Pauline, lol Yeah, I know, boo hoo. We actually got a really great deal on the house because we bought one that someone else put a deposit on, picked upgrades then changed their mind. Permits were already pulled. There is no way we could even afford this house had we not bought like that. When we came into the picture the house was going for almost $450k. We then said, ok, we don't need the granite in the kitchen, or the fireplace in the family room, nor the $3K faucets in the master plus other misc things, then we made them an offer almost $100k less. It ended up being less then what the base house costs, we still have tile / granite in the master as well as a beautiful fireplace between the bedroom & sitting area. While we did good, there are a lot of builders hurting, they are lowering prices but not our builder. My guess is that after the house went up, someone else came in looking to buy it which is why they wouldn't help us with the very 1st offer we had on our house. We asked for $7,500, they said no. I've been watching the market here and know there are a few houses that they haven't been able to sell, 2 in particular that are the same model as ours but on crummy lots have had multiple price drops. There are a few other houses sitting that are estates. We got through Tuesday with a lot of luck. The mover had to bring a 2nd truck which they had around the corner or something. We were nervous it wouldn't fit and it didn't. We ended up loading the plants in a 26 foot U haul - even stacking the plants there wasn't enough room so when we got to the perennials I just threw plants one on top of the other and figured they would grow back. We left hubby's desk because it would snap in half had they moved it and my daughters bed was broken (hubby) so we'll have to go shopping. Once I get my money from my dad's estate I will take her for a new bedroom set. Our buyer walked through the house not knowing if we'd be out by closing. Hubby ended up leaving with my car, then came back for me. My agent called, I told him that I was going to vac the house but the power was shut off. The movers finished up just before he was ready for me. I had enough time to go through the house, close windows & change my clothes. Hubby called he was really upset. Turns out the buyer thought we'd leave the electric hooked up for them. How silly. Their agent is the wifes grand father, he knows better, for them not to call all of the utilities was something he should have told them to do. The things that came up in the inspection ended up working out after all. We have a crawl space, at one time the owner before my hubby dug it out and put in a service pit. It's 7ft tall by 20 ft wide, about 30 or 40 ft long and holds the water heater, furnace & softener. The old owner put up concrete blocks to hold the dirt in, but when he put them in it wasn't level. You can clearly see that it isn't a load bearing wall and there were no cracks in it to suggest it's moved. Their inspector actually wrote it was amateurishly put up, but it ended up being our problem. The title company had already put the agreed on terms in the closing sheet, so they were forced to accept a $300 deposit my hubby gave to the contractor we picked. The rest of the total repairs was credited to them so if they decide to use someone else, they are $300 short. This was a huge stresser. They ended up calling the contractor Thursday and decided they didn't like him for some reason or another and wanted to change what was agreed on. By the time we got the phone call it was after 6pm on Friday, the start of a national holiday. I don't know how either of us held it together all weekend, we were so stressed. We fully expected not to close Tuesday due to it. The funny thing is I don't remember them ever going down to look at the service pit the 2 times they were there, even when their inspector was there. When they came for the walk through Tuesday, you'd think he would climb down the ladder to look for himself, nope. We also offered for them to come and look at it weeks ago, they never took us up on the offer. We got screwed with our cabinets and ended up with almost 1/2 of what it was worth. In hind sight, we should have had our attorney deal with it months ago to have them take them out. Yesterday I couldn't even put the kitchen together, I put a few things away but decided I'd open boxes in case we needed something & would deal with it today. Once the movers left yesterday, my daughter & I set up all the bedrooms, including computers & TV's. Comcast had come early in the morning, before the computers were unloaded so we couldn't check to see if all of the rooms had internet & we didn't. Hubby and my son worked on unloading the plants (about 500 pots) then made the hour drive to return the truck. By the end of the night I set mine up (which is supposed to run the wired rooms) but the net in the bedrooms wasn't working so we have to get the people that wired the house out today. My son was upset, he couldn't play his Xbox so I told him to bring his stuff to the computer room & hook up there since it's the only room that has internet. Once he did that he was happy. It's going to be another long day. I should have started already but sitting down feels too good. lol You would think that the house would be pretty clean but it's not. The kitchen cabinets are pretty gross, there is dust all over them. Hopefully by tomorrow most things will be put away that we use daily so that I can start looking in the rest of the boxes for stuff I'll need. I still haven't found my business card holder or tools. While we tried to keep everything organized, when the movers came to unload yesterday boxes went in the wrong rooms so we have to deal with that. The top floor is done, I have piles of boxes that need to go to the main floor or basement, I don't doubt stuff in the main section needs to go up. It will be 10 years before we do this again. I don't know how people do this every few years. Moving is the pits. I can't wait to get outside and deal with the gardens. A lot of the roses started blooming because the inside of the truck was hot.

