The new 90210

Okay, get excited, because here comes another 90210-related post! Last night was the premiere of the new version of 90210. I most certainly did DVR it and watched almost the whole thing, until I fell asleep in the recliner. Here are the highlights:

• You can almost, ALMOST pretend that you're watching a continued version of the original, because you've got Kelly Taylor, Brenda Walsh, and Nat Buccichio (spelling, anyone?) kickin' it old school on the new show. Also, there are some "all grown up" kids from the original on the new version, including Erin Silver and a brief glimpse of Hannah Zuckerman-Vasquez.
• Kudos to the writers for including the line from the teacher regarding Hannah Z-V, "Wow, she looks like she's 30 or something!" because you know Andrea was at least 30 when the original premiered!
• There's the promise of more to be revealed with the whole Kelly-has-a-son storyline. Who is the father? Also, is Brenda staying in town long term?

Some of the things I wasn't in love with:

• Why do all these people who are like 15-16 years old on the show dress and act and look like they're about 28 years old?? I mean, these people look way cooler than I ever did! Let's be honest, they also look cooler than I do now, too!
• Also, we're really going to start Day 1 of school with Ethan getting a BJ in an SUV right in the school parking lot? Come on...that's taking it a little far!
• I felt like there were a couple of things that just came out of nowhere and didn't go anywhere. For example, Annie sneaks out to go to the "not-so-sweet-sixteen" party for Naomi. Her parents realize she's gone and dad goes to try to track her down at the party. Later, she's getting ready to go on a date with a boy from school and calls her mom for permission. There is no mention of the sneaking out. Is she in trouble? Has she been reprimanded? Jim and Cindy Walsh would NEVER have let that behavior fly!! They would have sent Annie directly to Paris for the summer with her best friend as punishment!

We will see about you, new 90210. Can you rise to the challenge of providing entertainment like the original did or will you fizzle out?

90210 -- The Marathon

Oh, what a marathon it was! In case you are unaware, the original Beverly Hills 90210 had a 24 HOUR MARATHON of episodes on yesterday. 24 hours, people!!! That's some good tv! I did not catch all 24 hours of this marathon (my mother just cringed at the thought of me watching 24 hours of tv!), but I did watch a lot of it! Nothing is better than the high school 9-0 episodes on in the background of your day. Nothing.

I have some thoughts about some of the 9-0 episodes, storylines, characters, etc. that I'd like to share here. Some of these came from my sister, too:

• Sometimes, all you need to do to solve racial tensions is DANCE IT OUT while wearing spandex dresses and military boots. Trust me.
• It also helps to have a scrawny white kid rappin' on stage while this DANCE FOR UNITY takes place.
• If you are drunk at prom and you have like 325 friends in your group, don't you think that a few of them could, I don't know, be on the LOOKOUT for Mrs. T so that you don't get caught leaving drunk? Let's plan it out a little better, people!
  
• Okay. Donna Martin got drunk for prom. Now, I'm not a huge stick in the mud, but when the rule says, "Don't get drunk for prom or you won't be allowed to graduate," and then you get drunk for prom, let's not be so haughty and go around the school saying, "Come on! Donna has never done anything wrong! I'm sure they're not going to keep her from graduating just to make her a scapegoat!" I'm talking to you, here, Brandon Walsh!!!
• Also, kids, walking out on finals to make a point? I'm not sure that would really work. But let's say you tried it anyway. And then you and your large, chanting-off-beat crowd did manage to push your way into the school board meeting...don't take that high and mighty tone with Superintendent Ep-HARDT! I would be kind of irratated if this high school senior guy was getting all snotty on my ass if I were the superintendent!
• Are you telling me that in the whole senior class of 1993, Steve Sanders and David Silver were the ONLY PEOPLE with last names starting with "S"? And David Silver actually wasn't even technically in that class! So just one "S" person? Isn't "S" one of the most common name letters?
  
• How in the hell did they get those big ass letters up to the Hollywood sign? I know that got a van, but wouldn't those letters still be enormous? And just those 8 people did all that work? I don't know if I buy that.
• Let's get serious, people. That Erica-Suzanne-Kevin storyline? Annoying!!

