Closing time: A retrospective

I never did write about closing day. It was like the last Colts Super Bowl. Kind of anticlimactic. We got up early and waited. Alison had already printed directions to the law office, conveniently located 20 miles north of our condo and 20 miles west of our new home, DeKalb County Water and Sewer, and Georgia Power.
Utility bills were going to be in my name for the first time in a long time.

The lawyers were smart. All I had to provide on closing day was the big check (not novelty size as I had wanted) and a driver’s license. We got to the office and waited while the seller signed papers. I looked at the Sports Illustrated cover in disgust. Can we stop encouraging Americans to be dumb by putting headlines like “Dynasty” on a cover about Alabama, a team that has won one championship in a row?

The process was lovely. There was light conversation and a container of “fun size” candy bars. No, wait, that was everyone else. They chatted while I signed seven copies of everything. I didn’t notice until page 20 that I was signing and the lawyer was entering the date. Is that part of the bar exam? The 85-year-old who used to live in the house was there. I’m sure we would have bonded, but I was there for one reason. I finished in about 30 minutes after severely devaluing the street value of my autograph. We left. The seller’s agent, whose primary goal seemed to be playing road hump to every thing we wanted to accomplish, forgot the extra set of keys.

I stopped at the house long enough to say hello. I had errands. It was my intention to eat lunch, but I shifted to making lunch my goal. I went to the water department. Both at the water department and Georgia Power, which were almost too quick, I was the only white person. I don’t say that for any reason other than it was unusual. At Georgia Power I was told that I had a good payment history in 1999, which was the last time my name was on utilities. I lived in a crappy condo in Doraville at that time.

My lunch reward was a burger from Five Guys. I always tell myself that I’m not getting the fries at Five Guys because they aren’t to my level of crispiness and when you order them to go, you get five pounds. A piece of grilled onion landed on my dress shirt as I ate and drove back to the condo to pick up items to bring to the house. On Monday morning, I would wear that dress shirt to work because in a weekend full of moving, I did not get another dress shirt to the house. The stain wasn’t that noticeable.

I’ve had some great memories at the condo, and it will always be a spot of nostalgia because that’s where I fell in love with my wife. How can I forget my first visit when she told me that the cat fetched paper balls? She told me this, threw a paper ball, and the cat looked at her like “you’re on your own”, refusing to move. This house is truly ours, and according to the paperwork, mine.

LED for you, LED for me

Imagine that you have recently purchased a new home. This home is complete with all the necessities, like a grill and a large TV. The problem with the TV is that your wife decided that it needed to stay at a friend’s house until you moved into the home. The TV has to be retrieved. This is traumatic, like when you find out your starting running back is inactive and it’s too late to change your starting lineup.

Oh, wait, that’s not traumatic to sane people.

The TV is back, and your family has the temerity to ask you to eat dinner before installing the TV. Sure, it was time to eat, but this is important! I ate quickly, pouring Franks on everything because either peanut butter or Franks goes on everything.

I went downstairs with my brother-in-law to get the TV set up. He’s an electrician, so unlike the rest of us, he’s useful during this move. We get the TV out of the box. It’s 1.177 inches thin. “Wow, that’s even thinner than mine,” he said. Yes, this is a rare occurrence when a man is jealous of a lack of thickness. We took the TV out of the box. We found the stand upon which the TV would sit. When we looked at the instructions, they cleared stated not to take the TV out before putting the stand in place. I held the TV while bro-in-law screwed the base into the stand. The TV was supposed to click into the stand. There was one tab, with a sticker next to it saying “yes, there is only supposed to be one tab” and two slots. There were two silver prongs on the bottom of the TV clearly created to fit in the stand.
Only it wouldn’t fit. We gingerly lifted the TV and put it down. It wouldn’t click. We tried about 15 times with no luck. In my previous job, it was my job to test test test until I figured out was wrong with an application. We moved the TV sideways and tried to click that way. We brought in the women. It wasn’t clicking. Would I have to lay my TV on the carpet to watch it tomorrow? There was only one thing to do. Unscrew the base. It was the only thing we had done so far and maybe we did it wrong.

I unscrewed. I took the base off the stand. We had looked to see which way the base was supposed to go into the stand, but we had not looked to see which way the stand was supposed to be. It was backward. I put the screws back in and it took about three seconds to get the TV in place. We screwed the TV to the base and we were done.

There were a couple of issues. One is that we didn’t have our satellite hookup yet. That was fine; I had brought my Wii out of storage for this occasion. I opened the Wii box and found everything. Except for the power cord.

There’s a reason why when we’re younger, we move every year and when we get older, we move much less often. We even do insane things like agree to pay for a place over 30 years so we might never have to move again. This weekend was a weekend for moving. It’s not over yet.

Change = not always a good thing

Is change good? I have to question the assumption. My gym was a pretty run-down place. The equipment and the clientele were old. I didn’t care because even though half of the elliptical were always broken, I could find one and get in my miles.
I woke up early on Sunday to go to the gym. I knew that no one would be there at 8:30. I was right. What I wasn’t prepared for was the new equipment. They had cleared out all of the machines and replaced them with new ones. I saw a row of elliptical that looked completely unused. I thought what the heck; try the new ones and then finish with the old.

