Doing our part to stick it to The Man in '06

I posted two days ago about our surprise side-project...well, now I can tell you what it is, what's been going on and literally been causing more drama for this mama than she probably needs or deserves. Oh, but it is such a good thing.

Here at the O'Neal household, we do our parts to be a slave to The Man. We shop at Wal-Mart; we eat at McDonald's; I buy inane top 40 songs on iTunes. This year we will have 2 of our requisite 2.2 children.

But perhaps most importantly, Dada and I have allowed The Man to keep us down in an obscene way for the longest time. You see, as starving and transient students, we were constantly under the thumb of The Man in the housing market. Not knowing where we would be in one, two, or even three years, we gave The Man all our money, wasted in rent. Over the five years of our cohabitation, this amounted to almost SIXTY-FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS. And the worst of it was of course in Seattle, where the exorbitant rent was exceeded only by the exorbitant inflated housing market, leaving us no options. Now we live on the East Coast, and the home prices, though lower, are not incredibly affordable to Joe Six-Packs like us. It initially appeared that the O'Neals would continue to bleed money to the machine for all eternity.

And then something happened. An old lady died, as old ladies occasionally do. Her kids all live out of town and wanted to unload her house in an expeditious fashion. On Saturday, the O'Neals drove by this same house with a for-sale sign in the yard, and remarked how cute it is, how it is less than 1-1/2 miles from Dada's office, how it is 100 yards from where Isaac would go to elementary school, how it is in a neighborhood next to parks and populated entirely by young families and old people. The O'Neals looked at said house, fell in love with it, and made an offer, the first time they have ever made a real-estate transaction in their lives. Today we found out that the old lady's son accepted.

That's right, Mr. Man. We're buying a house. You can take your rent and shove it...into a bigger, fatter tax refund for us next year. Boo-yah!

Here she is, our new house. She's a tidy one, with three bedrooms, hardwood floors, a full basement, closets (what on earth are those?), and a nice-sized backyard. We will be eating our share of ramen noodles in her, but she will be OURS: