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!

An Eventful Night

We ended up going to the emergency room in Irvine last night. Cuong’s been having chest pains for about the last three weeks. Yesterday he said that they were the most painful and constant they had ever been while he was at work in the morning. That same feeling came back last night.
Last week he saw his primary care physician. They hooked him up to an EKG and didn’t find anything except that he has a slow heart rate. His doctor recommended that he see a cardiologist. The next available appointment that the cardiologist had is December 13th. In the meantime, the doctor told him to go to the ER if the pains got worse.
We drove down to Irvine Medical Center to their emergency room and checked in. We were the 2nd ones in there, behind the kid with the broken finger. We waited a little while and then a nurse checked Cuong out, hooked him up to an EKG, took some notes, and then sent us back out to the waiting area. We had to fill out some forms before he got his hospital bracelet put on.
We waited a little while longer, and then they called him back into a room to be seen by the doctor. When the doctor came in, he asked a lot of questions, and checked him all out. They took some blood and put in an IV. Since he said his pain level was at a 6-7 out of 10, they injected some pain medication intravenously.
From there, they wheeled him in the hospital bed down to the radiology area of the hospital. The doctor said that chest pain can also be caused by a blood clot in the lung, which could be serious….so he wanted to check that out just in case. They hooked Cuong up to this breathing machine. Once he had been on it for about a minute or so, they put in this colored vapor and he was to keep breathing it in so it would go down into his lungs. After that had gone down into his lungs, they took some sort of x-rays. Luckily those came back negative!
Once back in the room, someone else came in to take a chest x-ray.
The doctor came back in a little while later to let us know that the blood tests, breathing tests and chest x-rays all came back fine. He recommended that he try to push up his appointment with the cardiologist to do a Stress Test. He said that the pain could possibly be coming from muscular strain and not the heart (since it is on his right side).
After about 4 hours, we were on our way back home….and here I am today at work, definitely tired!! Everyone at the hospital kept saying that I looked more worried than he did, and I probably was!
So Cuong’s at home today, just relaxing. Hopefully the cardiologist will be able to see him sooner than his original appointment to get everything checked out. It’s pretty scary when they talk about different heart diseases and ailments.
Definitely keep him in your prayers!

A New Offer

Last night we put in an offer on a house in Orange. It’s up in the foothills in an area called Serrano Heights. It’s right on the other side of the hill from Anaheim Hills.
We definitely really excited about this one. It was built by Centex in 2001 so it’s basically BRAND NEW and it’s gorgeous inside.
The owner bought it in 2005 when prices were way up and now unfortunately he is going through a divorce and needs to move before he goes into default. The house is listed as a short sale and is listed well below market value. We are currently the only offer that is being submitted to the bank for approval. The agent seemed impressed with our credit scores and the fact that we have the down payment ready to go. Hopefully the bank will be impressed as well. It can take them about 2-3 weeks to approve or deny the offer. It’s kind of nerve wracking and it’s definitely a new experience for us.

Now we’re just crossing our fingers (and toes) that the bank will approve our offer in a timely manner!

Aerial view of the house (Corner Lot)

Another One Bites the Dust

So we made an offer on a house on Halloween. It was one that we had been looking at for a while. This house has everything we were looking for....plus a lot of work that needed to be done. But the actual layout and structure of the house was great!

We put in an offer that was definitely lower than the seller's asking price, simply because the house did need so much work on the inside. Turns out that they've borrowed SO much against their house that they need it to sell for a certain amount just to break even. They ended up coutering back at about $30,000 more than what we offered, and that just won't cut it!

It's a total bummer that we'll have to walk away from this house, but there is no way that we'll be able to satisfy them...and us...with a decent price on the home. Darn!

For now we'll stay where we are and continue our search. I'm sure we'll find the right house, or it'll find us!!

Fire/Smoke Pictures from Costa Mesa

Pictures From Palm Desert

Here's us after dinner at Tuscany Ristorante:

Cuong in the lovely lobby. See the little boats down on the left? You could ride those around the resort to get to different places....we didn't though.

Here's us on of Official One Year Anniversary! :)

Of course I had to get a picture of some of the TONS of wind mill things! They're HUGE!!

Our First Anniversary

This weekend we celebrated out 1st wedding anniversary! I can’t believe that time flew by so quickly. I’ve heard people say that the first year is the hardest. If that was the hardest, then we’ve got no problems! J
We have made quite a few adjustments since we’ve been married though. At first it was moving in full-time into our house together. That was a very exciting time.
Then a few months later we decided that it would be the best time to put the house on the market. Thank goodness we did it when we did. We sold it within about 4 days and 45 days later, we were moving out.
Now most of our things are in storage, in Connie’s garage in Oceanside, or in my parent’s garage! Moving back in with my parents is different also! It’s definitely not the place you would like a newlywed couple would want to live, but we are very thankful for their hospitality and generosity. Now we’re able to save up some more cash for a down payment, or “fix up” money.
We’ve come so close to putting an offer in on a house in Fountain Valley, but it never works out completely. It’s a nice house (in structure), but it’s a real fixer upper on the inside. We’re handy and we can definitely make it a really nice house…but of course, that all takes money. Unfortunately these people have borrowed WAY too much against their house and are now unable to lower their price because their loan balance is so high. We are the perfect buyers, but sadly they aren’t willing to work anything else out to let us buy their home.
This weekend to celebrate our anniversary, we headed out to Palm Desert. We stayed at the J.W. Marriott Resort. The grounds were gorgeous! You could even take a gondola ride from one location to another. We saw a bride and her family taking pictures before her wedding ceremony. A very nice day to get married!

We had our couple’s massage at the spa on the grounds of the resort. Following the massage, we relaxed in the steam room and Jacuzzi. Later we went back to our room, changed for dinner and then headed to the Tuscany Ristorante. It was merely steps from our tower of the hotel. We had a very nice dinner, complete with wine…and dessert, of course!
Naturally, we stopped at the Cabazon outlets to do a little shopping! I didn’t find a WHOLE lot of things to buy, but it was just enough!
…More pictures to come!