... And It's Not Near A Landfill & Other Good Things

Other good things first: my boss told me nice job today. I'd prepared a position paper outlining my proposed strategy for a new software licensing and support contract our project needs to negotiate with an existing vendor. My boss sent it to her bosses, who have to approve the contract eventually. They came back happy to her, and she came back happy to me. I bit my lip to keep from crying. It's been a long time since I felt useful at work.

In other news, Wife and I have grown increasingly frustrated with our realtor. We felt like we were not making progress. When I added up the time we had spent actually looking at houses we realized that it was seven calendar days out of the twelve we've been here. And if you count "looking-days" it was only five because four of the days were really half-days. Now, I admit some of the fault is mine because I've had to work, but still ...

Then yesterday Realtor calls and says, let's go look this evening. I worked until about 5pm. Wife picks me up at designated spot at designated time driving new car. We'd spent an hour at lunch time rehearsing the process. Practice makes perfect.

I get behind the wheel and start the drive northwest of Houston toward the town of Cypress. Traffic, to put it mildly, is a bitch. We figured it would take us an hour to get to the housing development; it took five minutes more than that. BUT ...

The houses at Sydney Harbor are all brand new and all sit on a man-made "lake". We walk into the first house and we love it. We find out that the lake is usable. All the houses have little paddle boats or canoes or what ever sitting behind them. The lake supposedly is stocked with channel cat and bass, but I didn't see any indication of that: water was pretty ugly. Lots of ducks swimming around though. This picture at the left would be the view from our bedroom window.

The area is very nice (no land fills that we could find ... or nuclear power plants or refineries). Lots and lots and lots of shopping just down the street. Golf course right across the road. Six minute drive to my commuter bus stop. Community swimming pool. Lots to like. Oh, yes, and the house has a balcony off the upstairs game room as you see from picture at left.

We only found three things that gave us caution: (1) The commute, as we discovered, is awful. It would take me an hour by bus to get to work. I'm thinking: take my laptop and do my writing for two hours a day. (2) The builder is not very careful: cabinets were dinged and scratched, paint where paint shouldn't have been, electrical outlets in strange places. We'd have to work all that out with the builder if we decide to buy. (3) The "lake" is narrow at the point where the house sits. We look right across at the people on the other side as you can see from the shot of our bedroom. Still, compared to houses we've seen, that's tantamount to the other house being MILES away -- most have been within spitting distance of our backdoor.

This builder has one other floor plan we are interested in and has two other houses available with the same floor plan as the one we saw. Other builders also operate in this subdivision. I suspect we'll be back out at this subdivision on Saturday to give all these a tour. Our realtor also has two other houses to show us in other subdivisions. Those houses are also on lakes (although the lakes are just to look at and not use). One of the houses is also part of a golf course community. All these houses are about the same one-hour commute.

We're happy last night and we drive home. It's now about 8pm. It only takes us 35 minutes to get back downtown.

We're hungry and we drive around near our apartment looking for a likely spot. We find a nice new strip mall with what appears to be loads of restaurants. One called Cafe le Jadeite calls out to us. We're severely under-dressed, but the maitre 'd is happy to seat us. Very friendly staff. Nice wine list. Lara is on La Crema chardonnay, I'm having Beringer. Lara has pumpkin soup with seafood and I have seared tuna for appetizers. We both have grilled halibut for entree -- hers with steamed mussels, mine with grilled shrimp. Superb, but they're Texas sized portions: we struggled to finish it all. Total cost: 64 Pounds Sterling (sounds better than $130). We'll be back.

Now ... if we just see some more houses we like ....