Happy Pi Day! Here are 9 pie recipes to help you celebrate (the collage is clickable)
You know, I watch a lot of HGTV, and most of it has to do with buying houses. Property Virgins, House Hunters, Love it or List it. The Property Brothers is my favorite, because a) they're cute and b) while I understand all the benefits of buying a fixer upper and renovating, I wouldn't have a clue how to go about doing it, so I like watching them do it.
Anyway, my point is that I figured my watching lots of HGTV would prepare me for buying a house, it did not.
Like, appraisals. I didn't even know they were a thing. I figured that's why you have a real estate agent, to tell you what the house is worth. But no, after you're already under contract, you have someone come in and appraise the house and tell you the price that you already agreed on after 48 hours of negotiations is more than you should be paying and if you go with the price you agreed upon, that's going to affect the mortgage that you already did all the paperwork for and locked your rate in for the next 90 days except not because that extra $3k is going to raise your rate which doesn't make any sense to me because nothing's actually changed. This was the price I was approved for, this is the price I'm paying, but now it's somehow all wrong.
Raise your hand if you think this should come before you actually agree on a price with the seller. *raises hand* Doesn't this all seem a bit counter-intuitive?
So the house underappraised by $3k. Which, in terms of real estate, is not a big number. And since it's not going to appraise for a different price for anyone else, it would seem a given that the sellers would give me the house less that amount. So now's the time that the attorneys get involved, and I get a call from mine saying the sellers can't afford it. They're actually bringing money to the table in order to close. But! she says to me, their attorney is going to try something she's never actually heard of anyone doing before, and it might not work, but it's worth a shot. He's going to go to the bank and see if they can forgive the $3k, making it a short sale that's not actually technically a short sale. If he can show that the sellers can't afford to stay, and afford to lower the price, and since it's not like the appraisal is going to change anytime soon, and the fact that they already have a buyer on the line, he thought it was worth a shot to try. But, my attorney says, it's never been done, and she doesn't even know if he'll get in the door.
So this was Friday. On Tuesday, my realtor calls and says, the sellers found a place but need to push back the closing date 2 weeks. They'll drop the price if I agree. After checking that it's well within my 90 day rate lock, I was more than happy to agree.
Movies- Here there be spoilers
Silver Linings Playbook
Okay, I had high hopes for this movie since I love Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, but I didn't really like it.
Of course going into it, I didn't realize that it was about the "mentally ill." And like most similar movies, the whole time it was like, "ooh, look how deep this movie is because we're talking about the taboo and we're making the mentally ill people the ones you root for, but secretly we're still ostracizing them because we're showing them as wrong and strange and the only people who can love them are other mentally ill people." As someone who's been there, I tend find these movies insulting.
Because look at it this way, if you take away the mental illness-- if Bradley Cooper's character had been in jail or rehab, or similarly isolated from society, and if Jennifer Lawrence's character had just been having trouble adjusting after her husband passed away-- it would be a really bad movie about a highly toxic couple. Tiffany actually extorts Pat into being her dance partner, and then it turns out she was lying the entire time (but it's okay, even romantic, because he's mentally ill? Not understanding that logic). Pat shows zero interest in anything other than getting back the ex-wife that cheated on him with his coworker to their wedding song. When he's with Tiffany, he does nothing but talk about Nikki, his ex, or bring up the fact that Tiffany's husband is dead.
And not for nothing, even thought Pat is supposedly bipolar, they show him nothing but hypomanic. Not once does he have a depressive episode, and I don't even think that he showed a true manic episode, since they all seemed to be over in minutes. But I guess depressive episodes just aren't interesting enough (and even though he's supposedly in recovery, he's not taking his meds for the first half of the movie, so don't give me that). But I guess depressive episodes just aren't crazy enough. I mean, the urge to beat someone after you find him having sex with your wife to your wedding song, and he tells you you should "get out of here" when it's your own house, doesn't strike me as particularly crazy.
I thought the more interesting story, the one they spent the least amount of time on, was Pat's parents. Taking in their grown son after he'd been hospitalized, trying to deal with his episodes and their own guilt over not seeing it sooner. That would have been a good movie, but I guess they're just not young and pretty enough.
And what was up with the people in town? The therapist plays Pat's trigger in the waiting room of his office-- Pat, who'd just gotten out of state-mandated hospitalization for beating a guy half to death. Pat could have hurt the receptionist or the other patients in the waiting area (not on purpose, but that's why we keep triggers in controlled environments, dude) and he wasn't even there to see the result. And that cop, "Hey, aren't you Tommy's widow? Yeah, so sad, you wanna have sex?" And Tiffany's sister is all, "Hey, Pat's back, and he's crazy, and Tiffany's crazy, let's invite them both over for dinner so they can meet, but then I'll get upset when that's the only thing they can find to talk about." The f*** is wrong with these people?
Posts From this Week
And not for nothing, even thought Pat is supposedly bipolar, they show him nothing but hypomanic. Not once does he have a depressive episode, and I don't even think that he showed a true manic episode, since they all seemed to be over in minutes. But I guess depressive episodes just aren't interesting enough (and even though he's supposedly in recovery, he's not taking his meds for the first half of the movie, so don't give me that). But I guess depressive episodes just aren't crazy enough. I mean, the urge to beat someone after you find him having sex with your wife to your wedding song, and he tells you you should "get out of here" when it's your own house, doesn't strike me as particularly crazy.
I thought the more interesting story, the one they spent the least amount of time on, was Pat's parents. Taking in their grown son after he'd been hospitalized, trying to deal with his episodes and their own guilt over not seeing it sooner. That would have been a good movie, but I guess they're just not young and pretty enough.
And what was up with the people in town? The therapist plays Pat's trigger in the waiting room of his office-- Pat, who'd just gotten out of state-mandated hospitalization for beating a guy half to death. Pat could have hurt the receptionist or the other patients in the waiting area (not on purpose, but that's why we keep triggers in controlled environments, dude) and he wasn't even there to see the result. And that cop, "Hey, aren't you Tommy's widow? Yeah, so sad, you wanna have sex?" And Tiffany's sister is all, "Hey, Pat's back, and he's crazy, and Tiffany's crazy, let's invite them both over for dinner so they can meet, but then I'll get upset when that's the only thing they can find to talk about." The f*** is wrong with these people?
Posts From this Week
