Thursday, December 20, 2007

Another Year Coming to an End

2007 is almost over! I can't believe another year has just flown by.
I'm lucky that Warmington is giving all of their employees the time off between Christmas and New Years!! Yay!! The crazy thing is that we're going to be busy the entire time!
This Saturday we're heading down to Oceanside. We'll be staying with the Tacazon/Nguyen family for the weekend and until Christmas day. It will be good to see everyone, and of course the nieces! We usually see everyone at Thanksgiving, but since we were in Arizona, that didn't pan out.
Christmas morning, we'll wake up and open presents with the girls, and then we'll head back up to Costa Mesa for lunch. My grandparents and great-aunt from San Diego will be joining us also. My mom will be preparing the usual honey baked ham. YUM! After lunch we'll open some more gifts with the Dressler/Papineau bunch.
The day after Christmas we'll be heading out to Vegas again. We booked 2 nights at the Palms, for a great deal! It'll be a little get away for us and we can do whatever we want! :)
On Friday we were invited to my friend Cristina's mom's 60th Birthday party in Santa Barbara. Cristina has been going to school on the east coast for a number of years now. She wasn't able to come to the wedding...and she's never met Cuong before, so we HAVE to go. It'll be a long drive from Vegas to Santa Barbara, but I've known Cristina since I was 2 years old and she was 1!! I might as well take the opportunity to hang out with her and celebrate her mom's birthday.
My parents are planning on going to Arizona for New Year's, so we'll have the house to ourselves. We don't have anything planned, so it might just be a night in for us. We'll ring in 2008 quietly.
I hope everyone has a great Christmas and a wonderful and safe New Year!!

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Tick tock....tick tock

We’re still waiting to hear about the house.

We were told that Countrywide should’ve had an answer for us regarding acceptance of our offer by Friday, December 7th. Then it moved to Wednesday the 12th…now they’re hoping that we will hear something by this Friday or the middle of next week.
It’s exciting, but getting frustrating. We get our hopes up and then hear that it will take more time.
The agent isn’t making things any better. We tried to contact him before and he never returned our phone calls or emails. I ended up calling him almost a week later and he FINALLY answered his phone.
He’s supposedly in the top 1% of realtors in the nation, but he definitely hasn’t showed that to us!! It’s been a lot of unanswered phone calls and emails.
We’re actually getting more answers from our contact at Countrywide (which coincidentally happens to be our realtor’s contact as well!)

In the mean time, we’re still laying awake a night thinking about how we’ll decorate the house and everything we’re looking forward to. It would be just GREAT if we got the house. I have pictures of the house on my computer at work that I look at every now and then just to day dream!
We’re still keeping our fingers (and toes) crossed that it’ll be a wonderful Christmas present for us to find out that they’ve accepted our offer!

Sunday, December 9, 2007

Thanksgiving

With Christmas quickly approaching, I figured I should go back and blog about Thanksgiving!!

Our usual Thanksgiving has been consisting of 2 meals in one day!! For the past few years we've been down at my grandparents house in Mira Mesa (San Diego), eating and hanging out there, and moving on to Connie's house for....of course...more eating and hanging out!
This year was a bit different. With my brother living in Arizona for the past 2 years, we decided that we'd head out that way!

My parents, Cuong and I left the house in Costa Mesa at 6:30am and finally made it to Mesa, Az. at about 2:30pm or so. My aunt & uncle (who actually live full-time in Illinois) have their future retirement house in Mesa. My other aunt & uncle drove up from Chandler, Az. These were people that we've never spent a Thanksgiving with! It was definitely different!

After eating and relaxing, we made the 2 hour drive up to Prescott, Az. where my parents have their future retirement house...where my brother is living.

We were excited to meet my brother's girlfriend....but alas, that didn't pan out. She had been working 2 days of 12 hour shifts at the hospital and was too worn out to head to the bars on Whiskey Row.
Here's us at one of the bars on Whiskey Row where all the cool college kids hang out.


We saw the sights of Prescott while we were there. They have a lot of hiking trail and camp sites. My brother took us up on a hill near the famous Thumb Butte (a rock protrustion out of the hill...I guess the Native Americans thought it looked like a thumb). We took a hike trying to get a view of Thumb Butte, but we could never quite see it!