We’re still waiting to…

We're still waiting to hear on house #4. Offer submitted Monday, we were told we should get a response within 24 hrs. Have not heard yet, but the realtor says it could be any day, any minute now, and they are 'confident' that we'll get it. I have no faith at this point. Argh.

There's still a slim possibility that we'd get into the house before the baby comes; we asked for an Oct 2 closing, and since we're offering to purchase this house as-is, there's no inspection process to worry about. It takes two weeks from acceptance to do title search, etc., and we're good to close. But we don't want to inflict a new baby on Daniel and Anne (and Robert and Catherine), so one way or another, we're really hoping to be out of here by October 10th or earlier. To that end, we've started looking into month-to-month leases for rentals; if we get this house, we may want to be in a rental for a month at least while some necessary repairs are being done. It's not so easy, finding a minimum 2-bedroom month-to-month rental that is willing to take a dog. We could continue to leave Ellie at Jarmila's, but we miss her. :-(

In the meantime, trying to keep busy, distracted. Teaching has been great for that -- I love my fiction class, love meeting with the students about their work, which is most of what I did on Tuesday, a whole string of student appointments, with a few more this afternoon and next Tuesday. Critiques on their first stories start next week, which should be exciting.

Kavi is also a good distraction. A few nights ago, I was feeling stir-crazy, so we went out for dinner with her to a local Mexican place, Maya del Sol. I had two appetizers for dinner -- the first, a butternut squash tamale, which was a little over-sweet (more queso fresca would have helped balance the dish), but was reasonably yummy with tomatillo salsa. The second was a quite tasty ceviche trio, which I would happily order again. Kevin had a sadly icky soup (too sweet, and severely under-salted to boot), but at least Kavi liked it. And I think his main viejo roja was decent, if not spicy enough. In general, the restaurant seemed to underseason and underspice things, which may be a common problem for us in trying to eat ethnic food in Oak Park, where there seems to be a tendency to cater to bland Midwestern palates. Maybe we should have had a margarita or two; that might have helped.

Kavi was the one who enjoyed her meal the most. They had a big cone of chips, and dipping the chips in salsas and eating them made her very happy for the entire meal, even though she was very tired (note bags under her poor eyes). She also liked eating outdoors, and enjoyed the nearby firepit. Very cute.