Home Ownership

As you may or may not know I've been without a computer for a bit.  Jim and I now share a laptop, which makes for some interesting moments.  So I really haven't been doing much on the blogs.

And I do have something to share!  As of the 18th we became home owners!!  For the first time EVER!  Hooray!  We never purchased a home before because we weren't sure of where we'd be since Jim's military.  But we've been calling Norfolk home for so long that we decided to put down roots.

It was a long drawn out and painful process for us.  Much harder than I sure it really should be.  Let me tell you about our pain filled house hunting expedition.  I won't name names because that might seem mean of me.  Even though I have been known to be quite hateful at times.  I'm trying to be a better person.  And I believe karma will come back and bite them in the butt later.  :-)

We chose a bank close by instead of our Internet bank because we wanted human interaction and lots of help since this was our first time buying a home.  People would be helpful right?  Wrong!  We would have been better off with the Internet bank.  Apparently this branch has a LOT of issues.  Our first loan officer is no longer with that bank and apparently he didn't file much of our paperwork.  We think he was fired, but aren't positive.  I was constantly bothering them asking if there was anything we needed to do and was told no.  We were pre-approved and went house hunting.  Finally we found a house.  I'm not even going in to that!

Two weeks before closing they hand me a stack of paperwork (I'm not exaggerating here it was 35 plus pages) and tell me to fill this out and send me on my merry.  No instructions or explanations.  WTF!  We went in Saturday for some help.  Jim stormed out very irate.  He was ready to call it quits with this bank.  We found out the rate hadn't even been locked in like we'd been told.  After I got things straightened out or so I thought we FedExed everything to the processor in Florida.  

So I called Monday morning saying if they needed anything to let me know before noon so Jim could get to work on getting things.  I get a call back at nearly 4 telling me things are missing.  Things that they told me on Saturday I didn't need.  And then they had the audacity to lie to me and say that they told me on Saturday they needed it.  I went there immediately with what I could.

I asked them to please be sure to get everything to my closing agent before the end of business day on Friday.  We are now one week away from closing on this house.  And this person (I'm trying really hard not to call names here) had the nerve to say that they would as long as we turned everything in on time.  I stared at her in shock for a moment and then responded that as long as they didn't spring anything new on us they would get all their stuff.  Ugh!  She was lucky I was holding a small child at the time or I might have slugged her.

Things did not run smoothly to say the least, but it finally happened and we're home owners.  Thank God!

-Michelle

Some pigs are more equal than others...

I'm guessing by now that the majority of our readers (yes both of you) have heard about the mayor in Maryland that had his home raided by the Prince George's County Sheriff's Department. If you haven't I'll summarize the story, while picking out the points I think are odd or important.

It starts in Arizona where a pot-smuggling ring had hatched a scheme to smuggle some 400lbs of pot over state lines. The idea was that in AZ the smuggler would address large quantities of pot to someone not involved in the plot and then on the other end another smuggler would intercept the shipment.

So the Prince George's County Police Department (PG County has a PD and a Sheriff's Department) gets intel that a shipment of 32 lbs of pot is on its way to an address in PG County. These geniuses don't bother to investigate and track the shipment from afar. No that might make sense. Instead they intercept the shipment and deliver it to the third party not involved with the scheme. They also got a knock and announce warrant to go into the home after the pot had been delivered. (Interestingly, Maryland didn't have no-knock warrants until 2005 and the PGPD has said that they don't believe the state has no-knock warrants. Makes you wonder why these people are still employed if they deny the existence of a law passed by the Maryland legislature.)

The big day comes. The undercover officer posing as the delivery man attempts to make the delivery. The Mayor's mother-in-law refuses the shipment, so the undercover officer leaves it on the porch. Let me repeat that, the person at home refused the shipment, so the officer left 32lbs of pot on a doorstep.  The Mayor was apparently out for a walk. He says that he walks by the police officers and even waves to them. It is important to note that the police were all in plain clothes and probably unmarked cars as well. This comes into play later. It also is unclear whether or not the Mayor recognized them as police officers, but he did no there were people sitting outside of his house. My guess is that the Mayor isn't an idiot. He probably knew they were cops. You don't have carloads of people just sitting along the road in parked cars ordinarily. 

The Mayor gets home from his walk, notices the package on the porch, picks it up and goes inside. He then goes upstairs to change for an appearance later in the day. That's when the SWAT team goes in. Remember they're in plain clothes and armed. The Mayor's mother-in-law sees them and screams. Hey, wouldn't you? Armed men, not in any discernible uniform, running towards your home? Yeah, I'd probably scream.

