Firsts & A Little Easter Treat

Loretta Young

This week has been filled with firsts!Each one like a beautiful Easter treasure in my virtual basket. I celebrated my first 400 posts, and received such love and support and even a couple new followers. Such a pleasant surprise. Then on Wednesday I shared with you a wonderful book set in 1926, by the name of SILENTS! by author H.P. Oliver. Nothing too new about me sharing with you when I find a book worthy of devoting a post to, but this time the author themselves contributed and so I was able to share an enlightening Q&A as well as wonderful photos to set the stage should you decide to order the book...and I hope you will. 

Other firsts this week, I got back on the walking band wagon and was able to get out four times and each time walk between 3-5 miles.it was the first time in a long time I was able to walk more than a mile or so. My daughter Rebecca had the week free, and she brought her  cute little dog, my "Grandoggie" and so she helped me stay motivated to get out and get moving again. The icing on that was spending time with my daughter. I am sure I talked her ear off, but right now being under a lot of stress, it helped to unload that...of course she understands as she is soon to be a bride, come this June and as of this week her older sister, Chanda, is officially engaged to be married September 15, come rain or shine and at this point lack of money. BUT there is no lack of stress related to the union. 

Another first....for the first time ever, you can purchase the wonderful drawings my daughter Rebecca does for Ruby's Musings. Of course sans the tag of the blog name over the top of them. If you check out her page,Vintage Inspired...look to the right....and click on the drawing of the 1920's dame, you will be taken to her Etsy shop. She is hinting that any proceeds may just go to helping us buy things needed for when we are able to once again own a home. Isn't that just the most amazing gesture? There are many to choose from, along with all the other Vintage lady drawings,as well as original paintings and a few not so vintage type paintings available....however only the mini Rubys are for the "fundraising". There is also greeting cards available of many of the prints.

The latest avatar on my FB fan page.

The firsts will not stop with this week. As I have mentioned in the past, we are going to attempt to dip our toes into the real estate waters again. This prospect has us trembling out of fear of the unknown. After loosing our home, basically selling everything we owned to survive, relying on the kindness of others to see us through dark times when we thought we might even loose the apartment we had moved to, well all that makes it down right scary to want to face what comes with buying a home again. There are so many more things to consider. Having had a short sale, we have a time line we are forced into. Having been living pay check to pay check, well that forces us to wait till we can save enough to have even a small down...and it will be small. We can only go for a FHA unless we wish to wait another full year before trying.  Then there is the homes that are out there, in our price range and that we can see affording in the long run are all either short sales or bank owned. Many now are Fannie Mae Homestead homes, and that opens a can of worms we are really not sure we wish to deal with...not that FHA will be much better. These homes, are all in need of A LOT of work...that may be an understatement even. You then have to have your offer, which may have to be higher than the price of the home to win a possible bidding war and to see the bank say "yes". The list of hoops and the hurry ups and waits are too many to count and even conceive of. In the past we always had time limits, but we never had so many hurdles. 

The first steps in this process was finding a real estate agent, then we set up a portal so that we could watch the market. One of the firsts that happened for this week, along with the others mentioned is that we went for a drive past a possible home, that IF still on the market when the time comes was on our list of maybes. We are still three months out, but we wanted to just see. Ok, I wanted to. It is a home only a couple blocks from where we once lived, on a street I always loved. I had seen the photo on the portal and knew the home that was pictured as I had walked by it on so many occasions. I knew there was work that needed to be done, the house is from 1928....there is always work on an older home. I guess even though I saw it in the photo on the portal a sort of haze went over my eyes and I went into a dream state about the home. Our possible future there. Of course against the better judgement of my family. When we drove by, stopping to asses the home, the flaws and repairs and the obvious mistake in the listing details, such as there being a garage attached to the house, did not remove the dreamy haze entirely, but it surely perhaps woke me up a bit to what we are facing in this journey. I am both eager and well not ready at all, if that makes any sense.  But I know too, that we can not continue the apartment way of life. Not that there are not pros as well to staying, there is, and there is a lot of cons to buying a home, especially an older one. Regardless we are going to try to do this. 

So as the months roll on, I will be, as I have mentioned a few times in what is to come in this blog, be sharing my/our journey through all this. I hope that if even one of you readers have been through this you will kindly help ease my mind a bit, if you have not, but you perhaps went through what we did and can not yet see the light at the end of the tunnel and I can grab your hand and lead you through, well then it is worth me sharing the details. Now, because you have been so patient, I have a bit of an Easter treat for you!A few Easter themed photos of Lilian Harvey Hope you enjoy! I will be posting a few more Easter pics on the Facebook fan page over the next two days.