Stop me before I start carrying around wallet-sized photos of my house and forcing strangers to look at them.

Hey! It's my blog's anniversary! Three whole years of this nonsense.

To celebrate, I thought I'd do something really unique and wild and crazy and actually...wait for it...update my stupid blog. I know! Stand back, for we do know how to party around here.

Don't even get me started on the barn burner that was our Thanksgiving.

Hey there, good-looking. I'm a venture capitalist from Vermont. I have an emerging maple syrup conglomerate. Wanna dance?

This past week has been a blur. Everything got kick-started into crazy fast motion last Sunday when we officially accepted an offer on our condo. Our real estate agent neatly shuffled the papers and glanced at her watch, noting that it was 3:30 pm and we had exactly 30 minutes left of Open House time. And then we were all, BREAK! GOOOO ESCROWS! and high-tailed it over to see a couple townhouses.

We actually thought we were lost and almost turned around. (And by "we" I mean "I thought we were lost and demanded Jason turn around because THIS ISN'T RIGHT AND WE ONLY HAVE 15 MINUTES BEFORE THE OPEN HOUSES CLOSE OH MY GAWWWWD" and Jason reminded me that it's not like the realtors lock the doors PRECISELY at 4 pm and like, hiss at you through the mail slot to go away after that, so we kept driving.)

We saw two townhouses. The first one was cheap and had a lot of potential, provided you were willing to spend the next six months of your life scraping wallpaper off of every flat-ish surface in the entire house.

The second one was a 2,600-square-foot end unit with a remodeled kitchen, three bedrooms, a den, a finished basement rec room and four remodeled bathrooms. It was not as cheap.

Guess which one I liked. Guess!

For the first time since we started looking at houses, I got that weird little fluttery feeling in my stomach as we walked around. They'd knocked out a wall in the kitchen to make it big and open and bright. The basement wasn't basementy at all, but was more like a real part of the house. Was that a pantry? And is this ANOTHER closet?

Then I went into the master bedroom, turned a corner and saw the little sitting room. They'd set it up as an office.

"This is it." I told Jason. "This is the perfect house."

(And that was BEFORE I saw the remodeled master bath with two goddamned sinks oh my holy lord.)

It took all my willpower to refrain from throwing myself at the brick exterior to give the house a hug as we left.

We went back on Monday night with our agent, who confirmed the awesomeness of the house and the neighborhood.*

Then we found out that the sellers had received an offer from somebody else already.

I was crushed yet took it all in stride no, mostly just crushed. But the last thing we wanted to do was get into a bidding war in a damn BUYER'S MARKET, especially after being lowballed by our own buyers. So we went out again on Tuesday to look at a slew of other places, each more disappointing and laughable and fucking EXPENSIVE then the last. (Highlight of the day: the 1920s farmhouse with ceilings so low that Jason took out a light fixture with his forehead.)

Then! (Why is this story taking me so long to tell? Even my mom doesn't have this kind of patience for the minutae of my life.)

It turned out that the other offer on the townhouse was not very good. Were we still interested?

Yes! And then we lowballed them anyway. HA HA.

Anyway, after some frantic back and forthing on Wednesday night, when we were supposed to be on our way up to Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving, our offer was accepted. We left for PA around 8 pm and got there around 2 am, oh my God.

We still had both home inspections to get through before we could consider everything officially cool, so I ate a lot of extra stuffing. You know, for the coping.

(ALMOST DONE, I SWEAR.)

The inspections were yesterday. We spent several hours at the new house in the morning (the place is perfect and I love it more every time I see it, even though we don't have nearly enough furniture and will have zero money for new furniture, so hello guests! Pull up a box and stay awhile!) (also I forgot the camera so I don't have any pictures I can post yet). And then we were kicked out of our condo for mannnnnnnnnny more hours in the late afternoon.

At one point we stood forlornly on the sidewalk outside our building, watching the inspector walk up and down and up and down our stairs through the window. Jason kept reminding himself that our stairs are in great shape, while I kept trying to forget all the times I'd walked up those stairs naked, because Jesus CHRIST, you can see RIGHT IN FROM DOWN HERE, WHAT KIND OF CRAZY PEEP SHOW HAVE I BEEN RUNNING THESE PAST FIVE YEARS?

Our agent called this morning with the good news: the inspection went perfectly. No issues, no repairs, just smooth sailing until settlement.

We move in 20 days.

There's really only one thing I can say about that...

(I'm sorry, but this photo is pretty much the BEST EMOTICON EVER, and conveys more than all the exclamation points in the world.)

*I'm going to keep that info to myself, if y'all don't mind. I'm simply going to say I live somewhere in the MD-DC-VA metro area. Look at me! Learning lessons and defining boundaries! And it only took me three years!