Friday afternoon my home loan officially funded and recorded, which means the house is officially mine. Part of the offer agreement was to let the current owner live there rent-free until the fifth of April, though, so I don’t have keys yet.

Turns out the current owner will be out on Saturday, April 3, so I’ll get keys then. We don’t have the utilities scheduled to be turned on until the fifth, though, so we can take a couple of loads of the fragile stuff over and that’s about it. Maybe just run around in the empty house and enjoy the fact we’re moving.

The packing process kicked up a load of dust this weekend so my allergies are going nuts. I think this is the worst part of the whole process - the packing and actual moving. Next time I’m going to try to budget to have our stuff packed and moved and everything. I’m taking the opportunity while packing to get rid of stuff I don’t need anymore, but couldn’t I do that while unpacking just as easily?

We also started painting this cobalt blue wall in our apartment back to white. We’ve got two coats of primer on there and we’ll put a third on tonight before painting it back to the original white color. The primer’s doing a great job of covering the color up; I’m not sure why people complain so much about colored walls.

I love that Microsoft has gone on a security kick and is starting to lock things down, but let me offer a thought: The reason most desktop users don’t use Linux is because it’s too fucking complex to configure. To that end, I just read an article about how to enable remote debugging once you’ve installed Windows XP SP2. What a pain in the ass. I can only imagine what other software hoops I’m going to have to jump through to get the simplest things to work. I should probably read up on that.

Just when I had gotten all of the Harry Potter Legos, they released the Prisoner of Azkaban series. And some of them are rehashes of sets they already put out, which is just annoying. Bitches!

I’m a stress case. I’m a high-strung, mildly neurotic, anal-retentive, passive-aggressive stress case.

The house buying thing is causing me stress. I’ve worked my ass off packing and arranging funds and getting things coordinated and there’s still so much more to do. The time is going altogether too quickly.

Work is causing me stress. I’m working on one project, which is really three projects that people are kind of calling one project, all of which have their own timelines (unreasonable) and goals (conflicting). Requirements are poorly defined (if, in fact, they are defined); cross-project dependencies are entirely out of my control (and they’re trying to jerk the carpet out from under me on one particular key dependency); and the whole thing is just moving way too fast for me to feel in control of my own destiny.

To that end, little things are bothering me now. I get the urge to tell everyone to just fuck off because I can only deal with one thing at a time anymore. I’m constantly riding that “last straw line” and it seems that folks can always just find that one last nerve to step on. I’m rational enough about the situation to realize that I’m not going to be able to address any of this rationally in a discussion, nor do I want to “talk it out” or debate about why things need to be the way they are. I don’t care. I just want shit fixed, I want it to work, and I don’t want it to require my personal time and attention.

I think I need a vacation.

I went at 11:00a to the title company and promised my mortal soul in exchange for…

Oh, wait a minute.

I mean, I went to the title company and signed all of my loan papers, handed over a ridiculously large check, and now my house is in escrow. As soon as the loan funds and records (which should be Friday), I’ll be getting some keys to the place because, at that point, the house is mine.

Of course, the lady selling the house won’t be out until April 3, which was part of the offer - allowing her to stay there rent-free for a few days while her new house closed and she moved out - so I won’t be able to go in until then. I’ll take a couple of loads of stuff over, maybe roll around on the carpet, nothing major… but on the fifth, I’m movin’ in.

My realtor, Gregory, missed my paper signing, but I think it was just some sort of miscommunication or something. He said he didn’t get the message on when the signing was, while my title officer (who is, coincidentally, also my aunt) says she left a message for him with the info. Gregory is understandably irritated because he thinks it reflects poorly on him, while my aunt is also understandably irritated because she thinks it reflects poorly on her. I don’t think it reflects poorly on either of them; they both provided me with excellent service and will be getting future business and recommendations from me. These things just happen sometimes. I’m not sure what Gregory would have done there anyway, other than just showing support; it was basically just a bunch of new versions of loan documents I already signed.

All in all the signing took about 45 minutes and I signed probably - seriously - 100 different things (I have two loans - a primary/first mortgage, and a secondary/home equity line of credit - so there’s double the usual paperwork), many of them duplicates of each other, but all reasonably straightforward. Now that it’s said and done, I’m not sure what all of the hazardous warnings and bad signals were all about that I got from people I talked to; the signing isn’t really a bad experience, and there’s not a lot different there from when you buy a car or any other big-ticket item. There’s just more to sign, which doesn’t make it bad, just a pain in the wrist.

Only one more step remains in the entire process - the actual move. We’ve been packing nightly and getting things ready to go, but there’s still so much more. I’m wiped out, man.