That's all for now, but I reserve the right to add to this list in a future post! Tell me some of your favorite 9-0 thoughts!

It's Friday!

It's been a weird, BUSY week. With selling and buying a house, the MANY phone calls between me and our realtor, meeting with the bank guy, and getting all kinds of appointments scheduled, I'm ready to just drop! However, I don't think I'll be able to do that until after we move, because there are still so many things to do!

Today will be a fun day, as my parents and sister are coming up to see our new house! Erin helped us pick it (forced us to, more like! Just kidding!), but Mom and Dad haven't seen it yet. I think (hope!) they'll love it as much as we do!

The rest of this weekend will be filled with my attempts to start getting packed and organized. I have a delightful hair appointment Saturday morning, but after that...PACK CITY will commence at 1528 MLK Drive. My goal for this move is to have ENOUGH boxes so that I don't have to resort to throwing things into garbage bags at the last minute, and to pack things fairly neatly so that unpacking is easier. We'll see how this goes. I'm strangely confident about this, though! I think it can happen!

We have no big Labor Day plans that I know of. Nick is working all weekend but is off Monday night, so maybe there will be some sort of event happening. We'll see!

So productive...

There are so many things to do in this whole "hey, let's buy a house!" process! Many calls between me and Jean, the realtor, have taken place since Sunday. Many. Like I'm considering making her one of my 5 people I can call for free, almost! :)

I feel like I've been productive during the past couple of days, though. I called my loan officer at my bank, Curt, to set up an appointment to get this financial ball rolling. I was supposed to meet him this morning at 8 a.m., which means I had to either find all my stuff I had collected before for my loan application (W2s, check stubs, bank statements) or I had to get that stuff collected again. Of course, I couldn't find my copies, so I managed to get most of it pulled together. Unfortunately, Curt had a dog-related emergency this morning and wasn't able to make our meeting. He's supposed to be coming to my work to do this stuff today, though, which is nice.

Also, I found a copy of something I got from Toyota because there's a recall on a part of my car. I got this thing so long ago and just totally forgot about it. I called the service department today, though, and I'm bringing my car in to them next week on Tuesday morning, so that will be taken care of!

I got a call from the home inspector that Jean hooked me up with, and that appointment is scheduled for a week from today, so that's done. I like when stuff gets scheduled and completed!

Finally, Nick just called me. He got called for an interview for a position with the City of Bloomington. I applied him for this Support Staff IV - CSO position. I think the CSO means Community Service Officer. I think it's mostly a secretarial/front desk type job with the police department. Now, it is 2nd shift, which isn't ideal, but if he were to get it, he'd be IN TOWN (a HUGE plus!), and he'd have his foot in the door and could potentially change shifts. We'll see. He's interviewing next week on Wednesday at 11 a.m. I think we're both happy with where he is for now, but we'll keep an open mind...

Oh my God, we BOUGHT A HOUSE!!

Yes. It has been a BUSY couple of days! The woman who saw our house on Saturday put an offer in for it on Sunday. We discussed it with Jean, the BEST realtor in the world, as far as I'm concerned! One part of the deal is that there's some First Time Homebuyers' program called AmeriDream that our buyer is a part of, so in order to make the deal, we have to pay a percentage to AmeriDream. Not a confusing concept, but this does result in us getting less in the end than her actual offer. Okay, the other contingency is that she has to close by September 26.

As in one month from today.

So when I heard that, I started to cry (shock of all shocks, I know!) because I couldn't imagine doing this deal and having to move in a month and having to go to a hotel or an apartment or something like that. After the initial rush of emotions, we talked through some logical options and came up with a few. Here's a tip. If you're ever in this situation, your realtor probably knows of some month-to-month apartments (even sometimes owned by her company) or might be able to get you a really good hotel deal.

Luckily, we don't need either of these options. Our buyer lives with her sister and has agreed that, as long as we close on the 26th of September, we can do what's called rent back, where we actually rent our house back from her day by day until we close on our new house. Whew! We went house hunting Sunday night and Monday and found one cute one that we thought was "the one"...until we found THE ONE!!! The first house was really cute and had the space we wanted, but it wasn't quite as cute as the one we ended up selecting.

