Deja Vu

My life has shifted to include three central items: work, Jack, and the house (don't worry, God still counts as number 0, as the precursor to all three). The house came along at just the right time. I needed a project!

Work will probably take a lot of my time for the next 30 years. Nurse Jackie asked me to create a new service line at the St. Fozzie's (actually, she told me I'm going on a site visit to a hospital in Milwaukee and I actually had to prompt her to tell me what she was asking me to do). I was asked to create an osteoporosis clinic, to help bolster our women's care services. I'm excited about this opportunity, but stoked about the way I keep getting asked to create programs. The ol' resume is growing.

Although we both put a lot of time into work, marriage still comes first. That's why we agreed to have one weekly "date night" per week. It ends up being "go home, get into pj's, and watch America's Funniest Home Videos together on the couch," but that's okay. So that's why this house project came along at the right time. We need something else to do with our lives to get out of work mode more often. Plus, it gives Jack and I an excuse to go bummin' together on weekends.

We took our first trip to Lowe's yesterday, in search of paint colors. We spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars at Lowe's during the past several years. We refinished virtually our entire house in SB and regularly strolled the aisles at Lowe's, dreaming up ideas and color schemes for our house. Well, in the new house, it isn't much different. The great thing is that, with a new construction, everything is done. It's new and fresh and we don't have to do anything. Granted, all the fixtures and lights are contractor-grade crapola (and Jack can't stand uniform conformity!), but they are functional. Nonetheless, we strolled the aisles at Lowe's dreaming up our color scheme for the new house.

The weird part? After picking out a new chandelier, pendant lighting for the kitchen, ceramic tile, and a slew of paint colors, we realized that we're subconsciously trying to re-create our old house! We're trying to inject some character into the sterile, bland house! It's an intentional deja vu.

The other thing is that I am tempted to pick paint colors based on their names. Doesn't "Sunset Bliss" sound better than "Pale Ecru?" How about "Serenity" instead of "Washed Denim?" I particularly liked "Creme Brulee" over "Beeswax." Perhaps I shouldn't pick paint colors if I'm hungry.

Regardless, this is super fun and I'm very glad the house opportunity presented itself. It's so easy for me to lose myself in work and the Christmas season is very tough for me. So this will be a great diversion and give me something else to focus on for a while. Plus, it's just great to be able to reorganize everything. Nesting 101!

Our home inspection is Saturday (after which, we're going to hang around and measure for curtains!) and after a successful inspection, the appraisal will be completed. After that, the complete file will go to the underwriters and pending their stamp of approval, we will close the week of December 6, and move to our new house on December 11.

St. Fozzie Season

Are you kidding me? You know this whole recurrence of St. Fozzie thing we keep experiencing out here in Chicagoland? Well, I just drove by the title company we've selected to coordinate the closing of our new house. It's in a little strip mall and when I glanced up for the name of the strip mall, it was called St. Fozzie's Way.

I just laughed. This is starting to feel weird.

I think it's time to look up a short bio of St. Fozzie and accept this guy as one of our patrons. I should fashion a St. Fozzie's statue for our home. The new house has an "art niche" in the living room...which has generated a bit of conversation between Jack and me. We're talking about rotating seasonal art in the niche (little Christmas tree at Christmas, my little Easter tree at Easter, an orchid in summer, etc.). I wonder which season should qualify as Fozzie season?

I'm sorry...am so very tired and still on pain meds from my amazing (read: awful and painful) root canal experience on Friday! I've put over $4,000 into my mouth in the past few months...take it from me, do everything you can to take care of your teeth. If your kids grow up on well water, give them flouride pills so they do not have to go through this!

Joke Journal: Friars

The friars were behind on their belfry payments, so they opened up a small florist shop to raise funds.

Since everyone liked to buy flowers from the men of God, a rival florist across town thought this was unfair. He asked the good fathers to close down, but they would not.

He went back and begged the friars to close. They ignored him.

So the rival florist hired Hugh MacTaggart, the roughest and most vicious thug in town to "persuade" them to close. Hugh beat up the friars and trashed their store, saying he'd be back if they didn't close up shop.

Terrified, they did so, thereby proving that: Hugh, and only Hugh, can prevent florist friars.

We're HO's Again

...As in "Homeowners!" We got our house today at a perfect equilibrium price. We paid as much as we were willing to pay and the sellers are selling for as small of a price as they'll take. It's just nuts; we got 30% off that price.

A house on sale! Even better! I'll post pictures of the inside when we get the keys in mid-December. Oh, and for the few of you who have asked, the house I posted here two days ago is NOT the real house. It just looks sort of like the two we were vacillating about and I wanted to give you the general idea.