Not every elliptical is made equally. On the ones that I was used to, I had to go as fast as I could to exceed a ten-minute mile. When I was going fast, I could burn 19 calories a minute. I never really trust those numbers, but they are the numbers I have. With the new ellipticals, I could do a mile and a half in ten minutes and burn about 15 calories a minute. I felt like I was moving at a different angle. Maybe I was a little more straight up with this one as opposed to leaning a bit. I struggled at first but completed seven miles in 50 minutes. I had to do this because when I stopped to go back to my old reliable, I saw that the row behind me also had the new machines. My old reliable was gone. I had no choice.

When I woke up the next morning, walking was a problem. My right calf belt like someone had kicked it repeatedly with a steel-toed boot. I limped around all day. Today is day two after operation new elliptical and my calf is still tight and sore.

I’ll recover, but for now change doesn’t seem like such a good thing.

The Hidden Costs

Nothing in life is exactly what it seems. We love to obsess on the surface and frankly have no time to go deeper. It's only when we have to go deeper that we learn the true cost of things.

The obvious first example is the house. The first thing you do when you want a house is make an offer. It's not just a dollar figure. There are closing costs, rodent removal, septic systems, electric, plumbing and dozens of other considerations. And when you get what you want, thinking for a moment that you've pulled something over on the other side, you realize that's not the fact, jack. The house has twice the square footage than our current place. We need more furniture. The bathrooms don't have electrical outlets. We can't live without those.
I'm a man and therefore must have a grill. But even a grill's not just a grill. I'm not going to double the price for the grill with the extras like gas, a cover, and utensils. It's going to be higher than the sticker price.

We bought the man-sized HD TV and wouldn't you know, it needs more than a place to sit in the man cave. We need to upgrade our cable or satellite to HD. We need HDMI cables, which you can't get at the dollar store, to hook the tellie up to a DVD player (Blu-Ray of course), cable/satellite box and any kind of surround-sound system that we get. And don't forget the Netflix subscription.

I listen to the NPR Fresh Air podcast, and two of their episodes were the hidden costs of the wars we have going on. Everyone knows about the army of contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq. We look down on them, almost to the level that returning soldiers from Vietnam were treated. I learned that the contractors have to get their own insurance, which can be as expensive as their salary. That's OK, though, because it's paid by the government. When a contractor gets injured, they may get military transport out of the "hot zone", but it's not guaranteed. And when they get home, while their insurance claims are also paid by the government (paid to the insurance company, not the contractor), they do not have the veteran support structure that regular soldiers get. There's a big hidden cost to that bloated salary you might get to drive a truck in Afghanistan.

Speaking of trucks, another NPR podcast told the tale of bribes contracting companies pay to the Taliban in order to get the supplies over the sparsely defended roads in order to, yeah, fight the Taliban. Most of the countryside is controlled by warlords, and since contractors can only defend themselves with AK-47s, they go the payout route instead. At least in this case, and it really is a least, some Afghani businessmen are making a lot of money out of the deal in protection.

Most of the contractor costs aren't made public. We'll never really know how much the war costs. It would make more sense to have everyone under the umbrella of the army. That would probably require a draft, and we're not going for that again. We're OK with people profiting on the suffering of others, though.

If I ever meet a contractor who has been injured in a war, I'll give them the same respect I'd give to a veteran. It's the least that they deserve.

Burn, baby, burn

I had an extremely brief career as a stand-up comic. It lasted less than five minutes. I did one set and immediately retired. If I had stuck with it, I could have used last night’s events as fodder.

I went to the gym yesterday afternoon. I followed that up by going to the grocery store. Alison had written a list of grocery items. As usual, she put items on the list that I had never before purchased, and in some cases had never seen (stuffed clams?). Going to the grocery store after working out is the worst. You stink and while your mind thinks that it would be a good idea to eat everything, your body is still saying “no, thanks”. While at the store I thought that this would be a good night for a fire log.

We have a fireplace in our condo. We do not use it often. When we do, we go with the fire log. Your average fire log is probably five percent wood and 95 percent unknown chemicals that will eventually cause one of us to grow a third arm. They are wrapped in paper that you can burn to get the fire started. A week ago I purchased a six-pack of a generic brand, thinking that we’d easily burn through them before we moved since it’s been freaking cold in Atlanta for more than two weeks.
When I got home, Alison had started the fire. She complained that the log wasn’t burning. She was correct. Most of the paper was gone and the charred outer part of the log would not stay on fire, save a small portion of the left side. I had a brilliant idea. Add a second log to the mix.

That log wouldn’t catch. I poked it with the handy fireplace poker, tried to light it again and nothing was working. My last-ditch effort was to get a piece of cardboard from the fire log box and ignite that. Success!

Perhaps there was too much success. The double fire logs caused a heat wave that made the surrounding furniture so hot that we moved it back. Despite the flue being open, there was a little smoke. And we had a lovely plastic smell, not the great wood smell you usually get from a fire. I was on the computer but Alison was so worried that I had to watch, poke, and taunt the fire until it gradually burned down.
An hour after the fire was finished, I closed the flue and fireplace. Alison told me that there was smoke, so I re-opened it. In the morning I closed it and we were fine, other than a lot of fire loggy ashes.

Alison actually ridiculed me on Facebook (although not by name, as she claims in her best lawyer-esque tone) for almost burning the house down. I get it.

This morning, as I was gathering my things, I told her that I was going to throw away the rest of the fire logs. Obviously their usefulness had expired. We’re moving to a new house in a week and it’s actually starting to feel like an Atlanta winter outside. Her response, which would be the punch line to my imaginary comedy routine, was “you’re not going to throw them away, are you?”