Anger and stress

I don’t like to focus too much on the negative, but I’ll throw in a couple of examples. Once again I had Glen Beck on in the gym changing room. I had to de-sweat for a few minutes and had to endure his discussion with a panel. I like that his point was at least deeply thought. During the Great Depression the country enjoyed the escapism of Tarzan and Flash Gordon, and at the onset of World War 2 Superman became popular. Right after 9/11, the Spiderman movie was the first movie that did well. It came out the following May but I’ll say close enough. When times are tough, we want escapism. You can guess which direction this is taking. Our country wanted a superhero who would tell us that everything was going to be all right, therefore we elected an image and not a man.

I love you, Mr. Beck. My left shoulder has been tight for weeks because of this house issue. I need to be angry every once in a while and let it out. Beck makes interesting points, at least in the way they are constructed. He makes no sense. He wants a guy who isn’t a superstar but tells us how it is. Hasn’t Obama been at times brutally honest with us? Not when he’s listening, apparently. I would say that the previous president played on the cowboy motif quite often, and clearly took advantage of our emotions. Nice try, though.

What’s new with the house? With the help of our agent, we converted the inspection report into a “to do” list for our seller. We had to clear up some typos, which is not the strong suit of inspectors. Our goal is to get this list out to the seller before Christmas. We do not expect them to accept our latest update to the contract.

I kept things simple so far regarding my wishes for the new place. I wanted a new TV and a grill. Alison’s in charge of getting our furniture. I want it to be comfortable. Cat claw proof would be nice as well. I’ll let her pick out the design. I’m so giving, aren’t I?

The continuing story of Zach meets house

Here’s the last 18 hours or so of the house hunt, condensed into a few hundred words.
Yesterday, the selling agent brought in a plumber to double-check our estimate. The plumber came back with an estimate of more than $10,000. Because of this, it’s almost certain that there will be no septic to sewer transformation. Fine. Our current offer asked the seller to pay for all septic to sewer costs. Since there would be no costs, the seller could just sign our offer and we’d be done with it.
The deadline was 10 p.m. last night. At 9:30 we called our agent. There had been no word. At 10:15 we got the call. The counter came in. The seller took our septic to sewer amount and changed it to zero. I felt like it was a bit of an eff you, since technically the number would be zero no matter what. Hey, the seller is a lawyer, and you have to accept such things.

Late last night I received the offer via e-mail. My goal would be to print out the pages I needed to sign, sign them, scan the pages and e-mail them back. I printed. I signed. I scanned. The printer kept giving me a carriage jam error that meant nothing to me. I handed the papers to Alison. “You put down the wrong date,” she said. Really? Ugh. We gave up and called it a night.

Scanning, signing, and printing continued in the morning. I re-printed the offending page, initialed and signed the date, double-checking it. I gave it to Alison. After shutting down the computer and printer and getting my stuff ready for work, she said that I had to sign another page. Sigh. It was 8:15 in the morning and for the third day this week, we were having a nice cold downpour in Atlanta. Traffic would be a bear unless everyone had already given up for the year. I turned on the computer, opened my e-mail, printed the page, signed the page, scanned the page and e-mailed the page to Alison. I was done. To be more accurate, I was done for the morning. This afternoon we meet with the “money man”, who will look over my financials like Tiger’s wife has been looking over his cell phone records. Tomorrow is the inspection. Bring it, house.

Have a strong opinion. Or don't. I don't care. Or maybe I do.

I had a strange sensation today. I didn't get two dozen e-mails regarding septic, plumbers, and interest rates. I only received about six e-mails on the house.

Ha, now that I went back and checked, I got exactly the same number of e-mails today as yesterday. Yesterday just seemed so much more dramatic. Today was calmer because I was outside the fray. The seller brought in plumber number two, and the result was an estimate so high that our place would have to appraise for $60,000 more than our asking price to exceed "the threshold". We might even talk the seller into accepting our last proposal because the whole sewer/septic part should not be a part of the equation.

I'm at home performing my usual multi-tasking. I'm doing laundry, cooking dinner, and talking about my feelings. In a few minutes I will be eating, doing laundry, and talking about my feelings.

How do I feel? I'm not sure if I had a eureka moment lately, but it felt somewhat profound. It's a tough time in history. We are on the verge of having no privacy. Extremists, and by that I mean not terrorists but people who have a strong opinion and will not budge, is at an all-time high. Small groups of people who would never know of each others' mutual interest can gather and become a community. Celebrities who used to be able to have a tiny amount of anonymity have none. The political process seems more messed up than usual. It probably has always been that way, we just have more access to the goings on.

