The main high was buying our new house (as well as selling the townhouse, no small accomplishment in this economy). It took us about 3 months of looking, and no small amount of frustration (bidding on and not getting a

[Read the whole thing]]]> 2011 was a mixed bag for us, with some big highs and big lows.

The main high was buying our new house (as well as selling the townhouse, no small accomplishment in this economy). It took us about 3 months of looking, and no small amount of frustration (bidding on and not getting a house we liked, and seeing many other houses we didn’t like) before we found this one at their open house. Debbi is a believer in things that are “meant to be”, and I’m not, but this house is a strong circumstantial argument for such a thing: It’s really perfect for us in location and layout, it’s just what we wanted. And the move went smoothly, even though it took weeks after the move to get the last few items moved from the townhouse

The other high was Debbi’s sabbatical and our trip to Hawaii, where we went to Maui and the big island. This was a great trip which we’ll remember for a long time.

The low, of course, was learning that Blackjack has cancer (lymphoma). He spent 5 weeks getting radiation therapy, followed by 6 months of chemotherapy. He was a good boy through all of it, even though he hated going to the vet. He seemed to be doing pretty well, until we got back from Hawaii when we learned that he’s gone deaf, and he was very wobbly on his feet. That seems to have been the low point for him, and he’s improved since then, almost back to his old self. But we still worry.

Those were the big points of the year. We finished out 2011 with a week off from work (both our companies closed down for the holidays). We spent most of it quietly at home enjoying the house.

We’ve just about got the last room in the house, the dining room, set up. For a while it was just the room with the big tables and all the boxes we hadn’t yet unpacked. Actually it still has 2/3 of the boxes we haven’t unpacked (by which I mean “2 boxes”, the third one is upstairs in the study), but now it has a buffet tables filled with our board games, and we bought a rug for it on Saturday, so it’s looking pretty nice. The cats are enjoying the rug, since it gives them somewhere comfortable to lie where they can look into both the living room and the kitchen.

Blackjack has been doing better this week. We’ve both seen him moving around more swiftly and even starting trouble with Roulette. He’s getting more comfortable jumping, and this weekend he got a little more affection towards Debbi, which she loved since he’s her special cat. But he also likes to go into the smaller spaces in the house (the bathrooms and closets) and meow his head off. He’s always had a really pathetic meow, so when he started doing this we’d go find him to make sure he’s okay, but it seems he just likes to do it. I don’t know if he can hear himself meow, or if he has a bit of tinnitis or similar phenomenon which makes him want to meow, or if he’s just frustrated at his condition and does it to let out some frustration.

Newton, meanwhile, has a cold, and I need to get some meds for him.

Thursday we drove over to Half Moon Bay for breakfast and then went up to San Francisco for ice cream sundaes at Ghirardelli Square. We also went to Borderlands Books, but the cats were not in residence, since they’ve connected the bookstore and cafe and the cats can’t be there until they have a door between the two. Oh well!

We stayed up ’til Midnight on New Year’s, mostly watching the NCIS marathon on the USA network, including many episodes from last season I hadn’t seen. We got visits from two sets of neighbors from our dinner party wishing us a good one and saying how they were happy we’d moved to the neighborhood. We’re glad to be here, it’s nice to have friendly faces around to chat with when we step out the door.

I have a bonus day off today (Debbi’s back at work), and I plan to just take care of a few things around the house and figure out what to make for dinner. And then it’s back to work tomorrow, trying to put back together all the code I tore apart and rewrote during December. (Ahh, nice big code-rewriting projects, always fun and satisfying. But this one has been larger than any of us had anticipated.)

While I can’t say I’m looking forward to figuring out my income taxes this year after everything that went on last year (but hey, that’s why I have a CPA), I’m hoping that 2012 will be less momentous than 2011 was. On balance things are good right now, but I hope we can go a few more years without that sort of disruption again!

Well okay, another trip to Hawaii would be acceptable.

Actually it was our neighbor Juan who wanted to have a get-together, and he finally pinned us

[Read the whole thing]]]> Two nice things about our new house: One, we have enough space to host a dinner party. Two, we have a neighborhood and we’ve been getting to know our neighbors. And that’s what we did Friday night.

Actually it was our neighbor Juan who wanted to have a get-together, and he finally pinned us down last month to set a date. We invited a couple from a couple of houses down whom we all knew, and the couple between their houses who moved in recently. Everyone brought something, but Juan’s wife Maria cooked most of the entrees: Roll-up lasagna, and chicken tortellini with sausages.

The sign of a good party, I think, is when you lose track of time, and after people started arriving around 7:15, it was 10:00 almost before we knew it. The food was delicious, and we had a great evening all of us chatting. Blackjack hung out with us most of the evening and even showed that he can still jump if sufficiently motivated (like piles of yummy food on top of the counter). Even Roulette came down to say hi later in the evening.

We also got to show off our Christmas lights: We have a new light show on the front of the house, and we have two Christmas trees up: Our main one in the living room, and a smaller one in the family room. All of our guests live across the street from us, so they all get the benefit of the front lights.

A great night.

[Read the whole thing]]]> Back in May Debbi and I bought a house together. But since I already owned a townhouse (which I bought in 2001), that left the question of what to do with the townhouse. My agent suggested I consider renting it, given that the market for homes is still pretty soft, but after considering it I decided that I didn’t want to be a landlord: Even with a management company doing the work of managing the property, it wasn’t something I really wanted to be responsible for. Besides which, the complex is quite small, which means we all shared the load of doing work for the homeowners’ association, something I didn’t really want to continue with – maintaining our new house is plenty of work (even split between the two of us), and I didn’t want to keep having to chip in on the old place.

So, to jump to the end of the story, I sold my townhouse on Tuesday.

As for the middle of the story…

We spent the first two months after we moved unpacking, buying stuff, hosting an open house, and generally enjoying our new house. Then at the end of June my agent prodded me (gently) into moving on the townhouse, since it was just sitting there empty accumulating property tax obligations and HOA dues payments.