The police say that scream ruined their element of surprise, so they had to go in "hard." That is to say they had to go in without knocking and "take down" everyone in the house. Let's review this shall we? They had a knock and announce warrant, but they were concerned about the element of surprise being lost. What surprise is there when you knock on the door and say "police we have a search warrant"? At least, if you knock and announce the people inside may hear you say that you're the police. In this case armed men were storming the house, void of uniforms and identification. 

(Sure, they probably had a badge displayed, but when someone has a gun out where are your eyes going to go? Are you looking at the threat, i.e. the gun, or searching for a badge? You're looking at the threat. This has been shown in police shootings where the police shoot a gunman's hand, not trying to shoot the gun out of their hand, but because their eyes are focused on the gun.)

The SWAT team went into the house, one of the Mayor's two Labrador Retrievers barked at the officers and was shot and killed on the spot. The other Lab ran into a back room and was chased down and shot by the SWAT team. The reasoning was that the dogs posed a threat to the officers going in. A full team of men with guns and concealable body armor, yet they were threatened by a dog that was running away from them, sure they were. (It seems that anytime there is a raid these days the dogs get it, even though the Supreme Court has said the police need to use a lesser levels of force to allay the threat posed by dogs, and that shooting dogs with no cause is an unnecessary deprivation of property.)

The Mayor and his mother-in-law were handcuffed and questioned. Eventually, they were released when it became obvious they weren't part of this nefarious plot.

The story gets weirder from there. The PG Police and Sheriff's Deputies say that they didn't know who was in the home. They didn't notify the city's police department that they were about to conduct a narcotics raid in their city. They do claim that the knew the layout of the house and that there were two dogs in the house. 

This brings to mind some serious questions. Like, why didn't they know whose house it was? How did they get the layout of the house? If they looked through city or county records wouldn't the owner's name be available? Wouldn't a simple check of the phone book revealed a name?

At this point, I'm forced to conclude someone in the PGPD was out to make a name for him or herself. He or she has a 32 lbs shipment of pot going to a local politician. Making that bust would make someone's career. I believe they didn't tell the city PD about the raid because they didn't want to alert the Mayor.  They got buck fever and blew the investigation trying to get the politician.  After all, they had to outsource the raid to the PGSD in order to execute it on that day. The PGPD SWAT team was busy with other enforcement actions.

Oh and the PGPD Chief has refused to apologize for his department's actions. He has said that the Mayor has been "victimized" by the drug dealers. Funny. If the police had not intervened the shipment of drugs would have never made it to his door and his dogs would still be alive. 

As it stands now the Feds are looking into the case. They'll try to determine if the Mayor's rights were violated under US Code Title 42 Section 1983. That's how they got conviction of the officers who beat Rodney King.

Now to the pigs part. It seems that police can shoot our dogs with little or no consequences. However, if you so much as shout an obscenity at a police dog or make a face at a police dog you may be charged with animal cruelty. Yeah, I'm not kidding, sadly. 

http://www.tcpalm.com/news/2008/feb/25/28-year-old-man-charged-cruelty-animals/
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,278701,00.html

Resources:

http://www.examiner.com/a-1525303~Mayor_exonerated_in_plot_to_smuggle_pot__police_say.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/05/AR2008080502664.html
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-mayor0807,0,4563211.story
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/08/07/mayor.warrant/index.html
http://cfc.wjla.com/external.cfm?p=calvo080708
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/07/AR2008080702161.html
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,399882,00.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/08/AR2008080802690.html

Crash

Michelle's hard drive has crashed. She has lost some pictures, some documents and some iTunes songs. I have ordered another one and a new operating system for her computer. It will be some time, perhaps a week, before it's back up and running.

That leaves me in charge of posting. 

We're in trouble folks.

A Day With The Ponies

So today we took my mom and dad to a Polo match.  Most people think Polo and they think snobs.  It's not though!  It's really quite fun.  It was a nice sunny day with a nice breeze.  This is a picture of my parents.  They've been kind enough to let me photo them for my class assignments.  The Polo match this time was regional teams.  It was Pearls vs. Newport team.  It was a charity game for the fight against breast cancer.  We got great seats.  Right next to the scoreboard and were able to back our car up the the site.  Hooray!

There were tons of children out, most of whom were not being corralled by their parents, and dogs.  This dog came from across the polo field in search of a ball to play with.  He found it in some kids who were playing catch.  Jim took this photo.  Good job!  The owners were no where to be seen, which worried me for quite some time.  And when they did finally show up I wanted to smack them because they were like 'oh you shouldn't do that'.

The light colored horse was one of my mom's favorites.  This was the best shot that I got of it.  Action shots can be a bit tricky.  The pink shirts are the Pearls and the red shirts are Newport.  The Pearls eked out a win at the very end.  They won by one and we think that the Newport team let them.  

And of course I can't complete this post without at least one photo of my sweet baboo.  At least I chose the clean one.