Let's take the climate change debate as an example. It seems that you have to be on one side or the other. It's the same as the political climate. Wear a blue shirt or a red shirt and we can easily define you in 140 characters or less like a Twitter comment.

One side of the debate believes something hysterical like the world is getting much warmer and that we are the cause of it. Because we caused this, we can change this. We're quite powerful, and who doesn't want to be powerful? This belief was fringe a decade ago and seems fairly mainstream now. It's not, of course.

The other side of the debate counters by saying that we only have 160 years of weather data and the satellites in 1850 weren't quite up to today's standards. We are not powerful enough to change the planet that much. Al Gore is a big fat liar. Staying the course is the only logical course.

The debate has been set up so you have to choose sides. The "we must change now" side has been cast as liberal, and the "don't change, more of the same" side has been called conservative.

There's a theory out there, and I'm too lazy to scour the interwebs looking for it. The theory states that if you hear an argument that's close to your set of beliefs, you give more credence to it than an argument that runs counter to your beliefs. The more deeply you believe, the stronger these opinions are.

I say that the world should be more like me. Now, a few months ago I would never suggest that being Zach-like is the way to go. I don't have opinions. I just exist. What if there's a third option to taking one side or the other in an important debate? Is it possible to accept parts of each side's beliefs, or to simply state that one might need more data, or even to go the route of immersing oneself in another debate altogether, most likely sports-related?

It's really hard to not accept a label. I thought Al Gore's movie was great. Yeah, he's profiting on the climate change trend, but Dick Cheney profited from the War in Iraq too. It seems logical that if you can profit from something you believe in, that the rewards could be immense, in self-worth and in cash. I'm not going to automatically take Gore's arguments and make them my own. It's the easy way to live, but I'm through with that. I need more data. Or for my Boston audience, dat-er.

I'm not saying that it's bad to have strong opinions. That's why they are opinions. Just keep your ears open. I heard Glen Beck, please don't throw tomatoes, it was on in the gym changing room, compare the anti-climate change "cause" to Galileo's battle against the church over the earth not being the center of the universe. I immediately wanted to yell at him and anyone stupid enough to buy that horrible logic. It demonized that side of the debate. There are good points to be made, just not in that instance. I had to shut my mouth and move on.

I constantly make fun of my friends who are obsessed with Farmville on Facebook. You read that sentence and either think "those people have no lives" or "I need to fertilize my crops". There was a new group on Facebook called "I don't give a flying fuck about what you're up to on Farmville". I thought the group was clever. I did not join. I'm not a joiner. I don't feel good about myself when I feel superior to people who enjoy these games. I do kind of enjoy the superior feeling, which is probably why I feel it. There are plenty of activities that I partake in that are equally as worthy of ridicule. Come to think of it, I'd like to see a Facebook group called "I don't give a flying fuck that you won your fantasy football playoff game last week". It would be somewhat validating.

I think there's room in the world for Farmville people and non Farmville people. Can't we just get along?

Home buying, the epic

I knew that buying a house would be difficult. I did not understand how I might drown in the details.

We applied for an FHA loan, which carries a much smaller required down payment but has restrictions. What restrictions, you might ask. Let me tell you.

Here’s the whirlwind courtship between us and the house. We looked at it Saturday morning. We made an offer on the house on Sunday night. By Monday night, and I mean late Monday night, we had a counter offer. One clause in the contract would cause trouble. We asked for money to be set aside to connect the house to the sewer line. The house has not one but two septic tank units. FHA requires, and someone had to come up with this, that we pay for connection to the sewer line if the cost did not exceed three percent of the home’s value.

We could only somewhat vaguely know what the value of the house was. There was the initial list price. There was the price the house is at currently. There’s the price that we asked for in our offer. And there’s the price that an appraiser will establish, after this septic sewer mess has been resolved.

We had a magic, albeit, number floating around for this price. The plumber would come by today and I left work to meet him. He arrived. He confirmed quickly that septic was the system of record. He also confirmed, as I stupidly joined him in the crawl space wearing my bidness casual clothes, that there were two pipes leading to the separate septic systems. In order to hook up to the sewer, we’d have to redirect one of the lines to the other line. There was one key item. Was there a lateral?

No, this is not a football term (if you want football, go to Zach on Sports). A lateral is kind of a widget. If it’s there, it allows us to connect our home to the county sewage system. If it’s not, we have to get one installed. Getting one installed would be the difference between above three percent and below.

This was the moment when the reality show would break for commercial. It would show me, slack jawed as usual, hoping that the news is in our favor. Due to the crazy financial setup, we actually wanted no upgrades to be necessary.

