Friesians & Fried Kool-aid

Hello all,

So I know I've disappeared for a while. With Andrew losing his job and us pulling out of the house deal I've kind of shifted my focus to family and supporting my husband in this difficult time. We were able to get out of the contract on the house with most of our money. The only money we were unable to get back was the $395 that was paid for the appraisal done by our lender. Having Andrew home a lot more has been good in some ways. I think this is the most caught up on dirty dishes we have ever been. Every dish gets washed daily. It is fantastic! Andrew has also been listing items on craigslist and going through stuff to see what we can get rid of. He has also cleaned up a lot of other places that get overlooked during the day to day cleaning, like the top of the fridge or the nook where we store extra toilet paper, Kleenex and paper towels.

So this post is a little late but we had planned prior to Andrew losing his job for us to make the trip up to The Big E in Massachusetts. Well that trip was planned for the day after we received the bad news. We decided to go ahead with our plan since we had already paid for the tickets. For those of you who don't know what the Big E is, I'll fill you in. It is a whole lot of Awesome!! The Big E is a large fair that is for all of New England. There are rides, 4H competitions, tons of booths with home products for sale, a horse show, FOOD and of course the State Houses. There is one State House for each of the states in New England. Each building is full of items that come from that state.

Every year we try to go when the Friesian horses are at the horse show. My horse Rhia's daddy was a Friesian. I never got to meet him but I bet he was as beautiful as this one.

Rhia's tail can get this long if I keep it braided up when she is outside, but for some reason I have never been able to get her mane to grow any longer. I love watching the Friesians, Morgans and Saddlebreds. The horses that compete at the Big E are some of the nicest I've ever seen in person.

They also have two sets of Clydesdales. One the traditional Budweiser Clydesdales and the other set is the Halmore Clydesdales. I didn't get any pictures of the Budweiser horses but Andrew took some of the Halmores. Here they are getting hooked up for the daily Mardi Gras parade.

And now for a few pictures of the the parade floats.

Yes the people on the floats are throwing beads. No you don't have to flash them. Let's move on to the yummiest part of the Big E. The FOOD!! We have our usual stops. Corn on the cob in New Hampshire, baked potatoes in Maine, whoopie pies in Maine. Then there is this one food truck that sells yummy chicken pitas. This year we decided to try something new - fried pickles. They were so yummy. Andrew was skeptical but he like them too.

 Last year the new item we tried was fried kool-aid. It is like fried dough with cherry kool-aid mixed in. They are the best when they are fresh and still warm, Delicious!!!

We decided to get the fried kool-aid just be for we left for the night. A great way to end the night. I can't wait to go again next year.

Life's Little Surprises - The Bad Kind

So just when everything seems to be going our way - Life decides to throw a few wrenches into the plans.

We were originally under contract to close on the Pearl on October 5th. However, the appraiser was taking his sweet time getting the appraisal to us. Well the appraiser got back to us and as you know from this post we had a little issue with a leaky roof.

Well right before we heard from the appraiser, my husband called me with some super sucky news. He lost his job!



That's right. His company had decided to change some things up and they were eliminating some positions. Lucky us, his position was one of them. So now we had to figure out what to do. We knew the bank wouldn't lend us the money without both of us having a job. There was a slight chance that if he found a new job that paid the same or more that we could still get the loan, but then he had to have 30 days of pay stubs for the bank to approve the loan.

Then the seller's agent said we could bring out a licensed roofer to get the roof certified. Yeah so I called a roofer - they wanted $250 to come out and certify the roof. Well the problem with that is we didn't want to spend anymore money on a house we might not end up being able to buy. We had no idea how long it was going to take to find my husband a job. Since the roof had already leaked once it was unlikely the roofer would certify it, which means the roof would need to be fixed. From what we know about the roof it would probably end up being a totally strip and re-roof job. We can't afford to add that onto the purchase price and we highly doubted that the bank would pay for it.

So we had a big decision to make. Keep fighting to buy this house or walk away due to job loss and get our deposit back. We chose the later. I won't lie, I was really upset but it is probably for the best. There is a chance that Andrew will find a job in the complete opposite direction from where his old job was located, which would then make it pointless to buy this house. Also, Andrew may find a job that pays better, which then means we could buy a nicer house that would need less work.

For now we're staying in our current apartment and maybe if we are lucky we can start house hunting again next year. Hopefully the market will still be buyer friendly and the rates will still be low.

I really wanted to make sure we take a moment to thank all our friends and family who have been very supportive in this tough time. You all have been great and we don't know what we would do without you.