House update

Yesterday, the seller agreed to pay the cost of fixing the chimney, therefore we decided to remove all contingencies, which means that the house will be ours in 15 days, no matter what happens...

Yesterday also, Joy helped us pick a loan. It took us almost 2 hours to settle on a 30-year fixed 6.25% loan, interest-only for the first 10 years, with no points and no impounds. It's very helpful to have a mortgage broker in the family (and way more useful than a software engineer ;-)

Armeen and Etienne

Armeen and his parents were visiting from Iran last week.
We invited them for dinner on Thursday:


Both of them enjoyed jumping on the couch, playing with Thomas trains and watching Ice Age...


Armeen is two weeks younger than Etienne, We hope they move back to California very soon! Here are a few pictures of the fun they've been having together during the past 3 years...

December 2003:

April 2004:


February 2006:

Welcome Gramie!

Gramie arrived from France yesterday and she's going to stay 2 full weeks with us! Etienne pretended not to recognize her after almost 7 months apart, but within 45 minutes, all he wanted to do was to play with her...
Elodie always tries to imitate her brother so they're competing for "Gramie time".
Stephanie and I enjoyed having a babysitter ready to take care of Etienne at 7:30 am on Saturday morning ;-)

We found a house !

BIG NEWS: This evening, our offer to buy this house was accepted !


It's located in West San Jose (next to Lawrence & Moorpark) at equal distance from Stephanie's office and mine. Let's give you a quick tour of our future home, starting with the entry:


You arrive directly in the living room. The 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms are on your left...


On the right is the family room...


Next to it is the kitchen...


From the family room, you access the backyard. It has orange, lemon and apple trees!


Thanks to Vickie, our excellent agent, we only searched for a month and a half, and we made offers on only 4 houses, including this one.

What's next ? Tomorrow we'll have the inspections and appraisal done, we will close Escrow on March 8th, and then the owner has 2 months to move away, which means we'll probably move in at the beginning of May !

Happy Valentine's Day

I've just realized that I've not published any picture of Elodie since New Year's day! What a shame...

Alone in Boulder Creek

Last weekend we left Elodie in Boulder Creek and drove to Tahoe for a ski trip. Etienne had been "abandoned" in Paris and Neulette numerous times, but it was the first time that Elodie had ever been apart from us. Of course she was perfectly happy (although sick on Friday and Saturday) with Grandpa and Grandma, and Etienne got to enjoy beeing an only child for 48 hours...