I guess I’d expected that preparing the place for sale would be a whirlwind of remodeling activity which would all be a blur but would be done fairly quickly. In fact there was less work to be done than I’d expected (mainly making sure the unit was fundamentally sound, and making it more presentable), but it took quite a bit longer than I’d expected. Here’s what we did:

1. A chimney sweep came in and cleaned the chimney. This was pretty easy, and he even found a part which needed to be replaced. (I’m going to miss having a wood-burning fireplace, as our city prohibits newer homes from having them, as they’re big sources of pollution. The gas fireplace we have is nice, though.)
2. The unit was painted. We got estimates from a couple of places, and then I had to choose the colors. Of course, my feeling was, “pick whatever makes the most sense for selling it”, since I certainly didn’t plan to put my own stamp on a unit that I soon wouldn’t own, but still, it was up to me. We had them come back to touch up a few things, too. So this took quite a bit longer than I’d expected. (The paint looked great once it was done, though!)
3. The carpets also needed replacing, since they were 10 years old or more. We got a couple of estimates, picked a company, picked a grade and color of carpet – and then things got delayed due to a family matter at the company we’d chosen. Not really anyone’s fault, but it was a little more time added in. By this time we were deep into August.
4. We had a landscaper come out to tidy up the back yard and lay down some wood chips, as well as stain the bench back there.
5. A pest inspector examined the unit, and found some cracks in the flooring under the washer/dryer closet, and a crack in the pan of the master shower, which led to concerns about possible water damage underneath.
6. We hired a contractor to fix the water damage, including replacing the master shower. The damage was minimal-to-nonexistent, happily, and the replaced shower stall looked great. However, this actually took us up to the beginning of our vacation in Hawaii in September.
7. While we were in Hawaii, a home inspector checked out the unit. While it’s comforting how thorough home inspectors are (especially considering that there are many parts of homes that can’t be inspected), it’s also worrying in case they find something really serious. Fortunately,they didn’t find any such thing.
8. Along the way I filled out disclosures about the unit, gather information from my records, and get the HOA to provide information about the association to my agent to add to the disclosures. This involved a lot of reading, looking things up, and signing.
9. And finally, it went on the market smack in the middle of our Hawaii trip.

So it wasn’t that anything went wrong, just that all the work and a few delayed added up to more time to get it on the market than I’d expected. I’d originally figured it would be on the market in August, when in fact it went on in mid-September.

Surprisingly, an offer came in on the place the weekend before it hit the market – the day before we flew to Hawaii. We deferred the offer for a while because I just didn’t have the mental bandwidth to deal with thinking it through at the time. However, that did mean I spent bits of time during our trip communicating with my agent.

In the end, though, that unexpected offer was the one I accepted. The buyer was apparently very interested in a unit in that particular neighborhood (hard for me to argue with since I liked it quite a bit myself, especially the great freeway access), and kept in contact with my agent while the place was going on the market.

While the market in our city is pretty good – everything sells, and things which take longer to sell tend to be overpriced, and sell once the price drops – it’s still a pretty soft market; prices are nowhere near where they were in 2006. But then, they are a little above where they were when I bought the unit in 2001, so it did go for more than I paid for it. Even with the soft market I’d expected it would go for a little more, but it didn’t turn out that way. Still, I’m okay with the price it went for – I haven’t had any recriminations about it.

So the unit went into escrow in late September, and finally closed on Tuesday. (It is a lot less stressful to be on the selling end of escrow than the buying end, as most of your work has already been done just getting the unit listed.)

It is a little sad to no longer own the unit. Whenever I went back to the place it seemed a little more alien as all the decor changed. I kept thinking of my late cat Jefferson whenever I went there, since it had been his home longer than anywhere else, and it was of course his last home – I’m not going to have any memories of him in the new house.

I made multiple sweeps of the place during escrow to see if there was anything we’d forgotten. We made a trip to the county’s household hazardous waste drop-off to get rid of a bunch of old paint and similar items, almost all of which had been left there by the previous owner and which were now out-of-date, if they were even still any good at all. And I found a couple of piles of stuff in the garage which I hadn’t realized were there which I either threw out or brought over to the new place. I finally went through every closet, drawer and shelf in the house one day and didn’t find anything else, so I think I got it all.

Debbi suggested we leave a card saying “welcome to your new home” for the buyer, so I did that on Monday, and left the keys and the garage door opener as well. Then I let myself out one last time.

It was the perfect house for me for many years, and really it was mainly that Debbi and I had outgrown it that caused us to move. I hope the new owner enjoys living there as much as we did.

But we like our new house an awful lot, and really, I don’t have any regrets about making the move.

[Read the whole thing]]]> Last weekend we had our second house guests in our new house, as K and her new boyfriend C visited for a day and a half (two nights) at the end of a vacation they’d be on. We had a good time, with dinner at Cascal, and a visit to the Computer History Museum. I hadn’t been to the museum since before they opened their spiffy new exhibit hall. While the artifacts on display haven’t greatly changed (other than lengthier descriptions and some multimedia presentations), the big change is that they were able to spread out the exhibits for the personal computer era from a couple of racks of hardware to several rooms of material. Well worth visiting, as always.

Two sets of house guests in two weekends is a little exhausting, though, since it means we spent a lot of time cleaning and preparing for their arrival. We enjoyed having them, but it feels like it’s been quite a while since I’ve had the time to keep up with hobbies and even home maintenance.

That was the most fun “bump” in recent days. The rest are not any fun.

Blackjack has been more subdued lately, and Debbi and I have both been worried about him. He had his regular chemo treatment on Thursday, and the vet said she agreed that something seems off, but it’s nothing she could diagnose, and that we should keep an eye on him. He did have one of his more difficult chemo treatments right before our first guests arrived, and it might be that all the visitors has thrown him off and he’s just feeling tired of change himself. Fortunately, these last couple of days he’s seemed perkier than he had the previous week, so maybe he’s getting over it. But we’re still worrying about him.

The other big bump has been that we have ants in our house. The tiny, black kind who send out little scouts and then swarm when they find things. The weird thing is that they started out in our master bedroom, and have gradually made their way downstairs. They’re in the kitchen now, and found the cat food yesterday. We’ve been dealing with them as best we can, amidst everything else we’ve been doing, but it’s been massively stressful. As with many such problems, my first concern is the cats: The ants aren’t really a danger to the cats, but I don’t want to use a treatment that will hurt them. If it was just us humans, I’d be more likely to call an exterminator to nuke the buggers.

Here’s what we’ve tried:

1. We started by getting a soy-based spray and spraying it along the base boards of the bedroom, which stopped them from coming in for about a week.
2. We bought some Grant’s Ant Stakes, which seemed to eventually get rid of the ants in the immediate vicinity of the stake, but they have not shown a huge amount of interest in them, so they haven’t done their intended job of destroying the colony.
3. We’ve treated a few spots outside with a spray insecticide, which certainly dealt with the problem there, but doesn’t help indoors, since I don’t want the cats to be exposed if we can avoid it.
4. I’ve caulked a couple of places where they were getting in, but I don’t think we can caulk every opening.
5. Finally, after reading an article by my friend J.D., yesterday we deployed some Terro bait traps (which I’d previously picked up but not tried), which is another “kill the nest” treatment. This one the ants are quite interested in, and we’re hopeful that we’ll have J.D.’s experience and see the ants go away over the next couple of days. Cross your fingers for us that it works.

