The Zoo over Ambuscade Street

Ok, my credit union has a free program, with people there Monday-Saturday during normal business hours to help answer all my stupid questions, who will help me find a realtor and house/land, and who will, at the end of this whole process, give me cash?! Up to $1,000 per transaction (which may end up being two - land and modular house), with an additional $100 for financing through Navy Federal.

Where is the drawback, here? I mean, other than the insane amount of junk mail I'm going to be getting.

They've already answered some of my funky questions about this whole land-then-house thing, and told me where to go to answer the rest.

That's where we're currently looking, by the way - buying land and putting a modular home on it is going to be as cheap, and in most cases cheaper, than buying an already-built house with enough land for le horse. Who's finally paid off as of yesterday, yay.

We can get sufficient land for around $50,000. We could get 15 acres about a mile from Lake Anna State Park for $100,000, if we cared to go that high. The modular home is going to cost us somewhere between $54,000 and $180,000, although I should note that most of the models I'm looking at are not at the extremes of that scale - say $130,000, which is where I was looking in the first place. That gives us a brand new home on a 5+ acre parcel of land for under $200K.

Drawbacks involve the 2-6 month delay in being able to move in, and needing information on the mysterious "construction loan," which may or may not require monthly payments before completion. This construction loan would include both the house and the land at the end, so only one payment. One much smaller payment than it would be for the houses we were looking at before.

Then again, there's always the trailer on 8 acres for $80K, but I think I have too much pride to actually buy a trailer, even with the intention of building a real house to live in on the land.

I will perservere! The drawbacks of last week will not prevent me from moving out of the hellhole I currently live in! Huzzah!

I have no idea who wrote this, but it's amusing me at the moment:

Roses are Red
Violets are Blue
Badger Badger Badger
Badger Badger Mushroom

Ok, we need to get this over with. Monster is quite clearly the best show of this season, hands down. Why did it take me this long to start watching it?

Kenran Butoh Sai: The Mars Daybreak had potential, but episodes 5 and 6 really let me down. Aishiteruze Baby is staying strong, which is good. Bakuretsu Tenshi is all flash, little substance - entertaining, but lacking depth. It still remains to be seen how Keroro Gunso will turn out (entertaining, I'm sure), but it's a fluffy comedy show based on a fluffy comedy manga - nothing to compare to the depth of the characterizations already shown in only 1.5 episodes of Monster. Nothing else this season has caught my attention in the least (except for Le Portrait de Petit Cossette, which is excellent, but is also an OVA and therefore doesn't count).

Lots of politics, too - not necessarily the Washington type, but the political interactions between people. Good stuff. I'll be picking this one up the moment it comes out.

A thinking show, with adult characters doing adult thing. Not enough of that around.

[EDIT] Pretty Cure and Poipoider are both worth mentioning as well. Pretty Cure is just...odd. Magical cell phones fall from the sky, and turn into plushies. The two girls can then swipe phone cards to transform. Then they fight David Bowie's Goblin King's spiritual sucessor. Yea. It's actually odder than it sounds.

Poipoider is a character in Mars Daybreak - a dolphin with a deep rumbly voice in a mecha suit. Rock! Sadly, he still doesn't make up for the weak story in the two episodes I mentioned.