My real estate agent called the local water and sewage department. I wished that the taps poured tequila rather than water. After many minutes on hold, we got our answer. The lateral existed. The cost of the repairs was below the threshold. We’d have to ask the seller for more money.

Or not. We had an option of signing the current contract, which would mean we would foot the bill for more than half of the sewer update. We could add to the home’s purchase price and have the seller cover the sewer in cash. Or we could ask the seller for more money.

We asked. They have balked, so far. It looks like we’re going to have to wait another day, perhaps more, to have a binding agreement. The fun’s just about to start, folks.

Homeward bound

Yesterday we may have found a house. It led me to a quandary the likes of which I have not faced before.

On Friday night we got the place looking like a home in which people live, instead of a shack where wild dogs had recently ravaged the place. We went to Moe's for dinner, where Alison tried to show me some of the places we'd see with a sketchy Internet connection courtesy of Starbucks. We dropped off more junk in the storage closet. All storage places make you think of Silence of the Lambs. You really don't get much of a positive vibe there. Our final stop was Target.

After dropping about four car loads of junk, 90% of which we would not miss if the place burned down, the house was much cleaner, less cluttered. I begged off around midnight and Alison joined me. We were in the midst of a cold spell so all four of us were necessary to stay warm. Someone who lives in Chicago would laugh at us for our wussiness.

We got up around eight. Annette, our real estate agent, was coming over to see our place and show us some homes. At the same time, Alison's mom and grandmother were arriving, to tag along. I would be highly outnumbered.

She arrived with her husband. Brad was a nice guy who's a project engineer for the city. He also is wicked smart about home design and repair. He'd be a useful guy on our quest. Annette reviewed our place. She called the floors the "wow factor" and thought that we should keep our updates to the bare minimum. Alison's mom and grandmother were raring to go.

We got a large packet of information. On the front we had a list of 14 homes, from most expensive to cheapest. Most of them were in the region of Laurel Hill Road, where we had seen a place last weekend. We wanted to be in DeKalb County but not the City of Decatur. There are tax considerations. There are dozens of considerations, and I may be aware of three.

We didn't know what place we'd visit first visit, until I turned the page. The houses were listed in order of our journey. The first house was near Tucker, a bit outside the zone that we have been focusing on. It was in the middle of our price range, and recently reduced. We joked that the listing mentioned an antique set of doors that were from New York and "had a view of the Hudson".

I brought a notepad and was determined to take good notes of each place. You see, I want to feel like part of the process. I have a wife who, once she's invested in a project, is really invested and there's not much room for anyone else. What do my notes say?

"No lawn backyard". The backyard is a bit of an oasis. It's an oasis in winter so the growth is less than it would be. There are trees, bushes, and paths as far as we can see. From the giant bay window in the living room we can see it all. It's going to be a favorite of the kitties. Wait, am I talking like we've already decided to buy the place? Sorry, getting ahead of myself.

"Small kitchen". We have a very small galley-style kitchen in our place right now. We want a big kitchen. This place does not have a big kitchen. It's a 47-year-old home and the stove looks it. We'd have to do some work.

There is a man cave. Let me quickly discuss the man cave concept. We currently live in a 1,000 square foot condominium. It's small. There's no room for my man activities, mainly watching sports and farting. The downstairs has a bathroom (small but people were smaller in 1962), one bedroom that will probably turn into an office and a carpeted room that has cave potential. It leads out to a porch. The porch is an add-on. To the left of the porch is where my grill will reside. We found a couple of frolicking kitties under this porch. Alison thinks they were doing something else that starts with "f" but we'll leave it at that.

Upstairs we have three bedrooms and two bathrooms. The master bath is tiny. We'd have to do some work.

Oh yes, the doors that faced the Hudson now face the car port. There's room for two cars but it would be tight. There's also a small storage area for outdoor equipment. The only lawn is in the front yard, and it's smaller than a putting green. I could get one of those 50s mowers that doesn't have an engine and just relies on man power. I am a man, after all.

My description doesn't cover how I felt about the place. I liked it. I've been blah so far in our house hunting, mainly because I don't know what to look for. I felt like, at this place at least, that I might have found a home.

I like to post odd stats regarding sports, mainly football, on my twitter feed. Here's the stat about this place. It's two doors down from the first house I rented in Atlanta. I only lived there three months, but the journey is interesting.
The rest of the search was long and difficult. The best part about the second house was that there was a tray of mini Butterfingers. We didn't stop for lunch until after three, so this kept me going as we drove by and visited a total of 12 homes.

