Arr arr HEEyar arrrrrrr arr. Happy International Talk Like A Pirate Day, ye scurvy sons of sea hags! Tis September the Nineteenth today, and I can hear the wail o' the wind an' smell the salt o' the sea, callin' ta me, down ta me boney bones.
OK enough of that.
It's been a pretty uneventful week for me, unfortunately. I can't really recall anything particularly spectacular that's happened, it's just been kind of the same old situation. Work's been workish, school has been schoolish, and everything has been trudging along. The week has plodded it's merry way toward today, blessed Friday, and the utter awesomeness that is a weekend. This weekend in particular.
Of course, I have to get through class tomorrow morning, but that oughtn't be too tough. It's a pretty entertaining and engaging class.
Tomorrow at approximately noon, I set sail (parrrrrdon me seafarin' references!) for lovely Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, in wanton celebration of the death of Rhyno's bachelorhood. Don't worry, Ryan...it's not such a bad thing to lose. If I know anything about you, it's that you're ready to get married to that blushing bride. First thing's first, though, and that first thing is a party.
So that's what we're a'gonna do.
Other than that, we've got the second opinion realtor coming over tonight. That should be fine. We'll see what she has to say (doubtfully anything of substance tonight, we'll find out more later)
I'm playing pirate ballads at work today. People are confused, but when they ask, I just tell them that I'm celebrating the holiday.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
In other, less depressing news, today marks the birth of my lovely and intelligent wife, who is (hands down) the most wonderful person in the entire universe. I am completely blessed to have her for a companion, because she is (in my opinion) perfect in every way.
And hot.
Love you honey!!!
And hot.
Love you honey!!!
Well that really sucks.
Ugh. All I want to do is sell my house. Well, not all – I’m still holding out for the offer to open for Clutch on tour. Selling this house is a big priority right now, though. It doesn’t really matter when – I graduate next May, and don’t take the bar exam until July, so I’m fine with sticking around. It would be better for us, though, to sell the house early and have to live in an apartment than to not sell the house and have to stay in my crappy job ad infinitum. This brings us to our sordid tale of woe known as the current mortgage market.
Let’s start from the beginning and bore you with details. As much as I would love to blame George Bush for the current state of things (I’m sure he’s got something to do with it, right?) the fault can be placed on the shoulders of idiot lenders that gave mortgages to people that really shouldn’t have had them. Said idiot lenders were handing mortgages to other idiots who would then idiotically buy houses that they couldn’t afford. Due to an extremely sharp rise in the prices of houses, a lot of these houses were actually selling for considerably more than they were worth.
Suddenly, the terms on many adjustable-rate mortgages came due. Like a shotgun, people that were barely making interest-only payments at 5% or less now had to pay three times what they were paying before, due to a higher rate and having to pay principal. (Lost? Sorry if I’m skipping definitions, I’m trying to be brief. Heh.) Long story short, these people (and there are LOTS of them) couldn’t make their payments. Their houses went into foreclosure, and are now being sold dirt cheap by the banks that took them back.
What does this mean? It means that in my neighborhood (and likely yours too) there are 47 houses for sale in a 6-block radius and 30 of the 47 are foreclosed properties. This produces an effect that makes me want to go on a violent rampage: Person A has a house for sale at $200,000. Person B got their house (similar in every way to person A’s) foreclosed upon because they couldn’t afford it. Bank C sells person B’s house for $30,000. Person D, a generic consumer, sees two identical houses, one for $200,000 and another for $30,000. Yeah. Tough choice.
As a result prices of houses everywhere go sharply downward. (Yes, I know there’s more to it. I’m simplifying here. There’s a story, after all.) The infuriating result of this is that when Kerry and I contacted a realtor, she said that our house could sell for a maximum of about $60,000 less than what we want for it.
That’s a lot. That’s out of the question.
There’s more to it than that, even. I may very well be projecting here, but I’ve got some severe misgivings about the realtor we spoke to. See, I know that she’s in a difficult financial situation (because I’m a snoop, a spy, and a person who knows people), and I know that she’s done some kind of shady things in the past. I’m thinking that she wants to sell a house immediately, because she wants a smaller commission now rather than a big one later. It might be wishful thinking on our part, but either way, yeah…not gonna be going with her, I’m thinkin’.
