Settling In

Well, we're finally pretty much all moved in to our new house. 90% of the boxes have been emptied and we've even started hanging pictures up on the walls. I haven't exactly kept up this blog all that well during this process, Getting a house, and moving in was a much more intense experience than even I (a person who hates change) has been able to handle. But we did make it through it, and we're really happy here in the new house.

The garage is one place where I hadn't been able to make any progress, until today. I got out there and cut a padlock off the garage door track that I don't have a key to, and found that the garage door opener works fine, which was good news. I did discover though that whoever wired the electrical up for the garage apparently didn't know what the heck they were doing. There's a light switch in the back hallway of the house that when flipped up, turns on the power for the garage and four lights on poles in the back yard. That's crazy! Why would you want to turn on four yard lights every time you want power on in the garage? I'm going to have to track the power lines down and try and split those yard lights off from the garage so they can each be turned off and on separately.

I still have a couple of minor plumbing issues I have to tackle yet, I was hoping to take care of them in the next couple of days, but I may have to wait another week to do that. All in all though, everything has gone pretty smooth and it feels really good to be a homeowner.

Creeping closer to closing on the house

Well, I was contacted today by my realtor, and the title work is finally complete. The only thing holding us back at this point is some miscellaneous paperwork that the mortgage company is waiting on. I did some digging myself and sent them what they hopefully need. If so, then we should be closing by next week. If not, there could yet be a slight delay waiting on a credit bureau to get them the final papers they need. Either way, we're almost home, literally!

Star Wars The Clone Wars

The first season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars was all right, it was good enough to keep me watching, but didn't really wow me. Season 2 has now reached it's second episode and the show has improved considerably! The character models appear to be more detailed, and the lighting and textures have been improved as well.

The storyline seems more mature as well. In the first season, there were an awful lot of stories that seemed, light-hearted, and to be brutally honest, silly. This season's shows I've seen so far are much darker, with a much more mature theme. I'm looking forward to seeing how this season progresses!

Fantastic news!

I've been pretty lazy lately about posting new info here, but it's been pretty busy lately in my defense. I've finally got great news to impart. Our offer on our dream house was accepted! Not only that, but since then I've gotten my mortgage paperwork in and now we're only waiting for the appraisal to be done which is happening tomorrow afternoon. Then it's just waiting on the underwriters to finish all they're paperwork. We've got a tentative closing date of October 21st. There's a slight threat of the closing date getting pushed back a little further though. Hopefully that doesn't happen though, we're really looking forward to getting moved in and starting what we're calling "part 2" of our lives.

House hunting....house buying...I don't know....

Well, house hunting has pretty much come to a stand-still. The good thing though is that we have an offer in on our dream house once again. We won't know until late this week whether or not we'll have any luck this time and get it. We've all got our fingers crossed, so cross yours as well for us.

If we don't get the house this time, I'm stepping back from looking for a house until next spring. I've about had my fill, and frankly, we've run out of nice homes in our price range anyway. I'm really, really hoping that we'll get the house this week. All of us want this to happen. So wish us luck!

House hunting goes on...but at a slower pace

Unfortunately, we're still in the "house-hunting" phase, and the pace is going to be slowed down. We've pretty much gone through all the houses that are worth a close look in our price range and the pickings have come up slim. I'm still holding out hope that our "dream house" on Sherwood Terrace will come back on the market and that we'll be able to make another offer on it.

We were looking at a house this morning with our realtor that I was marginally hopeful about, but it turned out to be a dud. This house was listed as being a 2, possibly 3 bedroom a little less than 1100 square feet. The possible third bedroom was described as a "loft" that could possibly be a 3rd bedroom. The loft turned out to be a partially finished attic of about 240 square feet that a normal sized adult wouldn't be able to stand up straight in! I don't see how anyone could consider this a "possible bedroom".

