House

On Monday I made an offer on a house. It is basically exactly what I was looking for, with the exception of the fact that the lot is only 8,000 sqft. I was hoping to find something with a half acre+, but I put that aside when I figured out that would put me pretty far outside the city.

Tuesday passed with no word.

Wednesday passed with almost no word.

Thursday afternoon, the seller's gave me a counter offer and today I am accepting that.

I am pretty excited to get out of apartment living, I am excited to have a yard to barbecue in, and I am excited to get a tax deduction.

End of Days

I am down to two days and change on my time in the Middle East, and while I am certainly not forgetting it, other people seem to be counting down the days as well. My current boss sends me an email each morning with the total time left until I get to Houston for instance.

I have now closed every account and returned everything that I need to return. The truck was the last thing on the list and I parted ways with it this afternoon.

I have had some things on my mind about moving to Houston and one of them is buying a house. I have decided that it is too much to ask of myself to find a house within 30 days of arriving, so I will look at houses with intent, but I will also scope out some apartments for the short term as well. I was also thinking about phone service. I return my company phone tomorrow afternoon and will be without phone service (for work) for about a week, more if I can't figure out who to talk to about getting a new phone set up. So I asked my new boss to look into it for me since he is in Houston and I am not.

Things I will miss about Dubai:
No real speed limit between Dubai and Abu Dhabi
High Speed Limits in most areas of town

Things I will not miss about Dubai:
Speed Bumps in the road (who thought that one up?)
Liquor Licenses

I will add to those lists as I settle in Houston.

5 Days and Counting

I am down to 4 days and some change until I move back to the States. Today I finished cleaning out the apartment and moved to a Hotel/Apartment. This place is better than the apartment I lived in and for roughly the same money. I should have just lived here. Nice place with breakfast in the morning and a bar, room service with a few items. They clean once a week. There are two televisions a bed, a couch, several televisions, dining table, a great kitchen.

Enough about the room itself though, I booked it for a 5 nights and I got the cheapest thing they had, a studio with a full sized bed. When I arrived the guy upgraded me and put me in a one bedroom with a king bed. I luck into a lot of great situations, including getting upgraded on flights and upgraded hotel rooms.

I am down to just needing to return my truck at the moment. Everything has sold and everything has been canceled. 5 nights, 3 days of work, 2 lunch outings, and a day of flying. Looking forward to getting home.

Pretty soon I will post a full write up of Dubai and then I will probably follow that up with posts about each country that I visited while I was traveling over here. Its been a good 16 months, but I am certainly ready to come home if for nothing else than that I don't have to have a license to buy alcohol (well, not a liquor license anyway).

My Ties With Colorado

I am in the process of breaking my last two big ties to Colorado.

The first is my Bank. For the last year I have been not getting cash out because there are no branches of my bank here and if I were to get cash out it would cost my 5 bucks to do so. So I decided with another move immanent, I should go ahead and move my bank account so that I had access to it.

The second is my phone. I hung on to my 720 number for a year and I have finally decided that it is time to get rid of that expense since I rarely use that phone.