Looking for Houses

So yesterday, I spent the entire day wrestling with big scary stuff related to house buying, and now I just need to gather my thoughts. I spent yesterday morning gathering up financial documents - because I put everything in storage, I needed to request copies of my taxes for 07 and 08 and such. Fortunately, this was all relatively accessible, which was nice. I'm still short a couple things I need - particularly, my 1099s. After that, I sat and figured out how this whole mortgage thing works, and messed around until I worked out if I can marshal a 20% down payment.
( The Money Part )

After I sat down and crunched the numbers, I started to feel kinda stressed. By no measure do I really have enough money to do this while putting 20% down. However, I decided to keep going, with my upper (and past upper) limits clearly in mind. The next step was to narrow down where I was looking.
( New York City is a Big Place )

In truth, in before I started pursuing which areas would make sense, early indications were that Riverdale was actually one of my only options, which seems highly contradictory to me cause in my head Riverdale is expensive, but it turned out to be the very first area I found when first searching that met the criteria of being safe, looking nice, allowing the dog, and having parking.
Thus, over the weekend, I got in contact with Linda the Real Estate Agent and made an appointment to get shown apartments in two different complexes.
( The Apartments )

When I got home from all of that, I did a little more poking around online. I checked a couple neighborhoods I hadn't yet, and confirmed that I don't, in fact, have a prayer of affording an actual house. Then, I messed around a bit on Ikea's web page, and firmly established that cosmetic remodeling doesn't cost terribly much at all, but appliances are expensive. :)

To sum up everything, I didn't like the second complex as much as the first. I saw some stuff in the first complex that I really liked, but it's tough to force myself to realize that the one that I saw that I really liked is at the outside limit of my price limit - and it's only even in that range if I can borrow money from my grandfather.

All in all, I hoped that writing all this would de-stress me, but instead, I feel a bit overwhelmed...Sigh...

Healthy Eating: Fudgy Brownies

The next offering in my recipes is one for fudgy brownies, inspired by milbrcrsan and galiyah who got me thinking about healthy brownies. As usual, I tracked down a recipe already reduced and made more healthy, and then used lower cal ingredients.
( Fudgy Brownies )

Man, I Wish I Was On a Boat...

So, I tend to be about 2 years behind the curve on "random crap that goes around the interwebs." So a few minutes ago, I finally decided I couldn't stand more of the Mets game (the current score is 11 - 2, and we're the 2...) and I noticed that a couple of my friends on Facebook were fans of Being On a Boat. I had the idea that this was sort of a thing, those internet things I never actually pay any attention to, so I thought I'd try to figure out what the hell the thing was.
( I'm On a Boat...no, not actually...(Not at All Work Safe) )