I just knocked my glasses off of the bathroom counter. They bounced on the floor and under the counter. I looked, and they had fallen down into the heating vent beneath the counter (my bathroom and kitchen have pseudo-heated floors). I think that if it weren't for the earpiece, they'd have fallen down into the nethers of my home. Close call.

Labels: house, random

As obnoxious as it can be sometimes to be on the homeowner's association board, after last night's emergency meeting (I won't get into the details publicly) I think that this is probably going to be pretty good life experience in the long run. At work I make the occasional important decision that has a significant impact on our product. But it only impacts people who use SharePoint Designer, and they're not financial or business decisions. In the homeowner's association I have to consider the needs and situations of everyone in the association, but more significantly, I'm playing around with real dollars. I own (well, in 29 years I will) about 5.3% of the association, but I have 20% of the voting power. That 20% is a lot of money to be responsible for.

Labels: house, work

Well, the bad news is that I didn't successfully finish my Ethernet wiring project tonight. The good news is that I now have a handy window from my office room to the stairwell.

Wait, that's bad news too. The hole was supposed to end up downstairs through the floor, not in the stairwell through the wall. Flexible drill bits are approximately as hard to use successfully as they look.

I failed at pretty much everything today. I'm glad it's over.

Labels: house

I gots me flowers now.

Labels: house

I took a day-vacation today, and it was pretty refreshing—it's like a bonus half-weekend, smack dab in the middle of a week. I spent the day buying and planting flowers and decorative grasses for my miniature front yard and my carport. It all looks pretty nice now, if a little sparse—I'll have pictures soon, I'm sure. I still don't like touching flowers, but I'm getting much better (less ridiculous) about it. With latex gloves on I wasn't bothered at all today.

I was sure to only buy perennials, so I won't have to do all this again next year. Screw annuals and their needy passive-aggressive plant-me-every-year nonsense. I don't need another extremely mild sunburn next year, thank you very much.

Anyway, that's one more project down. Now I just need to get that ceiling fan up in the stairwell, and in a couple weeks I should have the last tool I need to wire my "office" and living room for Ethernet.

Labels: house, work

Today's payday, so I went to pay my Visa bill and see how much money I had lying around. I was kind of sad to see the numbers. I thought I had a lot more money than that, and looking through the transaction log, it seems that my balance has been steadily decreasing. This was worrisome, so I started going through my records, and found a transaction for many dollars that was responsible—I'd put it into my different-bank savings account. This is so unlike me. I didn't even remember doing it. I usually just keep everything in checking; certainly I know it's theoretically better to keep things in savings, but when the difference is about five bucks a month in interest, I usually don't care enough to bother moving numbers from one box to a different box on a different website.

So it turns out I have some money saved around after all, just in my ING Direct account, where I get 3% interest instead of .5% interest like I do in my hilariously pitiful credit union savings account. It used to be 4.5% interest a year ago... oh, economy. (And now I feel super-clever for buying that 5.75% CD half a year ago.) I'm saving up to do some home improvements, mainly redoing my kitchen, which is amusing in its hideousness, but that amusement wears off pretty quickly. My stove is about a decade older than I am, and the cabinets and countertops are unspeakably ugly. I figure that it's half an investment in my sell value, half something to make me like my house better while I live in it, and that seems like a decent enough ratio to make it worthwhile.

I hope to get started on planning out what I want to do with the kitchen in a month, when my CD matures.

Labels: house, money

Here's a free product idea that I offer freely to the world. This would be a wonderful safety and energy conservation feature for a stove that I would seek out when making my next purchase.

Imagine a stove with a light sensor. It knows when the kitchen lights are on and when they're off. It would be able to calibrate itself to know what's "on" and what's "off" by simply observing normal light levels. There may need to be two in different places on the stove, since in certain kitchens it might be common for one side of the stove to be obscured by shadow, but not the other.

Now, whenever you turn off the lights, this kitchen will wait a couple seconds, and if either of the burners or the oven are on, it will emit a series of beeps and then blink a "snooze" button. If you really wanted the lights off but the stove on, you could press snooze to make it not beep again for eight hours.

Tada. No one would ever forget and leave their burners on again.

Labels: house

This weekend I planted a small shrub near my house. As of tonight, it's more than doubled in size. At this rate, before the end of the year, it will have grown large enough to affect the Earth's orbit. I think that the time to wonder if we should be worried is over—now is the time to wonder what we can possibly do to stop it.