Karyn,It takes my husband 35 minutes usually but it took him a hour and a half today. He said cars were stuck and blocking the one lane plowed roads up here through out the countryside. He said it was like a snow maze trying to get to work. At the worst spots the snow was higher than his 4X4 and the road was so narrow that the mirrors were nearly scraping the snow. I did venture out today everything looked good at first but on my way home I took a different route and I am sorry I did. I thought all the roads must be in decent shape since the ones I had seen when I went into town looked ok but on the way home I had to keep turning around trying to find one I could get down with my vehicle. I still am not use to driving on these snow covered hilly roads. I am use to the flat land of MD and DE. It definitely is scarey when you start sliding down one of these hills and just pray that you will stop before going into a feild or ditch. I think I will wait till Sunday before I go out again. Denise

I thought I would give an update. Since our chat with the neighbor in November, there haven't been any more visits from the police. We're pretty sure that he can't hear the drums anymore, because even on the weekends when we are pretty sure he is home he hasn't called the cops. There's even been one or two occassions where he and my husband have had occassion to chat about something else. Things are much more peaceful, and I'm no longer fearful every time I hear the neighbor close his door or see him outside. The more time that goes by the less and less I believe the neighbor's story about how the cops and the apartment manager all told him that they were going to tell my husband to stop playing the drums. I'm just not buying it. It doesn't make sense that they would tell him that and then not put it in their reports. I only believed it when he first told us cuz he sounded sincere. Now I'm thinking he's just a very skilled liar. Based on his claim that the manager had told him she was going to evict all of us if we didn't settle things, and a few posts from property owners here and on other boards that they wouldn't renew a lease with a tenant that had a lot of complaints against them, I got worried that we wouldn't be offered a renewal. I didn't want to accuse the manager of telling us one thing and the neighbor something else, and I didn't want to bring up his accusation that she was going to evict all of us. But I wanted to make sure that we were going to be offered a renewal when our lease comes up in April. I had mentioned this to my husband, and just yesterday he had something else he wanted to talk to her about. So, while he was there he asked her if there was going to be any trouble with us renewing our lease after all of the trouble with the neighbor. She laughed, said if there was anyone she wasn't offering a renewal to it would be the neighbor, and asked my husband if he'd like to sign the new lease right then. I'm seriously doubting that she said anything to the neighbor about evicting us. So, given the evidence, or perhaps lack of evidence to substantiate the neighbor's claims, we're pretty confident that he's lying his head off. I figure that he realized that he wasn't going to be able to force hubby to quit the drums by calling the cops all the time, cuz they weren't on his side about it. He wasn't going to be able to get the manager to tell us to stop cuz she wasn't on his side either. Maybe he was even told by the cops that if he kept calling them they might write him a ticket for wasting their time after they had told him it was fine. So he tried an approach he hadn't tried before, he tried being nice. And it worked. So there's a tip for people with problem neighbors....if being nice doesn't work at first, try being an a-hole for a while. Then when you're nice again it'll be such a relief to your neighbor they'll be happy to listen. Now, why he felt he had to lie and tell us that the cops were telling him something different than they were telling us, I don't know. I think he was counting on us not having the police reports, or maybe that they wouldn't be as detailed as they were. Oh well, I don't care. I will feel more comfortable when he's gone, but at least until then things should be much calmer.

Well, Alisande, during a flu outbreak, every one should wash their hands multiple times a day. But I do not think this administration engineered a swine flu outbreak to push a health care bill, as has been suggested. Nor do I believe this was some sort of terrorist attack. That was suggested up-thread. The Center for Disease Control (CDC), and the World Health Organization (WHO) have been totally transparent in their tracking of this disease. Case zero has been discovered - we know where it came from. It was a child living near a pork factory in Mexico. He got ill and recovered, but not before passing the virus on to others. No conspiracy.