If the Terro does work, then we’ll investigate more perimeter defense to see if we can keep them from coming back.

While I don’t really hate ants, seeing them swarm around the Terro baits makes my skin crawl. I just don’t want them in the house. I can’t recall ever living anywhere that ants were a problem – it’s weird that we never had a problem with them at the townhouse, which is only half a mile away. But maybe ants are just a problem everyone has to deal with around here, and we just got lucky. I don’t know.

I thought I was dealing with adjusting to our new home pretty well, but the ants have really thrown a wrench into it. It sucks.

A smaller issue is that one of our carbon monoxide detectors (which are now required by law in California homes) beeps occasionally, and the other night about 2 am it decided to beep multiple times, but not persistently, and not in any pattern that the instructions said meant anything. So after checking things out, I removed the batteries, and put fresh ones in in the morning. No more beeps since then, but it’s annoying. (One friend on Facebook called this the “pull me off the wall and throw me in a drawer beep”.)

Lastly, we’ve started moving on selling the townhouse. My agent says it’s in good shape, and he was impressed with some of the things the HOA has done over the last decade to stay up to code. We’re doing the necessary improvements (such as painting and recarpeting, things we probably would have done soon even if we hadn’t moved), and hopefully it’ll go on the market in the next month or so. Other than a few miscommunications, this has been rather fun; but amidst everything else that’s been going on it’s been just one more thing to take care of when I’m already pretty stressed out.

Overall, I’m hoping we’ll have good progress on the ants in the next couple of days, and that my stress over them will go way down.

[Read the whole thing]]]> This past weekend we had our first house guests at the new house: Debbi’s sister Dianne and bro-in-law Shawn flew out on Saturday. Shawn was out here for business, and Dianne tagged along to see her favorite older sister; they hadn’t been out here to visit since before Debbi and I started dating. Now, this wasn’t a new meeting for me; Debbi’s family and mine live pretty close to each other, so whenever we go back to visit our families, we each see the other’s, although we each spend most of our time with our own families. But I know Dianne and Shawn fairly well by this point. Our friends Lisa and Michel have gone back to visit them with Debbi a couple of times, too. But them coming out to visit us was a novelty, as they’re usually so busy with their kids that they don’t often travel.

They flew in Saturday afternoon, and after giving them a tour of the house, we took them out to Hobee’s for a late lunch since they apparently didn’t eat much on the way out. Then Lisa, Michel and their kids came by for a few hours and we played with Isabella in our yard, trading off running around with her. Shawn was showing her some soccer moves. Otherwise we just hung out for the day, picking up dinner to eat at home, since they were pretty zonked from their flight and the time change, and they turned in around 9:30. I think this is the first time I’ve ever had more than one house guest at a time, so they were able to take advantage of the fact that we have a queen-sized bed in our guest room now, rather than the single-person futon I had at the townhouse (although that futon is still in the living room, and is one of Blackjack’s favorite places to hang out, looking out the front window).

Sunday we drove over to the coast and had Sunday champagne brunch at the Moss Beach Distillery, sitting on their patio for a while afterwards. We didn’t actually go down to dip our feet in the Pacific Ocean, but I did stop off at the coast trail to get a different look at the ocean. Then we drove to the other side of the bay area, and hit a couple of Livermore wineries in the afternoon before coming back home. A lot of driving, but fun! After dinner (at Vive Sol) we went into downtown Mountain View for a little shopping and to show them our downtown.

Monday and Tuesday Shawn worked, but I took Monday off and Debbi, Dianne and I drove around Silicon Valley in the morning and early afternoon. Shawn finished up early that day and we headed up to San Francisco for ice cream at Ghirardelli. We hit a couple other places (like an Apple Store), but it was cold and foggy in the city, so we didn’t stay too long, and got home before dark.

It was back to work for me on Tuesday. Somehow I cleverly scheduled a meeting for 5 pm after forgetting that Tuesday was the baseball All-Star Game, but I got home during the second inning. We got take-out from FJL and watched the game.

Wednesday morning the three of them got up to oh-god-thirty to take Dianne to the airport, and Shawn headed off to work an hour after I finally got up, and he flew to LA later that day (hopefully he avoided carmageddon on his flight out).

It was great to see them, and to break in the guest room at the house. The cats gradually warmed up to them – Roulette even gave Shawn some attention (and she’s getting a little more adjusted to the downstairs as time goes on). Hopefully they can come out again sometime!

[Read the whole thing]]]> Trash day at our new house is Wednesday. Actually it was Wednesday at our old home, too, but that was a townhouse, so we had a large common dumpster (paid for by the HOA) and I’d just take the trash out when it was ready and didn’t care about when trash day was except for the recycling. At the new place we have a couple of trash bins and we’d have to remember to take them out to the curb every Wednesday.

Well, we had a couple of trash bins, anyway.

We unloaded our storage unit a couple weekends ago, and one of my projects was to break down all the boxes for our electronic stuff. (We had boxes in there for items we no longer own!) The boxes themselves go out with the recycling, but the styrofoam packing goes into the trash. We’ve been putting our regular trash into the smaller of our two bins, while we spread the styrofoam out across 2 weeks, putting it in the larger bin. They took the first half last week, and I put out the bin with the second half Tuesday night.

Wednesday morning I looked out to see if the trash had arrived – not yet. So I went off to shower and have breakfast. I looked out again, and…

…the trash still hadn’t come, but the larger bin was gone. Just gone, styrofoam and all.

Who would steal a large trash bin filled with styrofoam?

I walked around the neighborhood a little to see if I could spot it, but no luck. I thought maybe some wacky neighbor had “borrowed” it and it would magically reappear at the end of the day. Nope. I noticed a neighbor across the street had a bin sitting out at the end of the day after everyone else had taken theirs in. Had our bin somehow ended up over there? But this morning they’d taken it back in, and I saw where they kept their bins, and there was only the one garbage bin. So much for that theory.

It was a bummer since getting a new bin costs money. (Hey, an incentive for someone to steal trash bins! But full bins?) But we figured we’d call and get a new one.

And that’s when Debbi solved the mystery: It turns out we weren’t paying for service for that bin, so the trash company took it away. Apparently the picking-up-extra-bins truck comes around separately from the regular trash truck. It’s a little weird (though nice) that they took the trash, too, but it explains the mystery.

