Tony Brewer View

Can you remember the last time that you received any party invitations in the mail? To be perfectly honest, most of my friends and family members rely on word-of-mouth and invitations by email or on our facebook events pages, or even a new Internet service that calls itself Evite.com or something like that. So when Teri told me that the reason Andrea never comes to any of our parties is because she never got any “official invitation” in the mail, I was completely astounded! Now let me tell you that if Andrea was an eighty-year-old lady that insisted on “proper Emily Post etiquette” I might, just maybe, understand the reasoning behind this “I didn’t come because I didn’t get an official invitation in the mail” excuse. But in this day and age? For adult family and friends? Really?

So Teri and I have decided that this summer we are going to have a big family and friend barbecue party and we will actually go ahead and make an official invitation to the party on our computer and print it out on card stock paper and mail it to Andrea by First Class, registered, with return receipt requested to Andrea. We will even include a postage paid return envelope with an RSVP card for her to fill out and mail back to us. We are going to make absolutely SURE that she gets the invitation. As soon as we get the confirmation back from the Post Office that she signed for it we are going to call her up on the telephone and make sure that it was really HER that signed for it and verify that she is aware of the party and that she is invited.

To be perfectly honest, I think that Andrea simply doesn’t WANT to come to any of the family gatherings. I think that maybe she suffers from some kind of Social Anxiety disorder and that the “I didn’t get an official invitation in the mail” excuse is just that – an excuse to not have to go out to a party and risk some kind of embarrassment. I’ll be curious to see what happens when she actually DOES get one in the mail!

Learning all that it takes about buying and financing a new home can be a real challenge to a first time home owner like my favorite niece who is now tackling that issue. She has saved up for sometime now in order to have a decent down payment on the perfect house when she finds it, and after 6 months of searching the search is still on. I have to say that I’m surprised that it is taking such a long time what with all the good deals out there on homes since all of the foreclosures that have been taking place since the economy went to pieces so many years ago. I guess she is just being very cautious, making certain that the one she chooses will have everything that she needs and wants, along with an affordable price tag attached to it.

For someone her age, 23, she has good credit, which is a big plus, so she will be able to hopefully get a decent interest rate. There is a lot of good information out there for people like her that are new to the whole mortgage game and I know that she is doing her homework and using the Internet to her advantage. Wish there was something that I could do to help her other than telling her of homes that I see around town that have For Sale signs in front of them. But I’m sure when she finds what she is looking for that I will be one of the first ones that she calls for help moving in since I have a pick up truck.

Contribution by Saul Martin

I am very excited about moving this summer. I am happy here, but I think the change is going to be good for our family. We will be closer to our family, which is a huge bonus to this move! I think it will be good for my kids to get to start over and make new friends at their new school too. They seem to have made friends with a few kids that I think are bad influences and I am ready for them to make new friends. This move might just be the thing that they need. I am also picturing it making them closer to each other, because at first the only people they will have to play with is each other. I have the fondest memories playing with my brother the summer we moved to a new town, because we didn’t have any friends yet. I am trying to get everything in order for our move. I have us signed up for Bounce Texas and have gotten all the other utilities ready to be hooked up the day that we move in.

One of the things that has become a higher priority recently for me is keeping the family valuables safe from burglars. Several homes in the neighborhood have been burglarized in the past couple of weeks, and it is very unsettling to think that when we get home from work in the evening that we just might find our house had been broken into and some of our valuables had been stolen. I think that the biggest issue, though is how violated people feel when they realize that some stranger had just been in their house, uninvited, and going through their personal belongings. I was reading an article about fingerprint safes on the SafesAtoZ webpage and I’m thinking about investing in one of them in the near future.

Several years ago my sister’s house was burglarized when she was at work, and she was so upset that she ended up renting out her house and moving to a new place in a gated community. Feeling vulnerable and violated is a terrible thing, and I hope that no one else in my family ever has to experience something like that again.

We got word today that my nephew succeeded in passing the ea cpe requirements he needed in order to keep his job as an enrolled agent this year. Times are tough for everyone these days and it wouldn’t be cool if he lost this job just because he didn’t do the enrolled agent continuing education that is necessary to continue working with people and their tax situations. It has been nice having someone in the family that has been able to help so many of us with our tax questions, concerns and our returns, every family should have one.

He is a good kid, or I guess I should say young man. He went through some wacky years but seems to have been able to pull through them all and is doing very well for himself. I sent him an email letting him know how proud I am of him and that I want to take him out for a celebration dinner this weekend. It’s been a while since I’ve seen him and a good one on one dinner will be nice.