TGO David

Looks good.  Those Springfield Loaded series guns are usually good to go with minimal fuss.  Should be a sweet shooter.

Looks like a good piece of kit.

Glad they got you taken care of, man.  I think we need to have that long overdue beer as soon as you're able and stateside.  :)

  Yep and yep.  We priced at roughly $12K more than I needed.  We got asking price, cash.  They sure as heck didn't offer 65% of the house's value as was suggested by FTE.   *shrug*   I'm just considering myself thankful and counting my blessing rather than worrying about counting dollars.

  Nope.

I bet you're fun at parties.  :D   Here's the bottom line, Chief... the listing was for more than I owe on it.  I lost my ass with that house to the tune of about $60K in equity gone *POOF* in the blink of an eye when the market crashed a few years ago.  The neighborhood which was once all "owned" homes is now mostly rental.  It's clawed its way back up to where it is now and if I can sell it to an investment group for more than I owe, and get out of it without having to make any repairs... guess what I'm going to do.   I'm not going to sweat a frickin moment of it not being maximum dollar.  :lol:

Yeah, you guys are confirming my desire not to deal with VA loans if I can avoid it.  It's a shame, really.

  Yeah we've seen a little of that in our new neighborhood.  Granted it's all new construction but it's been slow going for the builder.  Things have recently started to pick up for him, though, and he's sold more lots with homes to build on them in the past three months than I think he did all of last year.

I can tell you this much, right now is a crazy crazy seller's market especially for homes in the sub $200K range in decent school zones and growing towns.  Two guys I know at work have sold homes in the past few months and none of them lasted on the market a week.  One lasted 24 hours.  Mine will technically have lasted four days if we accept an offer from the investment group tomorrow, but they made a verbal offer at 48 hours.   Our agent told us there is a serious drought of starter family homes and they are just being snapped up left and right by investment groups.  The only way an individual buyer can compete in this market is to be pre-approved for a loan.  Not pre-qualified, pre-approved.  Investment groups know that a lot of people lost homes a few years ago, have been renting apartments and are tired of that lifestyle, but likely still don't have strong enough credit to buy right now.  That's who these investment groups are buying up to rent to.  And they're renting them faster than they can buy them.

  Having two of them was kind of dumb but we both really dug my Trail Teams so when the wife's vehicle started giving her fits she drove it straight to the Toyota dealership and drove away with a 2010 Army Green.   The thing that sunk it for both of us was the suicide doors.  Somehow my kids couldn't figure out how to get in and out of the FJs in parking lots without pinning them and us inside a trap formed by two cars and two doors, or beating the crap out of other cars next to us.   I traded mine off first for the Raptor, but the wife eventually parted with hers for the Armada, wanting a larger SUV for our family.  I really do miss my Trail Teams though.  I wish I had kept it and we'd just traded her FJ off for the Raptor.         I am really, really going to have to wait and see how that plays out the first year.  I'm glad I didn't do a first year Raptor and end up with the 5.4L engine.  I do wish we'd gotten the 2012 with the revised center stack in the dash but I love everything else about my 2011.   The new truck is going to have to just blow me away to make me want to switch immediately.  My turbo Diesel F250 taught me the valuable lesson that forced induction is only awesome when it's working right.  No boost = no power.  The Eco Beast is going to have to prove that it's reliable and the new truck is going to have to look better in person than it does in photos.   It's just not near as muscular in appearance as the current generation Raptor, at least in pics.   :meh:

Thanks folks.  After I posted this we had to head out to meet some friends for a birthday dinner.  We also had to give our agent an answer about the pending offers.  We ended up telling her that we were going to wait and give the investment group until Monday to give us their offer.   As many have said in this thread now, any time you deal with the government whether it is FHA or VA, there are many more chances for it to go sideways.   The investment group offer was full asking price, cash, with a simple inspection to make sure there was never any flood or fire damage or structural problems.  None of those are of any worry to us, so this looks like it will be the easiest AND fastest way out of that old property.   Keeping our fingers crossed and praying we made the right decision.  :)

I listed my old house to sell this past Thursday.  Since then we've had a bunch of offers but so far the best one is actually above asking price and the customer has a pre-qualified VA loan.   I really want a quick and painless sale.  I don't want to spend a lot of money fixing this and that at the old house.  It's in very good shape but I've heard nightmare stories about home inspectors working for the USAA on VA loan sales being super picky about, well... everything.  Almost to a one, the friends I have who bought on VA loans or sold to VA loan customers said that the seller had to do quite a bit of remediation work to satisfy the lender before the sale went through.   Is that typical?  Have any of you gone through this?   My second-best offer is from an investment company and is a cash offer at asking price.  There would be an inspection but they are only looking for major repair issues like flood/fire damage, structural unsoundness, etc.  Unfortunately the agent soliciting the purchase for that investment company says that she cannot get us anything in writing from the company until Monday.   If we wait for them, the VA customer's offer expires tonight.   One in hand versus one in the bush?   Help me out here.