Now we’ll have to decide whether we want to get a larger bin (and pay for it), or stick with the smaller bin. I think the smaller bin will do the job for the most part, but we’ll see after a few months whether we want to go to a larger one.

[Read the whole thing]]]> Saturday we throw what is easily the largest party we’ve ever thrown: A big open house for our new house. We each invited many of our cow-orkers, as well as friends and our new neighbors. I think we invited about 130 people, and including kids and significant others I bet we had about 80 show up (probably around a 40% return rate, since many who showed up were not direct invitees). Fortunately they didn’t show up all at once, since I don’t think we could have handled that! Rather they were spread out between 1 and 7 pm, with the last few taking off around 7:45.

We were pleased to get nice weather, especially after the heat wave we had early last week, as we planned to shunt many of the kids out to the back yard to play, which worked out well. (The only casualty was my hummingbird feeder which broke when a large ball got kicked into it at high speed. I had actually been thinking of replacing it anyway, so not a big deal.)

Before people showed up we locked the cats in the guest room (Roulette yowled vigorously when we caught her to throw her in.) I put up a “Do Not Enter – Cats Inside!” sign, along with a full-size photo of what the room looked like that morning before we threw them in, so people could get an idea of what the room looked like. Locking the cats away meant we could open the front and back doors without worrying about them escaping outside (which in turn meant no doorbells going off every few minutes to upset the cats).

Then we gave many, many tours of the house, which got the hoped-for sounds of appreciation. The seller/builder showed up with his brothers and their wives and he showed them around, and our agent showed up too to see what we’d done with the place. We had three neighbors stop in, including the fellow across the street whom we’ve gotten to know and his wife whom Debbi described as “a hoot”. We’d hoped & expected to get a few more neighbors, but perhaps many were busy on a Saturday afternoon at the end of June. (We did partly invite them just so they’d know we were having the party and wouldn’t be surprised that our guests used so much local parking, but we wanted to meet some, too!)

We used Evite for the invitations, as we usually do, but we had the odd experience this time of not only having some folks show up who hadn’t RSVPed (which always happens), but having some folks who up whom Evite claimed hadn’t even viewed the invitation, which must be some sort of an Evite glitch. The last time I used Evite I got some feedback that it was quaint that someone was still using that site, but it’s always worked for me. If it’s starting to head south, it may be time to find another invitation site for future parties.

For food we served snacks, but Debbi also made three wine bottles’ worth of sangria, which was almost completely gone by the end of the day. The hummus went over really well, too.

I was happy that my friend Rob showed up, as I hadn’t seen him since his housewarming party last year. He brought his three kids, the youngest of whom loved our stuffed animals (Sam, my giant stuffed sea turtle, went over really well with the 3-and-under kids). I think I’ve known Rob longer than anyone else other than my family, and it’s always good to see him. Even though we don’t have hordes of interests in common as we did in junior high, it always seems like we get along just as good as ever.

We let the cats out when there are only a few people left, but only Newton had the remotest interest in coming down to check things out. (Newton had spent much of the afternoon sitting in the window watching people run around in the yard.) The other two came down once everyone was gone and we were cleaning up.

It was a lot of fun, but also a long time to be standing on my feet. I switched from sandals to slippers part-way through, and then to bare feet not long after that. By 9:30 at night I was falling asleep on the couch, so we called it an early night, and a successful party. (But going to bed early meant we got up early enough to beat the Sunday brunch rush at Country Gourmet!)

Debbi’s now talking about doing this every year! Well, maybe by next June we’ll be completely unpacked.

[Read the whole thing]]]> We’ve been in our new home for almost a month now. I’ve chronicled a few of the major changes involved (mowing, for instance, which I did again on Sunday), but there have been lots of smaller adjustments to make, beyond those and beyond buying furniture and unpacking:

• Now that we have a two-car garage, in theory we can both park inside. In fact we’re still staging our stuff in one side of the garage while we figure out where to put it all. So since Debbi’s been parking on the street for five years I told her she could have the garage and I’d park in the driveway. This past weekend we emptied the storage unit into the other side of the garage, so now we’re both parking in the driveway, but that shouldn’t last too long, as we’ll get rid of the lot of the stuff from storage one way or the other.
• We’re still trying to remember which light switches control which lights. We have a lot of light circuits, so there’s a lot to remember.
• We have air conditioning now! And we’re having a heat wave this week! But we haven’t really figured out the thermostat yet, and haven’t gotten into the habit of turning it on. In Wisconsin I’d turn my A/C on for much of the summer, but that’s because it was humid in Wisconsin for much of the summer, and I had a much smaller place to cool, so it wasn’t a big deal. We only really need A/C here for a couple of weeks out of the year, so we’re not used to turning it on.

  I need to figure out how to program the A/C, and then I could leave it at (say) 80 during the day and have it kick in an hour before we get home. (The cats, weirdly, actually seek out the hot parts of the house when we have heat waves.)

• I’m still figuring out my routine when showering and dressing in the morning. Somehow everything (the bed, my dresser, the closet where our robes hang, the bathroom) is just far enough away from each other that I end up walking back and forth a lot. In the old place pretty much everything was right next to each other.
• For the first time in my life, my comic books are not in my bedroom. That’s still kind of weird to me.
• I’m still training myself to remember where things are in the kitchen. I do a bunch of unnecessary walking back and forth to get plates, glasses, silverware, etc. for various meals because I haven’t got the location of everything down intuitively.
• We now have litter boxes both upstairs and downstairs. So I’ve adjusted my habit to scoop the litter in the mornings rather than the evenings, so go up and down the stairs slightly less. But sometimes I forget to scoop, which means an extra trip upstairs when I do remember.

None of this stuff is major, it’s mostly just changing my habits or committing details to memory. It’s just taking some getting used to.

I do sometimes think of the old house a bit wistfully. It was a good house and I lived there for almost 10 years. It’s hard to let it go, even if the new one is much bigger and nicer.

I borrowed an electric corded mower from

[Read the whole thing]]]> Today I mowed a lawn for the first time in, oh, 20 years or so. I’m pretty sure I stopped mowing my Mom’s lawn when I went off to graduate school, since I had less and less time to go back and visit from that point forward.

I borrowed an electric corded mower from my friend Chad, who has a gardener who does his and Camille’s yard. Since it had been sitting around for a while unused, I cleaned it up this afternoon, bought a 100-foot cord, and tonight took it out for a spin (it having been maybe 2-1/2 weeks since the lawn was last mowed, around the time we closed escrow).