The listing agent who described the property said that it had, a newer roof, newer vynil siding, newer windows, newer furnace, newer water heater, and the remodel is complete. Notice there's a lot of "newer's" there and not "new"? And I think by "the remodel is complete", they meant, "this is as much as we're doing, and we're not doing any more!" I found light fixtures and thermostat's hanging by their wires, wiring for the furnace wire-nutted and taped together instead of being properly in junction boxes. Holes in the walls that had been painted over without being spackled first...and the list goes on. In the back yard behind the detached garage were six old car tires and about a 6 yard dumpster's worth of trash.

We left this house realizing that we were starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel. So we're now basically hoping that our "dream house" comes back on the market and waiting for some new listings to come on the market. Wish us luck, looks like we'll need it!

Tip for Netbook Users

I'm a pretty big proponent of netbooks, but recently I'd found a problem that was plaguing me. It wasn't really a netbook problem, so much as it was a firefox problem. I've found that it's much nicer to access the internet on a netbook through firefox when you use full-screen mode. That is, by pressing the f11 key you can maximize firefox so that it hides the upper and lower tool bars so that you get your internet pages covering the entire screen space.

The only drawback to doing this is you can't access your bookmarks. When you move your mouse cursor to the top of the screen, it drops down a minimized version of the toolbar that does not include the file toolbar. To access my bookmarks, which I use frequently, I would have to drop out of full view mode by pressing the f11 key, access my bookmarks, then press the f11 key again! Not very handy to say the least. I have finally found a firefox add-on that will alleviate this problem.

Compact Menu 2 takes all the components on the file toolbar (file, edit, view, history, bookmarks, tools & help) and puts them in a single icon that looks like a small blue ball that sits to the left of the navigation buttons. By clicking this icon, while in fullscreen mode, I can now access all my bookmarks anytime I want!

J.R.R Tolkien's children use the U.S. court system to blackmail New Line Cinema

The estate of J.R.R. Tolkien has just settled out of court with New Line Cinema for an undisclosed amount of money. Here's the gist of the background...Back in (I believe) the 1960's, Mr. Tolkien owed quite a bit of back taxes to the government. To pay off his debts, he sold the rights, including film rights to "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy and "The Hobbit". Eventually those rights were passed on to New Line Cinema who with Peter Jackson brought the world the wonderful "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, which as we all know garnered many oscars and hundreds of billions of dollars. New Line Cinema is now on the verge of bringing us two more films which will together tell the story of "The Hobbit".

Now, in February of 2008, quite a few years after all this has gone down, and has proven to be quite a cash-cow, J.R.R. Tolkien's two surviving children who are 80 and 84 years old, decided that they are being cheated out of their share of the money that's being made off of the their father's work, regardless of the fact that he "sold" the rights to these works and was fairly compensated for it. The thing I really hate about this is that there was probably very little chance they would have won any settlement in a court trial, after all, Tolkien had sold the rights. They knew though that since New Line Cinema was going into pre-production on "The Hobbit", that any court action would snarl up the shooting of the upcoming movies and cost the studio hundreds of millions of dollars even if they won. So it was just a ploy to get them to settle out of court for enough money to make the old greedy bastards happy!

It's a shame that the U.S. court system is basically just used by most people these days to "blackmail" people and corporations out of money simply through the threat of a protracted court case. Shame on the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien, if the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy of movies had been a flop, they'd have never even considered trying to sue for a share of any of it's money.

Still House Hunting

Well, the first house we made an offer on didn't pan out. Since then we'd put in an offer on a second home, which we just loved...unfortunately the house got pulled off the market and is now in "limbo". We're hoping it may get re-listed soon and we can make our offer again, but until that happens, it's back hitting the bricks to look at more homes. It's the extended holiday weekend though, so we've been slowed down to a stand-still until it's over with, and we can get back to work! Wish us luck, house-hunting has certainly proven to be frustrating.

House Hunting

I've been pretty quiet lately on the net. I've had to be, my wife and I have been house hunting. 19 years of living in the same mobile home has finally worn thin, and it's time to move into a real house. This process can take awhile, but we've gotten to the point of making our first offer on a home. Hopefully by early next week I'll know something, and hopefully it will be good news. We found a really nice two bedroom home that would fit us perfectly. So wish us luck and maybe I'll be announcing our moving plans here soon!