Wow, this is about as vitriolic as a debate between Glock and 1911 owners.   :D   For what it's worth, in the past 20 years I have owned Hondas, Toyotas, Nissans, GMs, Mopars and Fords.  The ones that gave me the most trouble were GMs.  I didn't keep the Honda long enough to find out, but I had an Acura lose its damn computer mind on me and shut down everything in the middle of me trying to pass a slow moving vehicle on a two-lane road.  That was fun.   The Nissans were both mechanically reliable for as long as I owned them (under 3 years each) but the interior materials quality was just mediocre at best.  The Titan had the suckiest brakes of any truck I've ever owned and the Armada's suspension felt like we were driving a 1970's Cadillac.  It cornered like a whale on quaaludes.   The Toyotas, Mopars and Fords have given me the least trouble of anything I've ever owned.  These were/are all great vehicles...   Two 2010 FJ Cruisers (his and hers... don't ask) 2006 Chrysler 300C SRT8 2012 Jeep Wrangler Rubicon Unlimited 2013 Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT8 1994 Ford Mustang GT 1998 Ford Mustang GT 2003 Ford Mustang Mach 1 2011 Ford SVT Raptor   We still have the Grand Cherokee and the Raptor.  Our carbon footprint is a size 14.  As in 14MPG.  If I were going to buy another vehicle right now, I would be considering two options and both of them are Toyota.  The TRD Pro 4Runner and the TRD Pro Tundra.   I dig both of them.   But all of this to say that I'm pretty much a car whore and don't really pay too much attention to country of origin any more.  I won't buy another GM product if I am able to avoid it though, and from what I've seen from friends experiences over the past 20 years, Honda is Japanese for  "a death by a thousand paper cuts".  Major things never seem to go wrong with them, but the older they get they really nickel and dime you to death.

  Thompson's Station is one of the more expensive areas to buy in.  I'm not sure that's a good recommendation for his price-range.

Yeahhhh... it's not suspicious at all when someone from Dubuque Iowa signs up to reply to a post from 3 years ago to tell you that "we just go their dip kit and it looks sweet".  :lol:   Shootn, if you want to advertise your business, let me know.  Otherwise, welcome to the forum and please refrain from making any posts designed to plug your business.

I just want to point out ONE small thing:   If you have ever complained about the police, or bitched that they shouldn't be allowed to carry certain types of firearms or wear certain types of body armor, or wondered loudly to anyone who would listen why that cop who pulled you over was gruff and didn't cut you the amount of slack that you thought they should...   Keep in mind that the assholes you see destroying Baltimore on TV are cut from the same cloth as those that the cops in your town have to deal with all day, every day.   YOU are the exception to their norm.  So when they encounter YOU, there was a line of "animals" ahead of you that spent up all the patience that cop writing your speeding ticket might have had for the day.       That's all.  :)

Welcome to the zoo.  :)

Welcome!

Welcome! If you guys could find a way to dump Chicago into Lake Michigan, you would actually have a nice state.  Maybe one of those trips down here to Tennessee you'll just decide the trip back isn't worth it.  :)

Welcome!  I doubt you'd find much to regret if you relocated here.  :)

I'm just going to leave this right here...   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFXqTNJXMls

  That of course is everyone's right and should not be extrapolated to mean he's hiding something.  Civilians are commonly told to say nothing except "I want to speak to my attorney" after a self-defense shooting.  Everything that happens after a fatality is the domain of lawyers.  It's best to let them do what they went to school for and are paid the big bucks for.   That particular cop might just be the smart one.

My problem with the Sig 1911's is that they come in two flavors.  You either get the Granite series slide which doesn't fit any other 1911 holster not specifically made for it, or you get the Traditional series slide which does.  This confuses people and they wonder why their Sig 1911 won't fit any other 1911 holster, which in turn leaves a bad taste in their mouths.   If I was going to buy a Sig 1911, it would be the TacOps Traditional.

I've owned several Kimbers.  I had no problems with any of them.  Hands down the most reliable of the bunch was my Warrior that I had worked over by Jeff Meister.  I had no problems with it before he touched it either, but afterward the thing just ran and ran and ran.  He reamed the chamber, addressed some issues with the feed ramp, tightened the slide a little and that was that.   I hear the current owner would rather talk to you about giving up a kidney than giving up my old Warrior.   ;)   All that being said, hundreds of bad reports out there on the Internet might be fabrications, but they might not be either.  I went with a Colt for my last purchase for a reason, but it was a toss-up between it and a Springfield.  I think either of those two would be far above a Kimber on my current shopping list were I to do it again right now.  Kimber has acquired a bad reputation lately for a reason.

I was reading up on this last night and found several anecdotal reports of "suspects" being taken on intentionally violent rides in cruisers or transport vans while handcuffed and shackled and summarily receiving spinal injuries as a result.  If that practice is indeed employed by some officers, there might be something to this story.   Like someone else said in this thread, it's rather difficult to logically walk through how a suspect can be subdued and restrained, and then somehow receive an injury that almost completely severs their spinal cord while in custody.  Was there another fight or scuffle with officers?  Some sort of sincere "freak accident"?   This one just looks bad no matter what news source I use to read accounts of what happened.  Baltimore PD may have brought this one upon themselves.