The two big drawbacks:

1. The cord is by far the biggest pain in the ass in the process, having to swoop it around to make sure I didn’t mow over it. Fortunately, I didn’t, and I didn’t get tangled up in it either.
2. The bag is small, maybe 1/3 to 1/2 the size of the bags on the mowers my Dad owned growing up. So I had to stop to empty it often.

So I bet I’ll end up buying a new mower with a larger bag. While I grew up using gas-powered mowers, I’m not too enthused about having to buy and store gas for it. So more likely I’ll get an electric battery-powered mower.

I might also need a weed whacker or other edging tool, as part of the yard is edged with large rocks. Fun fun.

All-in-all it took about an hour, but I think with no cord and a larger bag it would be faster and even pretty easy.

Still, how long do you think it’ll be before we break down and just hire a gardener?

[Read the whole thing]]]> This weekend was mostly given over to unpacking. Debbi has been stressed out with all the boxes around the house and was frantically unpacking the kitchen, while I figured it would take several weeks to get most of the stuff put away. Eventually we came to a compromise where I’d prioritize unpacking the books in the living room, but have more time to do the study and library. So yesterday I anchored the tall bookcase to the living room wall, and then I unloaded all my hardcovers into it and the two short bookcases next to it, cutting in half the unemptied boxes in that room. Progress!

Meanwhile, we went to Ikea on Friday night and picked up a couple of bureaus (and they were heavy, so picking them up was no mean feat!). It turns out that Friday night is a great time to go to Ikea, as they were pretty quiet and we got through (and, in particular, got parking) in record time. I put the bookcases together over the next two days, which was rather a pain in the ass: Since all the drawers are themselves unassembled, it took about 2-1/2 hours per bureau to assemble them. But they look pretty nice now that it’s done, and we’ve unpacked most of our clothes. It also feels right to me to have a bureau on the wall across from the bed.

(By the way, our friend Chad pointed out that Californian for “bureau” is “dresser”.)

We also ran some errands on Saturday, in particular buying a couple of counter stools at California Stools Bars & Dinettes. While the price was more than we were prepared for, we had not had much luck finding what we wanted at places like Target and OSH, and admittedly the quality of what we bought at CSBD seemed better. And honestly I couldn’t fault their service on the showroom floor (yay for salesmen paid on salary and not on commission!). We’ve sat in the stools for breakfast the last two days and are very happy with them! (Blackjack also enjoys sitting on them sometimes.)

We’ve been in our new house a little over a week now and we’re really enjoying it. Debbi keeps saying how it feels right. The cats are all used to it, although Roulette still prefers the upstairs to the downstairs. We spent Saturday evening on the couch in the living room (a.k.a. “the room without a television”) reading, enjoying the gas fireplace, and the cats hung out with us.

We’re still moving the last items out of the old place. Almost everything left there is now in the garage, but we still have a few more car loads, not to mention stuff to throw away, stuff to donate, and stuff to take to the dump. It’s “the unromantic part”, Debbi said. But we’re getting there.

We wrapped up the long weekend with a small Memorial Day barbecue – though it hardly felt “small” since we had three couples (Subrata and Susan, Chad & Camille, and Joar and Karin) and their children (4 all together, each one 3 years or younger). Yes, the cats spent almost the whole afternoon hiding in the bedroom. But we got to show off the house to people who hadn’t seen it yet. I was able to use my grill to cook 12 hamburgers and 4 sausages all at once, and the kids enjoyed running all over the yard. We had a nice warm – if a bit windy – day. Also, Chad brought over his electric lawn mower which I’ll borrow for a while – I just need to get a long cord for it! (He hasn’t used it in years since they have a gardener for their place.)

We had a great time, but were definitely tired by the time everyone left.

Actually the whole weekend has been pretty tiring, even though we were very productive and had a good time today! But somehow I don’t think it’ll exactly be a relief to go in to work tomorrow!

We closed on our new house last Tuesday, and we

[Read the whole thing]]]> Buying a new house and moving sucks up all your available time, which is why I haven’t been writing here lately. Plus, we don’t yet have Internet at the new place. But! On Saturday we made the big move to our nice new home.

We closed on our new house last Tuesday, and we took Thursday off to be at the house for some appointments, including Comcast coming by to set up cable TV, and our washer/dryer being delivered by Home Depot. All the appointments went off without a hitch, and we were able to move some stuff over during the day as well. Susan and Ajay also came by to see the place, and Ajay enjoyed playing in the yard as well as running in circles in all the empty rooms.

We were packing right up until the movers arrived on Saturday, though we did go to bed and got about 6-1/2 hours of sleep the night before. Debbi called around to several moving companies and we went with Trusted Van Lines, based in San Jose. The phone contact was apparently very helpful and was the only place she called to give us a written quote. They also had the best price. Originally they were supposed to show up between 1-3 pm, but they called on Thursday and asked if they could come between 8-10 am, which was fine with us! They actually arrived around 8:40 am with a 3-man crew and a plenty-big truck.

I think we packed around 90 boxes all together, and the movers filled a couple of larger boxes with bedding and pillows. Plus our furniture, which actually was not as tough to move as the fact that about 50 boxes were filled with books, comics and CDs! Heavy!

But these guys were awesome. They were friendly, courteous and careful, and impressively efficient, only taking a few breaks. We had water available for them, and I went out to buy us all lunch from Quiznos. They trucked lots of boxes up the stairs at the new place (where they didn’t use dollies to spare the new carpeting; the old place didn’t need such care as its carpet needs to be replaced before I sell it), and got almost everything routed to the right place (3 boxes ended up in an adjoining room – hardly a tragedy!). Given the heavy stuff they moved for us, we gave them a pretty hefty tip (at least, I think it was hefty, from standards I’ve read about elsewhere), and the final total was actually close to what I paid for my 2001 move. It took about 7 hours end-to-end, which was slightly above estimate, but given all the books I wasn’t too surprised.

We would definitely use them again. In fact, we might use them again to empty our storage locker next month!

As the movers were finishing, Chad and Camille and the twins came by to give us a care package of mai tais, and we invited them in to see the place.

I locked the cats in one of the bathrooms in the old place for the day. Newton spent much of the day meowing, but I hope they were able to get some sleep after we left for the other house. Debbi and I made a run back to the old house to pick up some key items we’d been unable to pack, and then we picked up the cats, put them in their carriers and brought them over.

Newton is a well-travelled kitty, having done 2 previous moves (1 cross-country), and he was out of his carrier within 5 minutes, and trotting around with his tail held high within half an hour. Blackjack and Roulette, however, refused to leave their carrier after a peek outside, so we eventually pulled them out and closed it up. Blackjack started to come around, finding a good hiding spot but venturing out periodically to explore before retreating. Roulette, however, was miserable, looking for somewhere to hide and not finding one she liked. Debbi eventually took her upstairs where she hid under the bed for the rest of the day.

