Category: Home

A Little Staycation

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!

The Big News

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.

Positive Indications

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.

A Little Rebound

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.

And the Bad News

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.

House Gathering

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.

Disposal Day

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.

New Bed!

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.

Long-Delayed Project

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. 🙂

Epic Rainstorm

The Bay Area is having an epic series of rainstorms this week, with the heaviest downfall hitting today. While we had thunder Tuesday morning (and our DSL had gone out, though rebooting the modem fixed it), it’s just been pouring, pouring, pouring this morning. When I got up this morning, Blackjack was hiding in the closet. He’s come out and been social this morning, but he doesn’t like this weather. I think this is the most rain we’ve gotten in such a short span of time since I moved here. (I wasn’t here for the El Niño storms and mudslides of the 90s.)

Naturally there have been plenty of traffic accidents, including this impressive story about three men pulling an unconscious driver out of his burning car.

I’ve been delayed getting out this morning by spending time trying to improve the drainage routes in my back yard, since I noticed there was half an inch of standing water on my patio. The thing just wasn’t built for this amount of rain. I unclogged the main artery for the patio to drain, which routes the water into my pond. The pond is a pretty good place to send the rain, since it’s away from the building, and I can also grab a bucket and bail it if necessary. I bailed 10 bucketfuls (20 gallons, maybe?) into the sink this morning, to provide some more space for the water. Perhaps I should invest in 50 feet of hose to use the pond’s pup to just pump the water steadily out of the pond and into the sink. Hopefully it won’t come to that.

The rain’s picking up again, and it’s time for me to head out. I’ll drive carefully, you can bet on that.