Wait, why did we call her in the first place? Because she's a very nice person who was our agent when purchasing the house, and we wanted to see what she could do. Yeah, not so much.
Let’s start from the beginning and bore you with details. As much as I would love to blame George Bush for the current state of things (I’m sure he’s got something to do with it, right?) the fault can be placed on the shoulders of idiot lenders that gave mortgages to people that really shouldn’t have had them. Said idiot lenders were handing mortgages to other idiots who would then idiotically buy houses that they couldn’t afford. Due to an extremely sharp rise in the prices of houses, a lot of these houses were actually selling for considerably more than they were worth.
Suddenly, the terms on many adjustable-rate mortgages came due. Like a shotgun, people that were barely making interest-only payments at 5% or less now had to pay three times what they were paying before, due to a higher rate and having to pay principal. (Lost? Sorry if I’m skipping definitions, I’m trying to be brief. Heh.) Long story short, these people (and there are LOTS of them) couldn’t make their payments. Their houses went into foreclosure, and are now being sold dirt cheap by the banks that took them back.
What does this mean? It means that in my neighborhood (and likely yours too) there are 47 houses for sale in a 6-block radius and 30 of the 47 are foreclosed properties. This produces an effect that makes me want to go on a violent rampage: Person A has a house for sale at $200,000. Person B got their house (similar in every way to person A’s) foreclosed upon because they couldn’t afford it. Bank C sells person B’s house for $30,000. Person D, a generic consumer, sees two identical houses, one for $200,000 and another for $30,000. Yeah. Tough choice.
As a result prices of houses everywhere go sharply downward. (Yes, I know there’s more to it. I’m simplifying here. There’s a story, after all.) The infuriating result of this is that when Kerry and I contacted a realtor, she said that our house could sell for a maximum of about $60,000 less than what we want for it.
That’s a lot. That’s out of the question.
There’s more to it than that, even. I may very well be projecting here, but I’ve got some severe misgivings about the realtor we spoke to. See, I know that she’s in a difficult financial situation (because I’m a snoop, a spy, and a person who knows people), and I know that she’s done some kind of shady things in the past. I’m thinking that she wants to sell a house immediately, because she wants a smaller commission now rather than a big one later. It might be wishful thinking on our part, but either way, yeah…not gonna be going with her, I’m thinkin’.
Wait, why did we call her in the first place? Because she's a very nice person who was our agent when purchasing the house, and we wanted to see what she could do. Yeah, not so much.
Weird week thus far
My earlier stated goal of writing and recording three songs in some limited amount of time took a little longer than I had expected. The good news is that I’ve written 5 songs now, rather than three. The bad news is that I haven’t recorded them yet, for lack of time. The good or bad news, depending on your musical tastes, are that the songs are all the type intended to be played by A Flock of Kobolds. So, if you dig songs about Vikings, drinking, seafaring, soldiering, and/or wandering vagabonds, you’re in for a treat. And really, how could you not?
I’ve had a weird week so far. My work week has been filled with random meetings, every day, always at 2:00 PM. My home life has been (unsurprisingly) filled with homework. My school week (consisting of only one night thus far) has been filled with awkward Bioethics conversations about abortion, which (again unsurprisingly) ended up being monopolized by a complete douchebag who decided to evangelize for a while. He got completely pwned by my friend Kristian (inventor of the reset stick, incidentally) but the results and politics of that conversation are going to be dropped from the rest of this blog. My mission here is certainly not to attempt to sway people from their current way of thinking.
This past Sunday, I took Gwennerpants to the zoo. It was super fun. She adored the Giraffes. However, there was a moment of interesting shock: We were observing a rather angry-looking 400 lb. gorilla, who was just kind of sitting sullenly in a corner. Suddenly he LEAPED from his sitting position and crashed his fist against the Plexiglas. Gwen’s reaction was delayed compared to the rest of the crowd’s shock, but she was soon wailing. I was already on my way out of the gorilla viewing area. Heh.
I’ve had a weird week so far. My work week has been filled with random meetings, every day, always at 2:00 PM. My home life has been (unsurprisingly) filled with homework. My school week (consisting of only one night thus far) has been filled with awkward Bioethics conversations about abortion, which (again unsurprisingly) ended up being monopolized by a complete douchebag who decided to evangelize for a while. He got completely pwned by my friend Kristian (inventor of the reset stick, incidentally) but the results and politics of that conversation are going to be dropped from the rest of this blog. My mission here is certainly not to attempt to sway people from their current way of thinking.
