big day

yesterday was a big day. the biggest thing for me was closing on the house that we bought. it's officially ours now, and we get the keys on monday. signing for it took much longer than i remembered it taking last time i bought a house. and they wouldn't just let us sign our usual signatures--they made us sign our ENTIRE names on each of the hundred or so lines on which we were required to sign. there was even a page where we had to sign our names every possible way we could (marissa beatty, marissa j beatty, marissa jean beatty, m.j. beatty, etc.). for me this was even longer, because it made me go through the whole thing with "macdonald," too. and, weirdly enough, there was one line where i was "marissa c beatty." i pointed out that my middle name has never started with a c, and the lady told me to just cross out the c, write "never known with a c," and sign "marissa beatty." i'm surprised they didn't take our fingerprints and scan our retinas.

the second big thing was that ninkasi went into bottles--to be sold at the actual grocery store! (j, i know. i can't just make up punctuation rules whenever i want like an exclamation point in the middle of a sentence, but i'm doing it anyway)--for the first time yesterday. this dude called the "mobile bottler" came down from washington with his machine (also called the "mobile bottler"), unfolded it like a transformer, hooked it up to the tanks, loaded bottles into it, and voila! ninkasi in bottles! i stood around the brewery (because i took the second half of the day off, knowing i wouldn't be able to sign for a house at 1:00 and then contain my excitement enough to go back to work) drinking beer and taking pictures of the process. i switched my (old, outdated, and with annoying delay) digital camera to the "black and white" setting, and i actually have a pretty good little ninkasi bottling slideshow that i was going to put up here. but alas, after all the excitement, everyone went out to the bier stein to celebrate and i left the camera there. oops.

scrabtastic!

i have recently signed up for facebook. i don't really get it, but a lot of my friends are starting to defect to it from myspace. it seems a lot more complicated than myspace, and also a little more annoying (people poke you, feed you turkey, throw shit at you, etc). but the one redeeming factor that might get me to switch over all together is SCRABULOUS! it's a feature you can add on facebook where you can play scrabble with people! myspace doesn't have anything like that!

right now i'm at home working on an LAR (DHS people know what that is, for non-DHS folks it's a ridiculously long document that you create by basically going through an entire case file and re-writing everything in it onto a form that the department of justice uses in trial to help you terminate someone's parental rights. it takes about a million years to finish), and i'm obsessively playing online scrabble with strangers to distract myself from the fact that it's 9:30 and i really just want to be drinking wine and watching tv.

a little update on the house buying

the seller accepted our counter-offer, and we're in the inspection process. the sewer scope inspection is scheduled for this afternoon. (when i sold the house in portland, the buyers asked for a sewer scope and i guess it turned out that our sewer was shot to hell and just days away from having serious problems, so we had to spend thousands of dollars to fix it in order to still sell the house.) the house was built in 1925, but there was a fire in 1999 and the flooring, roof, windows, and all electrical are pretty new. it's really cute, and has a porch swing! here's a picture: