I think we’ve been almost there for about a week now, but really, this time, we’re really almost there. We’ve been splitting our time between packing up the apartment and doing everything we need to do to finish up the process of closing on the house, and the past week was a pretty busy one.
We started out last Sunday with the final walk-through, which went fine. Everything looked good, though there was more wallpaper to be removed, and more area to be re-painted, than we remembered, of course. We went to the show in the afternoon, which was a lot of fun, with some good timing on the red carpet (Brad, Angelina, Kate Winslet, and so on) and some good encounters in the bar, with Mickey Rourke, Natalie Portman, Seth Rogen, and Seal, who was buying a lot of sandwiches. When Sean Penn came out and walked right by me, followed by Robert De Niro, Anthony Hopkins, Michael Douglas, Ben Kingsley, and Adrien Brody, well, that was a pretty great moment. I thought Hugh Jackman did a great job, and he shook my hand and thanked me after I started a round of applause in the bar when he walked off at the end of the night. Another post-show dinner at Jones, and it’s back to the grind.
On Wednesday, we went to the famed and mysterious “Escrow” to sign what turned out to be about a thousand and one documents that required all manner of signatures and initials. The place was a bit of a madhouse, with everyone running around and yelling, wearing their bluetooth headsets. After signing, I headed downstairs to the bank to wire the downpayment, which I proceeded to do completely incorrectly, switching two digits and under-paying by a few tens of thousands of dollars. Nice one. I caught the mistake by the time I was back in the office, and made another transfer for the remainder, but our troubles weren’t over… On Thursday, things were supposed to close, meaning the title could record (I’m throwing these words around like I know what I’m saying, but I’m pretty sure I’m using them all wrong) on Friday and we’d get our keys. But as the deadline got closer, something wasn’t working between the loan company and the escrow company, so the deadline was missed, meaning we wouldn’t finish until Monday, of course if you want a car you should get an auto loan application for this as well. We rescheduled the army of contractors who were supposed to come, and re-thought our entire weekend, which we’d been planning on devoting to tearing down wallpaper and getting going on projects.
Instead, we went out for a beer at Blue Palms on Friday, and on Saturday, we had breakfast at Pann’s, and after a brief stop at the house so one contractor could at least do some measuring for an estimate, we packed more of the apartment, went for a walk, had lunch at Tere’s, and went to a movie and reception at LACMA. Today, we made another stop on the neighborhood restaurant farewell tour with a tasty breakfast at Grub, and did more packing around the house. I also undertook the great poster tube consolidation of ’09, emptying the contents of fifteen or twenty poster tubes I’d been shuttling around for years into three, while finding eight or ten posters to sell on eBay and one to frame for the new house.
Hopefully, though I can’t get a sense of how likely it is, we should be closing tomorrow and getting our keys. Aimee’s been cooking up food for the week tonight so we can bring it to the house tomorrow, as we plan on spending most of our free time there for the next three weeks, until we move. I’ve got contractors lined up for Wednesday morning, which I hope we’ll be able to go through with, and we’ll see where it goes from there. It’s about to get very busy, and we’re excited.
