Hello again! Long time no see in the blogosphere! It has been quite a busy last two months, and my life has been taking on a series of twists and turns.First of all, I was not able to get out of the reserves with a medical discharge....they promptly lost my paperwork. (Losing paperwork seem to happen a lot in the service.) While I do have an arthritic back, it's not bad enough yet to require surgery or wear a back brace all the time...so I guess that brings me to my destiny for the next 5 months.....army officer basic course.
That's basic training redux for the first 7 weeks, and after that, you'll go somewhere else to learn the "tricks of the trade" for your particular branch of army service. I will start in April, and come back in early September. I don't feel physically or mentally ready for it....but I'll try and hope to God that I'll get through. Not looking forward to trying to keep up with people who are at least 10 years younger than me, but that's just the way it goes sometimes.
In other news, the GF and I have been looking at houses in our area, and there have been a lot of hits and misses. The GF so far have done most of the legwork because I don't have as much time due to my work obligations. We were with this one realtor, but he seemed shady and was kind of sucky in terms of him not returning our calls or e-mail in a timely fashion, plus the fact that he kept showing us these really shitty looking houses. That made us feel really hopeless that we'll find a good place. The GF then found this really nice lady realtor who also is of the same "orientation" and she has been really helpful in helping us look for places. There were a few places to which we had found to be promising...but they fell through due to multiple offers or being under "short sales". (Meaning that the house is bank owned due to foreclosure and the banks usually are really slow in accepting bids...in the hopes that the market would bounce back and they can make a killing on the property.)
We got up early (for a Saturday) this morning, I got an excused absence from my reserve unit (who wants to do weekend drill when you are going to be playing army 24/7 for the next 5 months?), and the GF and I headed out to look at some more properties. We took the dog with us because who could resist his look of "please take me with you"!?
Long story short, after looking at about 5 places, we locked down on this cul-de-sac without a basement or garage, but with a fenced in backyard, a big kitchen, and a good deck. We placed a bid on it and are hoping that it'll get accepted. The property is such a good one that I think that there definitely will be multiple bids on it...God willing, we'll get it.
I will post again before I depart for armyland....and will probably post sporadically during my training pending how much free time I will have.
In the meanwhile, keep on keeping on and I'll see you again soon!
