Comings & Goings

I spent all of June blogging about April and May, but I'm still about a month behind on all of our adventures. So this is the laundry list, picture-free post to get caught up.

Ever since we left Baltimore last summer Ainsleigh has been asking to go back and do all of her favorite things. After finishing up the school year we finally had some time to make the trip. After Ainsleigh's dance recital we jumped in the car, drove to Balitmore and caught an Orioles game later that same night. The next day we went to the National Aquarium, and also got to see one of Tracy's best friends from high school, Kendra, out at Fort McHenry. Ainsleigh and Kendra even got to lower the huge flag over the fort. The next day we went to the Maryland Science Center, and then drove home. As I mentioned previously about our zoo outing, it was neat to see Ripken experiencing everything essentially for the first time. He especially loved the turtles at the aquarium.

A few weeks ago Uncle Tim came to visit. We enjoyed a soccer game, swimming, and a trip to the museum. Mainly, Ainsleigh and Ripken liked jumping on Uncle Tim.

Ainsleigh opened a savings account a few weeks ago. She brought her piggy bank and dumped all her coins into the coin sorting machine. Ainsleigh got all sorts of goodies in return: a t-shirt, a bank card with her picture on it, stationery, stencils, and of course, a bank book.

About 2 weeks ago we had more visitors, our friend from Penn State Tracy and her two girls Brynn and Elyse. We enjoyed the museum and Duke Gardens. Fortunately we weren't still showing the house, but I swear the kids were trying to sabotage our pending house sale by destroying the house. Fortunately we got it all cleaned up before the next day's inspection.

The inspection was, at best, highly annoying. The buyer's inspector was so picky and wrote down all these little things that were purely cosmetic as needing repair for "safety" reasons. This included saying that the bushes in front of the house needed to be trimmed. For the record, they did not need to be trimmed, and anyway, what does that have to do with the task at hand? Let's just say we were not happy, both with how he wrote up his report as well as how the buyers dealt with the results (as in, they asked is to do EVERYTHING, including many things that the inspector wrote up that were not in need of repair, but were rather a matter of house design). One of the things the inspector found was a 12" crack in the crawl space (8" of which was through the mortar, leaving only a 4" crack through one of the cinder blocks). I'm not sure what he thinks the foundation of a 11 year house is going to look like. So the buyers had a structural engineer come out to check things over. Fortunately for us, he was only here for about 10 minutes and said there was no problem whatsoever. Then a few days later they wanted the venting from the water heater checked out, so again we had a 5 minute contractor visit. Finally, we agreed on all of the repairs we would and wouldn't, be doing (like trimming the bushes). In fact, we got all of the repairs done in about half a day this weekend. The last hurdle is the appraisal, which we should hear back about early this week.

Austin made it through the GSK interviews last week. He has until Tuesday to tell Kindred yes or no about the job in Greensboro. At this point, GSK would have to come back with a crazy good offer to get him to turn down Kindred. That would mean we would move to an apartment in Chapel Hill for the next year, after which he would be placed at one of their other hospitals as the lead executive. More soon on the final decision!