Well, I’ve waited to post this until it was basically official, and after our little house-hunting excursion this past weekend, it is indeed – Liz and I are moving back to California. :)
See, the main reason we came out here to Texas is because the housing market in CA was basically crap – the median house price in Rancho Cordova was somewhere around $300K+, and there’s no way in hell we’d ever be able to qualify for that kind of loan – let alone pay for the mortgage that would go alone with it. Our plan was to come out here, wait a year, buy a house, and then slowly build equity in it, so that when we DID move back to CA someday, we’d actually have something worthwhile to put down on a house to that we could actually buy something.
There’s no way, of course, we could have known that only a year after we made this move, the crumbling economy would see foreclosure rates of almost 2/3 in some areas, sending house prices plummeting. After talking with my dad on the phone a few weeks ago, he confirmed it – we could basically buy an equivalent house in California to something out here in Texas for just about an equivalent price. Given that our families are still in CA, our choice is pretty clear – pack up and head on back westward.
We flew out to CA last weekend to do some hunting for a place to rent while we get our ducks in a row to qualify for a mortgage, and found one in Elk Grove and another in Rocklin – both spitting distance to Rancho Cordova. (My hometown) If all goes well, we should actually be heading back that way by the end of the month – appropriately, we’re aiming to be back the day before thanksgiving, which is the exact day we moved OUT here last year.
Moving’s a tricky business, though, and we could certainly use some help. Coincidentally, this times up with our annual Real Life Support Group Christmas Card drive. This will officially be the fourth year of this, and I’m going to post pictures of the cards from last year, (mainly because we’re going to be selling them as packs that you can send to loved ones… sans our signatures, of course) but the general way it works is such : Any donations of $15 or more to “gregdean@gmail.com” (Or you can just click on the “Not Hungry, Just Broke” image to the upper right) will recieve, BEFORE CHRISTMAS, (I know… it’s been an issue in the past. I have the USPS Christmas deadline mailing list handy – no worries this time) a christmas card featuring the Real Life characters in a christmas setting, signed by myself and Liz – and there’ll even be a little sketch of Greg in there, to boot. I generally make a habit of not making the image public until at least a year has passed, so it’s kind of a surprise when you get it, but it’s always a lot of fun.
Remember – if you want to get a christmas card, BE SURE to include your address in the “Notes” field. I have no way of tracking you otherwise, and it’s notoriously difficult to have the USPS deliver mail to “Some guy going by the name of DudeMan007.” The deadline for this is pretty much the last day these can go out and get to you by Christmas – December 11th, though it’d be awesome if you could help out before then, seeing as how we’re trying to move by about November 24th. :)
In any case, my time in Texas has actually been great, and if it wasn’t for the fact that pretty much everyone I know (Save for a few very good friends living about an hour away from me here) lives in California, we might just have stayed here. Family just turned out to be more important than I had thought it would be.