Labels: house

Well, tonight I was officially elected as a Director of my homeowner's association, during the association's annual meeting. I can only assume that it is going to be terribly tedious, but maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised. I met a few more of my extended neighbors, and got a lot of extra face time with the resident crazy lady. She introduced herself to me three times (there were only a little more than a dozen of us there), and each time told me the same story about being the first family to move in and having lived there since she was 45. Even the other slightly-less-old people in their mid-60s were snickering a bit by the third time the crazy lady introduced herself to me. Ah, fun times with old people. At least all of the board members seem to be pretty reasonable people.

Labels: house

Today I woke up with all sorts of ideas about home improvements in my head. In one of my dreams, I was walking around in what I'd describe as a museum of home improvements. One of the exhibits was about saving $358,000 over the life of your home for a cost of only about $500, and that was by simply installing and using a urinal instead of a toilet when possible. (Think of the water savings!) When I realized that I had awakened with a head full of dollar signs entirely imagined by my subconscious mind, I decided it was probably a good idea to forget everything I'd "learned" as soon as posible.

Labels: dreams, house

In filling out my 2007 income taxes, I realized that I've crossed that magical line of over-my-headedness where I easily see the value of having an accountant to just do all of this stuff for me. Before buying a house and selling stock, everything was simple. Really simple. I put a few numbers into boxes and then I knew how much money I was getting or how much I owed. The house part isn't so bad, but my goodness the rules for reporting stock purchases and sales are confusing. TurboTax has an "import from Fidelity" feature that is down right now, and I'm really hoping that that will magically figure out all of my numbers for me, because I've read and reread all of the documents and I'm still not sure if I have things correct. I have an idea of what I need to do, but it looks hideously tedious and would involve rummaging through a few years' worth of documents that I'd have to hunt down. I really don't want to do that.

Update: Their importer doesn't really work. Basically all it does is give you a bunch of boxes that you can fill in with numbers from your paper statements, but luckily that's all I needed. Entering that data knocked down my rebate by about a grand. :(

Labels: house, money

I'm now an executive of my homeowner's association for the next year. That's... probably going to be pretty tedious and awful. But I'll see how it goes.

Labels: house, travis

Well, the overpriced electrician who came today confirmed the source of the burning smell that had been plaguing my house—something in my electrical panel, behind the metal part that normally hides the gritty details from n00bs like me, exploded or melted a few weeks ago. This is presumably the source of my flickering lights too. It was replaced today for the low-low cost of $350 or so. But since you'd rather just see pictures, I'll go ahead and oblige. Particularly interesting is the series of upward brown streaks which I can now confirm are smoke scars, not dirt blown in from the outside like my homeowner's association president thought.

So yeah, I guess I was this close to having my house burn down due to its shoddy (or just ancient) wiring. Awesome.

Labels: house

It's probably best not to look at how little of my mortgage payments actually affect the principal on my loan. The payments on my second mortgage are $379.00 a month. Out of that, last month only $41.51 actually made its way to the principal. The credit union got the rest.

Owned.

Labels: house, money

There's a house nearby that burned down. It was a new house, nearly finished with contruction. So, it wasn't just someone who left the oven on. I guess it was either a mistake during construction, or perhaps, as suggested by a friend, arson by an eco-terrorist group. It happened Saturday night a week and a half ago, so probably not a construction mistake. Kind of unsettling.



I guess "burned down" is somewhat misleading since it's still standing for the most part, but reportedly the fire department says it's unsalvageable. The actual cause of the fire has yet to be determined.

Labels: house

I pruned my rose bushes today. I really don't have any idea what I'm doing... I probably killed them. I had to search for help online, and none of the instructions were really clear enough to make me feel confident that I wasn't ruining things, so I probably did. One site said to prune off a third to half of the existing plant. That seemed like a bit much, so I pruned off more like a quarter on average, and even that seemed like a lot once I swept all of the removed branches into a big pile. It just seems so strange cutting off all of the freshest, newest-looking parts of the bush.

Oh well. We'll see what happens. I skipped two of my bushes because they're still blooming, so if I screwed up the rest of them, I guess I've got a couple backups.

Labels: house

Labels: house

It's cooled down here substantially over the past week; it's down to 50, and the highs for the next week are all in the mid-60s. I'm trying things out with no fans running now. The fans I bought to help circulate air were very quiet as fans go, but right now the house is almost totally silent—all I can hear is the computer and my own breathing and keystrokes. No house noises, no neighbor noises, and no road noises. It's eerie.

Labels: house, washington

Toilet seats are attached by screw knobs on the underside back of the bowl. If your seat is wobbly, simply reach down and tighten them for maximum defecatory convenience.

(I always assumed they worked through bolts that were difficult to get to and adjust.)

Labels: house

Here are two pictures of my roses, for the interested. Click for larger versions.




Currently listening: Amon Tobin—Rosies

Labels: house, photography