house meeting #3

(James Blunt sucks. All of his songs are the same. Lame guitar/piano music, then the same 3 lines sung over and over and over. I bet they're easy to write. I know they're easy to get stuck in your head. Guess what we were listening to in the car.)

So Alfred went to another meeting about the new house yesterday. This one was with DEP, who we had already met at the house site and who indicated it wouldn't be any problem to get a permit from them. There was also a woman from Water Management there, and she apparently was not so easy. We now have to pay an engineer to say that our house will not cause the surrounding area to flood. It seems a little silly to have to go through this step, since we're surrounded by swamp, which is connected directly to a canal, which drains into a lake, which connects to the St Johns River. We are literally less than a mile from the lake, less than 2 from the river. We couldn't flood the area if we tried. But we have to pay someone to write this down for her. Stupid rules.

The good house news is that between moving the house by 5 feet and shrinking the pad a little, we only need to request a permit to fill .06 acres of land now. That's almost half of what it was before. We're submitting the paperwork to the Army Corp today, hopefully he'll be satisfied with what we've done and will just give us a damn permit. He said if it all looks ok, we can have a permit in 3-4 weeks! That would be great. I just hope he accepts it, he said at our meeting it's a 1 try thing, if he says no the first time we can't change it and try again. It's a little nerve wracking, but hopefully it will work out ok.

In other news, my parents are on their way down to visit. They left yesterday and should be here tonight around 6 or 7. We bought lots of meat and TP at Costco last night. I hope we make it through the week. My dad's on a diet because he's either borderline or actually diabetic, so I'm going to make a brownie recipe that has black beans and splenda instead of oil and sugar. I'm obviously not telling him that's what's in them until they're gone. I bet he'll like them until he finds out about the beans, then he'll hate them on principle. I made a similar recipe for the Superbowl and they were actually pretty good.

Hm, no pictures yet. Well, since Alfred's the one who bugs me when there are no pictures, here's an old one of him holding Ella. See, he totally loves babies!