As I’d predicted, she came out overnight and had pretty much conquered the upstairs by the next morning, but she’s still very wary of downstairs and mostly stays upstairs. (I hope she comes down to eat at night.) Blackjack has gotten used to most of the house, has been scratching at various posts, and took off up the stairs at high speed this morning, so I think he’s used to the place. Roulette may take a week or so to fully acclimatize.

For Debbi and myself the house feels like home already (albeit home with a bunch of boxes piled in every room). She’s unpacked much of the kitchen, I’ve set up the computer, TV and stereo, and we’ve made another run to get more stuff from the old house. (We still have another 2-4 car loads in the garage to bring over, but we’re almost there!) But we’ve been there a couple of nights now, cats snoozing on the bed with us, and we watched an episode of Doctor Who while drinking mai tais last night.

We have several projects to get the place just right over the next month or two, but so far so good. I think it’ll be a great place for us.

[Read the whole thing]]]> I’m taking a week off, starting today, for my Mom to come visit. We set this visit up a couple of months ago, thereby ensuring that we’d find a house and be in the middle of the process of buying it when she got here. On the other hand, it’s a better time than when we’re actually moving, or just moved and not yet unpacked. I’m looking forward to some down time with her.

The house thing is moving along. We’ve been providing a heckuva lot of documentation to our lender – I don’t remember it being this bad when I bought my townhome, but in the wake of the housing crisis I think the government has tightened up a lot of regulations. I think we’re just about done with this step of the process, and then we wait until we go in to wear our arms out signing the title documents. Well okay, we’re going to start packing after Mom leaves, too.

Blackjack is doing well. Monday’s chemo treatment I guess is the worst he’ll get, but so far he hasn’t been nauseous or anything. The vet said he’s been doing really well, and the technician said Monday was the first day she was able to get him to purr for her. His energy level is still lower than usual, but we’re hopeful that he’s going to get through all this without too much trouble, and that the lymphoma will be sufficiently in remission so that he’ll have a good life ahead of him.

Spring has been having trouble deciding whether to arrive, as the temperature has bounced around from highs in the 50s to highs in the 70s over the last few weeks. Makes it hard to decide whether to wear jeans or shorts! But the rain has just about ended (at least in the south bay, I guess it’s still raining up the peninsula fairly often), which means I’ve been cleaning up the porch and patio. I finally figured out the easiest and most effective way to clean the porch – just in time to move out of this place! Figures.

Over the weekend we went to see five children in four days: Thursday night we visited Subrata and Susan and their son for dinner, and then an evening of gaming. Saturday we visited Chad and Camille and their kids to keep the kids occupied for a few hours. And Sunday we visited Lisa and Michel, and their daughter and newborn son, whom we hadn’t seen since he was born a month or so ago. Young children seem to love me, which always strikes me as a little strange. I was definitely kidded out at the end of the weekend, though. But it’s nice to visit them.

Anyway, time to get some things done before going to pick up Mom this afternoon!

[Read the whole thing]]]> The big news from this past week is that we’re buying a new house! We found one not far from where we live now, and put in a successful bid. So now we’re in escrow. It’s a fairly new house, and both our agent and our house inspector (who did his inspection yesterday) were impressed with the quality of the construction.

I’m being a little coy about details because, well, partly because I don’t want to jinx it – even though I don’t really believe in jinxing things, and there’s not really much that could go wrong. But I think the stress involved in buying a house triggers my irrational paranoia. But we’re really pretty excited, and working in getting everything lined up to close next month, and then to move.

It’s gonna be a busy summer!

Meanwhile, I spent most of the last week somewhat ill. Wednesday (the day we made the offer on the house) I felt unwell enough that I stayed home from work. Mostly I just felt tired and had a scratchy throat and rough voice, but a few mornings I was parched enough that it was actually difficult to talk. I guess it was a cold of some sort, but it was a weird one. I’m feeling much better today.

It’s always something.

[Read the whole thing]]]> So Saturday we took Blackjack in to a veterinary specialist about his cancer. He has feline lymphoma, which is typically not curable but can be treated. The vet took an ultrasound of his body and it appears the cancer has not metastasized, so we are going to be taking him on on Wednesday for a CT scan, followed by several days of radiation treatments over the following two weeks. Hopefully that will put him into remission and we’ll have several more good years with him.

Apparently cats deal with radiation treatment and chemotherapy better than humans do, so he probably won’t be flattened for a long period of time following treatment. (If we’re really lucky, the actual trips to the clinic will be the worst part for him. I expect it will not be so easy, but we can hope.)

The poor guy got his belly shaved for the ultrasound, which makes him look kind of pathetic. On the other hand, it’s a lot of fun to rub his shaved belly – fun for us, that is! Not really for him.

Sunday we drove around to look at some more houses. None of the houses we looked at were ones we had high hopes for – four of the five were actually pretty far afield of where we’d like to live – but we wanted to get more of a feel for what’s on the market. Three of the five were homes which clearly hadn’t been substantially remodeled since the 80s (if not longer) and needed some TLC to make them livable. The other two were more modern and had much to recommend them – except for their location, as far as we were concerned. But hopefully some more places will be hitting the market in the next month that we can take a look at.

Today I took the day off and caught up on a bunch of project around the house. For example:

• Went jogging. It was a hard run this morning, but I managed to finish it.
• Washed all the bedcovers, which took most of the day. Also vacuumed around the bed.
• Replaced a dying bulb in a light fixture.
• Catalogued all the comic books I’d bought from the last two months.
• Paid bills.
• Distributed the minutes from our last homeowners association meeting.
• Pulled up some weeds outside.
• Even took a coffee break, walking down to Starbucks and reading for 40 minutes.

A pretty productive day, all around. Still haven’t done my taxes, though. Might work on them tomorrow, so I can send all the data to my CPA this week.

The good news is that Blackjack is feeling better, practically his old self once he recovered from being knocked out at the vet. Debbi says the vet told her that they took a pretty large sample of the mass in his throat

[Read the whole thing]]]> After our rough week last week we gave ourselves a low-pressure weekend.

The good news is that Blackjack is feeling better, practically his old self once he recovered from being knocked out at the vet. Debbi says the vet told her that they took a pretty large sample of the mass in his throat for the biopsy, and he’s been swallowing less – hardly at all the last couple of days – and eating and drinking more. While this is hardly conclusive evidence, I’m choosing to take it as an encouraging sign that the mass may be treatable. And more importantly he hasn’t spent the last few days in distress because he feels like he has something stuck in his throat.

