House sold (and bought)!

Yup.  It's sold.  No longer an owner of Hampton.  Sold for just a tad below $1.7M.  After mortgage and everything, we got almost $1.2M.  Yay.  So what have we done with the new found 💰?  Bought a new house of course!  Technically speaking, as of this writing, we can still back out of the deal in Hawaii thanks to its real estate regulations.  Deadline is either coming Saturday or Sunday...

So what does our new house look like?  Nice.  Some works need to be done but for the price, it's good.  We would prefer to submit a lower offer now that we know what the issues are (not disclosed), and we're currently working with the seller party to see how they can resolve or repair those issues, hence the above about backing out.  Having said that, I flew to Honolulu to check out the house on Saturday, 11/4.  It was a same day trip but upon reaching Honolulu, there comes the 🌈.

If one wants to know how expensive (Northern) California is nowadays, look no further than this menu from a restaurant - the only one that opened - at HNL.  Prices were actually cheaper than what you would pay for in most SFBA restaurants of similar type!  Most importantly, this was from an airport location!  

Having said that COVID has really hit hard in HNL - too bad that the housing marking isn't reflecting it (those Dems who don't believe in the bubble...).  Close to 65% of the stalls/stores in HNL have permanently shut down, and that's including luxury brand names.  The only one I saw that was still in business, but close at the time, was Prada (or something like that).  Click this link to see what it used to have - they were all gone. Other than the lone luxury brand, the one I saw were Pages & Pages (like ABC Stores), DFS (that's the image with the 🍍 gang), and florists.  Although the website (it's a .gov = official HNL website) states that those closures were "temporary," they were permanently since the retail spaces were utterly empty!

November 30th was the last day for Ma'e Ma'e in the dojo.  Because of that, and she pretty much has learnt everything in purple except for 1 form, Sifu Aaron has promoted her under special circumstance a BLUE belt.  She was SO happy and surprised.

Have been staying in Hilton Homestead in Belmont since the day before thanksgiving.  A big jump in terms of level from Motel 6, which is just next to it as you can see from the image below.  We stayed at the top/5th floor and it has the view from SSF (including SFO) to RWC.  Room is ok size but surprisingly, a bit smaller than the 2 full bed with kitchen Motel 6 room.  It's a lot smaller than Hyatt house too (1 King Bed room suite) but the price was identical between the 2 - except that if we enroll into Hyatt Honors club, daily price fluctuated but always $5-10 cheaper than Hyatt House (Marriott only provides discount for 1 free night, similar to Hilton).  Other than that, the room was nice and we liked the view (though a bit noisy thanks to not-so-good sound insulation).  Also, it only allows 1 car parking (for free) so our other 2 cars were parked on the street until they were picked up to be shipped to Honolulu on the 10th.

We spent thanksgiving dinner with Mari/Ken's family.  It was an almost 5 hours feast although we just talked most of the time.  Unfortunately we actually met with them couple of weeks earlier to learn how to make sushi so we kinda just sat without talking in between.  The other thing was that their friend also came and I guessed that either M/K or their friend didn't really like KFC fried 🦃 so they bought a Whole Food 🦃.  It's really too bad because, although it wasn't that crunchy anymore when we got to eat it after we brought it back to the hotel, it was yummy, and way better than the WF's.  The kids love the side dish however - Mac & Cheese and mash potatoes (better taste the the WF's).  That friend of theirs also made 🎃 pie and it was actually very yummy too!

Now we'll continue to be in Hilton until the 23rd, when we'll fly to Honolulu and move in to our new home.  Hopefully all the repairs there will be completed!  Well, most repairs anyways...👍🏻