So... after about 3 months of waiting on the house I got excited about in the previous entry, I found out that the seller's bank accepted another buyer's offer. The house was a short sale, which means the seller owed more on his mortgage than the house was currently worth and the seller's bank gets to decide which buyer's offer is accepted. The whole process takes MONTHS, which I was prepared for, but it still sucks to think of something as "yours" for awhile and then have it taken away like that. Oh well. I looked around some more and made an offer on another home in Willow Glen of San Jose, but found out after I made the offer that it was across the street from a funeral home. >.< It didn't make me feel very comfortable, so I backed out. I then looked around some more and made ANOTHER offer on a home in South San Jose. It was a bank-owned home, and another buyer ended up outbidding me. SIGH. Back to the drawing board.

Buying a house is one of the most complicated things I've ever encountered. I read the yellow Dummies book for First-Time Homebuyers, but nothing is ever as neat and compact as a book's description. After competency and communication issues with my first agent, I fired her after I didn't get the short sale home. She filled out my purchase contract incorrectly (good thing I caught it myself, and I'm not even a professional!), did not want to answer all my questions (told me to sign the contract and we'd get around to questions later, WTF!), and failed to get the most critical pieces of information for me from the seller's agent (like the fact that multiple offers would be submitted to the seller's bank, not just the highest one). I got myself a new agent I'm much happier with now - he's responsive, communicative, and very patient with me, which is important because I'm incredibly detail-oriented and like to ask a million questions.

People say the housing market in California is in the dumps right now, and that's true to some extent. There are a lot of short sales and foreclosures on the market that are dirt-cheap, but they tend to be in slightly shady neighborhoods and they can take a LONG time to close. Like months, or even up to a year. Can you wait around for a year to find out if you bought the house? I thought I could, but now I'm getting frustrated.

Since February of this year, I've toured upwards of 60+ properties - condos, townhouses, single-family homes. I have a very good idea of what I want now.

• Townhome or single family home
• 2-3 bedrooms, 2-3 bathrooms
• >1,200 square feet
• Relatively new construction (after 1995) because I don't want to worry about repairs
• 2-car side-by-side garage
• Safe neighborhood
• Close to airport and Caltrain

Doesn't look like I'll be able to buy a house in 2011, the inventory is so low and I've already seen all the listings that interest me. Oh well. Hope 2012 is the year I become a home-owner.

Wow, has it really been 7 months since I last wrote here? I do a lot of Powerpoint slide-writing at work, and the other day, I was writing said slides and realized how embarrassing it was that my vocab has shrunk to boring consulting-buzz-lingo and I realized it's probably because I stopped writing anything other than boring consulting-buzz-lingo. The old college me who wrote 80-page academic papers would be APPALLED!

Anyhow, here's my attempt to get back into the habit of updating my xanga. Other than being a wonderful place to immortalize the happenings of my life, I think it also helped me from becoming an extremely lackluster writer. I always prided myself on my writing, so I better not lose it.

My life has pretty much changed 360 degrees since I last wrote (or is it 180 degrees? *shrug, anyhow it's changed. A LOT.)

Notably:
I changed jobs.
I now travel like a FIEND (picture that guy in "Up in the Air," yeah that's my life)
I decided I want to buy my own place in the Bay Area <-- so grown up, tear
Oh and I also fell in love.

Each life change above warrants 10,000 entries on its own, but let's try not to be too ambitious on my first day back.
Since I started my new job in March, I've spent 70% of my time traveling to either New York or Chicago for my projects. I barely have the right to call myself a California resident anymore. As glamorous as that sounds, it really takes a toll on you after awhile. There's the time zone difference, which means I don't get sleepy at night when I'm supposed to snooze but I have a hell of a time trying to get up in the morning. There's the getting-middle-seat-next-to-2-fat-people-on-the-airplane part, which made me very cognizant of that obesity thing they keep talking about in the news & the Biggest Loser. And it's just physically tiring! It's not like vacation where after you arrive, you get to be lazy but I often have to work during my flight and work 15+ hour days after I land. I feel like my non-travel colleagues don't understand the extent of the sacrifice I'm making for the job. The only saving grace is at least I don't have to travel to middle of nowhere Wyoming or Kansas (sorry Wyoming and Kansas, as a Canadian, I can't even point you out on a map), and I get a gigantic meal allowance (like $100 a day) and I get to load up on hotel points & flight miles. Is it worth it? We'll find out.

On the love front, I finally decided on move on from the complicated relationship I had with my ex and start something new and amazing with a friend-turned-more. Much easier said than done, it took a lot of honesty with myself to be able to admit I was only making something/someone work when it clearly wasn't working to finally bite the bullet once and for all. I asked myself: "Could I see myself spending the rest of my life with this person [ex]?" (despite all the crap he's pulled on me) and the honest answer was "I'd be deeply disappointed in myself if that happened." That was it. It was one of those things I had felt deep down for a long time, but bringing it to full awareness took a lot of courage. Back in November, I visited a friend in Seattle who I'd known for a couple years and discovered him in a whole new light. He's really one of the most amazing guys I've ever met, and I had always told him I wished I would find a guy like him someday. Why settle for someone LIKE him when I can have him, right?! The rest is history. I now spend most of my weekends when I'm not at work here in Seattle with him, which means I fly cross-country twice every week but it's so so worth it. 
It's true what they say (and what I have always questioned in the past): when you know, you just know.

So something shitty has happened since I got here. Something that kind of creeped up on me while I was lah-di-dah-ing around the beautiful Bay Area.

Something smelly and gross.

Something like 10 pounds of weight gain. Yeah. In barely 3 months. When you're only 5'3", it's kind of a big deal. This is NOT going to turn into the West-Coast-15 if I can help myself. I worked my ass off to lose 10 pounds of college weight while in NY by going to the gym regularly and eating self-cooked meals, but looks like I undid all that hard work very quickly here.

One huge contributing factor is having a car. No one walks here, except to walk their dogs or solely for the purpose of exercise. No one walks to actually GET anywhere. I don't have time to walk for walking sake. Back in NY, I used to walk 1 mile to work and 1 mile home everyday. That was 2 miles = 200 calories burned everyday without even having to "make time" for anything - it was my commute. Here, my daily walking involves walking around the house and around the office, and the journey from car to home/office. Maybe 0.3 miles if I'm lucky.

Ok, enough complaining.

I need to lose what I gained by the end of the year. I want to feel confident about myself and not have to break out the fat clothes again. Here's back to regular exercise and better eating.

[Edit 10/29/10: Either I've been dieting/exercising really well this week or it was water weight, but I think my weight gain was only 5 lbs... half as bad but still a wake-up call to get in shape!]