This past Sunday, I took Gwennerpants to the zoo. It was super fun. She adored the Giraffes. However, there was a moment of interesting shock: We were observing a rather angry-looking 400 lb. gorilla, who was just kind of sitting sullenly in a corner. Suddenly he LEAPED from his sitting position and crashed his fist against the Plexiglas. Gwen’s reaction was delayed compared to the rest of the crowd’s shock, but she was soon wailing. I was already on my way out of the gorilla viewing area. Heh.
I'm happy with my geek status.
I’m excited to go to the Ren Fest this weekend. I’ve been there a billion times, and there really isn’t anything that changes, but I love the Renaissance Festival like other people love the State Fair: It’s this happy place that satisfies a craving for scotch eggs, mead, and bread bowl soup while at the same time providing nostalgia on about a billion levels: First, nostalgia from my youth. See, from high school until now, I’ve gone to the Renaissance Festival at least once a year. Sometimes (hush now) I even wore a costume. The second type of nostalgia is from my past lives: See, I’ve been a Viking, a Pirate, and a British serf in my past lives, so…wait, no. I’m totally kidding about that stuff.
Speaking of Vikings, I’m brewing some mead, so far it smells really good. Unlike beer, I can actually smell the mead through the airlock. I tried to convince Kerry to let me get a good drinking horn from which to gulp my honey libation. I’ll grow a crazed beard like my friend Johnny and shout “SKOAL!” with mead dripping from my drinking horn as I guzzle. Perfect. That’s the life for me.
On a tangent – last night I was playing WoW while drinking my homebrewed IPA and eating my father-in-law’s homemade venison and elk beer sticks. See, my father-in-law got a spiffy sausage maker for a retirement present, and the results have been delicious. Talking over my snack with friends produced the suggestion that we get my father-in-law and move to the woods somewhere and survive off of beer and sausage for the rest of our lives. Sounds like heaven. Might need to recruit some gatherers, though, or the ol’ bowels might suffer from lack of roughage. Of course, Lundo suggested that maybe we would just evolve to be some sort of beer-and-sausage culture. Like Germans.
In furtherance of my quest to become the ubergeek, I’m playing some Dungeons and Dragons after the Ren Fest on Saturday. I don’t know what’s going to happen – all of that geeking might cause me to turn into a druid or something. I predict best day evar!!!!11
Speaking of Vikings, I’m brewing some mead, so far it smells really good. Unlike beer, I can actually smell the mead through the airlock. I tried to convince Kerry to let me get a good drinking horn from which to gulp my honey libation. I’ll grow a crazed beard like my friend Johnny and shout “SKOAL!” with mead dripping from my drinking horn as I guzzle. Perfect. That’s the life for me.
On a tangent – last night I was playing WoW while drinking my homebrewed IPA and eating my father-in-law’s homemade venison and elk beer sticks. See, my father-in-law got a spiffy sausage maker for a retirement present, and the results have been delicious. Talking over my snack with friends produced the suggestion that we get my father-in-law and move to the woods somewhere and survive off of beer and sausage for the rest of our lives. Sounds like heaven. Might need to recruit some gatherers, though, or the ol’ bowels might suffer from lack of roughage. Of course, Lundo suggested that maybe we would just evolve to be some sort of beer-and-sausage culture. Like Germans.
In furtherance of my quest to become the ubergeek, I’m playing some Dungeons and Dragons after the Ren Fest on Saturday. I don’t know what’s going to happen – all of that geeking might cause me to turn into a druid or something. I predict best day evar!!!!11
Fond Memories of the Stick
Mario Kart makes me want to break things. I have had more juvenile outbursts playing this game than I have in a very, very long time. The funny thing is that when I go online, I can actually hold my own against the real people around the country (despite the game’s lack of any good online interaction…Nintendo, please add a “PWN3D!” message button that you can just hit during the race. Mua ha ha). My problems with the game arise when playing against the computer. It’s freakishly frustrating.
Last night I was about to finish a grand prix and got so angry at the system that I just shut the power off. A similar occurrence happened very often back in the days…of the Casbah.