-Michelle

24

That's roughly how long we traveled this past weekend to get to Virginia.  And that's round trip.  Normally it takes about 20.  New York City really gobbled up our travel this time with construction and congestion.  Ugh!  And that doesn't include all the back and forth driving we did.

Our friend, Floyd, told us about a different way to go that might be a little less congested.  So we'll try that next time.  Hopefully it'll keep Jim's blood pressure from rising.  Thanks Floyd!

We went down for our home inspection which we scheduled to coincide with Ingleside's Wine Maker's Library.  Ingleside was our original reason for going and we almost didn't make it.  Insert me fuming here.

Our home inspection took 4 hours.  No there was nothing wrong with the house.  I know this was on your mind because it's the first question everyone asks when they hear this.  Our inspector just liked to talk.  A LOT!  And didn't seem to catch the hint that he needed to stop joking and telling so many stories.  Ugh!  And I had scheduled it earlier in the day so that we would be able to make the Ingleside event.

This is a partial view of the entryway to the tasting room.  It's changed a bit since I've worked there.  That's the way of the world though.  I think it looks nice.  We got to the event 45 minutes before the end.  To say I was peeved would be an understatement.  But we got to see our friends and drink wine, so all was good.  We were able to try the 2007 Chardonnay and Rosato before they were released.  I must say that the Rosato is my favorite.  It rocks!  We were also able to try 3 vintages of Petit Verdot, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot.  Yum!  And of course there were tasty goodies there too.  It was an excellent way to end a very tedious day.  Good food, good wine and good friends.  We got to see nearly all of our friends while we were there.  It felt as if we had never left.

I was also able to get some of my homework done for my photography class.  This assignment was letters.  And you couldn't get them from a sign.  They had to be shapes you found in every day things.  Hopefully you can figure out the letters below.

     
Our professor said it would be really easy and that once you started looking you would find tons of letters.  I guess I'm bad at hide and seek, because I didn't find as many as some of my classmates.  Of course I wasn't going to take pictures while I was driving either.  Safety first!

Finally this is a picture of our buddies Neil and Linda.  That's right Linda, if you email me asking why I haven't posted you get your picture posted.  I have lots more pictures of Ingleside friends, but I wanted to get this posted before I get another gentle nudge from Linda.  =)  Look Linda!  Now you're famous! -Michelle

What Does Michelle Do With Her Monday and Wednesday Afternoons?

I know this is a question that has been on most people's minds.  I mean who wouldn't want to know?  I'm interesting.  Right?  Okay stop laughing now!

So let me put you all out of your misery.  I've been taking a Digital Photography class.  Yes I'm in school again.
So instead of writing anything of substance I'll bore you with my photos.  I've already babbled about it in the other blog, but there are so many pictures to share.  So I decided to spread it out.

So a few of these are 'action' photos while the rest are still life photos.  I'm enjoying the course and hope you'll enjoy the photos.  I have to chose 10 for my final project.

Just A Small Gathering

So yesterday we had a "few" friends over for what started as a black and tan party.  Have you ever noticed how a few can all be a totally different number to you than to someone else?  =)  More on that in a bit.  

This all started about a month or so ago when we went along with Karen to take Jake to the airport.  Hope I didn't lose anyone there.  We stopped at Dave & Busters for lunch and fun.  While eating we started discussing black and tans.  Much to our shame we can not pour these things to save our lives.  Jake informed us that he could teach us and promised to once he got back.  We promised we'd wait as Karen knew how to do it too.

Okay back to the present.  So we decided Friday, spur of the moment, that we should get together and do that black and tan party.  Yes I know time has gone by a bit, but hey life is hectic!  Originally it was going to be maybe 5 people.  We said what the heck let's do this in the afternoon and barbecue.  The weather will be great.  Good excuse to eat charred meat and drink beer.

I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but by the end of the day we'd had a total of something like 10 people.  When we realized how many people were coming Jim and I had to laugh.  How did the small black and tan party suddenly explode?  Not that we minded, but we were just curious.  

We had lots of fun though.  Have learned how to pour black and tans.  Thanks Jake!  We also learned that the house can accommodate 10 people comfortably.  Or should I say 10 and 1/2?  Theo was there too.  What's a party without my favorite brewer?  Kaiser warmed up to everyone by the end of the gathering and was in heaven with all the pets he was getting.  He even got a burger.  Lucky dog!  And was good with Theo, who by the way is walking now.  Odie showed up as Theo was making his departure.  Sorry Theo.  And loved all the pets he got.  Even the birds enjoyed it, as Jake likes birds and gave them lots of attention.

All in all a good time was had.  What I really have to say is...

You like us!  You really, really like us!

I'll ignore the fact that we were offering beer and food to bribe you to come over.  =)

-Michelle