Update

The mortgage guy got back to me with pretty good news. I only need to put 3.5% down and then have another $4-5k for closing costs because of a generous tax credit from the government. Sweet. I'm trying to keep my down payment around $10k so that limits me to a $285k house. It some parts of the country, that consigns you to the ghetto, but I can get a great place around here for that kind of scratch. The bad news is that my temporary housing will expire in two weeks and my new company won't pay much to extend me. I don't really blame them, but furnished temporary housing is fairly expensive so I'm going to try to find a place as quickly as possible. I still need to make sure to do the correct amount of research, but I don't think I need to spend a long time looking for the "perfect home." No place is going to be perfect and I don't mind putting a little bit of time and effort in later to spruce it up. I now know where to look around here so that's helped narrow my search and I also decided that I'd like to have at least a 0.25 acre lot.

I didn't get my fat incidental check with today's paycheck, but I'll get it with the next one in two weeks. No big deal. I'll have to pay a lot of tax on it, but I can recover some of that next year. Once I get my paycheck I need to call up Fidelity to set up my 401k. I'm going to contribute quite a bit to lower AGI. I haven't contributed jack-diddly to my 401k this year and that's going to be a big chunk of my retirement money.

The weather was pretty crappy today, but it's supposed to be 80 over the weekend. My blisters haven't quite healed so no hiking for me this weekend, but maybe I'll go look at some houses. I want to check out the neighborhoods in the areas that I found to make sure that they're alright. I don't want to live in white trash central.