ourhobbithole

08:22 pm: (A post copied from our website, because I'm a slacker)
We're featured in the August issue of Baltimore Magazine! Marylanders, be sure to pick up a copy at your local news stand. Or check on their website (http://www.baltimoremagazine.net) for details on ordering it.

Also, for those looking to learn more about us (well, me in particular - Rob), you may want to read some articles I've posted online at a friend's site. You can view my author bio at this link (http://www.theedwardwebsite.com/biorob.html), and also find other interesting articles. The Edward Website (http://www.theedwardwebsite.com) is a freelance writing site, where anyone can apply to become a regular volunteer columnist.

We've now been in our investment house over a week, and are enjoying the peace and quiet. Although my job's been keeping me busy, and Tania has plenty of small house keeping tasks to keep her busy each day, we're grateful for the stress relief of having a quieter place to live. As things calm down we'll be doing further planning on our Hobbit Hole and updating more frequently, but feel free to check back on our site (http://www.ourhobbithole.com) and here on our live journal.

08:03 pm: Our Investment Home Purchase Completed!
We went to settlement on 6/24/05 and now own our investment house! Currently we are replacing the carpet with bamboo hardwood flooring and repainting several rooms, but we hope to be moved in for good by July 10th. Tania and I are away on our Honeymoon, which we decided when we married to take on our 1 year anniversary (which is 6/28/05). We will return at the end of this week and continue work on the investment house, and hopefully have more time for updates once we move in and life calms down for us. An article in Baltimore Magazine is pending for their July issue, and we will provide more details as they become available to us.

06:32 pm: Investment House FINALLY!
Sorry for the lack of updates as of late, but life can be exhausting sometimes. However, our eight contracts offered on potential investment houses have finally paid off. The contract we offered yesterday was accepted today. The house still must pass the building inspection a week from today, but we may very well be closing the deal before the end of June.

And if this works out, we may even have land lined up to begin planning out the Hobbit Hole. Granted, we'll still live in the investment house for the next 2-3 years in order to build equity towards the project, but this is definite progress towards our crazy goal. We also have two interviews currently in the works that should gain us more publicity for our project. If you'd like to see what else we've been up to recently, you can click through our various other websites below.

http://www.sugarthecat.com
http://www.andhelived.com
http://www.robiscrazy.com
http://www.loftgeeks.com
http://www.thefunnel.org

11:05 pm: Another condo, come and gone...
We put in an offer on a nice local condo, our 7th housing contract offered to date. It was rejected - also our 7th housing contract rejected to date. A townhouse came on the market today and sold within a few hours. Kent Island is truly within the insanity of the housing bubble, with no end in sight. Oh well, it's good that our apartment is meeting all of our needs at present and is still pretty quiet for now.

We're putting a lot of time into our new webcomic, http://www.sugarthecat.com. Once things settle into a pattern there, I plan to do more information updates on the ourhobbithole.com site. For now it's all we can manage to keep up with the housing search, personal family stuff, a few hours per week for personal projects and a few hours to collapse. As soon as we get a house we will change our efforts towards obtaining land, the next step in the project. Until then the publicity will be kept on the back burner, but we definitely plan to bring it back full force when the time is right. Until then, we'll keep updating once a week or so.

-RH

05:27 pm: Sugar the Cat up and running without further paws...
Our webcomic about our Siamese cat is now up for everyone who'd like to read:

SugarTheCat.Com

10:03 pm: Life & other Train Wrecks
We are indeed still alive here at the Our Hobbit Hole Project, though sometimes just barely. This past weekend was spent mostly in the car, driving about 18 hours round trip from Maryland to Massachusetts. Tania's grandfather was not doing well after a stroke during the week and we wanted to visit him in person to show our support. We're back and just beginning to catch up on rest, but it may not happen fully until this weekend.

We've decided to start yet another project - a webcomic about our fiesty Siamese cat, Sugar. The website will be http://www.sugarthecat.com and should be up within the next two weeks. In other news, I wrote an article about Why We Play Video and Computer Games, which can be read via this link at The Edward Website. Still no luck in finding and having a contract accepted on a house, but the apartment is now much quieter and we should soon have a new neighbor next door.

With all the projects, rest assured that this one won't be abandoned. This is a long-term project and a sort of life journal for both Tania and myself, so it's going to have its ups and downs. Since I constantly have new ideas and have to move on them in order to feel like I'm getting somewhere in life, sometimes they just pile up. But they are all taken care of and kept advancing, albeit slowly.

Last of all, if you haven't already, check out the picture of Heather, our happy raffle winner, posing with her sword on the main page of our site. Hopefully we'll have another raffle in the future, but we'll keep you posted.

07:39 pm: RighTalk Radio Interview
Today I was interviewed on Right Talk Radio (http://www.rightalk.com/) about our project. Jeff Goldstein had contacted us via email a few days ago and set it up. It was kept fairly amusing (since his show is meant to be somewhat comedic) and we're very happy with the exposure. They have the most recent broadcast as a link from their main page currently if anyone wants to listen.

-RH

10:00 pm: Weddings, Houses, Interviews, etc...
I do apologize for our posts becoming more sporadic, but they do match our lifestyle. Tania and I were away for a 3-day weekend in Virginia for my sister's wedding (congratulations to the happy couple), and didn't get back until Sunday night. It didn't give us much of a weekend of rest, so we're both struggling to keep up with our normal busy lives until next weekend when we hope to do nothing.

The Sting Sword won by Heather in our raffle should be shipped off tomorrow, and we look forward to hearing how she enjoys it. Hopefully we'll get a picture or two of her brandishing the sword, so she can share her fun with everyone else at our site. There may be another raffle in the future, depending upon other developments that can't yet be foreseen.

We have a radio interview in the works with Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom later this week. We'll certainly post a link to it when it's a sure thing, but our schedules and the necessary rearranging to make it happen make me reticent to say anything for certain until probably after the fact. I chatted with Jeff a bit tonight and he seems like a fun guy, so the interview should be a blast in a similar comedic style to the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

We've been seeing a number of houses, and are now up to rejected offer #6. We're usually offering just below the asking price and then the asking price itself, but unfortunately this area is definitely a seller's market. Kent Island is now considered a resort area, and as a result, real estate is ridiculously over-valued. Each time we bid we have half a dozen other bids with which we contend, but one of these days our bid will come out on top. We'll keep you posted as things develope, and thanks for reading and your continued support.

-RH

06:48 pm: New Raffle Winner!
Unfortunately, we had to pick a new raffle winner since Tanya Ackermann failed to respond to our repeated announcements an emails within one month. The new winner is Heather Mullaney! Heather, please contact us as soon as possible with your mailing address so we can get your prize mailed out to you! We hope to hold another raffle in the future once traffic to the site picks up enough to justify Arms of Valour contributing another item to it, should they be interested. Thanks again to everyone who participated, and we hope to reward our new winner shortly! :)

09:16 pm: Chaos as Usual
Sorry for the lack of recent updates. We've been devoting more time to finding our first house and doing other things offline unrelated to the project. We will be picking a new raffle winner this Monday, March 28th, if we still have not heard back from Tanya. Although we'd love to get her sword to her, she hasn't responded in a month and it's only fair that someone else enjoy it. I'll soon be devoting more time to publicizing the site again, but for now it's all I can do to respond to an occasional email.

-RH