The vet was closed for President’s Day today, but hopefully we’ll find out the results of the biopsy in the next day or two. And hopefully it will be good news.

On the house front we went out on Saturday to some open houses, visiting three homes. In contrast to past visits, none of these homes are presently occupied; two were staged, and one was empty. The first one was a large house with fairly dated decor. It will probably be a really nice house for someone willing to do a major remodeling job on it (which is not us). The second one was the empty house, which has been remodeled and brought up-to-date (other than the rattling furnace which would need to be replaced), but which was rather dark in the main living space and the back yard, and which had a few quirky floor plan choices. It was probably the closest to what we’re looking for, but we weren’t bowled over. The third house was just frustrating: A nearly-brand-new house on a large lot near downtown, but with an utterly bizarre floor plan and a lot of space that just cried out, “What were they thinking when they designed this?” Debbi eventually figured out that it’s a sort of showcase for the builder’s skills, but it really needed a couple of run-throughs with an architect before it was built. It will probably be a nice place for someone looking for a large house who’s willing to do some major renovation to fix the weirdnesses.

Our hope is that as we head into spring more houses will hit the market and we’ll see some more variety. But it was nice to be looking at homes with no pressure again.

We also had the trailing end of a series of storms passing through the area, and visited the open houses in the rain. Which was actually kind of fun itself, driving around and walking in the rain. I do like rain. The cold temperatures aren’t as welcome, however.

We had a quiet day mostly at home on Sunday, which I was totally ready for. And then back to work today.

[Read the whole thing]]]> The second worst thing today is that we were not able to come to an agreement with the seller on the house we were interested in, so we decided to let it go. Now, this is disappointing, but when you get down to it, it’s just business: The seller wanted so much money for it, and we were willing to pay so much money for it, and the gap between those two numbers was pretty big and didn’t look likely to converge. As a friend put it when I first told him about seeing this place but not being prepared to do something about it, “My experience is that there are always other houses.” So we’ll keep looking. And at least we’ve gotten the ball rolling.

So the second worst thing is, well, just the way it goes sometimes.

The worst thing that happened today is that we learned the reason Blackjack has been swallowing a lot and perhaps occasionally horking is that he has a mass in his throat under the soft palette. The vet was unsure whether she could simply remove it, so she took a sample for a biopsy, and we should know in a few days whether it’s benign or, well, not.

There’s nothing we can do about it right now but wait, and try to make him comfortable and give him lots of love. Fortunately he’s mostly his usual self (other than recovering from being put under for the examination), but I’m trying not to think too much about it until we have more information.

Blackjack, by the way, is only seven years old. He’s been our hyper-energetic cat for years, so it’s hard to believe this is happening. Especially since we just figured he had a bunch of hair in his stomach he was having trouble processing.

You wouldn’t think that anything involving income taxes would be the high point of the day, but we met with my tax preparer today to talk about tax ramifications of buying a house together (inasmuch as we’re not married), and actually had a fine time chatting with her, even if going through all the options and running the numbers did melt our brain.

Well okay, the real high point was probably going out to dinner tonight at one of our favorite restaurants. Which after the low points we felt like we deserved.

[Read the whole thing]]]> We’ve been talking about looking for a new house for a while. I’ve been in our current home for 9 years, and Debbi moved in 5 years ago. A bunch of Debbi’s stuff (and a little of mine) is in a storage unit. And we have 3 cats, with the expectation of going back to 4 (or even 5) someday. So we’ve basically outgrown this place, even though when I bought it it was just the place I wanted (well, within the bounds of what I could afford).

We went out and looked at a few open houses early last year, but I wasn’t really ready to move. Now I’m feeling more motivated, so the last two weekends we’ve gone to see some houses on the market. January isn’t the ideal time to look at houses since there’s not a lot on the market (most people like to move during the summer, between school sessions), and the market is down so many people are keeping their homes off the market until it improves. We were mainly going to see what’s out there in in our price range in the area we want to live, and to talk about what’s important to each of us in a house and see how close these houses come.

What we didn’t expect was to see a house we both adored the second time out.

Now, this isn’t a huge problem. As a friend of mine observed, there are always other houses. But this one is quite nice, with three bedrooms, a den, a 2-car garage, a large yard (and yet, a yard that doesn’t look like it would need too much maintenance), and it’s very bright and cheerful. Its drawbacks are mostly cosmetic: I’d say the biggest one is that the living room could be bigger, and it could have more closet space. It is perfect? No, but we were both charmed by it. And the location is good, too!

Of course, we’ve only seen a few houses, whereas when I brought my current place I’d seen upwards of two dozen townhomes and had a pretty good understanding of the market. But we don’t feel like we have the same grasp of this market this time around, which is why finding this place so quickly feels a little uncomfortable, since we don’t have a lot to compare it to (though it’s much nicer than the places we do have to compare it to). On top of that, we hadn’t talked to a realtor or a mortgage broker yet, so we weren’t ready to actually put a bid on it.

So we’re talking to a couple of agents and a broker over the next few days. And if everything goes well, we’ll decide whether we want to make an offer on this house.

But if that house doesn’t work out, well, we’ll have started the ball rolling.

[Read the whole thing]]]> Today we made the long, long overdue trip to the SMaRT Station to get rid of a bunch of stuff. We’ve been dutifully collecting old light bulbs and batteries rather than tossing them in the trash, and last month I went through a bunch of electronic junk and filled a box with cables, peripherals, and even two laptops (whose hard drives I completely wiped) to get rid of.

Dumping the stuff turned out to be trivial: The woman working the public disposal site pointed us at the correct bins, and we chucked it all. The electronics bin had an amusing sign, “No scavenging”. Considering the station is near Weird Stuff and right in Silicon Valley, I imagine plenty of people come by to collect old electronics for free. I was amused at some of the ancient crap people had chucked (wow, people are still getting rid of ancient computer tape drives in 2010), but I certainly didn’t want to scavenge any of it!

Debbi noticed that they also accept old paint cans there, and since I have a whole bunch of old paint cans in the garage – inherited from the previous owner – almost none of which are any good anymore, I’m sure (or even relevant, since the exterior has since been painted in new colors), I should go through them and take them in for disposal, too.

Afterwards we walked a little on the nearby San Francisco Bay Trail, hoping to spot the extension they just finished building behind Moffett Field, but we weren’t close enough to see it, and it was too cold and windy to walk that far given how we were dressed. However, I was disappointed to see that the trail at that point isn’t paved, which means no biking on it for me with my road bike. Too bad.

