Stalk This!

So it's my wife's birthday today.  I hardly saw her.  I have spent the past fifteen hours straight coding so that I could complete my functinality before losing my broadband connection tomorrow morning.  My brain is numb.

Tomorrow morning the land line and broadband get shut off here, and the satellite and broadband connections get hooked up at the house.  I'll be basically moving all of the electronics tomorrow, plus whatever else I can fit in my car.

Friday is the main move, getting all of the furniture and whatever else is left up to the house.

The remainder of the weekend will be cleaning out the apartment and handing over the keys, and settling into the house.  I expect to be offline basically for the next two days at least, and probably until late in the weekend.  So if you don't hear from me, it's not personal.

So I got a lot done today, but not nearly as much as I had hoped.  I exchanged Ben's skates, which I got him for Christmas but unfortunately the box had one size 2 skate and one size 3 skate.  Now he has to matching skates that fit properly.  I installed the second pet door, so now the cats will have an open route to get to and from the garage, where their food and litter boxes will be located.  Finally, I replaced several outlets in the formal dining room, which turned out to be quite an adventure.

When the previous owners repainted, they did a very sloppy job in several areas.  All five of the power outlets in the formal dining room had been partially painted over and just looked tacky.  We got some nice new outlets, and I set about replacing them this afternoon.  I threw the breaker for the room, checked the overhead light to ensure it was off (it was), and then just to be double sure I plugged a lamp into the outlet I was about to replace.  The lamp came on.  How weird, I thought, the outlets must be on a different circuit.  So I threw another breaker that might possible apply.  Still power to the outlet.  So I threw another breaker, and another.  Eventually I had thrown every single breaker in the box, theoretically powering down the entire house, and still the outlet had power.  I checked the others, and all five in that room had power.  So did all of the outlets in the kitchen, and I could hear the compressor on the refrigerator still running.  Very strange.

I walked through the entire house looking for another breaker panel, and couldn't find one.  I certainly wasn't about to swap out power outlets with live current running through them.  Although to be perfectly honest I briefly considered it for a moment.  "What could possibly happen?" my inner Guy asked?  Then I pictured myself lying in the hospital bed explaining to my wife how Competent Man was defeated my his mortal enemy, Reckless Guy.  No, I had to figure this out.  Especially because if there really were outlets wired without breakers, that was a serious potential problem.  But one that never should have passed inspection, so it didn't make sense.  I finally called an electrician and explained the situation to him.  He was very nice, and suggested that I look for another breaker panel outside right next to the power meter.  Sure enough, there were another half dozen breakers out there, one of which was clearly labeled for the outlets in the dining room.  So with the power switched off I swapped out four of the outlets and it looks much nicer.  I may still need to swap the fifth, but it looks mostly ok.  The little bit of paint that is on it can probably be cleaned off.

After that I went over to say happy birthday to Ben.  He was all cuddled up under his new Snow White comforter (which manages to not look girly at all, so that's nice).  He was happy to see me and gave me a big hug and kiss.  And then he told me, "buh-bye."  He knows his schedule, and he surely wasn't going to go anywhere with me on a Tuesday.  Go figure.

In other news, mom managed to short out her cable modem today.  Important safety tip:  when watering the plants, don't pour water onto the electronic equipment.  It tends to cause smoke, fire, and that oh-so-pleasant carbon smell.  So if anyone is worried at her being offline all day, she is perfectly fine.  I spoke to the cable company, and will be able to swap out the cable modem for her tomorrow morning.  She should be back online by the afternoon.

I spent the first half of the day with my mom, mostly taking care of social security stuff.  On the upside, we did the paperwork so that SSA recognizes me as her authorized representative, so in the future I can call them to talk about her case without having to have my mom right there with me.  We also got her replacement card ordered with her correct name (the one she had still had her former married name), and figured out the problem with medicare (she should have been given medicare parts  A and B retroactively to November of '04, but they had started her in August of '05 instead).  So she'll get the retroactive medicare and be able to have several medical bills covered, adding up to over $7,000 in bills.  That's good.  On the downside, it appears that the payment she got in October really was the entire settlement amount.  We had been of the understanding that there was a second piece following, and that the lawyer had not been paid yet.  That appears to not be the case.  There is still some confusion, however, because an awards letter was never generated to itemize the back payement.  We should have it all straightened out in January.

For the afternoon, Kris and I went up to the house.  Kris had a nice chandelier that had been a housewarming gift from her condo, and I installed it in the formal dining room.  It looks very nice.  We also got a new light fixture to put in the downstairs hallway, since the existing one was missing the glass dome and was ugly to boot.  The one we got was twenty five bucks, was much more in scale with the space, and looks very nice.  We also replaced some switch cover plates in the dining room.  All of the outlets in there are going to need to be replaced, as the former owners had done a very sloppy job painting and had not bothered to cover the outlets.  Truth be told, we are going to need to just walk through the entire house and take an inventory of every light switch, outlet, and other panels that need to be replaced.  All total it's not that expensive, and it will make a huge difference.

The only downer to the day:  our Tivo is dead.  It locked up a few days ago and I was able to revive it, but it failied again today.  It is exhibiting the classic signs of hard drive failure.  So everything we had saved on it is pretty much gone, which kind of sucks.  But I have a recovery CD so all I really need to do to fix it is to buy a new hard drive and then blast the image onto it.  A pain in the butt, but at least it waited to fail until everything we watch was in reruns during the Christmas break.