Let’s drift off into memory. It’s story time, kiddies! My Sophomore year in college, I lived at a house in Morris, MN that my geek roommates and I had lovingly named “The Casbah”. It was not a party house, as we lived right next to the Sherriff. We participated in our share of shenanigans, though, and had a lot of hazy, delightful, drunken old times. There were a total of five of us that lived in the house. Of the five, I still talk to two on a regular basis. Of the five, three went on to law school. These are just factoids, not really terribly important details.
This was the fall of 1996. It was a happy time. I was a strapping young lad of twenty summers. Almost every night, we would shirk our homework duties and gather around the magic box: The Super Nintendo. See, the N64 came out that fall, but none of us could afford one. So we played oldschool games on one roomie’s SNES, and it was a ton of fun. One of these games was the original Mario Kart, and as it supported not one but two people playing at the same time, that was often our game of choice.
The SNES didn’t have a remote control like modern consoles. Oh, no. It had two big purple sliders on top of the box, one marked “power” and one marked “reset”. Frustration with @#$%@ Mario Kart became the mother of invention, and the owner of the SNES (in his mighty wisdom) came up with a brilliant device that stayed by our couch for the duration of the year: The Reset Stick.
The Reset Stick was…a stick. It was a broom handle, actually. However, it was a wonderful way for us to remain comfortably seated on the couch whilst resetting the SNES in our frustration. It was amazing. In fact, I like to think that it was the Reset Stick (and other similar methods likely concocted all over the gaming dens of the world) that led to this bold new renaissance of remote console. I thoroughly enjoy being able to turn off the power to the Wii whilst comfortably seated on my couch, turning purple with rage. Stupid Mario Kart. Why must I love you so?
Last night I was about to finish a grand prix and got so angry at the system that I just shut the power off. A similar occurrence happened very often back in the days…of the Casbah.
Let’s drift off into memory. It’s story time, kiddies! My Sophomore year in college, I lived at a house in Morris, MN that my geek roommates and I had lovingly named “The Casbah”. It was not a party house, as we lived right next to the Sherriff. We participated in our share of shenanigans, though, and had a lot of hazy, delightful, drunken old times. There were a total of five of us that lived in the house. Of the five, I still talk to two on a regular basis. Of the five, three went on to law school. These are just factoids, not really terribly important details.
This was the fall of 1996. It was a happy time. I was a strapping young lad of twenty summers. Almost every night, we would shirk our homework duties and gather around the magic box: The Super Nintendo. See, the N64 came out that fall, but none of us could afford one. So we played oldschool games on one roomie’s SNES, and it was a ton of fun. One of these games was the original Mario Kart, and as it supported not one but two people playing at the same time, that was often our game of choice.
The SNES didn’t have a remote control like modern consoles. Oh, no. It had two big purple sliders on top of the box, one marked “power” and one marked “reset”. Frustration with @#$%@ Mario Kart became the mother of invention, and the owner of the SNES (in his mighty wisdom) came up with a brilliant device that stayed by our couch for the duration of the year: The Reset Stick.
The Reset Stick was…a stick. It was a broom handle, actually. However, it was a wonderful way for us to remain comfortably seated on the couch whilst resetting the SNES in our frustration. It was amazing. In fact, I like to think that it was the Reset Stick (and other similar methods likely concocted all over the gaming dens of the world) that led to this bold new renaissance of remote console. I thoroughly enjoy being able to turn off the power to the Wii whilst comfortably seated on my couch, turning purple with rage. Stupid Mario Kart. Why must I love you so?
The Inner Sanctum
Those of you that know me (which I have to assume is all of you…heh) know that I tend to have really crazy dreams. This morning, during a thunderstorm, I was drifting in and out of sleep, and ended up having a really interesting one. OK, not that interesting, just vivid.
I was in class, just waiting for the professor to point his finger at me and make me answer a question from an assignment that I had not read. So, in my dream, I just got up and walked out. I went to my car and drove around the street. (This isn’t so important, but in my dream William Mitchell was situated perpendicular to the way it is in real life…not important to the story but weird in my dream and hard to explain). I got in my car and drove around the corner, and saw police, out of their cars, in a heated gun battle with some criminal types. I promptly turned my car around to avoid them, and decided to go back to class.
