Buying a house is a bit like feeding yourself to a lion.

A large part of you wonders "why am I trying to do this?"

And another part of you wonders "why, if I'm so tasty, is the lion so very, very recalcitrant to eat me? Am I not succulent enough? Am I not properly seasoned?"

This house thing has been one long adventure. Mostly because I was gone for three weeks after signing an agreement on the first house, which made things a little chaotic when I got back and had to get an appraisal and inspection completed in 3 days (eek!) and in this manner discovered that the house has serious problems (I knew that) and I can't use a regular mortgage to buy it (I didn't know that) and it's net worth right now is about the same as a Japanese mid-size luxury automobile with all the extras (I knew it would be bad; I didn't know it would be that bad).

One terminated contract later, we're back near square one. I've sent the seller an entirely new (and considerably reduced in price) offer, which he's "running some numbers" on now, and I expect to see a counter offer made of fail on my desk sometime Monday afternoon.

So I'm creating a new list of properties to view, and will start looking around again next week (sigh). With luck, I hope to be closing sometime before mid-July, which would put me out of this place completely by July 31. We'll see.