So we bought a house last Friday,  as I may have mentioned before.

Just prior to the closing we had a walk through of the house, and were somewhat distressed to find that the previous owners were not completely out yet.  We had come up with both cars loaded down and ready to unload the first round of stuff, but had to change plans.  The closing itself went flawlessly, and by 1pm we were homeowners.  The previous owners took pretty much the rest of the day to finish clearing out, and they hired a person to come in Saturday morning to clean.  As for us, we spent the rest of the day Friday doing things like shopping for a garage door opener and contacting utilities.

Saturday morning I picked up Ben, and took him and my mom up to see the house.  The woman was still there cleaning, and honestly she had a massive job to do.  Ben loved the house (on Sunday he asked to go see the house again, which I took as a very good sign).  Over the course of the weekend Kris and I took up three or four car loads of stuff, basically clearing out space in are apartment to be able to start packing for the main move.  We did some additional cleaning today, and have much more to do.  I am going to need to rent a power washer to clean the garage floor and driveway.  I also need to do some caulking in the bathrooms, install some new deadbolts, switch around some doorknobs and tighten up others, fix a closet door, move a ceiling fan to a different room....  the list goes on and on.

We won't be doing any painting before we move in.  There are too many other things to do, and honestly we don't have a clear idea of what we want to do color-wise anyway.  We'll figure that out as we go, and probably tackle a room at a time. That should keep us busy for years to come.  We also need to learn about local gardening and lawn care, as our lawn is in very sad shape.  Our neighbors have a beautiful lawn, so I hope to strke up a conversation with them and get some tips.  We met the neighbors on our north side yesterday, and they seemed very nice.  The dad was out playing with his daughter, who was just cute as a button (I'd guess she was maybe three or four years old).  It just seems like a nice family neighborhood all around, and we are really looking forward to living there.

Tomorrow I have a full day planned, so I really should be getting to bed.  I'll bring the camera with me tomorrow and start taking pictures to post in our gallery.  Stay tuned.

Spent last night mostly sick.  I'll spare you the details, but I didn't really get to sleep until around 3:30 am.  I tried to work today, got some work done in the morning, but by lunchtime I just couldn't concentrate anymore.  I wound up emailing in sick and taking the afternoon off.  I spent a solid hour just soaking in a hot bath with my ears under the water and a washcloth covering my eyes.  I didn't even hear Kris come home from work.  I felt progressively better as the afternoon wore on, which was nice.  I don't know if it was stress, or a very mild flu, or what it was.  I'm just glad it's mostly gone now.

In the evening we went to check out the Ice! exhibit at Gaylord Palms.  It was pretty dang cool, an exhibit of ice sculptures kept at nine degrees.  The ice slide was pretty sweet.

After that, we went over to Downtown Disney and caught the evening showing of King Kong.  I loved it.  Lots of nice references slipped in, both to the original and the 70's remake, but my favorite was the empty "rat monkey of Sumatra" cage in the ship's cargo hold.  That and the part where Kong went past St. Patrick's Cathedral and I thought, "hey, that's right where we stayed for our honeymoon!"

Oh, and we're buying a house the day after tomorrow.  Did I mention that?  I can't remember if I've mentioned that before....

For anyone who is interested, pictures of our new house.  More pictures will follow once we actually close.

I just heard from the mortgage banker.  The paperwork is back from the underwriter, and everything is good.  They need one piece of paperwork from Kris' boss due to her lack of pay stubs (he just hand-writes her a check each week), but that is just a formality.  At this point there is nothing to do but wait until closing.

The inspection for our new house was today, and it went very well.  We won't see the final report until tomorrow, but I walked along with the inspectors this afternoon and talked with them throughout.  My biggest potential concern was any water penetration during the hurricanes last year, but it is clear that nothing came through.  The roof is in tip-top shape, the attic is clean and dry with plenty if insulation, and the trusses are all solid.  There are some minor cosmetic things throughout the house (missing switch plates, a frayed cable on the garage door, etc.), but the only thing the inspectors really made note of was that the A/C unit needed to be cleaned.  Mechanically it is just fine, it just hasn't been serviced in three years.  Given that a routine annual cleaning costs less than a hundred bucks, I am sure we will be able to have the current owners take care of that before closing. 

So that's one more major item off the checklist.  The appraisal will happen tomorrow, and the underwriter should sign off on the mortgage on Wednesday.  I'm not holding my breath on that last one, what with the holiday, but it would be nice.  By Thanksgiving we should be in escrow, and we can breathe easy.

Given everything that happened this afternoon and evening, I guess it's not surprising that I am so keyed up I can't sleep.

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Realtor is meeting with seller now.  Transaction is complex in that seller is not owner.  Seller is inital occupant of the house, holding a contract to buy the house from the actual owner by the end of this month.  So the owner will make a cash sale to the seller, who will then turn around and sell it to us in the same transaction.  So if seller likes the offer contract, she will take it to the owner later today.  We'll have a gut check within another hour or so, but thus far it looks good.

I think Freddie Mercury said it best in Under Pressure when he sang:

Ee do bay bup
Ee do bay ba bup
Ee do bup
Bay bup
Dee da dee da day
Dee da dee da dee da dee da