Rasheed at the buzzer

What a shot!

Encounter at tvsquad.com

Thanks to Danielle for pointing me to Wil Wheaton’s reviews of ST:TNG. They’re awesome! Can you believe it’s been almost twenty years? Yikes. And TNG is still the best Trek series, however craptacular that first season was.

Purchase and sale

Yes, I’m still alive. We signed the Purchase and Sale agreement on Thursday and wrote a big check. There are now no more ways for us to back out (unless the mortgage application is denied, which better not happen). The seller has to fix the things he agreed to fix, and assuming that he does, we are going to have a new place! So on the buying end, things are now quiet until closing (scheduled for late April). On the selling end, things get started now. I’ve done some cleaning today, and we’ve started formulating a plan on Making the Basement Look Decent. That may or may not be possible. If we’d really worked on it this weekend, we could have gotten this place on the market by next weekend, but thanks to us being usual lazy selves, it’ll probably be the weekend of April 14. Might be a flower or two blooming outside by then, that should help! And if I could only get the knob screwed back on to one of the kitchen cupboards—it’s defying all laws of physics and refuses to stay on. I’m gluing the sucker on if I have to, dammit.

God give me strength

I don’t think I can write coherent sentences as this point; time for a list. Here’s what’s been going on since the last update.

—Nerve-racking home inspection
—Most things fine, a couple not fine
—Tense couple of days waiting for the seller to decide whether to fix stuff
—Transferring large amounts of money around
—Meeting with lawyer
—Hashing out the details of the mortgage application
—Scheduling the pest inspection
—Seller agrees to repair major problems
—Meeting with other unit’s owners
—Signing approximately 17,000 places on mortgage application
—Hashing out the details of the Purchase and Sale agreement
—Not sleeping particularly well at night
—Neighbors’ racket continuing to provide only motivation for this crazy plan
—Considering alcoholism

That about covers it!

Why blog?

It’s an efficient way to keep the peeps informed, and a forum for their hollers back.
It’s a good way to work shit out; writing encourages fuzzy ideas to form coherent shapes.
It’s a record of your life, for when time passes and you forget the rawness of the immediate moment.
It’s another way to kill time on slow afternoons at work.
It’s a window into your tiny, tiny slice of the world, and a precious link to exotic other slices you might not have known about otherwise.
It’s navel-gazing with cool cascading style sheets!

Happy birthday to me

Well, I didn’t plan it, but the first house to meet all the criteria finally presented itself today, and in a stroke of birthday luck our offer was accepted. Better location, top floor with the attic redone, and everything done well. No wondering how soon I’ll have to take a sledgehammer to something, no hitting my head on the ceiling in the bathroom shower, no sloping floors, and bonus items such as air conditioning. Aaaaah. Now I can take a deep breath and prepare for the sprint that happens after going under agreement: home inspection, punch list, lawyering up, mortgage mobilization. Oh, and getting ready to put the current pad up for sale. And if I ever have moments where I wonder if I want to go through the hassle of moving, I have a morning like yesterday’s, where the lovely upstairs neighbors vacuumed at 8:30 a.m. I mean, for chrissakes that’s practically a violation of my civil rights.

Makes up for the peeps who forgot my birthday. You slackers!

Good riddance

Looks like Diebold might drop their voting-machine unit after, I guess, finally noticing all the bad press from the last few years, and due to the number of states now noticing how useful it might be to have a paper trail for voting. I’m sure election fraud will happen whether Diebold provides the machines or not, but I’m not crying a tear when that business unit bites the dust.

Home is anywhere: Week 5 recap

Week 5 has wrapped up, and it was quite a roller-coaster ride. As of midweek there still wasn’t a single interesting prospect to look at, but then one came on late in the week that promised all kinds of magic. It has all three things we’re trying to improve: location, one more room, and top-floor placement. Seeing the inside on Sunday, however, was a bummer. The kitchen sink was the same kind that I had in my semi-crappy apartment in grad school—that is not a selling point. And the all-important third BR upstairs turned out to be just okay, with a bathroom off of it that only a person under five feet tall could comfortably utilize. In fact, the shower was nestled under the eaves such that the curtain rod was at an angle—you had to hook the curtain at the tall end so that it didn’t slide down to the short end via the cruel pull of gravity. Since I still feel the bitterness of that first rush of disappointment, I almost want to reject the place outright, but that would probably be irrational. So I think the game plan is to wait and see if it languishes on the market. And if someone is willing to house only munchkins upstairs and offer the asking price, I’m not interested in competing with that.

A far happier report on the weekend would focus on the sporting angle: the weather was actually warm enough for cycling (yay!) and we managed to play tennis even though Swami’s back is not 100%. Another successful round of calorie burning to offset all the consumption.