And then the karmic universe shifts again

Well, things were going TOO well. The buyer for our house withdrew her offer. At the house inspection, we were told her brother kept complaining that the house was too big for her, too many things would get expensive to keep up over the years, etc... None of which were valid cancellation reasons based on her purchase offer. So she invoked the "unsatisfactory inspection" clause even though there was only 1 minor thing mentioned and we were not given an option to repair it. So now the house is on the market again.

I had someone test drive my car, and that person is really interested in it, so other areas are still moving along.

Other stuff going on during all this -- Some of my old friends get together in another town (a ways away) on Thursday nights and this week would have been my last opportunity to go watch. So I made arrangements to go with a friend. It broke up around 12:30am, and as we were driving back along the expressway, in the pitch dark, with no other cars around, we suddenly encountered a man dressed in black walking down the center of the middle lane of the expressway. It was a miracle we didn't kill him. Until about 10 seconds before we saw him, we'd been going 70mph in THAT lane. We would have nailed him smack center.

And other stuff -- My sister had tickets to see Chippendales up at the Mt. Pleasant Casino, so I went with her last night. First time I'd been to a show like that since I got married 12 years ago. They were probably cute, but I couldn't tell. That was my first and last ever time I'll go to see a show there. You couldn't see the stage AND you couldn't see the projection screen because of the bad way they lay out the seats. So I got to sit there for 2 hours, listening to bad 80's music and not see ANY of the show and just wait to go home. BEYOND complete boredom and waste of money. And they do concerts and tons of shows there. I can't imagine how they manage to get anyone to come back. She was upset, rightly so, at spending the money for nothing. We ran into groups of women at McDonalds afterwards and it was everyone's experience that they couldn't see any of the show. Again, amazingly bad facility.

Everything coming together

Wow... things just seem to be happening fast. I received 2 job offers on Halloween. One much much lower than the other, but the lower one was the job that I really wanted more. Fortunately, we reached an agreement that was acceptable to both of us and so I accepted a job at Highland Solutions which is a computer programming company down in the loop in Chicago. The other company offer was Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Illinois. That job was also very tempting for different reasons than Highland's. It was not an easy decision. I don't usually take risks, and the company I chose was definitely the riskier of the two (a 16-person company vs. the monolith that we all know is BCBS)

And yesterday we received an offer on the house. It was lower than we hoped, and we wanted to make a counter-offer but were warned that the buyer had another house picked out whose sale price was lower than what she was offering us. So if we didn't take her initial offer, she was going to go with the other house. After long and serious discussion, we decided to take it. There were several other benefits, such as the person doesn't need to sell a house first and also she wants to close the same day we're scheduled to move out anyway. The timing couldn't be more perfect.

So I've given my notice at my current job, and will be moving to Chicago in less than a month.

The only glitch so far is my car. I was assured when I leased the car that the lease could be tranferred to another person. Today when I tried to arrange that (I have someone that wanted to take it over) I was informed by the financing company that I can't transfer it. Instead, I can add someone to the lease, but I still remain on the lease. I called the car dealership and they said "no", I COULD transfer it. I made them call the financing company and they came back and said that it did turn out that I had to stay on the lease. I find that to be deceptive sales practice since that was an assurance that helped convince me to sign a 4-year lease. I may have to follow up with the dealership and point this out and see if they offer any workable alternative because of their misinformation. Right now the only way out of lease is to buy it outright and then sell it to someone. Anyone out there want to buy a 2-year old VW Passat?