I was on a side of the building that I was unfamiliar with, and in my dream the building was much much bigger. I couldn’t get back to the parking lot – something to do with the gun battle. So I parked my car and went into a door at random. I found myself in a hotel that was attached to my school. It was kind of like a hotel/daycare, but there was a concierge/reception desk with a receptionist. Just outside, there was a playground and a swimming pool. The swimming pool was filled with kids around 2 to 3 years old. It was thundering in my dream (and in waking life as well, I later discovered). I told the receptionist to get those kids out of the pool, because it was raining.
Relying on my deft sense of direction, I chose a door that I thought would lead me back to my class. It opened into a darkened section of the building. Have you ever been wandering around a part of a building that you know you’re not supposed to be in, but just couldn’t help exploring a bit? That was the situation in my dream. I started looking around this back area. There was a sink, and a bathroom. I could hear someone in the bathroom, and I glanced to the right and saw that it was the Dean’s office, and presumably the Dean was taking a pee break. I turned around. Down a hallway I heard voices, so I investigated.
At the end of the hallway was a board room, with a board meeting going on. I didn’t want to get caught, so I turned around and went back toward the first door to the reception area. On a table, I spied some dirty dishes. I picked them up and put them in the sink. Then I woke up.
Yep, no clue what that one means.
Back to real life: I got myself a cork, so I made my mead last night. I’m fairly positive that I wrecked it. OK, I’m always positive (read: paranoid) that I’ve ruined beer. Every time I brew it, I think I’ve done something that will wreck it, only to find that it’s still good. This time, though, I think I’ve got a problem. I really thought that the carboy I was using was clean. It looked clean, and smelled of cleanly goodness. I had washed it with a powder cleanser thoroughly after using it last time. I rinsed it out and sanitized it last night. As I filled it with my freshly made honey-water, though, I noticed a spot, maybe a ½ inch square, of crusty old krausen that was still clinging to the side of the carboy, just under the surface of the might-someday-be-mead substance. DOH. That sucks. I’ll let you know in a month, I guess, when I rack it.
I was in class, just waiting for the professor to point his finger at me and make me answer a question from an assignment that I had not read. So, in my dream, I just got up and walked out. I went to my car and drove around the street. (This isn’t so important, but in my dream William Mitchell was situated perpendicular to the way it is in real life…not important to the story but weird in my dream and hard to explain). I got in my car and drove around the corner, and saw police, out of their cars, in a heated gun battle with some criminal types. I promptly turned my car around to avoid them, and decided to go back to class.
I was on a side of the building that I was unfamiliar with, and in my dream the building was much much bigger. I couldn’t get back to the parking lot – something to do with the gun battle. So I parked my car and went into a door at random. I found myself in a hotel that was attached to my school. It was kind of like a hotel/daycare, but there was a concierge/reception desk with a receptionist. Just outside, there was a playground and a swimming pool. The swimming pool was filled with kids around 2 to 3 years old. It was thundering in my dream (and in waking life as well, I later discovered). I told the receptionist to get those kids out of the pool, because it was raining.
Relying on my deft sense of direction, I chose a door that I thought would lead me back to my class. It opened into a darkened section of the building. Have you ever been wandering around a part of a building that you know you’re not supposed to be in, but just couldn’t help exploring a bit? That was the situation in my dream. I started looking around this back area. There was a sink, and a bathroom. I could hear someone in the bathroom, and I glanced to the right and saw that it was the Dean’s office, and presumably the Dean was taking a pee break. I turned around. Down a hallway I heard voices, so I investigated.
At the end of the hallway was a board room, with a board meeting going on. I didn’t want to get caught, so I turned around and went back toward the first door to the reception area. On a table, I spied some dirty dishes. I picked them up and put them in the sink. Then I woke up.
Yep, no clue what that one means.
Back to real life: I got myself a cork, so I made my mead last night. I’m fairly positive that I wrecked it. OK, I’m always positive (read: paranoid) that I’ve ruined beer. Every time I brew it, I think I’ve done something that will wreck it, only to find that it’s still good. This time, though, I think I’ve got a problem. I really thought that the carboy I was using was clean. It looked clean, and smelled of cleanly goodness. I had washed it with a powder cleanser thoroughly after using it last time. I rinsed it out and sanitized it last night. As I filled it with my freshly made honey-water, though, I noticed a spot, maybe a ½ inch square, of crusty old krausen that was still clinging to the side of the carboy, just under the surface of the might-someday-be-mead substance. DOH. That sucks. I’ll let you know in a month, I guess, when I rack it.
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