I'm superstitious! I can't help it!

Anyway, I'm plowing forward with my usual 13-14 hour days, (barely) keeping up with my Ethics homework (which is threatening to turn me into a philosophical wreck), negotiating on the house, drinking an awful lot of coffee, AND I have another marathon dental appointment tomorrow. I have plenty of pain meds to see me through this time!

Big Brother

So ever since I granted my assistant full access to my Outlook email (she can edit, create, delete, etc.), I’ve had a bit of a complex. She will create meetings for me, invite me, then accept the invitation she (through me) created. I have meetings popping up on my calendar that I never created or even remember accepting. Or I’ll have meetings postponed (or disappear) and be none the wiser.

I feels a bit “big brother” how she can delete emails (I asked that she deleted the junk that flies through every day and print anything larger than 1MB so it doesn’t fill up my box). But the phantom meeting phenomena is something new to me! When you live and die by your blackberry, it’s hard to relinquish control of your calendar.

Me? A control freak? Get out.

Under St. Fozzie's Wing

So Jack and I hit the road yesterday and looked at five properties. Actually (blushing), we looked at four properties and one of them twice. And we have one more to see again today.

It's down to a stately villa on the Illinois border and a two-story townhouse on a road called St. Fozzie's Avenue. Okay, it's not "St. Fozzie's," but it IS the same name as our hospital. Do you believe in serendipity and all that hoopla? Because I do, to an extent. I rented my current hovel, I mean, house, sight unseen. I knew it would be okay because I logged into Google maps, input my address, then searched for the nearest Catholic church. The nearest church? You got it, St. Fozzie's.

I don't know why we've chosen to attach ourselves to St. Fozzie's (or, perhaps, he's chosen to attach himself to us), but it's getting interesting. We used to walk by this particular townhouse and think, "wow, that'd be a great place to live!" When we drove by and saw a For Sale sign in the yard, I glanced up at the street sign so I could reference the correct listing when calling our realtor. Of course, it was St. Fozzie's Avenue.

In the words of Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone, "Is this a joke?"

So it's down to the villa, which, for the record, qualifies as my dream house and a slightly-more modest (about 400 square feet smaller) townhouse on St. Fozzie's Avenue. We didn't think we'd find a home (or two!) so quickly. But then again, when you know exactly what you want, what you're willing to spend, and where you want to be located, it's easy to focus your search.

Is it bad that I've already been visiting the Crate and Barrel, Pottery Barn, and Ethan Allen websites to discern bedroom furniture choices!??!?

Silenzio!

Recently, I had the unfortunate opportunity to attend an Italian wake for one of my assistant’s family members. She’s Italian and her remaining family in Italy flew in for the funeral.

Still new to the area and the interesting culture surrounding Italians in Chicago (ahem!), I didn’t know what to expect. I knew everything would be Catholic and in Italian, but my knowledge of Italian wakes ended there. I sort of expected mobsters in pale pastel suits to storm in, twirling their tommy guns around their thumbs.

I scanned the lobby and saw a sign that said “Silenzio.” Even with my limited Italian vocabulary (I know the important words…for wine, ice cream, and the Pope), I knew “silenzio” means “silence.”

So I walked into the beautifully-decorated funeral parlor and luckily, I spotted one of my co-workers. She was walking around, looking lost. I went up to her and befuddled, she said, “I think we’re in the wrong place. I don’t know who the Silenzio family is!”

I couldn’t help but chuckle…and at least there were no obvious mobsters to report!

Condo Updates

I'm happy to report that we were pre-approved for our mortgage. We applied for the mortgage on Monday and then did not hear anything from the bank for four days. Jack called and they said they hadn't gotten to it yet. I finally called the bank on Thursday afternoon and told them, if they couldn't make a decision, I had other banks who would quickly get my business. The loan officer pulled our file and called me back in 5 minutes with a resounding "yes."

Then I went home and discovered a huge packet from the same bank with our pre-approval notice and more paperwork to fill out. Whoops. They could have called! It would have saved me a quasi-embarrassing, stern phone call to the poor loan officer who happened to pick up my call.

Anyway, we're happily on the market for a condo. The walls in our current apartment feel like they're closing in on us...each time we visit a nice, new condo and return home to our hovel, it feels smaller and smaller! So we're definitely excited about this prospect.

Plus, we know exactly what sort of condo we want (basically, two of everything...two bedrooms, two baths, two-car garage). While the Beer Garden condo is still in the running, we are looking a several others tomorrow. We have our list of pro's and con's and our non-negotiables.

So, hopefully, we will have a home by New Years! Hurray!

