Merry Christmas, and especially a Happy New Year.
- Video
The year began, as it always does, on January 1st, with a fondue dinner with my friends that we throw every year. The first few months of the year began with us preparing to buy our first hosue. We were getting pre-pre approval, meeting with our bank, who turned us on to a realtor that we ended up sticking with named Lauren, and the hunt for the house began. I'm not sure how many houses we looked at, many of them being a blur, but there's a few that stood out. We'd come up with little nicknames for each house to keep them seperate in our heads. Dirty House. Blue House. Ziggaraut House (seriously). They all had things we liked about them, but plenty that we didn't.
While we were searching for our house, the bad happened. In late April, my dad suffered a massive stroke. Nobody was home at the time. We believe he was found within the critical period, but he was in a neuro ICU ward for for a good long while while they worked on keeping him going. He lost movement in the right side of his body and the ability to speak, but back then that didn't really matter, he would be heavily sedated most of the time. So that's a life altering experience for the family.
So, with this hanging over me and being on my mind pretty constantly, we continued on with the home search, and eventually found one that we liked, and that counter offered us. The day that we were counter offered was the day that I went to visit my dad still in the hospital, but out of the ICU. I remember it because on the trip down Kim and I discussed if we would counter their counter, or go through with it. We decided to go through with it and begin the steps to buy the house.
We went and met with the owner, who was moving because she was getting married and moving her family in with him. We bought some furniture off of her, some of it which proved to be pretty worthless (a mower that died shortly after we bought it and a grill in such bad condition I couldn't do anything to get past its rusted and worn down bolts). The inspection went fine, few problems here and there, but nothing game changing. So in August we signed the papers and moved in to our first house.
It's a two story with attached garage, eat-in kitchen that's not used for eating in, dining room, living room, 2.5 bathrooms, 3 bedrooms, 2 of which we are using for our offices for the time being, and a partial / partial finished basement. I have a fenced in backyard that we spent late summer taming, and a lawn out front that needs some weeding and reseeding, but the fundamentals are in place. We're really happy with it, and we have just kinda begun working on parts of it. We have a lot of things that we want to do in the spring and summer next year. I hope our motivation keeps up.
While we're doing all of this, my dad's been discharged from the hospital. From a medical standpoint, there's not a whole lot more they can do for him. He was placed in a kind of waiting facility with a friendly staff, but I was not at all fond of his doctor, nor the conditions that the rooms were in. Mom was waiting for a nursing home near their home to have a bed open up for him where he could start going through rehab. And while all that's happening, the effects of a recession in the economy become more apparent, and my poor mom feels the squeeze. It's really hard to be happy about a new home when your parents' are on the verge of losing theirs, so we helped where we could afford to, namely our Bush refunds that we just didn't need and felt would go better to them, plus some extra that could spare.
From here, there's not a whole lot more on the home front. We're all moved in and unpacked. We picked up some new toys for ourselves, and a bunch of things that you just need when you own a hosue, like ladders, and gardening stuff, and new furniture, and wall decor and stuff like that. We're living comfortably and are happy with how things are for us right now. Some things will change, but that's ok and will hopefully only make things better.
On the family side of things, dad eventually got put in the nursing home for rehab, and has been in and out of the hospital again with cases of pnemonia, I guess it's very common in stroke patients. Right now he's in the hospital again, but the last I heard he's doing ok. My mom and sister have even reported seeing him wiggle the fingers on his right side recently, so hope is always still there.
So that's been pretty much my year. I'm not in a real Christmas spirit kind of mood this year, some of it being that I'm perfectly content with what I have right now, and I would rather those that are having a hard time making ends meet spend on themselves instead of me, and part because of how my dad's doing. There is a very precious commodity that I'm discovering with age called "time". I just don't have enough time to keep everything running anymore. I try to stretch myself over a bunch of things at once, and I just can't keep it going. Tiny cracks form in each thing, and while most everything that matters is strong enough to handle a few small cracks, there's a lot of things that I like to do that have just been shelved because there's not enough days in the week to get to everything.
So, thinking of all of you and wishing everyone a Merry Christmas, and especially a Happy New Year.
- Video