Big Day Saturday

Ok... here is my shameless plug for our moving date... this Saturday, April 12th. Erin and I are finally moving into our own place here in the Worcester area.

You may remember a blog I wrote in January where I mentioned that we placed an offer on a house. We had our hearts and money invested into this place. The story did not end well as the seller (banks) cancelled the sale. They did not properly foreclose the house which then caused errors in the Title record. Our lawyer and the title examiner insisted (for our benefit) on changes to their documents to correct the error. This was out of the banks protocol and they would not make the change. The result: we did not get the house and we are now entangled in a bit of a dispute with them.

Erin and I realized that we would have to wait for a long time to try and resolve this dispute, so we decided that it would be better to look for a place to rent for the next year or two. We found a great deal in Worcester, right off of Grafton St. We'll share pictures soon, but if you want to see it in person, we'd love to arrange that too.

Write to me at my new Gmail address (jdestratis@gmail.com) if you're interested in helping with the move for a part of... or the entire day. The schedule looks like this:

8:00am - My brother-in law and I will pick up the truck
9:00am - Arrive at Extra Space Storage on Ararat St. in Worcester
10:30am - Arrive at our new place
11:00am - Begin placing and re-assembling of beds, etc.
12:00noon - Finish off loading the majority of our stuff (hopefully)
12:30pm - Lunch... we'll order some sandwiches or pizza
1:30pm - A run to Spencer to pick up items there
3:00pm - Unload remaining items
5:00pm - Return truck

See ya then!

Tendency to Blab

Some of you may be wondering... what's happening with Jason and Erin's move. I'll give the facts that we know of to this point:

• We have a renter for our house in Irmo, SC and things seem to be going well.
• We moved all of our furniture to a storage location here in Worcester.
• We placed an offer on a house here in Worcester.
• We received a counter offer... to which we countered... which was excepted by the seller!
• We are now scheduling several visits with our agent, lawyers, inspectors and others.

That's really all we know at this point. I'd love to speculate and share more hopes and dreams about this property, but it feels too early at this point. Even though Erin and I feel good about the prospects of being in this house soon, there are still so many things that have to go just right in order for us to move-in.

I noticed a tendency that I developed in my high school and college years; I would get so excited about the prospects of something new or a big decision coming up in my life that I would start discussing it with people... lots of people... before it was a sure thing.

Now... I'm a big believer in having a small circle of people with whom you can discuss big decisions. You should have a diverse group of peers and mentors with different perspectives. You should try to present the facts surrounding your decision in an unbiased manner (...harder than it sounds) as to not influence their judgement in making recommendations. Once you've had a chance to meet with this circle of advisers, a complicated decision begins to look more obvious (hopefully).

My problem in those later adolescent years was the tendency to blab to others... and try to influence as many people as possible to the outcome I wanted in the upcoming life decision.

Two results from this tendency began to show up... as I either:

• Made a bad decision (e.i. the new Nissan Xterra I leased in 2001... I impressed the ladies but paid almost 2x the vehicle value during the years I possessed it)
• Spoke too soon and it never happened (e.i. all the cool jobs I thought would be easy to land the day I got out of college... I even told strangers about my potential employers)

And now, feeling a bit nervous, but confident at the prospects of buying this house, I hope that I've done my homework on the numbers correctly and pray that I haven't just influenced my circle of advisers to just agree with me, rather than give me unbiased and sound advice.

How do you make big decisions?

Jumping Around

Since I last left you... I was traveling up the east coast with Claudio. We both sincerely regreat not bringing along the video camera as we both realized that we could have shot an epic "Awkward Moments" video. (Awkward Moments is the variety skech we developed for the youth group at Holden Chapel... which lives on to this day). But instead, we had the opportunity to focus on the ultimate goal of getting down to SC packing up most of my possesions into a truck and getting back to Worcester in about 52 hours. Our mission was succesful.


Now Erin and I are making an offer on a house that we are interested in purchasing here in Worcester. Here is a quick look:
















We'll let you know what happens with the offer as soon as we can.

I'll also share a quick clip from my cell phone... Mitchell is really working out his legs in the jumper at Kelly and Chris' house: