Regards to my little sis & her signifcant other.

Wow. It's been one whole year. Y'all have a swell day!!

We're officially homeless.

We closed yesterday on our Wichita digs. What a relief. what should have been relatively simple was made not so by disparate people who just happened to be working towards the same goal of complicating our lives.
I'm not in the habit of hatin', but sometimes things have to be said. Kerry Dunn is an agent who works for the sale, keeps you in the loop, and has commission rates that are a steal for the services he provides. Cindy Mavis (the buyer's agent) on the other hand, not only took 3% of my sale price, but made me do work that she should have been doing & doesn't understand the protocol of the business she's in. Caveat emptor. I'll leave it at that.
Anyway, we're 2 weeks out from getting our new place and we've got the closing cash to do it (yay!). We'll let y'all know when we get into our new place, and if anyone wants to move boxes & furniture the weekend of Apr. 12, let me know, 'cuz i'm buyin' the beer.

Welcome to this world, young Wenke.

Henry Karl Wenke joined the human race today @ 12:55 pm. For all the details, hop on over to his father's blog.

Much love goes out to his folks. Sleep while you can!

Potential Homeowners Need Apply(!)

Having successfully transplanted our household to a temporary basement apartment here in Hays, USA while waiting for our new home, we're getting serious about selling our old digs. After cleaning the house from stem to stern and moving out all un-necessaries, we snapped some new photos and listed on every for sale by owner site we could. We also put up a video walk-thru (see below).
If that wasn't enough, we've also listed our house on the Realtor Multi-Listing Service (MLS) with a local agent that takes a flat fee for listing. We're hoping this expand our buyer base, with our property now showing up on search sites like Yahoo and Realtor.com, and we've dangled the carrot of commission for any local agents looking to get people into a home. I personally think the flat-fee listing is a good deal for folks like us that have already done the homework and the legwork. Plus, we still retain the opportunity to sell sans-agent & keep the 3% buyer's agent commission for ourselves.

So, we're really ready to sell now. Wanna buy a house? :-)

A Christmas card from a family in transit.

With the move and all, we haven't been able to reciprocate any of the many holiday greetings we've received (sorry). We'll be on the road with a truckload of stuff headed North to Hays (weather permitting) during the holiday weekend. Just the same, while we're packing boxes, throwing out junk and cleaning, know that we're thinking of you all. Merry Christmas!

Wagons West!

Two Weeks ago, Anj accepted a position with the Ellis County FSA. It's effectively a transfer, as she'll be working for the the same folks, albeit this location is a bit closer to her family. It'll also give me more contracting opportunity as well, seeing as my primary contractee is based in Hays. Actually if you think about it, I spent 8 years in Hays prior to moving to Wichita after we got married close to 6 years ago, so it certainly makes our stint in South-Central seem a bit less permanent in the 1st place.

Housing is ridiculous in Hays; little supply, high demand and so we gotta milk every last cent outta the sale of our current digs, so we're gonna try to by-owner it. If y'all know anyone looking for a house in Wichita, be sure to send 'em our way!

A toast - to the end of our wedding season!

The journey of scheduling, traveling, spending & tracking down sitters that began way back in March has finally come to a close for this year for us; I'm talking about the wedding season. A half-dozen or so this year, including my lil' sis (shout-out!). This last weekend, we attended the finale, as Angie & me were attendants for Angie's brother Jared and his new bride, Christy.

Here's a link to the gallery with a few photos. (note to self - buy more ibuprofen).

A new Little Liles.

Congratulations are in order to our friends Jamie & Bill on the Birth of their son, Carson Allen!
Carson was born July 28, 2007 at 11:35 am, weighing in at 9 lbs, 1 oz, and 21 in long.

Good Luck to the new mom & dad. May your nights be sleepless & your diaper pail full!
In other news, I'm not making any more public guesses on baby gender (It seemed a sure thing that karma would have given Bill a girl).
:-)

The Cookbook Wiki Experiment.

So, I'm looking for an easy-to-use means to keep my recipes & such that I can get to offline as well. I decided to take the plunge with Tiddlywiki. Yeah i know - there's no integration w/ blogger whatsoever & maybe that makes it ugly/clunky. Just the same, I could store all of my recipes in one html file on a flash drive if i wanted to.

Give the new Cookbook Wiki a go, but know that I haven't imported all of my recipes just yet. That said, the old site still has them all if you need them.

Hello! Long time, no see.

You may have noticed that the old family blog has really languished over the last year. Between kids and work, we've just not been able to maintain it all that well. So, we've pared things down & tried to make some time-saving & ease-of-use changes via Blogger & Picasa. What this means for you the reader is more updates & more pictures (we hope). I'm still fooling around with how I wanna do Recipes (looking like another blog presently; I'll let ya know). In the meantime, you can still get to the old site, but be sure to update your bookmarks!

-bd