I wrote my notes on a different page for each house. Most houses didn't need a page. We walked through houses that were foreclosed and lacked heat, on a day when the high was around 40, that was really cold. We kicked a guy out of his house so we could look at it. It was a short sale, which meant that he was about to foreclose. We saw a CNN hat in the laundry room and remembered that they had recent layoffs. We also pushed out a family of four, including two young kids. It was obvious that they had outgrown their place.

The house we looked at last week was Alison's grandmother's favorite. It was the cheapest of all the places. It also would need the most work. There was one small bathroom among the three bedrooms on the top floor. The living room was a converted garage. The kitchen would have to be blown up. While we were talking about updates to be made, I said that the best thing to do would be to just tear the place down and start over.

We stopped at 3, tired, hungry, and oversaturated with knowledge. After eating and going home, we agreed that the first place was the one.

Which brings up the quandary. We can look at the house at 5 today. The Titans game starts at 4:15. There's a time in a man's life in which he has to make his priorities.

Getting more not done by 9 than most people fail to do in a day

I enjoy my Scion. I really do. It’s the first car that I’ve ever named. I like having a car that has some real power and handling. I do not like that the tires tend to deflate and attract nails. I’ve had three nail patches since I got the car. The yellow light on the dashboard comes on too often. After my latest oil change/nail removal I had been in the clear. The light came on last week. I went to the QT closest to work. Out of order. I tried the QT at home. Same. Last I checked, I didn’t see the yellow plastic bag over the machine anymore so I thought I could stop by early in the morning.

Our condo is in the midst of a remodel, so our cable and internet are unplugged. We’re eating out a lot this week. I’ve been scraping through the fridge for leftovers every day. I had a slight issue, though. During Thanksgiving I made the mistake of bringing out my laptop, with my jump drive attached, to the couch of the house in which we were staying. My nephew dove onto the couch and broke the jump drive. I would have cried had I owned tear ducts. I sent the pieces that remained to a service (Merry Christmas, Ryan) that e-mailed me a link to my files.

I got the e-mail on Monday. The only Internet connection we had was a sketchy unsecured line that moved at dial-up speed. Plus, my laptop didn’t have the storage room for the jump drive. I had to come up with a plan.

I had a simple morning plan. Get up, put the leftover panang in my lunch bag and everything else in my computer bag. Go to get my tire filled, stop at Target to look for a jump drive, go to Panera and use their Wi-Fi to download the files, and come into work a hero. I pulled into the gas station at 7:50. That was the extent of things going as planned. The woman in front of me in the air line, as it were, took the usual five minutes to fill her tires. I walked around my car and took off the four screws to I could put in the air without any inconvenience. I grabbed the air hose and pressed the button. Someone had removed the piece of the hose that connected to the tire. Fail one.

Target was next. You will never see as many people working at a Target as when it just opens. There are people moving about like it’s a rush. When I got to the “media storage” row, I looked over the options. There was an 8 GB flash drive on sale for $19.99. Bingo. Most of the drives were accessible by sliding their plastic handles over the metal holder. For the model I wanted, there was a plastic device keeping you from doing so. Suddenly, there were no employees nearby. I tried to break the plastic handle with my keys. The plastic containers have been designed in a way that you couldn’t cut through them with a welding torch. Once you do manage to get through, the plastic is so sharp that if you cut yourself you’d bleed out in minutes. I found a wandering employee and he freed the device. When I got to the register, the lady said “$41.19, please.” Wait, wasn’t this model on sale? I went back to the display, saw the sale price and the sign that said it expired on December 5. Of all the. . . My day turned when she agreed to sell me the drive at the sale price.

I drove to the Panera close to work. It wasn’t quite like my experience a couple of days ago when Alison and I went to a Caribou Coffee to use the Wi-Fi and there were 1.2 laptops per person. I ordered a “low fat” strawberry smoothie and set up the computer. I managed not to draw blood while opening the jump drive’s plastic casing. It installed and after a couple of minutes I was connected. I downloaded the software necessary to extract my files. I started to download my files.

I go back to the dial-up comment. Remember when you would download something from the Web and it would take four hours? That’s not quite the expectation now. When I first started downloading, my computer told me that it would take 22 hours. The transfer rate was slow. It eventually dropped to slightly less than two hours. I needed to be in the office in 15 minutes. For frak’s sake. I shut down and went to work, where I was able to complete the download. My files are safe.

By the way, the smoothies at Panera are quite good, and they give you a giant straw. That’s a key item in any milkshake-like beverage. Remember the DQ shakes that seemed cement-like in their consistency?

I didn’t complete all my tasks in a timely fashion, but I did complete them. The next fun task will be trying to get the TV and Internet/computers hooked back up when our hardwoods are finished.