Managerial Pickle

I have a problem I need to air and could use your feedback on this one. It's more of a difference of philosophies, but it's affecting me.

I'm in a director role. I have seven managers that report to me. I inherited all but one of them, so I am doing my best to work with them and collaborate whenever we can. Two of these managers tend to have guilt complexes (of sorts). Their employees (numbering from 2-16) are front-line staff who keep the clinical areas going. Most of them perform well and do their jobs day-after-day without much change in their routines. However, these front-line staff sometimes have family situations that are problematic. It might be a socio-economic difference, a divorce, or kids going off to school. Whatever the case, some of the front-line staff are not the best stewards of the money they earn at work and tend to look to the hospital to bridge the shortfall.

In short, they don't prioritize their earnings well, live beyond their means, and then blame management for not paying them enough.

I understand this situation, really. However, I feel like I'm in a Catch 22 situation when the managers come to me and say, "Patty is a reliable employee. She's here consistently and does a good job. But she's having a hard time at home right now, can we please pay her more?" No, we cannot.

While I am sympathetic toward these employees' hard home lives, I am not responsible for how they choose to spend their money. I pay them a fair wage and our Human Resources department annual evaluates everyone's wage to make sure they are consistent with the rest of Chicago. I do my absolute best to be fair and consistent in my managerial approach, and to boot, I am still under the administrative hammer of cost control. I cannot just extend raises to employees because they feel they need more take-home pay. And I do not think it is fair to others. For example, what about employee "Tony" who manages his money really well and chose to forego the huge plasma television set that Patty has?

I guess it stems from needing to work with the managers more often so they understand the context. They all know our financial landscape and we repeatedly communicate that our wages are at median for the rest of Chicago….but with these two managers, it is not sticking. They keep raising this concern to me with hopes that I will change my mind. I'm not going to waiver, but I'm not sure how to get these managers to grasp the concept that we're paying our employees equivalently and it is not up to us to save them from their personal financial crises?

Thoughts…?

Beer Gardens

So the news of the day is that Jack and I appear to be house-hunting. Er, I mean, condo-hunting. We already decided that we do NOT want a house; the maintenance and yardwork-free lifestyle is completely worth the association fees! That's how we chose to spend Halloween 2010.

We have been trying to live the humble lifestyle (read: packed like sardines in an 800 square foot apartment...coming from a house nearly twice the size of that). My bachelorette pad was fine when it was just me and Jack would come to visit every third weekend. But now, with some of our furniture, the crystal and small appliances that we received for our wedding, and my beloved shoe collection, we just don't fit. Plus, we're literally tripping over each other during our morning routines. Jack leaves when I do and has to get all gussied up now for work. While it's great that we can guzzle our (Caribou!) coffee together in the mornings, this tiny apartment just isn't working out.

When you can get something cluttered up in the span of 10 minutes, it's not good. I abhor clutter and I mess up the living room just by setting down my crapola from the day.

So we're in the market for a condo. We briefly tossed around the idea of moving downtown, but it makes more sense to stay in our Chicagoland suburb. We know and love the area, it's a decent commute to work, and we're only 20 miles from the Loop. We haven't called the bank for a pre-approval yet (that's this week), but we toured a couple condos yesterday.

One was in what can only be described as a retirement community, but it was GORGEOUS. Rose-colored brick with huge windows, it was nearly brand-new and offered stunning blond wood floors, cathedral ceilings, two bedrooms, wainscoting in the office, and two huge bathrooms (hurray!). The kitchen was okay, but the open concept was great and allowed a lot of light inside.

Then we visited a two-story townhouse (also with huge windows) that had two bedrooms, two glorious bathrooms, an awesome kitchen with an island, and a loft (for a cool office! Hurray!), a two-car garage, and a beer garden.

Seriously, a beer garden. There's about a 15-foot space between the French doors and the garage...just enough space to set up a couple of chaise loungers, a grill, and string up some lights for summertime parties. As we walked out, Jack leaned over and said, "Can we just buy this one? I want a beer garden!"

We're looking into this and while we have a general idea of our price range, I think we're going to move forward and see what the bank has to say. Despite our rotten experience selling our house in SB, now we'll get to be the buyers in the buyers' marketplace and make all sorts of crazy demands on the sellers!

Just kidding.

But if, for some crazy reason, we end up buying that townhouse with the beer garden, Jack said we have to clear a tiny patch of the yard, put down some dirt, and "plant" a couple empty beer bottles in the ground. Y'know, for a beer garden. Hey, admit it's a funny idea.

So more to come, I'm sure. I do have to admit that it's WAY more fun to be a buyer than a seller in this market!