I am now a homeowner.  Yow.  Only in America.

Here's how it happened.

Claudia was looking at houses every day for most of February and the beginning of March 2002 and the qualifications were tough:

    1) Not over $125,000 (I could just squeeze $125,000 with creative financing because I have no    debts, period, so no other loans or credit cards or anything.
    2) Good sized lot -- I wanted room for a dog, my many cars, I love trees and plants and all that good stuff, and Claudia is nuts about gardening and if things worked out between us it would be nice to have a huge garden for her to play in.
    3) Passably close to town, on a bus line, not too much in the sticks, hopefully.
    4) Expecting a fixer-upper but preferably not a total wreck.

Trying to get all of the above in one place turned out to be pretty much Dreaming The Impossible Dream. We had one lead that fit all of the above except for #4 -- it turned out to have a collapsing foundation and the owner (a bank) didn't want to make any repairs so that was out.

Claudia saw a listing and it seemed passable so she goes out to take a look and yadda yadda yadda, it was a little bit more than I wanted to spend ($125,000) but there was just something about it that said, "I'm old and don't look so good but love me and I will reward you, I promise." So I thought about it for about five minutes -- that was literally all the time I had to make the decision to make an offer, there were two other people ready to bid on the place behind me -- and said, "What the heck" and made an offer and end of story, we got the house!!!

That's it. At the beginning we didn't actually live at the house, we were tearing out the carpets and painting walls and patching holes and fixing pipes and wiring and it was nice to be able to go "home" to my dad's place at night and sleep in a nice house in a nice bed. But it's a half-hour drive each way and it got to be old after a while, going there every night after work, spend from 7pm-10pm doing whatever needs fixing the most, then home to sleep, up in the morning, work, lather, rinse, repeat, that stuff. Yawn. So after we did the main bedroom (patched and painted the walls) we threw an old mattress in the corner and settled in.

As for the neighborhood, "Southeast Portland" has high-points and low-points -- it can be ghetto, and it can be industrial, but it can also be nice, and we just happen to be on the edge of all three, but fortunately more in the "nice" part.  Our lot is so big and the neighbor's lots are so big it's like living in the country. Very nice; I can go up on the roof (and have done so many times, to inspect various and sundry cracks in the tar, ugh) and all you can see are trees and birds. Very nice.

We're also only a mile or so from Mount Tabor, a very cool park, so that's cool. I like to say we live in "Tabor East," which sounds rather pretentious, dont'cha think?

Anyway, our cat, Sid, likes it.