We discovered several wonderful new smells, some at the station and some at the salt ponds by the bay trail. Whee! All that wind is good for something after all.

[Read the whole thing]]]> Our home improvement project of assembling new bookcases for my comic book collection got finished a couple of weeks ago – I now have three 8-foot-tall bookcases (yes, anchored to the wall to guard against earthquakes) holding my collection, replacing the four 6-foot-tall cases. Overall the new cases have slightly more shelf space, so I have a little extra room, and they’re in better condition and look nicer than the 15-year-old things they’re replacing.

But the real reason for installing them is to make more space in the bedroom (yes, my collection is in the bedroom), in order to buy a new bed.

The old bed was also 15 years old, a queen-sized mattress and box spring, and has been on its last legs for a while. We’d actually started wearing through the mattress’ covering, exposing some of the foam. Well, last weekend Debbi talked to her friend Lisa, whom we learned bought a new bed that weekend, and from whom we also learned that that weekend – Labor Day weekend – is the time of the deepest sales in the mattress business. So we headed out to Sleep Train to try out mattresses.

Well, long story short, we bought a new California-king-sized mattress and box spring. Long story slightly longer, there are a lot of different mattresses out there. We lay on about 7 of them, and actually liked the one we bought more than several higher-end ones. Though I knew anything we bought would be much nicer than the one we were replacing.

Also, this just in: Mattresses are expensive!

So yesterday the new bed was delivered. They gave us a 4-hour window for delivery, and arrived near the very beginning of it. The two guys came in, removed the old mattress, assembled the new frame, and put the new mattress and bed spring on it all in about 20 minutes. Amazing, really! We spent about half an hour before they arrived vacuuming under the old mattress (I think most of what I sucked up was Jefferson hair), and another 15 minutes or so removing picture frames from the stairwell walls so they wouldn’t damage anything while carrying the thing up. But it was finished in a whirlwind of activity. (I gave the movers some water while they were there, which they both sucked down. Debbi observed that most people probably don’t offer them anything.)

In addition to being larger, the bed is also taller than the old bed, which means I’ll need to move the shelf mounted on the wall above the bed. But other than adjusting to that, the bed is really nice and comfortable, and it’s much harder for us to feel the other person moving around on it (which should help keep Debbi from waking up when I roll around at night, active sleeper that I am).

Newton has instantly claimed the bed as his own space, snoozing on it even before we put the blankets on it, and curling up with us last night. Debbi noted that the old bed has smelled like him and his brother for years, so he might be trying to make this one smell like him. I said to him that this is the second bed I’ve bought in his lifetime. He really seems to like it.

Last night’s sleep was very comfortable.

One thing I’ve been bad about doing with my bookcases is anchoring them to the wall, but this bookcase is 8 feet tall (including the extra shelf I bought), will hold a third of my

[Read the whole thing]]]> Yesterday I finally got around to putting together an Ikea bookcase – that I bought over Memorial Day weekend.

One thing I’ve been bad about doing with my bookcases is anchoring them to the wall, but this bookcase is 8 feet tall (including the extra shelf I bought), will hold a third of my comic book collection, and will hover (ominously?) above our bed, so I really needed to anchor it, this being earthquake country and all. The thing is, having never anchored a bookcase, I wasn’t sure how much work it would be. So I’ve been intimidated by the project for all this time, while the bookcase stood unassembled, in its box, in the garage. (Why didn’t I put it together over the long weekend on which I bought it? Because I spent a big chunk of that weekend at work.)

It turns out none of it was a big deal, but it did take about 2-1/2 hours to finish the project. All together the project involved:

1. Carrying the bookcase upstairs – too big a job for one person, and actually it took Debbi and me a good 5 minutes to maneuver it up the stairs.
2. Assembling the bookcase. Really, this was the easiest part. I’ve assembled so many prefab bookcases in the last 20 years that I can almost do it in my sleep.
3. Unloading comic books from the first of the four six-foot bookcases they currently live in, and piling them on the bed. Then, realizing that I really need to unload the second bookcase, too.
4. Locating the wall studs and marking the spots to drill holes for the anchor straps.
5. Moving the old bookcases out of the way and putting the new bookcase in place.
6. Vacuuming where the old bookcases where, since it was pretty dusty back there.
7. Affixing the anchor straps to the wall. (Requires ladder.) Then attaching the straps (which are the velcro type) to the underside of the top shelf of the bookcase. Why the underside? Because the top of the top shelf is going to be a usable shelf itself, with comics on it, once the extension is attached, and I don’t want comics sitting on the straps.
8. Assembling the extension and attaching it to the bookcase.
9. Filling the bookcase with comics.
10. Since one eight-foot bookcase is not as capacious as two six-foot bookcases, carrying a small (three-foot) bookcase into the bedroom from the front room and fill it with the remaining comics.
11. Putting one of the two six-foot bookcases in the front room in place of the small bookcases.
12. Disassembling the other bookcases and dump it in the trash. (I inherited this bookcase when I bought the house. It’s not an Ikea bookcase, and is not as cleverly designed as Ikea bookcases. Ikea cases don’t have screws going all the way through the outer wood, whereas this one did, and had little wood-patterned stickies to cover up the screws.)
13. Cleaning up. In this project I used a bunch of stuff in my toolbox, a ladder, a ruler and a tape measure, a pencil, a studfinder, and the vacuum cleaner. Waste included the box the bookcase and extension came in, the box the earthquake straps came in, and various bits I didn’t need (Ikea often adds a few extra hardware parts, though which parts you get always seems random). Plus two glasses of water. Not to mention that I showered and changed clothes.

So, that’s one bookcase, and it looks great! Now I need to buy two more such bookcases, put them together to replace the remaining six-foot bookcases, and then throw away two (or maybe all three) of the old bookcases (we’re undecided whether we’ll put the three-foot bookcase back in the front room or leave a six-foot bookcase there). So that will be a project for the coming weeks. But now that I’ve done it once, hopefully the other two will be easier.

The ultimate result of all this, I hope, will be a little more extra room for comics (ultimately, the three new bookcases should replace 21 shelves of comics with 21 slightly-wider shelves), but more importantly converting lateral wall space into vertical wall space so that we can replace our aging queen-sized bed with a new king-sized bed.

Plus, of course, the new bookcases really do look a lot better than my 17-year-old ones that I bought from a furniture store in Madison, in different colors because they kept running out of the colors I wanted. Ikea really does things right.

By the way, comments about the number of comics books I own will be ignored.