Here's our (soon to be) house! We can't wait for the "paperwork" process to be done and to get all moved in! The MOST fun will be decorating and finally being able to buy furniture (slowly but surely)!

Life is exhausting sometimes! A.k.a. the long rambling post...

Well, here's our weekend so far. Austin and I had a great time at Parker's first birthday party today! It was hot out, but there was a tent (love the tent), so we all sat in the shade and watched the kids play. Delicious cake, good friends, cute kids...all in all, a great time! During the party, I got a call from a realtor who wanted to show our house this evening around 6:30. I agreed and went home to clean.

Let me say this. Having your house on the market is a game full of ups and downs. You're up when someone's interested, and your down when there's no action. You (or at least I) also get pretty tired of constantly feeling like I have to clean. Here's the thing: I like a clean house. I love a clean house! I love the feeling of accomplishment I get when I clean up my house. I don't love, however, having to go home and frantically clean my house by a certain deadline. I also don't particularly love having to leave the house whenever people want to check the house out. It's just kind of inconvenient sometimes.

Anyway, so the lady said they were going to come around 6:30 or 7. I told her to try to come around 6:30 since we have a young man who needs to get to bed around 7:30. She said she'd call me if they weren't going to make it to cancel. We cleaned, we left, and Austin and I went to play at Cecilia's. About 5 seconds after I told Cecilia and Rohrk about this, the realtor called to say that they wouldn't be able to be there until after 6:30 so they were going to cancel. She didn't want us to have to leave the house. This was at 6:27. I told her we were already gone, so if they could still come, that would be great! She agreed and they checked out the house.

Nick beat me home after the realtor left but called me to say that she had locked the garage door! Oops! I had to call her to come let us in, as we don't have a house key (we just go in through the garage door). Nick talked to her a little, and she told him that her client LOVED our house. The only thing she wasn't crazy about was the backyard because she has a young daughter, and it really doesn't lend itself to outside playing that much. However, she said that our house is #1 on her client's list, and that she hopes to make an offer this week!

In taking a lesson from Magoun, we're not going to get too pumped about this just yet. However, that's at least positive, and worth the cleaning frenzy/vacating the house!

The other thing that is a bit exhausting right now is Nick's job situation. He works in Peoria for not a TON of money, and with gas being so high, it's not really an ideal situation. I would say that it's really never an ideal situation to work and live in two different cities, but especially with high gas. He had a job interview at ISU this week and we just found out that he didn't get the job. What is the deal with ISU? We have applied him for job after job there, and he's been called for multiple interviews, but so far, no job offers! Why is ISU such a hard place to get a job? I mean, what is it, State Farm? Anyway, we have a couple more applications in the mix at ISU, but after that, we're taking a break for a while. The good news is that he just found out he's getting a cost of living raise of about $1 per hour (yay!) and that he might be getting some back vacation pay or something. That certainly takes the edge off of the job turn down! And with gas being down a little bit (for now...please stay that way!), we're not in an impossible situation.

I just realized how long and rambling this post has gotten. If you've managed to read it all, thanks for listening to my jumbled thought process!

My Boy

Last night, I was looking at a lot of my pictures from when Austin was just a tiny bean. He was so stinking cute, I just about couldn't handle it! Let me share a couple with you.

He is such a little peanut in these pictures! It's amazing to me how much he has grown and changed in just a little over a year. We talk at work, all of us with all of our little children, about how fast they grow and how old they're all getting. I feel like Austin has already grown out of so many stages of his life! And yet, I know that there will come a day when Austin will be like 16 years old and all big and huge, and he probably won't want to hang out with his dorky old mom all the time...and I'll remember when my sweet, sweet boy was just a baby who loved to play on the bed and read books and fall asleep with his soft, peach-fuzzy head on my shoulder.

And I'll think, "Where did the time go? He was just a year old like yesterday!"

Here's to enjoying every minute!